Critical Diary

This is the link to my online Critical Diary

Deadlines

Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines...

all this in an attempt to kick myself into doing the 3 tonnes of work i have sprawled around me... We have a deadline for an animatic on tuesday 2nd which *luckily* i finished before i left leeds for the easter holidays *phew*

so thats the first deadline i can tick off the list... now there's the personal project, critical diary, critical diary report and print elective...

i've done my report, that was ok. basic enough. fine something i like and write about it. done. ticked. but the critical diary... EUGGHHHHH i hate it, i really can't bring myself to complete it, it all seems so pointless. i've decided next year i'm going to do an online version of it because i really don't like working in this sketchbook it's just pissing me off so much, looking at the pages and pages of white waiting to be filled with something i really don't have the time or energy to care about.

Personal Project? EUGGHHHHH x 2. I was going to build a website using the words and random conversations and stuff - no point in explaining because it's not happening. my brother asked me a while ago to help him build a website for Castletown Hockey club of which he is a member and team leader so i have decided to use that work as my personal project stuff, but it means i have to build all the background rough work to hand in as the website doesn't look like it's going to be completed in the next few days so whatever i hand in is gonna be half arsed and basically... shit...

arghhh i hate this, the 1st year is so confusing to work out what i'm supposed to focus on work wise, whats priority and now in the last few months i have deadline after deadline all shouting at once for attention... BAH!

i've just looked through my crit diary... and i'm thinking FUCK IT, i'm going to spend the next 11 days to build a blog that will be my crit diary... i can do this.. i hope, because i just can't bring myself to do any more stuff in that sketch book. i just get instant writers block and get distracted too easily...

and then print, i don't even know! the deadline is a few weeks away i think so i can blag that a little nearer the time, but i'm not likeing where it's going at the minute. i'm not happy with the prints i've done... drop in sessions will be used alot me thinks...

oh yeah and STORYTELLING... before i go back to leeds in a few days i need to have written the story and made all the images i want to use for my book pages... OH THE JOYS OF MY HALF ARSED ATTEMPT AT EVERYTHING. why didn't i try and get some of this done earlier? goddamnit i'm so annoyed at myself... BAH

and now i must work

Critical Diary Report 3 - PostSecret

My friend sent me an e-mail a few months back, I hadn’t heard from her in months and was pleased she’d got in touch. We’d spent the previous two years in college together discussing the finer points of anything and everything and we always seemed to have a similar sense of artistic thought patterns, always trying new things, attempting to find and push boundaries.

So anyway, back to the e-mail entitled “look look look!” she told me about a website: www.postsecret.com, which her tutor had told her about that day. She sent me the link because, in her own words, she “needed to tell someone who would fully appreciate such an ace idea...check it out brussell sprout”. And so I did, and I’m really glad I did... The concept behind the website is amazing. It all began with an idea by Frank Warren for a community art project back in November 2004. He handed out blank fronted postcards to strangers and left them in public places asking people to write down a secret they had never told anyone and mail it to the address on the reverse, all this was to be done anonymously.

The post cards soon came streaming in, each individually crafted, revealing the senders deepest secrets, fears, desires, obsessions, a view into the soul of human nature. The cards themselves stood alone as works of art and were displayed in exhibitions around the country. After a time Frank stopped putting blank postcards out but still they came thick and fast through the post with post stamps from all over the world, homemade, intimate secrets held on a piece of card no bigger than 6 x 5 inches.

After visiting the site, which is simply a blog that is updated weekly, I was inclined to see the book. The only problem was that it wasn’t on sale in the UK and so I had to buy it through the American Amazon site where I ended up paying almost as much for postage as I did for the books itself. The price we pay for art... anyway I am really glad I did, it arrived at my flat a few weeks later in the morning around 11am and by 2pm I had read it all, cried, cringed and laughed my way through its 276 pages. I was amazed at peoples ability to open themselves up when the chance arrived in which they could spill their deepest secrets safe with the knowledge that no one would ever know who had sent in the card. I suppose this concept already exists in the world as a helping agent to people with charities such as The Samaritans. The whole concept of PostSecret is in fact strongly linked with an American charity called Hope which is advertised on the site offering help similar to that of The Samaritans but focusing strongly on helping the suicidal. PostSecret is, in a way, a form of counselling allowing people to externalise things they may have held inside for years, lightening their burdens and their souls.

One of the post cards contained in the book tells of how a woman decided to write down six secrets she was never able to tell the one person she told everything to - her partner. On a spur of the moment feeling she didn’t post the cards but instead placed them on her pillow in their bed next to her partners head and left for work, a few hours later he turned up at her work and proposed to her... human nature at its best.

One thing I keep wondering about is how much more interesting the postman’s job would have been when given the route that had the address that the cards went to. I wonder what the postmen must think when they read some of the postcards that were sent...



the website is updated every week on either Sunday or Monday with new postcards and updating information about exhibitions and events

The book can be bought from here (beware P&P)

The book is amazing, in fact no... the book is a book, it is pages and images and writing. It is the concept behind it, the nature of humans... it never fails to amaze me...

