Artist Statement
We are living in a time period in which the largest risk to human well-being, to other species and to the Earth as we know it might well be ourselves. The human population is growing quickly, far outpacing the capability of our earth to support it. I have decided to base my final major project around over population and the negative effects this has on our planet through creating geometrical installation spaces.
CONTEXT & RESEARCH
REVIEW
INITIAL RESEARCH - WEBINARS/ DOCUMENTARIES
The Art of Protest
How do art and protest meet? We explore acts of defiance with artists, poets and activists
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jeremy-deller-3034/art-protest
NOTES 01/03/21
-A protest; a gathering or action expressing an opposition to something.
- In this episode artists and thinkers reflect on the way art and protest meet.
- "A lot of people can’t engage with politics, and a lot of people don’t want to engage with politics in that political way of activism and direct action; a lot of people don’t feel they have the knowledge or the education to engage, or to know what’s happening with the State; whereas art, I kind of feel has a cultural language, and a lot of people generally in the world like to connect with culture; so I feel like it can reach people that activism and formal politics doesn’t reach".
- Art can kind of have its own language of how it communicates.
- Message
- Communication
-David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64R2MYUt394 - This documentary has inspired me to focus on expressing environmental issue impacts in my art work.
Making Art In Isolation
Explore how artists of past and present have been creative whilst in solitude
Tate. 2020. Making Art in Isolation – Talking Point | Tate. [online] Available at: <https://www.tate.org.uk/art/talking-point/making-art-isolation> [Accessed 2 March 2021].
-"Removed from society and the regular stimuli that might spark imagination."
- Isolation makes you reflect on whats important to you.
- "Enclosed spaces they isolate themselves in." - Impact physically and mentally? - links to overpopulation - the feeling of claustrophobia, containment, oppression and social discomfort. - visual metaphors.
-"Isolation is a condition imposed on them by geographical, political or biological factors."
- This links the global pandemic occurring due to over population and this has negative impacts to the environment.
- However since the population have been put in lockdown, we have noticed our planet is benefiting from this for example "clear water in the Venice canals, blue skies over Delhi and wild animals are roaming boldly in locked-down cities. The oil industry and airlines are floundering in this new world, and carbon emissions are falling fast."
- "Isolation means I have the opportunity to distil what concerns me and what I want to make and do. I believe isolation is a chance for all artists to disrupt and evolve their practices".
ARTIST RESEARCH
Tomás Saraceno
Born 1973
"Tomás Saraceno’s practice is informed by concepts linking art, life science, and the social sciences. Enmeshed in the junction of these worlds, his floating sculptures, community projects, and immersive installations propose sensory solidarity with the planet through a social, mental, and environmental ecology of practice. For more than a decade, he has been imagining a world free from carbon, extractivism, capitalism, patriarchy and fossil fuel - or what he calls CECPF- that inflames some forms of life. In an unorthodox collaboration with cosmic webs, the air, spider/webs and indigenous communities, energies converge in a new practice of solidarity. In our era of climate emergency—when ecosystems are at risk—Saraceno’s work, deepening our understanding of environmental justice and interspecies cohabitation."
https://studiotomassaraceno.org/about/
Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt)
1912 - 1994
"The strength or purpose of the line was enhanced by her use of different materials, such as steel, wire, lead, nylon and various metals. In addition to relating to her interest in architecture, these materials also contradicted the new modernist movement in Latin America. Gego not only used these materials to create lines in her massive sculptures but also in her series entitled Dibujos Sin Papel (Drawings without Paper). These tiny works were created from scraps of metal that were bent and weaved together in order to evoke movement, experimentation and spontaneity. Gego's idea of a series artworks that would be titled "Drawings Without Paper" reflects on her view of space. Gego considered space as its own form; as if her artwork was occupying the artwork of the room itself. Since her work is made from nets and grid-like materials, negative space is everywhere, causing the negative as well as the positive space to be appreciated. But it is the shadows created by her works that reveal the integral connection between the sculpture and the room it occupies. Gego is thus allowed to play with the idea of the stable and unstable elements of art. The stable elements of art is the sculpture itself, while the unstable elements consist of the constantly changing shadows and the slight movement in her design due to the fragility of her materials. In fact, the way her sculptures exist in space changes every time it was installed because Gego had the power to recreate the image as she wanted."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gego
Naum Gabo
1890 - 1977
"Naum Gabo, was an influential sculptor, theorist, and key figure in Russia's post-Revolution avant-garde and the subsequent development of twentieth-century sculpture. His work combined geometric abstraction with a dynamic organization of form in small reliefs and constructions, monumental public sculpture and pioneering kinetic works that assimilated new materials such as nylon, wire, lucite and semi-transparent materials, glass and metal. Responding to the scientific and political revolutions of his age, Gabo led an eventful and peripatetic life, moving to Berlin, Paris, Oslo, Moscow, London, and finally the United States, and within the circles of the major avant-garde movements of the day, including Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, the Bauhaus, de Stijl and the Abstraction-Création group. Two preoccupations, unique to Gabo, were his interest in representing negative space "released from any closed volume" or mass and time. He famously explored the former idea in his Linear Construction works (1942-1971)—used nylon filament to create voids or interior spaces as "concrete" as the elements of solid mass and the latter in his pioneering work, Kinetic Sculpture (Standing Waves) (1920), often considered the first kinetic work of art."
