Low Residency Part 1 –
This week there wasn’t a formal zoom meeting due to preparations for both the Interim show and the Low Residency. There won’t be a formal zoom session next week either as this will be right in the middle of the Low Residency. For this reason I have decided to dedicate both zoom session slots to documenting both the Interim Show and the Low Residency. Part 1 will cover the Interim show Private View and Low Residency activities covering Thursday 9th March until Sunday 12th March. I will cover Part 2 next week from Monday 13th March until Thursday 16th of March.
The Interim Show (Thursday 9th March – 6.00pm-9.00pm)
I was really excited to be travelling to the Low Residency in London. I’m not the most confident of travellers, so I was lucky to have my husband accompany me. We left my car at Paignton boarded the train and headed off to our change at Newton Abbot railway station.
Once we arrived at Paddington, we bought some lunch and then set off on the new Elizabeth Line heading East towards Abbey Wood. Our actual stop was Farringdon. We departed the train at Farringdon and headed towards Kings Cross, the same direction as our Travelodge. After arriving at our Travelodge we unpacked, grabbed some tea and then set off for Trinity Buoy Warfe near Canary Warfe where the MA Interim show was being held.
Being at the show was amazing! I finally met people in real life as opposed to over Zoom. Although I really like Zoom, there’s nothing quite like meeting people face to face. Below I have put together a gallery of some of the exhibits. I did actually spend some time carefully editing these images. I felt that so much care and attention to detail had gone into each piece that I wanted to show them as best I could. The lighting in the venue was particularly interesting and many shadows were created on the walls. As I couldn’t avoid these shadows, I’ve actually tried to make a feature of them wherever possible. Apologies in advance for any pieces that I may have missed. All of the work was fantastic and I captured as many as I could before having to grab a tube back to the Travelodge.
Some Images from Trinity Buoy Warfe
Journey to Central Saint Martin’s
Below is my journey from the Travelodge to Central Saint Martin’s. I hope to attend the Low Residency next year so for me this is an ideal way to keep the journey fresh in my mind.
Paul Haywood Talk (Friday 10.00am)
On arrival at Central Saint Martin’s, I met even more people from my Zoom session which was great! After having a coffee, we proceeded to the second floor and into one of the classrooms. Dean Paul Haywood who is Jonathan’s boss was scheduled for a talk. As soon as Paul began to talk about his work I realised this was going to be amazing! The reason for this was because around 30 years ago I had also explored a similar technique to the one Paul was using. However, Paul’s talk allowed me to see what was achievable when done much more methodically, with purpose and with close attention to detail. Paul had carefully explored colour and even the pigments he was using to paint the pieces. What I really loved about his work was not only his methodical approach, but also because he retained his original pencil guide lines. I felt that these lines added a special dynamism to his pieces. I also liked his use of famous artworks as his starting point. He had carefully chosen them because they were telling a full story in one painting. I felt this was a great start to the Low Residency. It really did take me on a trip down ‘memory lane’, but it was also a fantastic demonstration of where this technique could be taken when done in a more considered way. Below are some of Paul’s slides that I captured during his talk. Below that are my works together with one of the original reference pencil drawings. Interestingly I had erased all of my guiding lines as I saw them as ‘visual waste’. However, having seen Paul’s work and based on what I learned, I have have since changed my mind about the guiding lines. Indeed I would approach this technique so much differently if I was using it today.
Foundation Course Images (Circa 1986)
A Futuristic Set of Weighing Scales
Each year my boss Pawel Psymanski (‘Pav’ for short) encourages the students to submit work to our Art Foundry Magazine. I can honestly say this has just gone from strength to strength. I mention this because this year the theme for the Art Foundry Magazine was ‘Fin de Siecle’, or end of the century in English. This year the idea was to take old work – if possible from last century and position it against new and current work. This caused me to dig deep into my archives. The reason I mention this is because I found another project in a similar style to that of Paul Haywood, but this time I had some roughs which showed some of my working out. The images below date back to circa 1991. As a quick experiment I thought that it would be interesting to see what the images would look like taking small fragments of the whole image. Although, this is a detour away from documenting the Low Residency, I just wanted to mention it here as an aside, so that I don’t forget about it. Ideally if I have the time, I would really like to find out more about Paul’s work and respond to it. Unfortunately it doesn’t currently fit with my project work so I’ll just leave this here for now as something to put on my wish list, along with creating a response to the work of Maria Helena Vieira Da Silva.
Some rough designs
Experimentation with parts of the design
Film Making ( Friday 11.00am – 5.00pm)
After our talk with Paul Haywood, we were tasked with making a film. We were put into random groups of five. My fellow students included: Trisha, Delphina, Lauryna, Jo and me. We had no official brief and creatively we had pretty much free rein over our ideas. We were given two days to complete the task. Our group was very interesting because we had just diverse interests and our practices were all very different. However, we decided from the start that it would be a film about collaboration and using this concept I think we all managed to produce something very interesting. Below is our finished video. The title of the video is a ‘mishmash’ of our initial 5 words that we chose as our starting point.
