Tuesday 30 October 2007

Louise Bourgeois Exhibition

When I went home for the weekend, I visited the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Tate Modern. I absolutely love her work, as she has associated herself with several different artistic movements and has explored a variety of materials, so her exhibitions always offer a motley of really interesting artwork. The infamous Spider was exhibited outside the Tate Modern. The spider is a reoccuring theme, as Bourgeois believes the spider symbolises both 'a predator and a protector, a sinister threat and an industrious repairer', which according to the artist is 'an eloquent representation of the mother'. She also associates the spider, with the process of sewing, spinning and weaving, with her own mother, who ran a tapestry restoration business. Furthermore, it ties into Bourgeois' current use of fabric.

Bourgeois's career spans seven decades, though there is clearly several themes, forms and motifs, which characterise her work. I was especially impressed with the scale and ambition of her environments, the cell pieces. These large installations are meant to act like tangible manifestations of psychic space. They had a confined yet reflective quality, due to the metal net around the cell, and the collection of objects, which Bourgeois displays around the installation; such as hanging chairs, mirrors, family tapestry etc.


'Cumul I'
In the early 1960s, Bourgeois created a series of sculptures made from malleable materials, such as latex and plaster, which all had the appearance of an organic matter. Later these organic sculptures went on to reveal a much more phallic or biomorphic form, which added a more obvious sexual dimension. Most of Bourgeois's sculptures were either skewed or slightly off-balance, giving them a fragile/vulnerable quality, which is rare in masculine artwork.

In Cells (Clothes), 1996, Bourgeois' themes are amplified to the point of becoming a habitable space, with circular boundaries delimited by old doors, brimming with objects, as in a warehouse of memory or an 'oneiric Wunderkammer'. The double-edged title signifies both the building block of an organism and a prison, and this installation can likewise be taken as protective or isolating. Here the work's interior could only be glimpsed through cracks in the doors, and the presence of clothing, hung on metal structures or resting on chairs, assigned the viewer the shameful role of Peeping Tom. The humble, ephemeral materials (such as clothing and underwear) and deliberately coarse items (e.g., heavy cloth) depart from the subtle refinement emphasized in certain recent marble and glass pieces.
I particularly liked her work, Red Room, which was an area, enclosed by a spiral of old, rusted doors, which had had the door handles taken off. In this space, Bourgeois displayed a jar of pennies, an hourglass, spools of red thread, and red latex sculptures of hands holding each other. The work related to her mother, who had worked in a tapestry repair shop. However, the numerous spiral motifs were placed in the installation to emphasise the tension that occurs in families, between intimacy and loneliness and estrangement. I thought this piece was extremely effective and I liked her use of spools of thread.

'When I was growing up, all the women in my house were using needles. I have always had a fascination with the needle - with the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair the damage. It's a claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive; it's not a pin!'

Tuesday 23 October 2007

Visual Research Installed In The Studio

After my walk along the Leeds-Liverpool canal, and my subsequent trip to Armley, Bradford and Halifax, I developed over a hundred photos that I had taken at the time, which, for some reason or other, had stood out to me. I displayed the horizontal images on the wider, larger wall, with the vertical images arranged to the side of my desk. I had wanted to create a large display of vivid photos ever since going to the Araki exhibition, in the Barbican Centre, a few years ago, so I was intending not to be overly picky. However, I had not realised that I had taken almost over five hundred photos, so choices had to be made.

After I had carefully decided upon the arrangement of the photos, I stood back to see whether I could ascertain a trail of thought within this large collection of images. It was obvious that the majority of photos were based around the textile machinery, many of which were close ups of both the material and the metal. I loved the contrast of the delicate flax or wool, against these solid iron contraptions. Also quite a few of the images were taken of the watermill in Armley or the canal. Knowing the importance of the waterways, I had made a conscious effort to take photos of bridges, and other water features. However, several of the photographs that I had developed were of just the water, with the canal borders.

Following on from this, I would like to do a sculpture/ installation based around the production of wool. However, to show the passing of time, I would like to use metal that 'had seen better days', so to refer to the past prestige of the North's industry. If somehow the sculpture could allude to the waterways, particularly the canal or canal locks, I think it would ground the piece more and add intrigue.



I found this beautifully detailed, 1855, engraving in the Charles Knight book. I made a screenprint of it and printed it with several colours and on different materials. I didn't really know what I was going to do with it, but it seemed a shame to not utilise the image, when it related so perfectly to what I was doing.

