Author: Katarina

If I’m being honest with myself, I’m finding myself to be quite unmotivated not really inspired to do this task. I walk around my house and outside for what seems likes hours trying to find objects or inspiration to use for these assemblages. I live in Titirangi so I’m surrounded my organic matter so I decided to live my inner child grab random objects, sticks, flowers, leaves rocks and just went into a no-mind state and just went along with it.

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I used mud so glue and just started to stick things together with it. I need to not get so stuck in my head and just do it. I also played around with balance and covering the objects entirely with other matter such as mud and leaves.

I think now I want to move into large scale sculptures and working maybe with crochet, covering the whole surface of the rocks, braiding in flowers, leaves, sticks. I could also cover it with moss.

Tracey is an English artist working with lots of media, drawing, painting, film, photography, sculpture and more. Tracey’s work is known for her engagement with exposing the truth. almost in an autobiography approach.

What’s interesting about Tracey’s work is that anything object in an isolated space/environment can be a sculpture. We see our messy beds, rooms, spaces as something with no importance or significance but in reality it exposes the truth of our personal lives almost like a confession. For this work, I view this work as a memorabilia of a time when someone might’ve gone through a difficult stage in their life, heartbreak? Grief? Depression? Or is this person just a messy person by nature?

I decided to continue working with the bed idea from the pervious prompt so with this, I wanted to take my bed outside and make it outside on grass. Taking feedback from last time, I did not include myself in the sculpture and took photos of the process as well as a time-lapse. The weather hasn’t particularly been the greatest, it has been raining for a bit so I had to wait and work around it.

I found this intervention interesting as it’s familiar to see a camp site or sleeping bag in the bush but not necessarily a made bed. I think it would’ve looked even more unsettling if I had a whole bed frame and bed sit table set up as well.

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I wanted to continue this theme of bringing inside props out in the outdoors much like the bed, I wanted to take my closet outside and use a tree branch as a make shift coat hanger. I feel like with the coat hangers on the clothes, this makes an interesting image as it doesn’t quite look like clothes on a clothes line hanging out to dry. Again, I did not include myself in the spaces.

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Lastly, I brought out an old armchair and place it in the bush, continuing bringing out indoor furniture to the outdoor spaces. Something about seeing an old arm chair placed in the middle of the bush feels so ominous and unsettling. Why is it there? Who put it there? Are they coming back?

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Something I would’ve liked to improve these sites it to play around with lighting. If I had an extension chord that allowed me to bring down maybe a lamp or lava lamp, I would’ve liked to place surrounding furniture like a side table next to both the bed and chair interventions and have to light on. I think it would look even more ominous if I took photos of the site during the night so that the the only light source would be said lamp and/or the flash of the camera. I think I could’ve improved these sculptures now reflecting on it to add more objects to better enhance to essence of them i.g could’ve added blankets, memorabilia, small details to better illustrate bringing the indoors to the bush, outdoors.

I found this task to be quite difficult for me, much like the previous task as I didn’t know where to start and what would’ve made a good intervention. What was too simple or not quite hitting the mark? Knowing that these tasks are related to the Dada movement, I realised not to take these task too “seriously” and to just play around and just create. My sculptures are somewhat nonsensical and that is totally okay.

I chose a space where I inhabit on the daily, my bed. After sitting on my bed for a while I started to notice things with new eyes. My room’s lighting is quite dark, casting shadows where the yellow hue of my overhead light doesn’t reach, my bed is quite large for one person alone. My bed it quite messy for a person, maybe more common for a teenager like myself. I have clothes, pillows and blankets thrown around on it.The bed sheets are loose. My laptop and charger is lying on the covers.Bed’s are associated with night time activities e.g sleeping, watching movies, whereas I’ve occupied it for the majority of the day. My body feels relaxed as it’s a free space but a bit uncomfortable due to the state of it.

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I started to interventions to the space my cleaning up my bed space. First removing all the clothes, then making the bed and lastly occupying the space comfortably where I also changed the light. As I started changing the space, my body started to feel my clean, relax and comfortable, almost felt no longer claustrophobic/tense and dirty from the ‘mess’.

I found this activity particularly difficult to start as I wasn’t quite sure on what to do as a sculpture, and what was too simple or complex. It was interesting to try out new things and realise some sculptures are about the experience rather than the physical material.

James Turrell is an American artist working with sculpture/architecture best known for his perception on time and space. He likes to play with light and colouring to the point where he uses the sky itself as a material/canvas.

From the Skyspaces collection, Turrell creates these chambers with no ceiling, allowing the view of the sky above.

