About Me

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Liverpool/Sheffield, United Kingdom

Friday 20 May 2011

RESTRAINT

The purest and most satisfying way to execute a route is to solo it with no protection (ropes or gear.) It is a form of climbing that is taken up by fanatics world wide and is something I have experienced only on very easy routes. Although my experience of this type of climbing is very minimal, the sense of freedom of movement in comparison to rope aided climbing is to say the least addictive. However as you can imagine it is at the most extreme end of an already extreme sport and is ridiculously dangerous.

This got me thinking about the freest way to create art versus the most restrained way to created art. If you think about it as artist students we have ultimate freedom in what we do which is terrifying. We get to write our own brief and tackle it in anyway we want, at no point over the last two years have we been given any form of restriction on our creativity. So what if we were given guide lines and boundaries? Would our work be any less expressive? could boundaries in fact improve our work? or like relying on a rope to climb with, would it restrict our freedom of movement? as suggested by Juan I had a look at Matthew Barney's Drawing restraints. Restraining creativity in the most physical sense.     
 
 

Thursday 19 May 2011

what next?

Over the past few days I have started to think about the direction I want my work to go in next year and how to give myself a head start over the summer. A conversion with Juan towards the end of last term encouraged me to start looking in to creating work based around my obsession with climbing. As I learned from the project I have just finished I am far more likely to keep interest in a project if it relates to something I can be permanently engaged in. 

Monday 16 May 2011

Jumble sale

On Saturday afternoon me and my boyfriend arrived at Bradway scout hut jumble sale. Bradway jumble sale is the god father of all Jumble sales and it occurs a mere twice a year and is an event that me and will make an effort to attend when we can mainly on the off chance that we will find some second hand climbing gear. However this year was slightly different as joining us was Lauren, A family friend of wills who was visiting from Australia. It was an interesting experience trying to explain to Lauren what a jumble sale is "Its kind of a communal event where people donate all the crap that they dont want, and people rummage through it and donate money to a charity." Apparently they dont have jumble sales in Melbourne. As we arrived at 2.25pm on the dot we were greeted by the hugest Que you have ever seen. It spiraled out of the scout hut swung twice round the car park and a good 15 meters down the road. As 2.30pm came around the doors were flung open and swarms of people forced their way toward the entrance in a sort of frenzied rampage. We walked through the entrance to find angry elderly ladies fighting for there right to pay 20p for the occasional underskirt and children clawing at each other to get at the second hand toy section. As I turned to Lauren it was apparent that she felt extremely out of her comfort zone. She gestured to me with a very 'help me' kind of expression on her face and I grabbed her arm saying "just keep close you'll be fine." After a good half an hour rummage and a car journey with Lauren appearing to still be in shock we arrived back at wills house and proceeded to empty our black bin bags and compare our prizes. Wills pile of prizes contained multiple 'vintage' looking jumpers (to be expected) a few books and a Charles and Diana commemorative wedding mug (less expected.) My sole prize was a Kodak brownie twin camera which I had snatched from a little girls hand for a quid! I was pretty exited about my prize. Lauren however had not bought anything as she explained she was too scared to get her money out as she had witnessed a lady put her purse down on a table to look for her glasses and another lady pick it up and try to buy it. I then found my defensively trying to explain that attending jumble sales was not something that me and will did every weekend and that we did have many other interests.

I can possibly feel a piece of art coming on relating to consumerism and wastage and the amount of crap we collect. All seems rather relevant.

Stupidly huge Que!!

My prize!



             

Tuesday 3 May 2011

The end of an era

After my assessment last Thursday I packed up my life in Liverpool and head back to Sheffield where I will spend the beginning of the summer at home before I go traveling in June. I always find it surprising how relativity easily I manage to adjust to both of my separate lives. My main aims during this more latent period of my summer are to maintain my art practice (which I find rather difficult to do when I'm at home) maintain my blog, to climb and spend as much time as possible in the peak district. It will be interesting to see how much my art practice differs due to the difference in my surroundings. Below are a few snippets of my day to day goings on so far and experiments with my SLR camera.


Interesting light using my camera on Night mode



The state of my hands after a day of climbing





Washed out over exposed