MA FINE SHOW FINAL
ART 2 0 1 2
design
by
Lenka
Kalafutova
http://lenakalaf.tumblr.com
FINAL
MA FINE SHOW ART 2 0 1 2
CONTENT
introduction by dr keith piper alejandra contreras rojas aynur karaman cassandra marshall chris wong jillian knipe julie ann steward michael lee vrishti raturi afterword by prof jon bird
introduction by Dr KEITH PIPER
This, the first MA Degree show held in the new Grove Building on the Hendon Campus, signals a watershed moment for post-graduate art practice at Middlesex. Recently, we as a University have engaged in a renewed celebration of our historical legacy. Within this, a long and distinguished history of creative practice dating back to Hornsey College of Art has been enthusiastically re-evoked. The development of a wide-ranging, innovative and risk-taking approach to Fine Art, as an integral part of a vibrant Art and Design community, has emerged as one of our recognised strengths at all academic levels. As part of this, our small but highly motivated postgraduate community has come to form an essential component. The work on display is the result of a summer spent by each artist developing a substantial final body of practice responding directly to spaces within the Donald Rodney Studio and in some cases, utilising the Grove Building as a whole, as well as the local suburban landscape of Hendon. What emerges is a diverse range of approaches to practice, embracing strategies spanning the painterly, the sculptural, the sonic, the conceptual and the socially-engaged, further developing themes which surfaced during the successful MA Interim Show held at the Mile End Arts Pavilion in March. This show therefore exists as a testament to the ability of these developing artists to respond innovatively and creatively to the possibilities of a shifting academic environment. And further, to build a community in which ideas and dialogues are shared, incubated and finally realised.
Keith Piper Programme Leader MA Fine Art
ALEJANDRA ROJAS CONTRERAS
“Art is an essence, a centre. (...) My life and art have not been separated. They have been together.”
I have primarily worked from painting to expand it to other languages, being interested in creation of surfaces, textures and colours to communicate my thoughts/feelings/sensations. Throughout the years, I have been attracted to ordinary materials (recycled, industrial and plastic ones), which have become especially significant to me because of their individual characteristics and connotations. I have always tended to collect them as valuable belongings; nevertheless they could be nothing... as the phrase above indicates, my work as an artist has also been a clear consequence of my life. In this project, I have used some industrial materials such as cables, wires, umbrellas, mattresses, metal and chairs and I have been reconfiguring them to express a loss. I have sewed some parts of these materials to transform them in something else; hence, the new form is not the object itself. Something has been missed and now the whole is changing because some fragments have been broken; however, nobody understands the way in which this new situation has been developing. Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse´s works have influenced this installation. I have been strongly inspired by the materials they used, the way they displayed them and the connections with their biographical experiences. The current piece “WOUNDS personal stories, universal stories 09-08-2011 / 19-12-2011” wants to invite the viewer to feel and connect the installation with their own sensations and experiences. The piece is comprised of a series of fragments of something that no one knows exactly what it is but that evokes abstract/strange sensations. We are not sure what we are looking at: however, there is an ambiguous feeling of calm and pain at the same time… Possibly, the presence of the blue colour soothes the environment, while the red lines, looking like bloodstreams, emphasise the opposite reaction/feeling. The veins go through the blue colour and in this way the artwork presents itself as an inorganic physicality that sometimes seems more organic. Indeed, some fragments are in tension and movement, which can indicate transition. Here, sculpture form elements seem to be falling to the ground as deadweight, maybe because they are still alive.
www.alejandrarojascontreras.cl
Hesse, in Artforum (May 1970), quoted in Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse, (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 5.
