Fabricate Exhibition!

Firstly! Massive thank you time! I'm still too excited from all the Youtube videos I was watching two hours ago!

I would like to hugely commend my friends and house mates Joe Boothby and Posy Jowett - a.k.a. Power Couple Josy - for the enormous amount of time and effort and Starbucks trips they put in to enable me (and more than 20 other artists) to show our work in Sheffield's Millennium Gallery. I merely turned up with my work and my role was fulfilled - the Fabricate team made it so easy and had been working for months to plan the whole event. When all the work was up and the gallery opened on Sunday morning, the space looked pristine and remarkably professional. Thank you to Josy and the rest of the Fabricate team!

If you didn't get the chance to see the show, you should a) sort out your priorities and b) look at the pictures belooow. Unfortunately, they're really just of my work because I'm too lazy and egotistical to edit images of other people's art work. Just kiddinng. I normally try to pass other people's work off as my own. Also kiddinngg. I hardly ever do that anymore. You're thinking of Shia LaBeouf.

I am what you are too (2014) Millennium Gallery, Sheffield 

Once again, thank you to everyone who was involved in the running and organising and curating of Fabricate - it was a pleasure to be a part of the show and I send much luck and best wishes to all the artists who exhibited work. Love x

It's super hard to title things inventively after a while

Heyyyyyy I've watched too many Grace Helbig Youtube videoooss this morning so I'm excited and ignoring my adult responsibilities yaayyyy

I really need to post some photos from the Fabricate exhibition BUT I'm posting these first so that there is some slight visual background to how the work turned out. Then I'll post the others. Stop hassling me. You sound just like my mother. 

Sam is my favourite person because he never leaves the studio. Ever.

Cuties

I have so many jars now!

My space has the best light in the whole building.

I'll be back x

All work and all play

As previously promised, here is a visual (and audible) recap of what I've been making in the last month. For the second time on this blog, this post gives thanks to Bimal Rana and contains some images of his amazing. I had the best time installing with Bimal, Chris Shaw and Sam Blackwood - their work looked fantastic and it was great riffing ideas off each other.

The work I exhibited in SIA Gallery was titled as follows:

I'm no Frida Kahlo (two glass topped plinths containing a jar, flour and a foil survival blanket)
Safety Recordings II (audio recording, approx. 20 mins, to be played through headphones)

The images I've included show the set-up of the work (and some of the guys' work as well) and how I altered my plans around what materials to use. I shall say no more - just have a look.

Oh, I also included the entire sound recording further down.

A section of Bimal Rana's installation - pretty awesome.

We turned the guys' projector around, onto my plinths. Just to see. 

Nice seeing you x

Colour tests and shiny blankets

The start of February means the start of term two! Could someone slow this year down? I hardly even noticed January sneaking by, the cheeky thing. 

Thankfully, the start of term two also means that I'm now post-interim assessment, which has left me with nothing but self-managed time from here on out. (With the addition of boring stuff like year meetings to attend.) Hopefully this will allow for more free moments to update you on the recent past. 

These test shots were a fun pre-assessment collaboration with Bimal Rana and his absolutely amazing neon plastic. (Hopefully he won't mind me using these images shamelessly.) I'd been trying to hunt down a source for getting larger sheets of tin foil (domestic rolls are great but a bit restricting width-wise) and suddenly thought of those shiny foil 'survival' blankets that I normally associate with helicopter rescue scenes. As it turns out, they're pretty cheap to buy from Decathlon (or Amazon), so I decided to indulge. There were ones that were completely silver and others that had one silver side and one gold side (I preferred the latter, although they're both quite plasticy to the touch and don't really hold their shape in the same way tin foil does)

I love the way these materials look next to each other; on top of one another. It isn't often that I use colour in my work, so it was also just nice for some of Bimal's material to talk to some of mine. I also bought some dust sheets that haven't quite found their purpose yet. I definitely prefer working with those sheets as an alternative to cling film - it doesn't stick to itself for one thing, so I'm much more able to reshape it and move it about. To put it another way, it doesn't make me crazy. 

Just damn good lookin', dontcha' think?

I did decide to use some of these materials in my assessment exhibition (we were lucky enough to install our work in SIA Gallery - a great space that's located in one of our university buildings. I think all our jaws hit the floor when we saw the kit that they were giving us access to. Did anyone say they wanted a table vitrine worth £4000 to display in? Because they've got two!) I'll post some shots of how it all looked and the decisions I made on the way.

Happy thoughts x