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Since the beginning of the course I have covered several different disciplines and core ideas, through each departure I have learnt something new that has contributed to my final pieces. During unit one I was exploring staging interventions, these felt quite theatrical but without any actors and encouraging participants to instead become part of the work. From this I have continued to have an absence of people within my work whilst the human condition is still very much at the forefront of my thinking. At this time I had been focusing on the work of Mike Nelson and Jeff Wall for their immersive installation pieces.

 

I moved on to create large structures for people to climb inside of, a warm and womb like space that starkly contrasted the minimalist forms I was making simultaneous to this. This much smaller sculpture arose from my thoughts on photography and how there is can be an absence of scale within a picture, that if I were to just show photographs no-one would know how big piece was. This particular sculpture was a hollow white cube with a mirror and a light inside it and small wooden blocks arranged inside. Though I decided to display the sculpture and encourage participation again, it was the idea of using photography to remove the audience from the sculpture that stayed with me.

 

Continuing with wooden pieces I made a set of white blocks with small tiles of wood arranged on its surface that were reminiscent of a birds eye view of a city, from here the idea of architecture came more into focus and I continued to use photography considering it now more interesting than the actual sculpture. I made a larger more angular sculpture with sharp pieces extruding from a frame with the intention of photographing it within a space that was made up of a lot of other lines and planes, this was another example of using photography to create a new piece of work rather than as documentation. I became excited by the work of Lygia Clarke and Helio Oticica at this point particularly for their smaller scale sculptures that would then transform into installations.

 

At this point I had begun to consider a lot of the ideas I am working with now but without pulling them into focus, rather what I was investigating was minimalism in the form of white wooden blocks arranged into small sculptures. More and more these became architectural maquettes but were never quite convincing and from here I began to consider failure as part of a work, these pieces felt like they wanted to become buildings but were falling far short, I then brought the built environment to the centre of my work. In terms of considering failure as part of my work I was looking at John Baldesarri and his piece Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line, the artist’s book was about the structure of games and following rules to achieve a goal, I saw a struggle toward to the unattainable within this piece and it made me think more about how much sculptures were doing this but also how real buildings were in fact attempting to do this and failing to realise their intentions, particularly with Brutalism.

 

This gave rise to the natural progression from using wood to using concrete, using a new material opens up a birth of research and I found this direction to be the most interesting yet. I began using mortar in cube moulds, making dozens with the thought that I might combine them all into one sculpture but found that they were not stable enough. I then made small forms out of MDF and timber and covered them with fire cement but was not happy with the colour as it was more of a sandy colour than the grey that I was looking for. I painted these objects but was again not happy with the result and they were now no longer concrete they were small grey paintings. I did experiment with the placement of these despite not being happy with them and found that they were most interesting when positioned outside of a normal exhibition space particularly when they lay in connection to the infrastructure of the building drawing the eye to the pipes and cables that you wouldn't normally take any notice of. Le Corbusier was a key influence at this point, I was still focusing on Brutalism, particularly its idealism and its attempt to create a utopian living and working environment with concrete being at the centre of its materialisation. Jonathon Meades' documentary was an important source of information at this time.

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My continual concrete experiments have allowed me to become familiar with the material and how it reacts to being treated in different ways; I started to use postcrete, which is fast setting, to cast oblong shapes on a production line until I had about 100 small sculptures. I also tried to work out how to use concrete as a ground by laying it onto boards, this didn't adhere to the surface and produced a brittle slab that was very smooth on one side. By laying the concrete on thick I was able to make an almost circular slab that was strong enough to hold rather than splitting and crumbling when it was picked up, I really liked this surface but wasn't sure what to do with it at that point. I started to photograph the concrete casts arranged together and then placed them in discrete places in the college, I chose places amongst the building’s infrastructure to create a connection between the concrete, the pipes that do largely unnoticed and the concrete structure of the building. I felt that I needed a stronger context and thought more about my relationship to concrete; having lived in croydon all my life concrete has become quite common place but focusing my attention on it I became more influenced by my surroundings and interested in Croydon specifically, I read Concretopia and found it to be extremely relevant. Concrete became a signifier of place.