A Physical Colour Experiment in Soup Adaptation (Creative Soup)
This short experimental film shows what happens when a group of creatives come together with no brief and relatively free reign on their creativity. ChatGPT was also thrown into the mix for good measure. The film is fairly nonsensical but there again that’s exactly as it was designed.
People were invited to write down a word of their choice. This could be any word they liked. These words were then fed into ChatGPT, which created a story. The first story was not acceptable, so the software was tasked with coming up with another story which it did. This was all juxtaposed against a backdrop of collaborative collage making. The film ends with old pieces of work from previous students being worked on at an individual level by each member of the group. This was so some form of individuality was retained.
Our film below is all about collaborating – ultimately it’s a film about making a film and the result is quite unique.
Secrecy and Collapse – Lecture by Bel Jacobs (Friday 5.00pm – 6.30pm)
Straight after day one of our film making session I went to watch writer, speaker and campaigner Bel Jacobs on climate justice, animal rights and new fashion systems, Bel Jacobs is founder of The Empathy Project and co-founder Islington Climate Centre.
Bel gave a passionate speech about her work regarding climate justice on animal rights and climate justice. In many respects she was ‘preaching to the converted’ as I am also very interested in these topics. I can honestly say I hadn’t expected the start to my early evening to involve seeing a cow getting slaughtered and butchered (from stunning to butchering). However, it served as a stark reminder to me as to why I am currently reducing my own meat intake (eventually working towards becoming vegan).
It was a powerful, emotive and hard hitting talk which I greatly appreciated. Although a far cry from the nice warm fuzzy chat about environmental and animal friendly fashion that I had anticipated.
I do think people need to be made more aware of slaughter house processes because these are beautiful, trusting, sentient beings that are being exploited and murdered on a daily basis. Bel explained that often she is sent very distressing images of slaughterhouse malpractice. I applaud her for being able to deal with this and I very much hope she continues with her fight for justice.
Film Making (Saturday 10.00am-5.00pm, Screening 5.30pm)
Our film making continued through the whole of Saturday. I’ve often made short films for work so I was assigned the role of editor. When taken into editing, the film took 4.5 hours in total from start to finish. This involved trimming cutting, editing and assembling. I was pleased because we had comfortably managed to hit the deadline. Once everyone had finished their films, we went into a library pod for the grand screening. It was really nice that other students were able to join us on zoom.
Below are the two films made by the other students. What I really enjoyed about the whole exercise was seeing how other students had interpreted the brief. Each film was really different and everyone’s approach was totally unique.
Shirin, George, Ester, Tim and Haoyue
Yaya, Eirini, Emma and Sean
Rebel Cards with Paul Haywood (Sunday 10.00am-12.30pm)
After an exhausting but very enjoyable two days of film making we were back at the college for another talk by Paul Haywood. It was strange being in the college on a Sunday without any students but at the same time very peaceful. In Paul’s talk we were introduced to a concept called Rebel Cards.
Paul talked to us a little bit about the cards, but he also set us a task so that we could actually experience using them. I would love to learn more about this concept and I was was really lucky to have been given a set of cards to explore at home. During our session we worked in pairs (me and Delphina), were tasked with going on an imaginary tiger hunt. Most people in the group opted to use their time from a conservation of tigers/ecological perspective, although one group did want to make fur hats from the tigers. Not being a fan of travel me and Delphina came up with the idea of developing a computer game to hunt tigers which we felt was much better. We had originally thought about ‘shooting’ them but from the perspective of not harming them but photographing them (shooting them photographically). However, both of us felt that developing a computer game was probably a more creative and safe approach than heading off into the deepest darkest jungle to actually physically hunt tigers.
I found using the Rebel Cards really helpful as it was a great way to decide which attributes were needed to complete our task. Time permitting I would like to explore the Rebel Cards further.
South London Galleries (Sunday 2.00pm-4.00pm)
In the afternoon after lunch we took a tube and a bus through Peckham arriving at the South London Galleries. On the picture below the windows right at the front used to be Jonathan’s old office. Interestingly the gallery does have space for students to exhibit their work which can be applied for. There were two buildings that we visited. In the gallery images below I have included a photograph of the respective buildings followed by the artworks held there.
Cakes at Shirin’s House (Sunday 4.30pm – 7.00pm)
After visiting the galleries we all headed off to Shirin’s house. Shirin had very kindly made her home available for the evening so we could have some tea and cakes. I was nervous about travelling home alone on the tube so my husband joined us. It was a lovely way to round off the day and Jonathan’s wife had baked some cakes.
I will continue with the rest my Low Residency documentation in Zoom Session 20. I chose to do it this way because the Residency fell over two weeks covering the two Tuesday Zoom sessions that we missed. Therefore it made sense to me to use my Tuesday Zoom session slots to write about our activities.
See Part 2 (Zoom Session 20) for:
Low Tech Photography (Monday 10.00am with Felix Loftus)
Central Saint Martin’s Group Work with Tim, Delphina and Rachael
