For this years Blaze Festival, a group of Artists will be working with professional curator Amy Lawrence to produce artwork in preparation for an exhibition in October in Accrington Library.
They will be working together over weekly sessions, and will be blogging about each session as it takes place!
Heres is this weeks blog post, written by Fern Nicholas.
Working with each other and the environment, sharing ideas and thoughts, creating work, thinking, sharing, connecting with each other and the space, looking, learning, experiencing, sitting, talking, listening, watching, checking in/out, eating, reading, living. Just some of the things we get up to at our sessions with Amy.
In our latest I was encouraged to think about what it is I want to get across to the audience in the upcoming exhibition, start the planning of our work and to keep asking ourselves why?
My ideas have been mainly focused on the natural aspects of the library – the spider webs, the light, the dirt being brought in… I wanted to highlight natures part in the library as, after all, without trees the library wouldn’t be the same as it is today
Our homework for this session was to choose a paragraph from a selection of texts and to annotate it. I chose a paragraph by Dziga Vertov, a film director, from the text ‘Ways of seeing’ by John Berger. In this paragraph Vertov is detaching himself from his human form- taking away all distraction and restriction, his physical body becomes obsolete – his focus is on viewing and nothing else.
This reminded me that all life I in continuous movement and no moment will be entirely the same. The text that I have read so far has been looking at how an image is different in every single persons eyes. When a person views a painting, for example, their interpretation and opinion of the painting not only comes from the aesthetics but every other experience that person has had in their life – colours, textures, people they’ve met, sounds they’ve heard, places they’ve been- no two people will view a painting in exactly the same way. It also looks at how taking photos/videos of a piece can completely change its meaning and that looking at a photo of a piece of work can never be the same as seeing the physical thing, and whether taking photos reduces the value of the original.
This got me thinking about how I display my own work and whether I want it to be more personal or easily understandable and whether simplifying work depersonalises it or opens it up for more understanding and interpretation.
I left the session with a lot of thinking, planning and exciting stuff still to come!