Throughout the course of the MA I have started work that has been put to the wayside after feedback from tutorials. This post going to detail the work that is outstanding and future plans for that work, how it will inform practice, and what I intend to do after the MA with the unfinished work. Also what the unfinished work was supposed to be, the intention behind the work in the first place that hasn’t been fulfilled because there wasn’t enough time etc.
Wax paper experiments:
working with wax, a material that I found so much joy and satisfaction in using. It came about purely via a discussion with a friend about casting things, he knows my practice pretty well and how I like to touch strange things. His business is in special effects/events and he offered me the wax pot after I expressed my frustration at not being able to create transparent layers. The wax is just paraffin wax it doesn’t dry completely clear, I have yet to figure out a solution for that, but I started to play with coating my books in wax looking at fragility. This in capsulation aspect relates to access to knowledge, again with regards to suppression and females in the Middle East. There’s a lot of restrictions on information that’s allowed to be shared as well as information that we have access to. A lot of books that I own have been left at home in the Uk due to content. It lead me to think about the ways in which we protect information now, we are all using passwords and encryptions. Here, customs check books before they come into bookshops and if they have inappropriate content they will put sticky labels over it or even stick pages together in children’s books, a magazine will have a marker pen scrolled through the content.
I’m also thinking about transportation of information, how wax-seals were used to stop people from reading mail. I was considering how coating pages in wax would still allow the information to be seen but would obscure it slightly. It would also stop it from being censored by pen or sticky label.
The wax makes the paper really fragile, as you turn the pages the wax cracks and crumbles. We encrypt secure information but it can be accessed at any time people can get into our information and identities can be taken and password can be unlocked people are always watching you; under surveillance, especially now with a pandemic.
The large scale drawing:
I love drawing, it’s also a medium and technique that frustrates me greatly. Similar to language, in a sense, as what I wish to put down on paper and what actually emerges are very different. Due to my issues with Attention Deficit Disorder I find it difficult to really concentrate and spend time on a drawing, so this large drawing was a challenge to myself. It’s a copy of a watercolour and ink piece I created prior to the MA. Actually it is a piece that was fundamental in re-establishing my practice after becoming a mother. Those pieces were really rushed; ink and watercolour, done during nap time. It felt like an appropriate thing to revisit to spend time on since motherhood has become a part of my life, it feels like time is really at a premium and difficult to come by. I feel very rushed in a lots of activities including the MA, trying to juggle the many roles that women have in their lives.
The drawing was really the beginning of me trying to slow my practice down. I am intrigued by the time spent on work by artists, and this was highlighted to me by a TED video by the artist Louise Despont:
Louise Despont Ted Talk - accessed 03 May 2020
She draws with architectural stencils, currently living in Bali and also working with local craftspeople. I’ve been following her for quite a few years now, her drawings are painstakingly beautiful. She does outsource and collaborate and she has an assistant with her in the studio because since becoming a mother she was finding it increasingly difficult to create work. I think outsourcing is one of those things as an artist that is a difficult hurdle to deal with. There is a lack of control when you outsource but the intention is still there in that you are in the work and you’re telling somebody what you require from them.
After the MA, the intention is to slow my practice down and concentrate more on the key skills, the things that have frustrated me over the years. Now, with the residency motherhood, I’m planning to go back to painting and drawing and really start to bring together the materials that I have explored in the Masters. Looking at the materiality how to bring wax into the painting, what happens if I mix my pigments with the drawing and the temporariness of some of the drawings, especially with water-soluble charcoal and graphite; I can draw all over canvas and then place it in a shower and it’s gone with the acrylic paint underpainting still remaining.
Collage:
There is a lot of collage work so I wish to. I’m looking forward to exploring aspects of my practice I’ve restricted so I do want to look into figurative work and figure out a way I can maintain that in the practice discreetly. Can I express what I need to do with sensuality and exposure without it being inappropriate or perhaps being discreet and hidden in unless you know it’s there.
Books:
I feel like my bookbinding skills are quite basic, still there is a lot of work to do to refine that and alongside the poetry work. There is a quiet joy in writing the poem is out and making these booklets. The works I’ve written for the final piece are currently unbound but I plan to bind them by hand together.
Language works:
I really have flourished writing and speaking these language pieces. There is a poetry group in Dubai that I am going to look into contacting, I am already friends with a couple of people so I plan to maintain those relationships. I have around 200 poetry works in that are written, they’ve been typed up in a document, some of them need work, some of them don’t, so I’m intrigued as to how I can move this forward
