Cakeland - Scott Hove

Scott Hove says of Cakeland on his Kickstarter page;

"Cakeland is an art installation. Cakeland is also a refuge of beauty, emotional experience and safe fantasy. Everyone has a relationship to cake, in the form of memories around family, marriage, birthdays and celebration. Using the theme of cake, I draw you into my sculptures and installations with the promise and expectation of familiar relation. Yet in experiencing Cakeland, you are faced with unexpected challenges; as in life, it takes patience and determination to win your reward. I guarantee, however, that you won't have to work too hard, because Cakeland, before all else, is a place of joy."

Just recently came across the work of Scott Hove. His Cake themed sculptures and installations are amazing. He talks of his works as 'Indulgent' which is part of the reason why I love it so much. It doesn't pretend to be innocent.

Although inedible, the sculptures are all very tempting and teasing. Hove uses traditional cake decorating tools in his works.

I feel like this is definitely inspiring work.

The Event II at Winchester School of Art

On the 15th December, Fine art came together for 'The Event II'.

It was an unbelievably busy day and an amazing success.

Here's a picture of me in my mask (made of cupcake cases and sprayed gold), taken by one of the Live Press photographers;

I am with my friend Tessa Gray, who I often collaborate with. In fact, on the night we worked on a Photobooth together, thanks to previously made plans and Tess' technical know how, it went down without a hitch and we got the images we needed.

Our sign was clearly awesome.

Here's a picture of the booth:

The booth is an interesting piece of work, but the photographs are not yet ready to exhibit, as the final outcome of the project needs more work and it's quite an ambitious piece, but all will be revealed soon.

I also did a piece on the performance stage at The Event. I have yet to edit the video but see below for a couple of stills;



The performance was me 'decorating' my face with cake decorating ingredients including Icing, hundreds and thousands, edible gold dust and edible gold glitter flakes.

It was the first time I had done the performance and it went reasonably well. I would like to do it again though using buttercream and icing flowers etc and make the whole thing more intricate and less messy, so it becomes less about covering my face and more about the decorative aspect.

I also want the camera to be far closer to me when I film it next time.

Bronze

On the right hand side of the above picture you can see my bronze cupcake
And a close-up.

The bronze casts have now been removed from the molds and are sitting in water. Soon I will clean off the last of the sand/plaster and work on my cupcake, neaten it up and polish it.

Bronze pour

Today we did the bronze pour, it was great to see and very warm. The bronze is now cooling and I can't wait to see my cast cupcake on Monday.



The bronze is heated to 1100 degrees Celsius.


It is then lifted out in a carbon pot.


The impurities are skimmed off the top of the molten bronze.

The bronze is poured into the sand/plaster mix molds. (the wax structure was encased in the plaster sand combo and then put in a kiln to dry out and for the wax to melt out, so the plaster can be poured in).


It will take a day to cool.


The left over bronze cooling.

It's a lengthy process but should be worth it!

Alelier Printmaking

Here is a photo of my cupcakes in the Printmaking Atelier. Unfortunately I did not have a camera with me, but got a quick snap on my phone. Hopefully other people took better photographs! The exhibition last night was great, the whole of printmaking came together and the show was beautifully curated by a fellow student. It was great to see how the range of works in our studio came together.

We have put the desks back today, but moved them around a bit. It's nice to change the space we work in a little. It's really quite refreshing.

Preparation for bronze casting

Current work in progress

Slowly building myself a cupcake army.

Some more thoughts on Cupcakes.

HIDEOUS

I've been thinking about cupcakes too much and now I'm just beginning to really despise them. I want to make more art about them. I want there to be people suffering and terrible things happening and then I want there to be icing everywhere and cupcakes covering their heads, because cupcakes make everything better.

But they don't, they are just these self indulgent, horribly sweet little things which are so trendy right now and with the glitter and the over the top icing and accessories they are just hideous. They have curds inside and glitter and gold dust and hundreds and thousands, but what tops it all off is that they are individual, personal desserts. They are self indulgent, you don't share a cupcake, it's all for you. Miniature desserts, Ugh.

(image via: http://cutestfood.com/)

Installation experiments

Last week I did a few quick experiments in the installation room with the film that Tess and I shot during our first experiment.

I first tried to project onto the floor by angling the projector toward the ceiling and then mirroring the projection onto the ground. This didn't really work in the way I wanted it to. So I projected onto the wall.

I then found that projecting onto the wall actually worked well for what I was trying to do. Although the video was on the wall, it still felt as though the viewer was looking down onto the scene.

I then played with the idea of adding the silver tray, which we had used to put the cakes on in the original experiment, to project onto. There is something I really like about this, however I felt that it made the work harder to understand as you can no longer properly see what is going on.

So next I placed the tray on the floor. I liked this as it showed what was left after the experiment and was itself physical evidence that the experiment had taken place.

