As we approach the end of my degree, my colleagues and I are busy making preparations for the biggest collective exhibition we have ever organised; opening on June 11th, Nexus,will be a culmination of the last three years of work and development, show casing our groups evolution as artists, and the exciting work we have put together in the last few months!
As with any exhibition, lots of preparation is needed and with less than three weeks to go until the opening of the show, it’s action stations, paint brushes in hands and plenty of hours spent sanding, plastering and repainting walls. In addition to the manual preparation, there is also lots of decision making to be done, from selecting works, to organising publicity, planning presentation method and finalising my supporting work like sketchbooks and portfolios.
When it comes to choosing work, it can feel like an impossible task. Not only do you have to select the ‘best’ and most relevant pieces of work, but decisions about how many works to include, how they will respond to each other in the exhibition space and how to title and organise the works. This year has been a busy one for me and means that I have to face the decision of narrowing down a collection of nearly 60 paintings, to just a select few that exemplify my practice, show my development and work alongside each other. Lucky me right!
This week we were able to move into our exhibition spaces, so it has been a hectic mixture of priming and painting walls, hanging, moving and rehanging work, organising postcards and business cards to accompany the exhibition, and continuing to document the new works that I am developing!
Planning Presentation:
As many of you will already know, Celia Hempton is a huge inspiration for me and her presentation style, as well as her paintings themselves, exemplify for me the way in which contemporary figurative painting can be both expressive and representative, all whilst breaking boundaries in terms of traditional nude painting. In many of her exhibitions, Hempton displays work on a background of pastel colours in blocks and overlapping strokes of paint. In doing so, the painterly nature of her work is undeniable and the physical context of the work unifies each individual painting as an expression of interactions with the human body. I wanted to harness this same materiality with my presentation, especially as my work is concerned with the context of the female nude, how we react to and perceive the body in painting, and how the figure can be viewed in many different ways. When exhibiting my work atBardoearlier this year, I had found that a grey backing wall really made the colours in my work pop, so I decided to use a grey tone for the backing wall in the degree show, but rather than a flat colour, I wanted it to be clearly painting, with drips, splashes and patches making the material admit it’s qualities. I started out with blocks of grey, but this felt a little too uniform and the grey was flat, rather than vibrant. This meant a second full day of painting, using a purple toned grey to cover the entire wall, followed by a watered down solution rolled on top and left to drip and pool onto the pale grey floor. I am so pleased with the effect and really hope it will set of the colours in the paintings, whilst also making the viewer undeniably aware of the paintings medium, not just their subject or form.
Choosing Works:
As I have already discussed, I am faced with a large selection of paintings to choose from, and just as when choosing work to submit for an open call, it can be difficult to choose works without the bias of personal attachment to them! I found myself gravitating to some of my earlier works because of their significance to the development of my practice, however on reflection I realised that some of the works I have created more recently in response to pornographic material, as well as some works that were worked on from social media imagery.
The chosen works are of various sizes and various levels of recognisability. By grouping them together I hope that the audience will be encouraged to focus on each work individually, while realising that the body is evident in all the works. As such, the perception of the body is called into discussion, as well as the viewership of it. In particular the works that are taken from pornography also encourage an awkwardness in the viewership, as all the images are re-contextualised as paintings, making their original intention, origin and prescribed meaning uncertain.
Organising Publicity:
As an emerging artist, the way I present myself to the public is extremely important and particularly at my degree show I want my artistic identity to be evident and memorable. I decided to design some business cards that use a detail of one of the presented works as a design, and also two postcards of two of my paintings. I plan to present these alongside my works.
Overall, it’s a busy few weeks as we approach the finish line for my degree and the starting pistol for my future artistic career – wish me luck, and I hope to see you at the show!