I shall be working with first year Fine Art students
for the duration of the site specific module out at Thwaites Mill. This is the
last year we will be doing this, the increase in numbers next year will mean
looking for something else to replace the experience. This video made by a
student from 2009 gives an idea of what the place is like. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQqgdHib4ck We try to make sure there are always two members of staff out on site, yesterday I was with Kelly and on Thursday I will be with Richard.
Students were introduced to the site before Easter and
did drawings, undertook research into its history, as well as took as many
photographic images as possible. A week after this they had one session back on
site with us and the permanent staff here before leaving for the break where
they introduced their ideas and we let them know whether or not the ideas were
practical and acceptable by the people who ran the site. Yesterday was the
students' first chance to show us what they were thinking about in more detail.
A couple of students had spent some time over the holiday actually on site
building things and so they had a head start over the rest, most of the others
had taken the opportunity to go home and have a break, as it has been quite an
intensive year for them.
Most of the issues we dealt with were about the actual
site specificity of the work they were doing. Typical issues and solutions: Student
(a) had been doing small paintings of views around the area. She was interested
in the way we romanticize places like Thwaites and that many of our historical
views of places like this are coloured by certain traditions of landscape
painting. In response to this she had been pitching the colour of the images
much higher or choosing certain views that were ‘pretty’. However she was
stumped as to how to present these. Eventually we went to each place she had
worked from and realised that she could engage an audience much more directly
my making iron frames for her painting that either came directly out of the
ground or that could be attached to nearby railings or similar fittings. The
technical focus of the work now moving from painting to welding and metal
construction, the site-specific aspects now responding to audience interaction and
the specific location of pieces; the bringing together painting with metalwork,
was also as way of reconfiguring the role of materials history (metals and
manufacturing/oil paints and art/leisure). Although we are working on site, the workshops remain open back at college and many students make their work there and then bring things back out to test them in situ.
Student (b) had spent the Easter making paper sheets,
(A1 size, using white pulp) cast directly from brick walls. She wanted to hang
these against a particular orange red brick wall, but something wasn’t right.
However another building in the vicinity had whitewashed walls, so we tested
the images against these walls, which by chance had the same dimensions of
brick and mortar. The white against white was much more subtle and would offer
a very different type of audience engagement. We spent time looking for more of
these whitewashed brick spaces and started to consider scale and positioning,
including the possibility of using invisible thread to hang these thin white
paper walls in such a way that air passing over them would make them slightly
vibrate.
Student (c) had bought a large dark red gym ball. He
had found an equally large wooden mold (formally used for metal casting) that
he had set the ball into and was making circles of putty around the ball.
(Thwaites watermill used to manufacture putty). Each circle of putty was about
2 inches wide, and this left two inch wide circles of dark red plastic glowing
through the neutral tones of the putty. In effect you had a large striped
sphere that had considerable presence. The putty was well handled and the
student had investigated how to make both matt and gloss finishes. (Putty is
essentially like oil paint, a linseed oil carrier with chalk as the pigment) He
had started to mix some dust into the putty to vary the circles but it was
decided this was too fiddly and that he should concentrate on making more
versions of these spheres and looking carefully at where and how they were
located. The fact that he was working with the wooden mold supported by two
wooden pallets meant that the stripes on the sphere were picked up by the slats
of the pallets, and this itself it was pointed out could be a formal issue that
eventually became important.
Student (d) was making a 10 foot high spider out of
cut branches and other tree offcuts. He had already tied together bundles of
branches with string and these would eventually become the legs of the
sculpture. The mill is located within ‘edgelands’ that all cities develop outside of their congested centres.
Overgrown bushes and spindly trees surround the area and there is plenty
of material available for this sort of work. By bringing these materials into
the shed in which he is working, the student is further confusing the boundary
between nature and the decaying old manufacturing site. One big issue is going
to be health and safety and the need for physical help. The legs are already
seriously heavy things, the projected body of this object will be a very large
cumbersome object and it will need to be fitted safely and securely to the
legs. One student last year had managed to build an even bigger sculpture out
of similar materials and the site warden had made him put up a sign warning people
not to climb, touch etc. Health and safety is now something we all have to work
with and although I don’t like it I am persuaded of the necessity and of course
having to deal with these things are vital learning curves for the students. He
will also have to find other students prepared to help him, there is no way he
will be able to put this together on his own. Skills in working with others
will come into this and how he engages and project manages this will all have
to be recorded. Students (e, f) are working together taking black and white
photographs of themselves performing responses to the mill. When I was talking
to them one of them had obviously been covering himself with white chalk dust
as part of some performance, but as they were using an old film camera they
couldn’t show me what had been done. They propose to develop this film (and
others) then print up large black and white images (using old technology to
make statements about old technology) allowing for chemical problems and other
‘mistakes’ that come from using an old process. The resulting images would be
placed around a particular stairway that leads up into the mill. In some ways
they are trying to re-inhabit the mill with human actions, some of which of
course would have been funny as well as tragic. The issues surrounding the
demise of all technologies and how capitalist industry moves on seem quite
appropriate for a recession.
All day was spent looking at similar issues and I
shall be out there again tomorrow doing the same. What always interests me is
how some students really blossom in these situations, whilst other find the
situation a threat to their own ‘integrity’ and find that their ideas don’t
fit. These first year projects are all designed to push people beyond their
comfort zones and those that still want to do the same thing they came with at
the beginning of the year are perhaps holding on to something that is so
powerful that it will just have to be accepted as their direction for year two.
I’d rather see this as being the case than the other reading, which is that
some people are just so limited that they cant cope with anything except the
one narrow focus that they have always had.
No comments:
Post a Comment