I sat in the room and thought about how the projection could become an exhibition. We had previously thought that we could have a picture of the cakes in the exhibition as a reference back to the original experiment and to show the audience how they tempted people. Whilst sitting there though, I thought it would be a much better idea to have the physical cakes there, much like the way that in 'Making a Scene', the way in which viewers walk through the room in Gillian Wearing's piece is similar to the original performance.

Thus I would like to host an exhibition with Tess in which there is a performance within a performance. I am hoping to do this before Christmas, just need to get some other work out of the way first and wait for the space to become available.

Repetition

I was recently thinking about the nature of repetition within art.

I am currently casting multiple identical cupcakes. Other artworks with multiple 'copies' have been:

Anthony Gormley's 'Field' series:




And Ai Weiwei's 'Sunflower seeds':
This last photo is one I took at the Tate this summer, of Ai Weiwei's Sunflower seed installation in the turbine hall.

Although their themes differ somewhat from mine, I feel there are similarities with the ideas and the method in which I want to display my work. Like Weiwei's my work will all look identical (although they are not), whereas Gormley's differ more significantly.

By making lots of identical cupcake pieces, I want to play on the cupcake culture and the way that cupcakes have become such a big part of society, it's a strange phenomena really, the way that people try to make lots of perfectly identical cupcakes, adorned with an excessive amount of decoration.

This seems to me to have similarities to the work of Weiwei, where he plays on the idea of 'made in china', as though his seeds look identical, they are all handmade and therefore are not. Nothing is really ever identical, yet we try to make series' of identical things.

Gormley's work too, although each figure is different, their identities are lots in the vast sea of figures. This makes me think of the way cupcakes have become popular and everyone has to have them. By following the trend, everyone becomes the same. Their identities lost.

My cupcakes will be like a sea of people who are all indulging in the same thing, whilst also being almost perfectly identical revered objects.

Experiment #1 (Collaboration with Tessa Gray)

We did an experiment last Tuesday. We left the above cakes unattended in the Foyer at our University to see what would happen. We filmed and observed from above.

Still #1

Still #2

The experiment worked well. The cakes were eventually taken but it took a long time for the first one to be taken. I think because when one was taken, it was easier for other people to justify taking one themselves as they knew someone else had done it.

We also found that many people were not morally opposed to taking something which was not theirs, but were afraid of getting caught, some people almost took cakes, only to be reprimanded by their peers.

We are hoping to complete similar experiments in the future, however for now I will be looking into ways to display and present the work.

Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage

On Saturday I went to the Hayward to see the work of Pipilotte Rist. She was not an artist I had heard of until a couple of weeks ago, when I saw her work on the Timeout London website. Later that week, both a friend and a tutor recommended I go to see the show, so I did.
Rist is a video artist and has an interesting and unique way of displaying her videos. As with Making a Scene, although I enjoyed the work, I was more intrigued by the methods of installation that she has used for her videos. Some you had to lay down to see, some you had to sit for and others were tiny videos on the floor which you had to kneel down at to best appreciate.

I had a lightbulb moment when I realised that a good way to display Tess and I's current video work would be to show the video on the floor looking down, rather than on the wall, as when videoing, we were looking down.

Rist also displayed her videos in other unique ways, such as installing them inside other objects or projecting them onto different materials and surfaces.

I really enjoyed the work itself too, it was happy work, celebratory and I felt as though I had entered another world or a dreamland. The way in which she used video and editing to project her themes were rough and exciting.

I would really recommend anyone to see her show. It's really been very useful for my work and I can't wait to experiment with different techniques now, when installing my own videos.

Making A Scene

So I recently went to see the Making A Scene exhibition at the Southampton City Art gallery. The piece I was most interested in was Gillian Wearing's video; Dancing in Peckham (1994) - Still above.

Basically it was a performance in which the artist herself danced as if in a nightclub, but in a shopping centre.

The work was interesting, especially Wearing's video, which, like the work of Tess and I, is cheeky and makes a comment about social etiquette, she is behaving in a way which is unexpected in the location that she is in, breaking the rules.

What I really got from the exhibition though, was the way in which the work was presented. It was large scale, so Wearing was almost life size. Also the benches for viewing the work were placed at the back of the room and there was a walk through for people to go from the entrance hall of the Museum, to the rest of the exhibition. So people wandered back and forth through the room in which the video was showing. I thought this was beautifully reflective of the video itself and the way in which whilst she was dancing, people wandered past.

It really made me think about the way in which we document and display our work, particularly video evidence from a performance.

Studio

Had a bad day today, not feeling to great, just one of those days, I have been over exhausting myself with late nights and early mornings, but I took a picture of some of the work I did yesterday and signed up for a workshop on Wednesday - Wet Darkroom, which I am looking forward to. I have a tutorial tomorrow and there is a guest artist lecture so I will relax today and get on with it all tomorrow. This weekend I am going to Southampton City Art Gallery to see a video by Gillian Wearing, so I'm excited for that.

