Ends and Beginnings

It’s nearly the end of yet another year and the third years are putting up their work ready for assessment. Once that is done its time for the final shows. End of year rights of passage are things that art courses do really well, I forget that other courses don’t have this celebration of the best work done, simply exams and a long period of waiting for the results.

Besides the occasional help with holding something in place while someone tightens a screw, I’m mainly wondering the studios and giving advice; simply operating as an extra pair of eyes. Sometimes you are so on top of the work that you can’t see things. It’s good to be able to just talk on a casual basis with students that you have watched grow and change over three years. Hopefully they are still hungry for more, ready for that next step out in the real world. As I go round there are so many possibilities being opened out, ways into making that if just pushed that bit further could be really great. The hard bit is though yet to come. How do you get enough money together to rent a studio, how do you get access to the right level of technical support and equipment? I really think it’s time Leeds had a proper sculpture workshop, a place for fabrication on an ambitious scale. There is so much empty property about at the moment, surely a group could be formed with the skills and interest to put something like Glasgow sculpture studios together.

Perhaps this could be something the three Leeds degree institutions could help put together. In Glasgow the sculpture workshop benefits the city as a whole and also services the School of Art helping to take pressure off their workshops in busy periods and at the same time of course, giving students an experience of what it is like to work out in a professional workshop.

Beginnings are also very important, for years I used to help think through and set up the opening large drawing set-ups for Foundation. Every summer we would re-think what could be constructed for the beginning of the year. Grids and geometric solids were always important, but just as vital was the decision as to what would work against these constructions. Some years it would be students being asked to create giant tools out of cardboard, other years objects chosen for their personal histories or stories, whatever it was these situations had to be immersive and capable of being measured, composed and selected from. There were a whole range of different approaches to this though and a different approach at Foundation level as opposed to degree level; I shall try and unpick what these approaches and issues were in the next post.

Third year critiques

More critiques this last week with third years. Most of the feedback was based on the pragmatic awareness that people have to get on with things if they are to get their final show up to the type of standard you expect. I was doing the crits with Sheila and David Steans, who came in for a day. It’s always interesting to work with someone fresh, David in particular is part of the young Leeds art scene, (if you can call it that), he is working as a curator as much as an artist, or perhaps in a merged field that covers both. This is a way of working that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago, curators were a breed apart and smelled of stuffy museum back rooms and hours spent pouring over old dusty art history books. How times change. I thought some good advice was given, but was left pondering the whole issue of the artist and being alone. What was great about those two days was everyone contributing to possibilities, people were giving openly of their experiences and skills and you could see work developing as ideas were clarified and tested out by the group. We are a social animal and ideas and art-work are so much easier to develop if we work together. The final product goes through a group edit and comes out much better for it. Making decisions on your own is very hard, working on your own is hard too, it’s always easier to keep going if you know a team of people are involved, as you don’t want to let others down. But our entire system is designed to promote individualism. The college marking system doesn’t work very well if students work as teams, academic measurement starts going astray and no one trusts a group mentality. I wonder how St Martins marked Gilbert and George in their final year? The group mind is far more powerful, this is why films are so great, so many contributions, people with an enormous range of overlapping skills coming together to make something that can at its best be wonderful. More art needs to be made like that. 

Critiques year three

Finally getting back to teaching today. I’ve been doing nothing but day after day of interviews. We had over 500 applicants and we see everyone. This meant looking through portfolios and giving each person approx. 15 minutes to convince us that they should be a degree student. In order to cut the time down, we choose one piece of work from the portfolio and take it to the interview room, this is what people have to then talk about, whether they like the work or not, the days of students going through the portfolio from front to back are now long gone. Sometimes potential students find the process one of opening up and being creative, at others I get the feeling they find it autocratic and impersonal.

As soon as interviews finished it was assessment time again and we were marking collaborative work done by the first year. This week though I’m doing critiques with year three. This group of students is one I haven’t worked with since I did a drawing week with them in the second year, so it’s interesting for me to get a feel of where they are. The morning session picked up some fundamental problems, the chief of which was pragmatic testing. I was worried that students were letting ideas drag on. The reality of professional practice is that you have to keep making things that can be exhibited. This means being pragmatic about what you hold on to and being prepared to let go. I think this group of students are over-working and over-thinking their production. They are not testing out the reality of how to get the idea out there and it feels as if everything is too comfortable. I realise they have just been writing their dissertations but again the reality is all of us have to manage multi-tasking if we are to get anything done. I’m also aware of students working out of other institutions and I would expect to see far more resolved pieces by now. Perhaps the critiques have not been aggressive enough or previous successes have been replayed too many times, whatever it is a wake-up call is needed. Above all the key issue is work. Work creates more work and work is often all there is. Then, when you have  a pile of stuff you can go in with that critical eye and pick stuff out, but fiddling about gets you nowhere, as I can clearly remember when I think back to some students I was at college with, including at times myself.

Thinking of long gone days, this is another of those foundation ‘Morning Drawing’ exercises.

‘Looking down at the body and drawing what you can see’.

Students are asked to draw landscapes of the body. Standing at an easel, they are to simply look down at themselves and draw what they see. Gradually the drawings would move from having to deal with extremely foreshortened perspective, to issues such as in and out of focus. In particular drawings would have to deal with disappearing noses, shapes that were shadows of their former selves, coming into and out of focus. How the eye works its way across surfaces previously understood from views in the mirror, now having to be re-invented as landscapes of personal ownership. The point about these drawings being of course that the familiar can become strange again, simply by taking a new perspective on it.

The students I spoke to this morning need to be able to grasp this point. They all had interesting subjects, but they needed to refresh their ideas by taking on new and different perspectives. Always of course easier said than done.

Back to the 21st century. A day with 3rd years

I did a days cover this week for my old friend Steve who is having to nurse his very ill mother. It's the beginning of the final year of the students' degree programme and the course always begins the process by getting students to review what they they have achieved so far. In small groups they present and staff (with the other students support) try and highlight significant moments and interesting threads that run through the work. This is a delicate process. You can't just tell someone what sort of practice they should be developing, its more a process of leading them towards self-reflection. If a student doesn't 'own' the practice, it wont be sustainable and you can find people 'illustrating' your ideas rather than discovering new things. Only in work will directions be found, but if the work is being done in too predictable a manner, its unlikely that new, surprising things will be uncovered. Process is as important as materials, which are as important as content, which is as important as concept. Some will need to start with materials play, others with conceptual engagement, some with the documentation of personal experience, others with a dialogue with the art business. The advantage of experience here is that the more you have the more possible entry points are recognised.  I'm never sure of course how people feel about this. No matter how hard you might try to be objective, people can read your suggestions as being subjective. It's therefore better if there are at least two members of staff to offer opinions, and/or articulate and supportive other students. 

These days still fill me with excitement. It's amazing how many possibilities are revealed and I can see so much potential in the different approaches to developing a practice. Some students are clearly just as excited by what they are doing and others are less confident. It is at this juncture that confidence comes into play more and more. There is a need to 'go for it'. A willingness to just do things and hope for something to happen. Soon the need for crafting, editing and refinement of ideas will come but for now its better to be slightly all over the place and awkward, the work will have to develop its 'edge' and that will not come from understanding but from a process that supports finding and discovering.