Note taking- description-interview

Methods mark II a new what, how, why

16/01/2014

Alice

"Dancing Boys"

Description of what I'm making

Currently I am working on a series of four paintings of dancing boys. The images that I am using as source material, are photographs I took over a year ago; of my former flatmate and boyfriend dancing wasted and topless in my bedroom. The images had been languishing on my hard drive for a while. The photographs in their aggregate have the sense of being film stills.

How I'm making it

I have stretched incredibly thin linen on to cardboard boards (each 55cm by 80cm), and used paper mache to fix the materials together, and then primed the boards. There is a possibility to potentially make either a foldable screen out of all the boards combined, or to take the paper mache further and make each painting in to some sort of diamond shaped form. I am drawing with a combination of oil and acrylic paints

Why I'm making it

I have been interested in going back to figurative painting. The boys poses are formally quite traditional, when looked at together they reminded me of the quick poses drawn in a life class. Looking at the work of Sophie Calle, I have been thinking about the autobiographical elements in my work, and so I wanted to work from personal imagery. I have been attracted to ideas around homoeroticism, gay culture, and sexiness in art, particularly current art practice, and video artists like Adham Faramawy. Last night I watched "Paris is Burning", and have been thinking about "the disco", and giving everything to that one night of glamour.

sol

this is going to be a description of work underway.

and as such it is to a greater extent unknown, but by describing it in miniature i hope to reduce a metastatic mess into some sort of sense, somethings which, by giving to you, i can give to myself.

so, to plunge.

what this is so far is a set of filmed interviews with three people, the widow of a farmer, a farm foreman and a RAF pilot, accompanied by a lot of footage of the area surrounding these peoples homes, footage of the interior of a victor nuclear bomber (converted to fuel tanker) training cockpit and photographs of a military record, declassified in 1993 regarding the fatal crash of an experimental handley paige victor bomber. In March 1962, in a small faming village in Lincolnshire, England, a region notable largely for its low population density and its easterly position in England, and as a result of these, a high concentration of Air Force bases, just after lunch an experimental Nuclear Bomber crash landed into a farmhouse. In the crash landing the farmer and his wife were blown clear enough to survive, though broken, and their farm foreman dragged them clear of the wreckage. I have so far produced video interviews with these two subject/witnesses and a (slightly later) pilot who flew these jets for the RAF throughout the cold war and the Falkans conflict. The interviews with the witnesses tend to focus largely on their own farming history, the history of their families on the land and sudden breaks into global narratives, such as their farm being staffed during and just after WWII by German prisoners of war. And, of course, the sudden break into the scene of a cold war experimental bomber into their bucolic rural lives.

I have around 6 hours of footage, along with footage in the interior of a Victor Bomber cockpit (the type of plane in question), general landscape footage around the village and photographs and video of the military records, de-classified in the 1990s from the national archives.

The Pilot goes into much greater detail about the spaces of the plane, the position of it within the british defence force and its role during the falcons conflict. The overall sense of this is vague and being worked through. it will structurally form scenarios which wander around the threshold of the particular or local and the global sublime, as their lives are fragmented by a body of the military industrial global machine.

I am looking to establish a structure for these weavings. I have conduced the interviews quite casually, by leaving the camera rolling and allowing the conversation to flow where it will. After contacting the first source, the woman, Mrs Burtt, who survived the crash itself, there has been a steady and serendipitous spread of contacts and sources which took place over a very short period; an old friends father flew these planes, the farm foreman was across the street when i was interviewing the Mrs Burtt, the local air museum had just taken delivery of a cockpit from one of the planes. I’m currently working my way through al the content to establish links of tone, subject and points in the story, to link together the wider context with the particular events and personal story. I am trying to establish an overall structure that these can drop into, or refresh points which will return it to a basic ground, most likely this will be in images from the military investigation.

I am interested in working on this for a range of reasons;

as an exercise into documentary form, creating sense and a contextualised story from a set of subjective stories. and in creating something utilising documentary forms and techniques which operates as an exhibitive object. I want to develop my techniques for wandering around the threshold where a much wider meta-narrative, e.g. the cold war, the european wars, mechanisation of the countryside and automation of the military, can be read in the particular. I have a general interest in events as ruptures and in the particular tones of voice characteristic of statements borne of being witness to ones own story. I’m also sorta into creating an archive method for recording these stories which are at the end of their availability, in that the generation who lived it are dying off, and their subjectivity opposing official methods of archiving the history, particularly of cold war era stories of scale and nationality become exclusive purely by persistence.