From the Ganzfelds collection, Turrell plays with the idea of experiencing the artwork naming is Ganzfelds, the German word for describing the phenomenon of the total loss of depth perception as in the experience of a white-out.

Turrell explores sculpture into other dimensions, space and depth. He is not focus on how the sculpture appears, more on how it evokes feelings within the viewer. Turrells play on space challenges my perception of what a sculpture can be as it can be used to create an experience and perception.

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I wanted to play around with balance and stability with my one minute sculptures but I can’t deny it wasn’t difficult trying to balance some things like the hand stand. I used objects like a box, crystals, a blanket and chopsticks as well as using one and two persons. After a quick chat with James I realised I needed to work more with the relationship between the person and object interacting with one another and back ground choices. I did feel a bit silly doing this activity and but it really made me aware what a sculpture can be

Erwin is an Austrian contemporary artist working with sculptures and photography. Wurm is known for being comical and silly with his sculptures as well as his One Minute Sculptures. These sculptures is interactive where the public is encouraged to with the objects to become part of the artwork temporarily for one minute and photographed.

This work of wurm’s caught my eye. A man stands with two cartons of liquid balanced on top of his feet. We assume it is filled with liquid, giving it weight so the man is pinned down under the weight of the cartons hence unable to move i.e. trapped. Or, he cannot move as he might spill the liquid. If we assume differently that the carton is empty, then why is he trapped? Can’t he lift them up? This artwork challenge’s my perception of what an artwork can be as the object(s) and the person are both interacting together to create one temporary sculpture. There would be a different meaning if there were only the cartons or the person.

Overall, I found this brief very fun in the way that I was able to have fun and experiment with different ways of painting. Not focusing on the perfect image or planned out. This brief really deconstructed my views on what a my final paintings ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ look like.

I chose these works as they are all my larger scale works sizing between A3-A2, this allowed me to create impetus, which really allowed me to move my body and have a freer hand when painting/experimenting. This brief was all about building vocabulary with marks and experimentation as well as responding to references. I think these 3 works best reflects this.

Processes that I particularly liked to play in this brief with was allowing the paint to smear and bleed together as well as layering on paint. We can see in my works that there are lots of layers of paint which allows us to see inconsistencies, previous colour choices as well as areas where to paint has mixed with another colour like watercolour and have bled together.

What was challenging for me in this brief was deconstructing my views on painting with detail/precision and just allow my brain to flow as I created. What I would have done differently next time was to go bigger scale sooner and continued to go bigger as well as to play around with abstract styles a bit more.

After deciding to move big scale once again, I grabbed a piece of A3 card paper and started layering it with different thin layers of paint. Continuing to respond from my smaller drawing. I also had a little fun splatting some watered down paint and splat it on the surface and removing it (subtraction). I got a little messy with it and allowed the paint to flow through me.

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I feel like there’s something missing with this piece. So I wanna to continue working on this, maybe adding in some twists/coils from my smaller drawings from last week, combining my drawings together. Overall I really liked out this drawing turned out! It surprised me a bit as it looks like quite a fun piece with the colours and the shapes. I really love the shadows on the lemons where I can see how thin and messy the paint is, yet it still conveys the effect of a shadow. I love how there is “little” detail there is and how easy it was to lay down some paint and still have an effective image of lemons and limes. Little goes a long way, and you don’t need precise detail to convey your image, abstract or representation

Faye Wei Wei

Faye is a British-Chinese artist drawing a lot of inspiration from mythology, poetry and folklore to create her figurative images. Working large scale, Faye says, “Working with large canvases means painting feels like a performance, the movement of the painting is like a dance, so much is intuitive.”

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Faye likes to work with oil paints, charcoal, linen, canvas and mono-printing. I really like Faye’s bold, gestural brushstrokes that are layered on top of one another. This allows us to see the movement of the paint and the texture of the paint underneath. I would really like to play around with thin paint working with layers to create this effect

Grace Wright

Grace is a New Zealand artist, gaining her Masters Of Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts. Grace’s work is very abstract with rhythmic twists and coils. Grace allows to painting to speak through her as she works saying, “I would enter a ‘transcendent’, ‘no mind’ state allowing the painting to come through me.”

I am very inspired by her playful use of brushstrokes and colour, allowing the paint to intertwine with one another, blend, bleed and layer.

Bibliography

ARTISTS, “Grace Wright,” September 15, 2021, https://www.gowlangsfordgallery.co.nz/artists/grace-wright/about

GRACE WRIGHT, “Grace Wright,” September 15, 2021, http://www.gracewright.net/

Cob, “Faye Wei Wei,” September 10, 2021, https://www.cobgallery.com/artists/27-faye-wei-wei/overview/%C2%A0