In this post I combine three separate tutor crit sessions that took place in the first three weeks of the project and provide my own thoughts on each.
The first session below was with Tom Hackett. This early crit stood back from the project and explored in a general sense what basic principles I employ in my art. I summarised that I tend to seek aesthetic simplicity in most of my work and enjoy the process of eliminating detail to make what remains more meaningful. When it comes to the viewer experience I enjoy creating an initial encounter but then extending this to a subsequent meaning that possibly wasn’t apparent at the beginning.
I am quite passionate about trying to lengthen the time a viewer looks at my work. I want them to lose themselves as the unpick the layers and unravel the meaning.
We also discussed the starting point for the project which is a set of letters from my past. I explained that I didn’t want to focus solely on the emotive human vulnerability of this material – for me that wouldn’t allow me to take the outcome far enough. I wanted to introduce another slant of either humour or general self deprecation. It was very useful to have this general talk about my principles for making art as it laid the ground for the first experiments.
The session below was with Julian Woodcock. We explored the idea of converting data between languages and from analogue to digital and back again. What became clear was that the data could undergo many transformations rather than just one, and multiple layers could be added to blur the original source.
Many different abstract ideas were then pulled together as to how the data could be visualised as a 3D outcome. There really is a lot of fun to be had here as each idea would bring with it a host of extra metaphorical baggage.
An extra direction of travel we discussed would be to create a site specific outcome – back to the inspiration for the letter content and photograph that for the final outcome.
The session below was with Tom Hackett. The essence of this talk was quite philosophical and enlightening. We considered the importance of language and whether this held the real power in the content I had. Relating the linguistic to the physical and using type as objects brought the words back into the frame and this is certainly worth exploration and experimentation.
A study of various linguistic philosophers was thought useful so a list was compiled. Some of these I am familiar with but others not so a more detailed study with a focus on language and its representation in art will be coming soon.