 

In light of this new path I started to take the concrete casts in Croydon’s concrete environment, I felt there was a strong relevance here that started linking things together. I also started to think of things that are part of my work and personal life that were also very relevant to what I was beginning to see emerging in my art work. The photography project that I’m working on with Crisis members has allowed me an insight into the lives of people that have had a very different experience of Croydon than I have, going on photography walks through the town has opened up some very poignant stories about their relationship to their surroundings and what they would like to be different about it. My project that aims to bring more arts activity into the community has enabled me to make more of a connection with the community and multiple groups that are already running programmes for people, this feels very much connected to the art work that I am currently making.

 

After reading Concretopia and seeing where a lot of the Brutalist architecture arose from I wanted to understand more about the history of town planning after the war, I watched The Way We Live because it was recommended in the book and it clarified a lot about how people were feeling at the time as well as elements of it being relevant to Croydon’s current condition, namely the uncertainty that is felt in many areas for local business and for people in rented accommodation. My research of the era spoken about in The Way We Live and Concretopia has highlight that the post-war optimism and modernist architecture combined in an attempt to realise the ideals of Brutalism but achieved something more synonymous with brutality than the intended bèton brut in Croydon. Despite all the best intentions, Croydon’s plans failed and many 1960s buildings have remained empty for years, simultaneous to the worst housing crisis in over a decade with homelessness rapidly rising.

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I have focused on a particular area that is due to be demolished in the near future, there will be no more interim uses and they are just to lie dormant until the new place of culture and education is developed, hopefully it will be more successful than before but its not clear that the new architects have really addressed the failings of the current environment because it will certainly run deeper than what the building looks like. The National Trust guide book and a short documentary by the Architecture Foundation have been excellent sources of finding beauty in things that have mostly been seen in a negative light.

 

As a further exploration into this area I have looked very closely at concrete paving slabs and every single one is cracked, they all have unique scars and it made me think about the failures or modernism, that the area had just been left to decay because it seems that nothing can be done for it leaving a memory of what it once was and what it failed to become. Shona Illingsworth Lesions in the Landscape, video piece following the story of a lady who is living with amnesia interwoven with an exploration of the depopulated island of St Kilda, Illingworth was able to drawing interesting parallels between the lady and the historical lesions on the landscape of St Kilda. I found this connection between a person and an environment really striking and was encouraged to find one more about the particular places I was photographing.

 

I’m using my sculptures to mimic the structures and subtly disrupt the environment; capturing this interjection using photography brings them into a single plane, I have looked at George Rousse’s photography in relation to this as he very cleverly flattens sculptures using photography. In his piece Thonon he presents an image of what appears to be a yellow circle superimposed on the image when it is in fact a sculpture that plays very well with perspective and the depth of field of a camera. Using photography is something that I had been doing throughout the course but struggled with due to lack of context whereas the images of the sculptures within the relevant croydon environment felt much more connected and a narrative was held within the image

 

I experimented with the concrete casts further by transferring images of buildings onto them and discovered this was successful so I went on to layer cement onto boards which produced an object that looked like a slim concrete slab (without the weight) then printed directly onto them. I feel this has given further emphasis to the material that lies at the heart of my own lived environment. Francis Mason’s piece Ballast combines photography and sculpture, he has turned the photograph into a sculptural object by hanging 2 concrete oblongs down either side of the image using rope or in Render 2 where he has removed an area of the photograph to reveal real concrete underneath. This use of the real material that is being referenced in the photographs adds another dimension to the work which is what I have tried to achieve by printing images directly onto concrete. I feel that I have reached a very exciting point in my work and I am keen to continue my exploration in Croydon.

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