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/naum-gabo-1137
Cornelia Parker
Born 1956
Cornelia Ann Parker is an English visual artist, best known for her sculpture and installation art. Parker is best known for large-scale installations such as Cold Dark Matter.
"Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View is the restored contents of a garden shed exploded by the British Army at the request of the artist Cornelia Parker. The surviving pieces have been used by Parker to create an installation suspended from the ceiling as if held mid-explosion. Lit by a single lightbulb the fragments cast dramatic shadows on the gallery’s walls. The mundanity and also refuge-like quality of the shed is important to the meaning of the work. By blowing it up, she is taking away the safe place, the place of secrets and fantasy, the place where a personal history of objects no longer in use – but not quite finished with – is stored. But she is also, in the process of creating an ‘exploded view’, perhaps creating a new space". "Somehow the idea and imminence of the ‘explosion’ in society seemed such an iconic thing. You were being constantly bombarded with its imagery, from the violence of the comic strip, through action films, in documentaries about Super Novas and the Big Bang, and least of all on the news in never ending reports of war."
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/parker-cold-dark-matter-an-exploded-view-t06949/story-cold-dark-matter
Chiharu Shiota
Born 1972
Two in-situ installations and a series of new sculptures explore the Inner Universe that some may see as the mind, others as consciousness, and which transcends the body, connecting beings to each other.
Famous for her monumental site-specific installations and skilful weaving of thread that spreads through space, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota has spent years questioning the notion of surface and the traditional boundaries of painting. With Inner Universe, she invites us on a poetic journey examining the secret ties between the finiteness of existence and eternity.
https://ocula.com/art-galleries/daniel-templon/exhibitions/inner-universe/
"Shiota's oeuvre links various aspects of art performances, sculpture and installation practices. Mostly renowned for her vast, room-spanning webs of threads or hoses, she links abstract networks with concrete everyday objects. Materials and colours carry particular meanings in her artistic work, in which menstruation blood is used as artistic material and red threads come to signify human relationships. Shiota acknowledges her teacher Marina Abramovic's influence during her formative years and refers to Christian Boltanski's work as a source of inspiration for some of her later installation works. Places matter to her work and she is strongly interested in psychogeography, the relationship between psyche and space."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiharu_Shiota
Olafur Eliasson
Born 1967
"Olafur Eliasson is a Danish–Icelandic artist known for sculptures and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience. In 1995 he established Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, a laboratory for spatial research.
Stardust Particle 2014 is a hanging sculpture that features two irregular polyhedra forms, one embedded within the other, to form a single spheroid made of partially reflective, translucent filter glass and thin stainless steel struts.
Initially it was the artistic and scientific properties of light and colour that were his primary interest; from 2003 onwards, however, he became more concerned with their psychological and physical effects – at its simplest, how light and colour can manipulate how one feels in a particular environment."
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/eliasson-stardust-particle-t15131
BAUHAUS ARCHITECTS & DESIGNERS
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Le Corbusier
JEWISH MUSEUM, BERLIN
I have come across many Artist and Designers that
have influenced me such as Daniel Libeskind. I
studied his Jewish Museum in one of my projects
focusing particularly on how the interior and
exterior was designed in order to specifically affect
the way the individual thinks and feels. The part that
stood out the most to me was the Holocaust
Tower, daylight penetrates the tower only through
a narrow slit in the unheated concrete silo and any
exterior sounds are heavily muffled by the walls.
Many visitors experience a feeling of oppression or
anxiety. The interior is composed of stark concrete
which reinforces the dynamics of the empty spaces
and dead ends where only a splinter of light is
piercing the space. It is a symbolic gesture by
Libeskind for visitors to experiences what the
Jewish people felt, such as even in the darkest
moments where you feel like you will never escape,
a small trace of light restores hope/ redemption.
Conceptually, Libeskind wanted to express the
feeling of absence, emptiness and invisibility
expressions of disappearances of the Jewish
culture, and he does this through controlling light, dark and
shadow; the angles and distorted walls and the
sharp edges of the building make it a profound
architectural and spatial experience.
RESEARCH - BOOKS
