BA Fine Art: Week 6-10

Having survived a bike crash, the rest of this term passed by so quickly! Here is what I have been working on in the past month.

First presented in a group tutorial, I performed this piece again during our open studio event. I hoola hooped whilst listening to ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ by Taylor Swift on headphones, and sung the lyrics really loudly. The piece what partly a critique of fitness trends, the aesthetics of fitness and ‘Girl Power’, as the song was the first song on my ‘Daily Mix’ on Spotify. This is my most played songs, all of which were pop songs by female artists, and songs that I used to listen to predominantly when I worked out, but now listen to all the time, every day. This was received well in the group crit, as people found it funny and saw how I was trying to undermine the seriousness of workout culture, and it was also suggested that it could be a method for experimental singing, as I was out of breath, didn’t know all the lyrics and couldn’t hear my own voice. They also commented on the sense of empowerment from the piece, as the song is a breakup song, but an upbeat one. I want to continue in this thread of exploring fitness culture, particularly how it is presented in social media and also relating to spiritual contexts, such as appropriation of yoga in trends such as “Beer Yoga”. Exercise is very manufactured these days, and I wanted to show it as pure energy and expression.

Having collected numerous sound clips about the rat living in our house, such as scratching noises, conversations with my roommates, read-outs of emails with our landlord, phone conversations with our landlord, screams, and high pitched ‘rodent-repellent’ noises, I have begun piecing them together into a sound piece. Currently, I have just stitched different clips, adding in pan and fade in/out effects, and I will continue to shuffle things around to creating a haunting atmosphere, a sinister piece that will attempt to induce similar feelings to what me and my flatmates experienced knowing that there was a rat crawling all over our kitchen every night. I might experiment with adding distortion effects, in order to build the mood further.

Finally, I took part in a group exhibition where I displayed my piece "1ground2". This was a group exhibition that 7 of us had been planning since the start of September, however we had run into several problems with exhibition venues. Eventually we were given a space outside the library in Central St Martins for a week, and I presented a sculpture I had made when we first started planning in September, 1ground2. 1ground2 explores the relationship between survival and pleasure, the mineral and the vegetable: one as the barrier to another. Representative of the classification of lower levels of consciousness, the primacy of colour is an indicator of energetic or vibrational levels. The base consists of the mineral, salt, yet the plastic plant hovers in between mineral, from oil, and the organic life from which that oil comes from, imitating the familiar form of a monstera palm. If the orange plant was organic, it would surely die whilst in the salt, covered in paint, so in order for it to survive as an object, it must be fake.

Over the Christmas break I've been working on some sculpture for an exhibition that I will be installing on the first week back.