I have been busy working in my studio at Bath Spa University, creating a felt response to my location, on a variety of surfaces. My use of materials needs to be specific for the same reason as my need to be very specific about colour.
Category Archives: MA Research
Artist talk
Past Present Future: sustaining practice. Tim Parry-Williams.
Tim Parry-Williams is a weaver, designer, researcher, curator and MA Design Fashion and Textiles course leader at Bath Spa Uni. This is what I have learnt today from craftsman Parry-Williams.
Plan your studio days as they are precious.
Translate to other ways of working.
Reflect on your practice, deconstruct what you are doing.
What have you got to offer?
What is your vocabulary, your language?
Think about how you start. I start painting either with a thick, solid ground or I build up with thin layers of glaze.
Record your task for the day. Be focused.
How can I translate what I am seeing in other artists work to mine?
Responding to the world by gaining a grounding in materials and process.
Dedicate your time to polishing a certain skill.
MA Research
Anslem Kiefer is a painter that infuses the landscape genre achieving the most powerful effects of meaning and interest. Kiefer’s work has different strands of meaning, themes taken from myth, legend, religion and political history. He takes complex ideas and puts them into a single coherent image, using a pictorial language the viewer can understand.
In my research I am interested that other German artists have recently exhibited in the UK, Gerhard Richter and Georg Baselitz and currently a retrospective Alibis: Sigmar Polke at Tate Modern.
Artist Research
After going to see the Anslem Kiefer exhibition at the RA, I watched the moving and physical DVD Over cities grass will grow a documentary on the work of Kiefer by Sophie Fennes. It was so moving and powerful to see how he works on such a grand scale and very interesting to see the works from the exhibition being made. Kiefer is surrounded by large pots of stuff, paint, concrete, rubble, rock. Calm and sometimes dramatic music accompanies the film setting the scene. His assistants are on hand, acting on his command. Highly recommended if you have been or about to go to the exhibition and simply love the work of Anslem Kiefer.
MA Research
I recognise when I am looking at a piece of art work my attention is drawn to colour, space, structure, organisational qualities and the ground and supports they are on. Through process and methodology I am searching for an equivalent, to experience another of what I am seeing. To achieve this I am considering what the places that evoke a deep meaning and emotion for me have in common: water, wrecks, history, mud, the submerged, rocks and detritus. I am considering local perception and local history. The sublime, the quality of greatness, a beauty you cannot explain.
Artist research
I have been thinking about my work through the work of Anslem Kiefer. His work has historical and political context. I am questioning why I am interested in the decaying old wooden structures on the banks of the river Severn. Is it because of their historical origins? Revealing, disappearing, the ebbing and flowing of the water over them? Revisiting the same places and structures within those places.
Kiefer references other artists work. Revisiting the sunflowers like Van Gough. Kiefer uses the sunflowers embedded in his work. His interest with German Romantic painting exploring the idea of the Sublime through the work of Casper David Friedrich.
An interesting idea Kiefer had was to make work responding to the architecture of the building it will be shown in, the exhibition at the RA, a physical interaction with the bricks and mortar.
Clare Thatcher 