After reading Knight's study on Leeds, I felt really inspired to write a shortened version of the essay. I have highlighted interesting points, which are relevant to my work, and have begun to condense Knight's writing. Initially, I was thinking about making a photobook to display the photographs, which I have deliberately aged using photoshop. However, after looking at five photo/sketch books in the Brotherton's Special Collections Library from circa 1900, it seems rare to get an image book, without some writing at the front, so to contextualise the images. Consequently, I have decided to use this etching as the photobook's front cover, as I think it would be ideal in both making the book look authentical, but also old-fashioned.

Monday 22 October 2007

Christian Boltanski

I went to see Christian Boltanski's commerative piece to all the Crossley factory workers, from its opening in 1877, to its closure in 1982, in the Dean Clough Exhibition, in Halifax. I loved the archival quality of the work and the choice of lighting in the enclosed, cellar space. It was as if I had taken a misturn, as the area looked like it had been neglected by the gallery; which added a new dimension to the contrived space.
Boltanski carries on the artistic practice of the 1960s and 70s, by bringing found, commonplace objects into museum or gallery settings. Ordinary materials such as metal biscuit tins, discarded clothes, domestic lamps and snapshop photographs recur regularly in his installations, and did so in his The Work People of Halifax 1877. This work seemed to represent the ordinarity of the worker's lives, as Boltanski had used articles from various sources and had randomly intermingled them, so to portray the overall histories of the workers. The objects in the drawers were also highly ubique, though carried a high cultural and social importance, which created a seemingly collective memory of the Crossley workers. By presenting rephotographed photos or multiple images of the same photograph, the artist avoided presenting any distinctive aspect or personality of the workers, instead an archtypal image of a worker was formed.

The inclusion of clothes, as elements for classification and documentation, also made the work quite potent, as clothes seemed to suggest the body's presence and its passing. In this work, the clothes seemed to be a surrogate for the workers, which added an intimacy between the viewer and the carpet factory workers.

I also really liked the incorporation of objects which had a patina of age; as the images looked aged and some lightly bent or ripped, whilst the metal objects showed hints of rust. The deterioration of the objects allowed them to appear like a momento mori, as the materials were a literal embodiment of the passing of time. The archival placement of the objects also created a sense of loss, as the things were obviously disconnected from their usual environments. Furthermore, the inclusion of simple and familiar objects seemed to allow the Dean Clough visitor to bring their own history and memories to the work, which I found particularly effective.

'My work must act as a stimulus which makes it possible to rediscover a previous forgotten emotion'.


Christian Boltanski, Les Registres du Grand-Hornu, 1997, Paris.

Sunday 21 October 2007

Dean Clough, Halifax


























After Chris Taylor's recommendation, I went to visit the Dean Clough Centre, in Halifax, West Yorkshire. The building was once home to the largest carpet manufacturer in the world, but the size of the building (2/3s of a mile from end-to-end) was very daunting, even for modern day standards. The building was regenerated in 1983 and began its gallery programme in the mid 1980's. The small town's architecture was reminiscent more of Bradford than Leeds, especially the buildings surrounding the mill. However the signs of industrial decline were more prevalent, as there were a lot of abandoned sites and buildings, which have yet to be demolished or regenerated.



During the walk around the nine galleries, I was particularly struck by the collection of metal sculptures; especially Anthony Caro's 'Table Piece', Sahaja's 'Homage to Vajrasatva' and Tim Noble and Sue Webster's 'Happy Snappy'.

I particularly liked Sahaja's three works, named 'Darkness of Wisdom', 'Projector Majic' and 'Eater of Flesh Demons', that were from the series 'Homage to Vajrasatva'. The sculptures were all made from collected rusty metal that had been welded together to portray the 'wrathful deity of Vajrasatva'. The found pieces of aged metal were arranged to depict Hindu demons, yet the seemingly jumbled composition of scattered scrap metal, transformed this heavy material, as the work looked energytic and vibrant. I also loved the different colours that you could see in the rusted metal; browns, oranges, reds, greens etc. This is definitely a material I would like to use in my work, as it would allude to the old machines in the mills and the idea of time gone by. Also, I think rusty surfaces have a very strong aesthetic quality.

Ralph Gratton's screenprint, 'These are the fences- this is the grass', was also very clever, as he had collected a mass of images of grass and fences and had adjusted the tones of the photographs, so that they were reduced to just black and white. The simple reduction of the images made for quite a bold and powerful design.

However the image that really stood out for me was Bill Brandt's, 'Back Lane, Dean Clough'. The photograph shows the iconic Halifax mill in the background, with the factory itself situated on the right, with three parallel rail lines infront of the building and three children playing in the street. In my opinion, this has to be one of the best works I have seen that has tackled the issue of portraying industrial Britain. The image successfully depicts the mill's omnipresence, whilst the children on the right of the image, remind the viewer of the worker and his living conditions.


Bill Brandt, 'Back Lane, Dean Clough' c.1960.

Saturday 20 October 2007