Monthly Archives: June 2019

The course notes suggest to try to harness the primary force of time in a creative way.

Thinking of how this fits in with my interests, there are a few different approaches I could take:

• Rust printing – continue work on this
• Burning – action of heat and time
• Decay – bury paper/canvas in the environment for a period of time

The last of these requires time for the paper/canvas to be affected by the environment, so I started work on this straight away (whilst still mulling over the other options in case they didn’t work).

I did some searching, but struggled to find other artists who did this apart from Kyla Dante. Her piece “Journey- book 3, 2011/2012” is a canvas book buried along a journey around the Lake District (Dante, n.d.) which chimes with the work I am interested in making. How she produces her work, how long it is left, etc. is unknown, so I tried a few different things.

Using a batch of paper and canvas cut to a similar size. I buried these in layers in a tub between earth, ash, metal, etc:

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Tub 1:

• Soil
• Paper
• Rusty metal
• Ash
• Canvas
• Rusty metal
• Gress
• Soil
• Canvas
• Coffee
• Paper
• Dandelion heads
• Grass
• Canvas
• Soil

Tub 2:

• Soil
• Paper
• Ash
• Canvas
• Soil
• Canvas
• Coffee
• Paper
• Dandelion heads
• Grass
• Canvas
• Ash
• Soil
• Paper
• Mint roots
• Soil

These were made up differently, but similar in some ways, as I would need to test unearth one tub first to see the impact to know how long to leave the second tub.

I also left some pieces in the environment:

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Two canvas pieces, with maps of their location drawn on in ink. One left under a stone in a pond, the other left under a stone on a track which was usually wet.

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A folded paper piece, produced on a search for a specific ash tree from a photography book with a fellow artist. This was buried in a damp place under a large boulder near where we found the elusive tree – still looking very similar to the photograph taken 20-30 years ago.

References
Dante, K. (n.d.). Books – Kyla Dante Artist. [online] Kyla Dante. Available at: http://kyladante.co.uk/portfolio_page/books/ [Accessed 8 May 2019].

The overall comments on my assignment submission was that my tutor is concerned about meeting the assessment criteria and that I should produce more rigorous personally driven and critically focused work. I am confident that my parallel project work will fulfil this and I will strive harder to make this come out of my stage 5 work also.

She is pushing me to try to expand my drawing to include more sculptural investigations. I find difficulty with this, seeing my drawing and sculpture work as being quite separate. Although links between them are getting stronger as time goes on, I find the way I think about sculpture work to be quite different and not informed by drawing beyond sketches and designs required to work out the practicalities of construction.

I need to direct research more towards the development of my own practice and focus in on work which will make an impact on that.