ALEJANDRA ROJAS CONTRERAS
ALEJANDRA ROJAS CONTRERAS
AYNUR KARAMAN
Aynur Karaman explores the duality of spiritualism and materialism in our Western culture with undertones of the environmental global landscape. Symbolic and metaphoric bold, raw organic lines, geometric shapes and decorative patterns reflect the complexity of our society and existence creating an intertwined organic rhythmic composition. The hybrid paintings composed of heterogeneous art styles emancipate the sense of individuality and the collective. The synchronization of layers evokes the balancing, capturing, and engraving of our connection with our own species and the rest of the living organism.
www.aynurkaraman.co.uk
info@aynurkaraman.co.uk
AYNUR KARAMAN
AYNUR KARAMAN
CASSANDRA MARSHALL
A site - specific piece, Interrupted Silence is a performance/broadcasting project from my research practice into the acoustics properties of the singing bowl. How we relate to a sound source when it is visible in a performance and how we respond to the disassociation of sound, through the non – visibility of an unrecognisable everyday sound through different listening environments is explored. During the live performance, the sound source is visible in one room for the participating audience whilst the live broadcast will be heard throughout various parts of the building and online via internet radio to a wider audience. From the performance aspect I am observing the physical relationship of these singing bowls with the performer and listener, the physical sensations of vibration and sound moving in space. There is also a meditative element of the sound source as it aids one into deeper states of relaxation. However, in terms of the site – specific nature of the piece, my main interest is with the temperamental nature of the sound, always changing and interacting with its surrounding environment. In this case it has been the different acoustic environments of the Grove building. In my approach to performing, every piece becomes indeterminate. A month residency has been set up online to broadcast this event. At the following dates and times listed below, performances will be taking place at the Grove Building, Mdx and available to listen to on Intersilence Radio.
http://intersile.wordpress.com
CASSANDRA MARSHALL
CASSANDRA MARSHALL
CHRIS WONG CHUNG MEI
Nature is the theme that I have been interested in and working on for years.
As a resident from Hong Kong travelling
to London, the change of daily encounters and living experiences further evoke a strong response to work with nature. As far as nature, not only in terms of content but also medium, is concerned, natural resources are gathered as inspirations and memories, traces of nature are left on the work while exploring different ways of engaging them directly as raw materials for art making; retaining transcultural memories in the work.
Refinement is constituted through various
destructive means of transforming natural materials, which reminds us of the absence of materials and the texture of time and space. Consciousness disappears through the repetition of simple elements or steps.
Sensation and subtlety are gradually
shown on the piece of art while transient moments with nature are captured, intertwining between borders of control and freedom, disruption and transformation, memory and oblivion.
wcmcuhk@yahoo.com.hk
CHRIS WONG CHUNG MEI
CHRIS WONG CHUNG MEI
JILLIAN KNIPE
Using rudimentary materials such as paper and wire I am inviting the viewer to ask … What is the work? Are these completed sculptures? Models for sculptures? Materials in readiness to make sculptures? Experiments? While the work was developed as one overall sculptural space, it is comprised of several objects. Each relaying a sense of movement – folded – leaning – compressed – to heighten the precariousness of their existence. Will they last? Topple over? Fall apart? Collapse? My aim is to create a sense of tension with these questions, while simultaneously portraying a cohesive environment. I am interested in the momentary. The ‘almost but not quite’. My focus is on the transitionary process based on psychoanalyst D W Winnicott’s theory and progressed in the 1970s by Gilbert J Rose to describe a lifelong transitional process between our environment and our complex internal reality. The negotiation between internal and external realities forms a union between the two. The work symbolises an exploration of this fluid, yet ultimately unknowable, bridge.
jillianknipe@mac.com
JILLIAN KNIPE
JILLIAN KNIPE
JULIE ANN STEWARD
I had to get out of the stifling airlessness of the cold corporate building where the windows had no individuality – they all opened and closed at the same time and we didn’t even have the key that controlled them!
The views of the scudding clouds, lush green fields
and glinting treetops only increased the yearning to escape.
‘Over
the summer, you will be an artist in residence,’ our tutor informed us.
I interpreted this as an exploration of my practice within the
university and the local community.
