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Writer's pictureAshton Blyth

Affirmative Feedback (continued...) and The Contact Zone

This week I ended up in a new group, where between people being absent last week/this week the group's had to be reorganised to balance the number of presentations that still had to happen.


Group with – Catherine, Terrye, Chelsea, Madeleina, Dee and Roz


Catherine


  • Lost the plot in the summer, trying to make really big pieces of work

  • Always taking photographs, see them as paintings

  • Obsession with bricks, link to ‘Britishness’

  • Glastonbury clear up, photos of structure sand shapes left on the rubbish

  • Thinking about what world be doing after the research paper

  • Grouping in colour

  • Lose intention, so the opposition of something conceptual

  • Whether work its ‘too nice’, wanting to attack everything with black

  • Using bin liners to obliterate her work

  • Seeing spiders and clouds appear in her work, making a painting a day

  • Shoe clouds in response to 9/11 imagery, dust and white things

  • Cloud installations

  • Clouds in space in paintings

  • Avoid thinking about the meaning of the work, world rather make ambiguous paintings

  • Liberation of responding while feeling anger

 


Terrye


  • Stonewall carving

  • Finding a face in a lump of stone

  • Quarry stone from Cornwall where she used to work

  • Process of keeping shape of the stone but what you’ve going to find in it

  • William Morris wall paper, used in tin and mining industries to kill of rats in sewers but also make pigments brighter

  • We have stuff in our houses than have been produced by someone in third world countries that suffered to make it for you

  • Liposuctions, risks of anaesthetic dying for what they believe its perfect

  • William Morris wallpaper, children used to scrape the arsenic of of Botallic rocks focus

  • One tea spoon world kill 6 people

  • Looking at arsenic and coming up with those images

  • Putting faces on spoons dressed in abstracted William morris wallpaper

  • Lack of freedom

  • Painting of the view on site at Perranwell Valley, as 1851 court case stated “Air thereby was greatly corrupted and infected”

  • Amalgamation of the story of this court case in combination of oil painting and digital work

  • It’s line the paintings are captured by the children affected, stylised in their imagination line their story books, compared with the stern rigidness of the faces of the court room put in digitally, on top of collaged background from William Morris wallpaper

 


Chelsea


  • Dolls, experimenting with types of clay so that it wouldn’t crack

  • PVA glue with cotton wool – really stressful process compared with a Catherine using cotton wool

  • Told to be reflective, but she just likes making things there’s not a deeper thought process

  • Creativity coming from “being”

  • As much as feel like its not driven from something, can recognise yourself and your marks in it – Roz

  • How presenting it against a white background would elevate the work and help you see it differently

  • Tried commercial art, illustrating, graphic design, reaching – none of which appealed


Fly the flag for non-reflection” – Terrye

Links referenced:

 


Madeleina


  • Found research paper annoying, trying to find the connecting thread between many thoughts and ideas

  • How can we liberate people to freely express their autonomous identity?

  • Troll comments since start of the MA, taken from screenshots, categorised and picked ‘favourites’ (violent, obnoxious, shockingly funny) to created the have dress

  • Ribbons have an invitation to be undone, used to tide the dress together to be destroyed in a performance of respecting the comments and taking ownership of them, taking power with the it words without credit to them

  • Not supposed to be neat, give impression of the weight they encompass that are being dragged around

  • Displaying people’s colours

  • Creating flags for the differentia people

  • Series of 10 for the final exhibition



The 'contact zone


social space where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination- such as colonialism and slavery, of their aftermaths’ – Mary Louise Pratt

Donna Haraway – extends this, dog show jumping at trials

‘Contact zones are fraught with danger, with the practices of encounter and conquest, but they are also places of possibility, places where peace might be made’


no one comes out of the contact zone the same as they went into it’ – Donna Haraway

Why do you make art?


What are you in contact with?

  • Noticing what I’m in contact with

  • Then thinking how am I influenced or changed by that contact


Questions - with Catherine and Lucy


Ryan Gander - visiting artist last year I would be interested in.

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