Category: Contemporary Art
CONTEMPORARY ARTS 2 | INITIAL WORKINGS
CONTEMPORARY ARTS 2 | SYNOPSIS
This semester, my work was focused on materiality and process and the exploration of how I could creatively and uniquely portray the more formal concerns that I dealt with last semester, this work being a somewhat continuation of the pieces I had completed before. This semester, I decided to focus more on the aesthetic and the making of things, rather than drawing a straight line from the context and meaning that I had situated the last works within, i.e a very clear feminine craft, feminine message context. Although I strayed from this rigidity of context, I always end up somehow arriving back at that point in some way or another, and that is what happened here. At this point in my practice, I have come to understand the female process and the systematic creation of pieces matters to me more contextually that the outcome. Because of this factor, installation and materiality are the main objectives within my mind when creating works. I like to create a lot of pieces that explore a certain area (maybe 20 pieces that have the exact same idea with only slight tweaks) in depth to get comfortable with materials and media and understand how the exploration can benefit a final installation of pieces.
This semester, as most go, my work took quite a left turn at around the half-way point in the semester. I wasn’t sure what I was doing with my work and I was creating pieces that I thought would be more successful rather than works that I actually wanted to make. During this process, I rediscovered an old bag of plaster from last year, and decided to play with manipulating this substance, of which I know next to nothing about the properties of, into forms that reflect my work, soft, muted yet colourful and almost textile-like. By the end of this process, I had created an array of plaster sculptures that almost look melted, stacked on top of one another and suspended on acrylic platforms, creating a sort of elevated Willy Wonka scene. By trying to move away from the work that I was making, rather than towards it at full force, I was creating pieces that didn’t make sense to me. I wasn’t able to create in the manner that has been successful for me in the past, therefore, the work struggled to be successful. By making a complete 180, I may have sacrificed time, but not inspiration, outcome or process.
The ideas within the work are much the same as they always have been in my previous works, that female process is something that comes naturally to me as a woman, to create forms and structures that subvert masculine predeterminations. Although, a lot of my process just includes play, the blind understanding of materials and forms that I have never explored, not wanting to stay within a field that I have experience in, as, to be honest, I get bored and uninspired relatively easily. I have thoroughly enjoyed exploring the ideas of artists working in similar contextual realms in hopes of gaining some of their thoughts around the execution of concepts within a contemporary arts space. I also took some time to explore the modern-woman’s craft and how the conditioning of the art world has affected how women create their work. I looked at people like the Guerrilla Girls who, although somewhat dated at this point, embraced ideas of femininity and challenged the lack of women artists in general media and art-culture.
In a broader sense, my work has come to align itself in a somewhat niche space in modern art: women creating feminine works within a material exploration execution. Some artist’s that I have looked at extensively while creating this semester have been women like Karla Black and Angela de la Cruz and who work with textiles and various other media to create works that explore materiality and the use of it in a female space. By looking into what these women were creating, I was able to understand more where my work sat in alignment to the current art-space outside the walls of Unitec and it’s confinements.
All in all, this work has morphed and changed into something I would have never seen at the beginning of the semester, and I think that is what I will continue to employ going forward in my works, A sense of reckless abandon, if you will. In creating these pieces, by not knowing where they will go and focussing only on the process and how it feels to touch the material, to manipulate it and to make it beautiful, I am able to become passionate and eloquent in my workings and create pieces that reflect the many facets of myself and the women around me. By being messy yet meticulous and working with materials that are new to me, I can create with endless possibilities within the realm of understanding I have surrounding the context of feminine process.
ANABELLE 