The university has recently
undergone a considerable transition, which has entailed the merging of different sites into one and as a result, transition is one theme that runs through my work, with its associations of transience and ephemeral, of aftermath and debris, of displacement and relocation, of memory and (re)collection.
Partly as a mode of investigating the nature of the transition from one site to another, I decided to walk the distance between the two, observing and collecting on the way.
As a result, the process of
walking became an integral part of my work and research and also provided me with an outlet from the airless restriction of the studio.
The chosen routes were those which by and large avoided the
main arteries and ran past backs of houses, alongside brooks and under main roads.
On the way, I recorded moments in mobile snap-
shots and salvaged pieces of debris – mainly signs of human intervention – that caught the eye.
Chance encounters of the scavenger
were relished to the point of obsession.
I then tried to re-present
the environment of the walk in the studio space to draw attention to what is underfoot or has been sidelined and provoke reflection. To maintain the vibrancy of the initial installation, it had to be continually replenished and watered with painterly layers.
I hoped
that it would provide prompts for others to go out and walk for themselves and enjoy the air and indeed, during the period of the show, I also instigated a short walk in the local area.
JULIE ANN STEWARD
Having looked at/experienced art for so many years, innumerable works and ideas have seeped into my imagination and influenced the work I produced for this show.
I will
mention just one or two of those I encountered or revisited while making this work. I saw
Last year at the Venice Biennale,
the work of Ida Ekblad for the first time and felt a
real affinity with it, especially in the way she combines poetry with oil painting on canvas and structures made from discarded stuff that she has found on walks around the city. In fact, there are many artists for whom walking and/or collecting form an essential part of their process.
Another
artist who worked in several media and used fragments of found objects was Kurt Schwitters.
He also dramatically
transformed the spaces he lived in, which is what I have attempted to do here on a much smaller, less radical scale. In 2005, in an exhibition called An Aside at the Camden Arts Centre in London, I saw a work by him called Painted Stone(s), 1945-7.
At the time, he was a displaced person
living in the Lake District.
Tacita Dean, who had selected
the works for the exhibition, saw this work as a way in which the artist was relocating himself.
This theme of displace-
ment and belonging is very much present in my thinking and I find I often return to the catalogue of this 2005 exhibition. Tacita Dean says that, in the work of other artists that appeals to her, it feels as if the form the work takes has been found through the process of making, and that is how my work for the MA show was largely developed, with chance and free association also playing a part, much as they appear to do in the ‘Robinson’ films of Patrick Keiller – another artist whose work has been an influence on me.
julie.steward@blueyonder.co.uk
JULIE ANN STEWARD
MICHAEL LEE
I spend as much time as the English weather affords me rooting around the local woodlands searching for magical moments of sunlight playing through the flora and fauna.
I have
become obsessed with capturing these with my camera, such that the results could easily be read as paintings.
I then
take these painterly photographs and work directly on top of them in the studio using whatever techniques necessary to complete them as actual paintings. The results are vastly varied covering the spectrum of figuration to abstraction.
Some leave much of the photograph
intact, whilst others have had it almost entirely removed from the composition. The colours are often bright and vivid and reflect the season they originated in.
Many are heavily
textured, adding physicality to the work, not normally associated with photography. I also take photographs of details of my paintings and work over them so that they are transformed into landscapes. These paintings allow the viewer to become involved in other worldliness, immersed in themes of immensity, macro and micro.
This exhibition references a breadth of landscape
painting whilst sitting provocatively on the edges of taste and convention.
mplee.com
MICHAEL LEE
MICHAEL LEE
VRISHTI RATURI
“The dilemma or the war of understanding and not understanding makes me probe more…. Search for unexplored horizons….” I am an Indian based artist. My work is abstract paintings on meditation and spiritualism. The impact of my culture on the imagery is inherent and in many cases it is towards the beliefs that I have grown with. My expressions are a culmination of all the experiences and impressions. My paintings are my inner experience and involvement with the mysteries of life and I try to express them in various colours, different tones and textures.
