BA Fine Art Year 2: Week 11-15

First week of term 2 was our exhibition for Unit 5. We envisioned a live, performed installation that enveloped the exhibition space, drawing in the other pieces of work and re- sponding to the environment, like a hive mind or collective consciousness, which we had discussed in our seminar series Virtual Worlds. The other works in the exhibition either fed the hive mind directly or were eaten by it – a text piece on the wall had been written during our rehearsals; a painting had an expla- nation in Morse code next to it, which was then recorded and fed into the piece; video works with no sound had our piece as a soundtrack. The only works that avoided being absorbed into our hive mind were a video, hidden away and displayed on a very small monitor, and a video displayed on a monitor on a plinth that critiqued Russian propaganda and had a soundtrack only accessible by headphones. The set-up was central, so the audio equipment and the table it was on became a sort of stage or framework for us to work around, and we used features of the room (such as the running water in the sink and the metal vent) to generate atmospheric sounds, along with our own bodies, voices, and objects. I think this worked well to create a group piece from half of the total group (and those that were absent were still able to contribute as we played pre-recorded sounds that they had made), how- ever we ran into some issues as some people had not nished their work until the end of last day of installation so curating their pieces around our set up became a struggle.

A link to the performance is available here: https://youtu.be/5pE10ZX1BnM

We decided to try a stripped down version of Hive in the per- formance platform, as we wanted to use the White Lab and experiment with only using our bodies and voices for sounds. I performed my guided meditation from the first performance which draws the listener into the collective consciousness-, read out sentences from my dream diary, and performed yogic breathing. The others made sounds using their mouths. I liked how this time the sound was more prominent and became a drone as the previous sounds mixed and melted together when they were recorded and re-recorded, and it was more of an audience-performer staging. Despite this, I think it wasn’t as rich as the rst performance, as the concept of the hive mind couldn’t exist without the context of the group exhibition, and its relation to the pieces surrounding it.

For my assessment presentation I worked on a continuation of Goodnight Parsley – I wanted a physical collection of items that documented our relation- ship to the rat in our house. It would not take the bait on snap traps, so we had to use glue traps and then beat it to death with an empty cava bottle. At first I didn’t have any cava bot- tles, so in the meantime painted empty wine bottles. The use of colour goes back to the work I was doing about chakras from May-September which I think I am still being in uenced by, as I started this project by thinking about the 3rd chakra or level of consciousness, and the documentation of the killing of the rat was meant to lead into questions of self-perception and under- standing concerning my personal ethics. I wanted to totemise the wine bottles as a kind of ritualistic killing instrument, as I had been reading David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, which talked a lot about ritual and language in oral cultures, and referred to how any cultures refused to speak about the animal they were going to hunt before they did so, out of respect. We, on the other hand, spoke frequently and negatively about the rat, and when we nally killed it we cleaned the whole kitchen, I burned sage, and my atmate prayed and lit a candle. I think that this piece has become too representative of the actual event, and the lack of context means that the theme of self-understanding is lost. I performed by sitting behind the plinth, and told the story of how we killed the rat in a very animated fashion, hitting the rat traps with the Cava bottles.

Having completed all my work for the term, I'm spending the next two months preparing for my exchange to Berlin by learning German, learning to drive, applying for a placement year and getting a head start on my research plan for my dissertation. My work Lemon Film is going to be exhibited in the Lethally Gallery for their show Temporalities next month, and I am working on a painting for another exhibition entitled Netflix and Chill. My practice will be further exploring the relationship between ritual, religion and shamanic practices and contemporary workout culture, particularly focusing on the notion of perpetual self-improvement.