Interview with a Writer

Whilst being at the Art House an emerging writer was invited to come and talk to me and my fellow residents and write some kind of prose either about or inspired by our work. I found the experience invaluable to talk to some who is also creative, but in a different field. 

He expanded on some of the concepts of anxiety to create a psychological profile type report to accompany the work. Which also alluded to some of the inspirations and starting points of this body of work and some of his own thoughts on the work.

Anyway, here is what he wrote (i hope you enjoy it as much as i did:

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Clinical Report: Analysis of CP's Anxious Urban Landscape Dream.
I have ordered my analysis by starting with the upper and/or more extraneous elements of the dream and working my way towards those with a deeper and greater significance - an almost literally top-down approach. I should mention that some of the material in this report has been informed by a background therapy session with the subject.

Lines of some sort tie the subject to her locality - local-I-ties. (Symbolic puns are common in dreams.) They are taut, so could be securing anchor lines; or they could be puppet strings representing manipulation from the outside; or, in a similar vein, bondage to a significant place; or, lastly, suspension lines, betraying the subject's sense of dangling uncertainty and rootlessness.
The sky is, she says, largely a blank - emptiness? An unwillingness - or anxiety-induced inability - to think about her situation (the sky representing the upper, more conscious mind)? There are "projection lines" but in which direction are they going? To me they signify all-too-obvious join lines (reminiscent of stained-glass leading). The subject is trying to reassemble her shattered, fragmented mind and memories. An impression reinforced by...
...The threatening, jagged skyline, apparently resembling shards of broken glass; and the building fragments themselves. Their edges abut perfectly, so a good reconstruction job has been performed, but there is only dream-logic holding the sequence together. This is what one would expect however: the building material of dreams is the remembered pieces of our lives that made the deepest impression on us - they can be, and often are, snap-shot moments; and with the rational mind out of the equation there is nothing to question unworldly juxtapositions.
As to the principal content of the dream, it is clear CP feels that dilapidated and abandoned urban environments pose exciting possibilities for exploration, but that they also induce great anxiety within her. I suggest that a childhood fascination with dens and make-believe transformations of found-places has become, for some reason, now associated with a very unhappy, even traumatic, event. Coupled to this is a now adult understanding of the possible dangers of entering such buildings, and an artistic sensibility about them. Yet some of that childhood sense of exciting possibilities remains alive, hence her ambivalent attitude towards these places. This is evidenced primarily in the number of doorways found in the dreams-cape  Some lead to darkness (danger, anxiety, uncertainty), and some lead to brightness (hopeful possibilities and playful escape).
Finally, it is perhaps worth noting the underlying mood of her dream. The textures and colour and smell of these places seems to have seeped deep into her subconscious. She has an especially strong recall of the sense the surfaces give her: rust-stained concrete, running and mouldering painted walls, water damage, general dilapidation. 
The psychoanalytical significance of this latter observation is hard to divine, but informs my clinical recommendation: the subject should find a way to express and explore her pre-occupations and anxiety. Given her apparently sensate nature perhaps this should be through artwork.

by Robin Lawrence
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Art House residency

I currently doing an artist residency at The Art House in Wakefield and have just finished my second week. This residential opportunity at the Art House has meant that I can develop a previous work series from university that was previously left unresolved. Being a part of the graduate residency program has really given me a confidence boost as an artist. 

During the past few weeks I have also been exploring a new series of collages that are specific to Wakefield. They contain photographs of the exteriors of buildings from around the city centre collaged together with interiors from totally separate buildings. These interiors project how I imagine them to be on inside but are actually completely false. I am also hoping to produce an artist book from this series.

 
 

I have also been developing previous work from university, which involved painted onto cardboard packaging and creating site-specific wall pieces by extending the linear elements of the pieces onto the surrounding walls.

 

My Practice (so far)

I am fascinated by the physical spaces we create and play with in childhood and the imaginary spaces that emerge from this. This idea stemmed from spending a considerable time at my Grandmother's farm during my childhood, which was mainly spent exploring the out houses and sheds and converting them into dens and hideouts. I wanted to express and explore this in someway during my first year of university and that initial idea evolved and progressed throughout my entire university career.

I focused on notions of imagined spaces and memories based on textural qualities found in architectural structures, with three dimensional spaces revealed within these works. I represented these ideas in a traditional painterly practice, along side other media and materials such as de-constructed and reassembled photographs of abandoned buildings, as a means of creating new imagined spaces.

This piece is called 'Carceri 2', (basically all the work I produced at uni is apart of a series called Carceri) and i think that it's a pretty good representation of what my work looks like.

However, as I have matured my practice concepts around topophobia, the fear of place, and vertiginous feelings have become increasingly apparent, creating an interesting juxtaposition to the initial origins the work. “Our fears today are less about openness and more about a general uncertainty surrounding the perception of space itself.”, Dr Caterina Albano, 2011.

My work is hugely influenced by the writings by Italo Calvino,Gordon Matta-Clark's and Emily Speed.

Gordon Matta-Clark

Emily Speed

At university I worked on large scale paintings that travel around corners or other architectural features and I started to use string in an endeavor to bring the work out in to physical space that the public inhabits. I work predominantly on both thin cardboard and cartridge paper as I feel that it potentially provides the fragile surface that attempts to capture the precarious spaces I am investigating.

I investigated combining and siting these pieces in relation to one another in an attempt to create other physical spaces and dialogues that aim to reinforce and heighten the sense of real and imagined spaces. This has was taken further through arrangements of wall-based pieces being linked by linear drawings as a means of create a subtle balance between collaged and painterly elements as well as connecting surrounding space and merging the work into the given architecture. 

This is an example of the small pieces that i would make (generally just on food packaging card) and then arrange of the wall and join together with connecting lines.

And it is this idea that I have decide to continue with after university, I like the idea of developing it so that whether it is placed it will be different and specific to that place according to what architectural features there are within the work.

Introduction

So I have recently graduated from university with a Fine Art (BA) and I recently decided/thought that it would be a good idea to document what I'm doing next. I know that initially after finishing it felt like i was in a void almost. I had no idea what to do with myself, or what I wanted to do and everything felt like a massive anti-climax.
Fine art is a bit of an odd degree to do i think, not odd like its strange, just that when your doing it you feel great because theres always something happening. You feel apart of things and then it finishes and it all seems so daunting and impossible.
But hopefully I'll muscle though?