The different tones of colours that
I have used in my paintings reflects my thoughts my feelings in meditation, the inner silence and the peace, negative and positive vibration. Somewhere these painting are a quest of life and sometimes a solace that comes from the sanctum sanctorum of mind. I share my emotions represented in my work and it tends to create an endless dialogue between my work and me and I find myself engulfed with not just one answer but myriad of answers & feelings, expressions & emotions.
While painting, I travel
inward to explore the progression of thoughts and emotions residing deep within my mind. While painting, I travel inward to explore the progression of thoughts and emotions residing deep within my mind. The inspirations while doing a painting comes from within and I honestly cannot define it as a theme, no matter what or how I paint.
VRISHTI RATURI
VRISHTI RATURI
afterword by Prof JON BIRD
The American art historian and critic, James Elkins, concluded his study of the art school somewhat ruefully: ‘Teaching in an art department or an art school is the most interesting activity that I know, because it is the furthest from anything that makes sense – short of psychosis’.(1) I say ‘ruefully’ as this comes at the end of two-hundred pages of critical examination – of trying to make sense of the pedagogic practices and historical evolution of contemporary departments of art and design. He devotes a whole section to the ‘critique’ – the standard model of fine art school analysis – exposing the hidden and explicit procedures of description, interpretation and evaluation that frame the exchange between student and tutor in the apparent search for meaning: the interplay of ‘judicative’ and ‘descriptive’ commentary (where the former is frequently concealed in the latter).
As one who has spent most of their professional working life in departments of art and design, and even though I part company with Elkins on a number of issues and assertions (he is recording the American university experience), his book is a useful reminder of the myths and contradictions of ‘teaching what can’t be taught’, and of the precarious cognitive value of aesthetic judgements. In an educational system where both students and staff are constantly under review and qualitative and quantative assessment at both local and national level rules our professional lives – current UK departments/schools of art and design – any reflection upon the art objects and practices produced under this rubric is to be approached with caution: one never knows whose interests might be served. That said, we are expected to make meaning/s out of the productive activities of our students whatever their multifarious concatenations: of film and video, photography and performance, painting and sculpture, sound and light, text and assemblage… a list as long and various as Borges fabled Chinese Emperor’s encyclopedia, or Lautremont’s ‘chance encounters’.
What, then, can one expect from one or two years as an emergent artist who has undergone (I almost want to say, survived) a postgraduate programme in fine art. A way of working – a method (not a methodology despite the regular confusion of those terms); some skills in making – facture and fabrication; knowledge of the historical antecedents to one’s own studio practice; a grasp of critical terminology – the discourse of art, and a degree of scepticism towards theoretical over-determination (again, Elkin’s comes to mind); a recognition of the demands and constraints of the pursuit of art-making as a career choice, including the institutions of art from museums and galleries to art fairs and auctions; a capacity for critical self-reflection and not always taking oneself too seriously, and the recognition that failure, mistakes, wrong turnings and doubt are as fundamental to the making of art as night is to day.
In another context, writing about the art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith, I suggested that the particularity of fine art practice resided in the ‘fashioning of convincing alternative visual scenarios for our encounters with the world’, (2) and this seems to me a reasonable summary of the aspirations of this year’s MA Fine Art group. The pitch of a note, the faint aroma of cut grass, light and space, the odd juxtaposition of found materials sewn together, the blending and tension between photographed and painted form, organic patterns of colour and line, paint dribbled across a surface: all in their different expression of intention and interest suggest a struggle and commitment to find affective forms of visualization for perceptual and imagined worlds. One can’t really ask for anything more.
Jon Bird September 2012
(1) James Elkins Why Art Cannot Be Taught, Chicago 2001 (2) Jon Bird ‘Imagining Otherworlds: Connection and Difference in the Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith’ in OtherWorlds: The Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith, London 2003