Next week I need to:

- Make Canvases
- Continue with Gum Arabic transfers.
- Clay coins?
- Purchase Icing piping bags
- Scan Negatives
- Develop films

Gerhard Richter: Panorama

On Saturday I went to see Gerhard Richter: Panorama at the Tate Modern.
I have to say, it was one of the most interesting exhibitions of painting I have ever seen, Richter really tests the medium of paint, from painting freely and abstractly to painting highly detailed photographic imitations, like that above.

Richter uses photographs to paint from, but unlike many other artists, he paints them as photographs, keeping the focusing point of the original focus. This works well as it draws your focus to the main subject within the painting, however you can tell it was painted from a photograph. Richter likes to use photography in his work, painting over photographs as well as painting from them.

I think the fact that some of the paintings were from photographs creates more of a narrative, it makes them fact and it makes them a memory, a static slice of a life. He is looking at his personal history and choosing significant moments from it to paint. Because of this some of his work can be compared to that of Emin, whose work is hugely biographical. The difference is that Emin's work is about herself and is hugely open, whereas Richters work is more private, like stolen moments we never seem to get to know the whole story.

I enjoyed the show but I wish I could have seen more of the process of his work, where everything came from. I guess that's the danger of seeing an art exhibition as an artist, you really want to get inside their mind and find out what their process is.

This summer I was distracted.

I flittered about, working, reading books, seeing a couple of gallery shows.

Now I have to decide what I want to do with my practice, my artwork and my career. I am actually not going to think about the career for a bit. It will distract me.

So, thinking about my practice. I want my work to be personal, but I also want it to be about other people, people in general. I don't want it to be about the masses though. I think what I want is for it to be about people, personally. I want it to be about social etiquette, rudeness, pushing the boundaries of human behaviour, but also about people's personal struggles in life.

I think I want to basically marry up my performance work with Tess with my work in general. I want it all to be about humanity. What I really want to do is look at things somewhat psychologically. I often remember things or use things that I've learned from my psychology A Level and recently I've been reading Love's executioner by Irvin D. Yalom which has brought a lot of it back.

Ach, I don't know what to do. I think I'll start by looking at artists who looked at human behaviour and emotion.

Lisa Golightly

I recently stumbled upon some work by Artist; Lisa Golightly. Her recent series, 'The Floodline' ecperiments with acrylic paint, cold press watercolour paper and fabric dye.

I really like the freedom in the work. It seems very organic to me, like vast landscapes or ariel views.

LOVE IS WHAT YOU WANT (Tracey Emin at the Hayward)

Yesterday I went to see Tracey Emin's exhibition at the Hayward. It was amazing.
I was very drawn to how personal her work is and I have always identified with her in that respect, but I don't think, before seeing this exhibit, I realised just how personal it was. Diary entries became works of art, videos showed her interviewing her mother or telling personal life stories.

I was left pretty shocked by one of the videos (about one of her abortions) and still have not got my head around how I feel about it. Prehaps it was meant to shock, but it seemed so honest. Afterwards the word which came to my mind for how i felt was traumatized. But that is too strong a word, as what Emin went through was real trauma.

My favourite pieces were the paintings, which were just beautiful and also seemed very natural and emotive. I had thought, previous to going to the show, that I would enjoy the light works the most, however the paintings were fabulous.

I did see some of the most prolific pieces from Emin's career, such as her quilts, and whilst I enjoyed these, they were not the highlight of the exhibition for me. I think I was so blown away by the painting and the video work that they paled in comparison. They were however, part of her early work and it seems as though she has matured enormously over the course of her career.

I am very inspired now and feel very much like painting. I also think I should incorporate writing into my work more, which is a feeling I have had for a while now.

I am still processing how I feel with regards to the abortion video, I don't think I have ever seen anything which has made me feel so uncomfortable, yet intensely interested. I feel morbidly fascinated with the subject, but at the same time horrified.




I went to the exhibit with Tess, you can read her review here:

http://rational-romanticist.blogspot.com/2011/08/tracy-emin-love-is-what-you-want.html

More resin experimentation

Made these on Saturday, they are similar to the ones I did last semester in University, only this time I used a better mold, which was much better as It did not need any vaseline and so the whole process was a lot cleaner. Also the surface is a lot smoother.

Not really sure where I'm going with this yet but It gave me some interesting ideas, so the next time I do it I will explore those and then write more about it.

At the moment I am skirting around ideas of preservation and burial.

Also this summer:

I have been working on some polaroids of a form of body documentation, shall we say. There are not enough for it to be a finished series yet, but I will post when there are.

Currently reading:

Rachel Hannah - A room Swept White
Nicole Krauss - The History of Love
Kevin Fanning - How I learned to Love you from so Far Away
(The last two are particularly good and I definitely recommend them, the first is for book club)

Some more pictures from Winchester School of Art Degree Show 2011

These are a few more pictures I took of the Fine Art section of this years degree show. All digital photos.

Jane Price

Jane Emberson

Andrea Willette

Rebecca Jane Smith


These are some of my favourite pieces. I can't wait for my degree show and to see what everyone I know well comes up with.