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HUNTER

A series rock / fossil / archaeological objects in which a mélange of organic and inorganic even technologic bits and pieces have left their impression. In total they look slightly anthropomorphic. Sized between 30 and 40 cm high, they vary in width, and are coated in a thick dark grey magnetic paint, with slight discrepancy in color and texture as to create a faux rock look. Each having several homemade and found, kitsch refrigerator magnets applied at random to their flatter plains and facets.

They are made of ceramic, using a combination of molds from actual rocks and sculpted objects. Then I will press found pieces into the clay before it is cured. After firing they will be painted. I will make custom magnets with basic consumer DIY, home craft tools then stick them on randomly.

Material choices relate to the first hard disc drives, which were comprised of thin ceramic disks coated in magnetic paint. Magnetic storage in real-time transaction processing computers could then be achieved. I am interested in employing these materials as a way to make strange surreal time-unspecific objects that cue a reference to an infinitely older and younger slower and less controlled yet equally entropic, form of geologic data/memory storage. The kitsch magnets will reveal the materials and by content they will take note of a current cross section of information and images - fossil-esque impressions will serve a similar function.

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Susanna

A number of short love poems, each approximately three lines long.

The poems are created from fragments of text drawn from a Victorian guide/book entitled The Language of Flowers. From singular words to sentences, these bits of writing are textual interpretations of the meanings of certain flowers. For example, the flower Acanthus means The Fine Arts.

I’m interested in the idea of a multiplicity of (universal) emotional languages, especially those that don’t exist, or can’t be expressed, through writing. I am intrigued also by the possibility of the translation of objects, and also in creating new meaning out of fragmented or found text.

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Sri

"Exercise Book" or "The Fourth Notebook"

A 20min digital video in black and white, which may be re-edited in the next three weeks to be around 30min. The first shot is of a metal sculpture on which a cockatoo sits. The camera pans around this tableau, the cockatoo following the lens of the camera. The next scene shows a male dancer slowly rotating his torso. The camera tracks his circular movement and pans back to take in the whole space, which is a black theatre box that also contains two large canvases with black shapes stamped onto them. The rest of the video uses the camera to track the sculpture, the bird, the dancer, the backdrops and the space. Laid over the top of the video is the voice of a woman reading a French text. If you don’t understand French you might still be able to comprehend the odd word, but the rhythm may become more important than deciphering meaning and your body might acclimatise to the particular pace of the speaker. If you do speak French the text might seem a little odd, meaning coming adrift. At some points the movements of the dancer and certain words in the text meet in the poses of particular animals described in the text such as rat, bee and chat.

The film originated in a letter written by the dancer Nijinsky and collated in a book called "The Diary of Nijinsky" that documents the process of someone developing schizophrenia. One particular letter called ‘Letter to Mankind’, was read out and recorded as a simple means of creating a ‘score’. I worked with a dancer to transcribe/translate this score into movement, and later object, print and image. The attempt to translate this text became a conversation about the impossibility of translation, and the need to avoid a translation that had a singular form, instead working with ‘attempts’ at translation; smaller exercises or approaches that might present multiple ways of approaching the text. These attempts were developed into choreographies—some simple, others more complex– that were then filmed in a theatre space that at the time of filming was unfinished.

The piece was an exercise in translating something from one form (text) into another—in this case movement. This attempt activated a set of discussions, exercises and forms that created a series of moving images that in its initial stage in the editing process keeps asking me WHY? I am in the middle of trying to thread together, through editing, the final form of the work that might find some answer within itself through structure, time and rhythm.

TIFFIN

This work is a series of 36 ink portraits mounted to a wall in grid arrangement of 6 X 6. Each portrait is on a piece of 8 x !4 white paper and mounted with no visible fastening device. Every portrait consists of a human figure from the neck up with a word written in various orientation on each paper. Some portraits have ink wash as a background with more graphic lines over top while others have a blank ground or wash borders varying in saturation with line brushwork of the figure overtop. All portraits are executed in black ink with varying levels of saturation. Each portrait is painted with a brush with little variation in thickness of line and texture, making them considerable as drawings. The method of the artist was to start with a word or name and then continue the portrait based on the name. This makes it conceptual. The figures vary in race and sex. Sometimes the names seem suited to the sex and sometimes the names aren’t even names at all but ideas of a word association to the type of person that that person may be. The reason why these portraits were executed was that the artist had an idea to convey content and form to a viewer. The artist wished to further his technical abilities as a portrait artist and wanted to use ink as a way of practicing. The reason why these were not done in another medium was due to economic circumstances (the price of material) and therefore these portraits can be read as evidence of social status within collective society.