Complaint and Storytelling McJazz

And now we are well past the end of the complaint brief... wasn't so bad in the end. I found it kinda difficult to find the incentive to do work after we'd handed in our powerpoint presentations, that was until last minute panic set in and then i managed to work my ass off and get a pretty damn reasonable project out there for all to see. *a woo* and it was funny watching loads of random people jumping down the stairs because i showed them how to look like a fool on purpose and make it fun rather than just looking stupid while attempting to have dignity. BAH who needs dignity when you can have hopscotch!







and now we have storytelling...

my character's a stick man... hmm genius, yeah well sod it. i don't like drawing and he's got a balloon for a head so NER! story book stylee. its about a scary forest, a kid lives in a village on the edge and looses his balloon into the forest where he's told never to go - and so of course, for the purpose of having a story enters. and meets the "monster" everyone is scared of... etc etc etc. all ends happily, MAYBE, depends what mood i'm in when i get to the ending. Monster might be a murderous bastard or he may just be a misunderstood outcast... uh huh. suspense is the name of the game. *nods*

so yeah, do some work or something... work work work work work work work. yes. now. i suppose. mmbah.

Oooo look a shiny thing....

*wanders off...*

Critical Diary Report 2 - Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley was born in 1950 in London, where he continues to live and work. Since his first exhibition in 1981 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, he has exhibited extensively in Britain and abroad. He was awarded the Tate Gallery Turner Prize in 1994.




In the 1960s he studied archaeology, anthropology and art history at Trinity College in Cambridge. He also spent three years in India where he studied Buddhist Meditation. Gormley’s early studies and his knowledge and interest in religions, philosophy and literature underpin his work to this day.



It was in the last 1970s that Gormley first used lead as a medium for his work while he studied sculpture at the Slade School of Art. He branched out into various other mediums such as concrete, iron and clay during the mid 1980s. It was during this period and his work with clay that saw the development of his so-called Fields; a group of clay figures made by communities in Australia, North America, South America, Europe and Britain.




Gormley is interested in the human figure and much of his work explores the body. He uses only one model for his body casts, one form giving a sense of constancy and intimacy; he uses the one model he knows better than any he could employ – his own frame. He knows the shapes and sizes that it will appear in the finished product. He knows what to expect and so his work has very intimate feeling of surveillance. He sees this starting point at a lived moment – a real body in real time. The human figure has been the dominant theme in Gormley’s work since the 1980s. He has said that ‘objects cannot talk of experiences’ but yet uses objects formed from his own figure to express emotions, thoughts and feelings.



Gormley’s best know work, the towering figure The Angel of the North was completed in 1998 and stands outside Gateshead on the A1. I saw it for the first time on our way back from Newcastle and for some inexplicable reason felt incredibly moved upon viewing it even for those few seconds as we drove past. It is constructed from the dimensions of his body and mathematically enlarged to around 65 feet high with a wingspan of 177 feet.

We, as the viewer, are essential to Gormley’s work. As the artist says there is ‘the work, the space and the viewer’. For Gormley it is the activity of looking and feeling that’s important, he wants us to create a context or meaning with ‘this raw material’. He talks about the work being a catalyst or waiting ‘like a trap’ for the life of the viewer to come and fill it.



“I want to deal with existence and I want to use my own existence” he says, “in a sense, as the raw material. It is important to me that each of these works comes from a lived moment. It isn’t an invention; it’s not an attempt to make a significant abstract form; it is a testament to a lived moment that has been transformed from flesh and its mortality into another zone of time.”



This can be compared to the way a person collects fragments from a day out as a reminder of that time. They stand alone as a memento, a scar left on view to conjure memories of that moment so that internal confusion can be released and no longer must be held inside to torment the mind. Along with the internal aspects of his work Gormley allows the viewer to feel less alone with their emotions - a support group – if you will, by viewing his work.



The models secret quests, missions are forever ongoing, forever unfulfilled, they hold their positions, waiting to continue with their journeys. There is a sense of foreboding, a sense of ominous happenings although they never reach a conclusion, an end of any type, they never show their beginning; they’re stuck in a continual loop that never moves, but emits the sense of movements both past and future.




All in all I cannot explain how it is that Gormleys work makes me feel, they are so calming and yet so hostile, we – the viewer - stand there and look at them, waiting for something to happen, but we know nothing ever will, it is an endless cycle, never moving, never changing, just waiting.



Be inspired – www.antonygormley.com

Post

Lets create a new post and it shall be called...

I'll come back to that, not sure why I'm writing but I'm suspended somewhere in those weekly four hour gaps between the Critical Studies lecture and the critical studies seminar so thought I'd have a go cause I think I'm hard enough.. Or summit.

Summit, like the summit of a mountain? or something... yes

i am thoroughly bored. but i have accomplished lots today. i have done lots of measurements of stairs for my research for my Complaint brief:

"It is a physical impossibility to walk down the stairs to the lecture theatre without looking and feeling like a fool."

Audience: Students of an non Vis Comm persuasion.

and i have started my research into people etc.

*I am now force listening to Sonic Youth, ooo music like... his voice sounds like placebo but not quite as irritating - das be gutt*

I have decided to do my "people" research using the people i live with, i live in a block of flats (about 40+ people) of all art students that go to this college and do a variety of courses and also know which steps I am on about so i figured it would be less difficult than asking random people who i don't know who will probably look at me weirdly and i'll get scared and run away to hide. so yes, home research will be good.

i am bored of writing now, i am going to go and measure more measurements and write more writing and then it will be the end of my time in suspense and i will watch presentations and then go home and measure more peoples measurements and make more notes on note type subjects..


end

This is Home

This photo was taken last summer in a field just above my house in the Isle of Man where i'm considered by friends etc to live "in the middle of nowhere" - 10 mins drive to the nearest village and 25-30 mins to the main town of Douglas where i spend most of my time. I'm feeling kinda homesick at the minute and this picture just makes me smile so i thought i'd share it with you all...