BA Fine Art: Year 2 Week 1

Back at it again at CSM, Winter Term of year 2 BA Fine Art has started and it’s better than ever. We’ve kind of hit the ground running, last week was solid briefings and crits where we showed work from over the summer break. I presented a sculpture of an orange spray-painted plastic monstera palm placed inside a vase filled with red salt, dyed with ink. It was meant to be an exploration of the first and second chakras, representing survival and pleasure, represented by the colours red and orange, and corresponding to crystals and plant life respectively. I had originally made it for an exhibition that was due to take place in the last week of September, however that was cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances, and now I will be presenting it in an exhibition at a space within my uni during November. My main goal with this piece was to try and achieve bright, vivid colours on the plant and salt, but I used cheap materials, and by the crit I had already used 2 cans of orange spray paint and 2 little bottles of watercolour ink, so the colours were not vivid enough and the overall finish was nowhere near what I wanted. This was brought up in the crit (I have since used red food dye and better spray paint), along with the fact that my work is becoming too didactic, I am merely representing the things I research instead of experimenting with materials, ideas and concepts. The main question I need to ask myself is “What do I want the audience to do with it?”.

I have been working up the chakra’s and their association, such as colour, consciousness, life form, sound and emotion, however so far all I have produced is representations. I am now working on the 3rd chakra: yellow, animal, how one understands oneself, located at the stomach. I am making a film that explores how I understand and present myself, through a spoken word sound narrative of how me and my flatmates killed a rat, and footage of myself eating a whole lemon, and custard donuts. The footage of myself eating a lemon has already been shot, in my room last week on my DSLR. This will do for the first cut, however in a couple of weeks I will shoot it again in the film studio, along with footage of myself eating a packet of custard donuts. The lemon footage is quite hard to watch, as I was really uncomfortable with eating the lemon, choking on the juice and spitting out the seeds, and grimacing at how sour it is. I wanted to be able to create the same discomfort in the viewer that I felt when I saw the rat dying in my kitchen, and over this footage will be a recording of myself reading out the email correspondence between myself and my landlord about the rat, and intermittent sounds of ultrasound rodent repellent noises and recordings my flatmate made of the sound of the rat chewing and scratching inside our walls. This will, at some point not obvious to the viewer, cut to a scream and a photo I took of the rat, and will then cut straight back to the previous footage and soundtrack. This is to get the same feeling of fear that I had when I saw the rat for the first time. I have also recorded myself re-enacting various conversations with my flatmates about the rat, and myself on the phone to my landlord, who called me when I was in the studio. I am unsure as of yet how, if, I use these recordings.

Other possibilities I am considering at this point involves sculpture using the traps we used to catch the rat, a cava bottle like the one we used to kill the rat spray painted yellow, lemons, oranges, houseplants and more red salt in an installation.