Portfolio book

This is the final outcome of the indesign lessons! A finished book based on the language theme I’ve been working with. The only similar experience i’ve had prior to this is creating a group fanzine and an individual comic story at Coventry. So this was quite different, but very satisfying to see the finished product. 

Snow: it came, it saw, it stuck

(and probably will be for a very long time. I read an article that stated this winter had a very mild start, by Swiss standards, so who knows when we’ll get our next glimpse of sunlight.)

Only a few days after Ash left, I woke up in the morning to pure white landscape outside. I went for a walk along the lake which had frozen over, leaving the ducks huddled around the one small part that was still water. The rest of this month involved very few trips, as there was much to be done at Movimax, arranging pieces around the room which included a lot of hammering much to everyone’s annoyance.

Jury went surprisingly well, considering me and Chelsea had both followed Coventry’s assessment method and laid out every single piece of work to be viewed, when in fact it turned out that they would have preferred a more narrowed down selection of our work. The work I had made using old vinyl cases, and some other collage pieces caught most of the jury’s eyes, rendering a lot of the other work i had produced pretty useless - but coincidentally the work they commented on happened to be more in the direction that i wanted to continue in! We traipsed around to some other juries of people in our class, ones of which was held in a huge studio room with at least thirty people in there! The guy presenting his work, Diego, pulled it off well though. 

Annoyingly we discovered that there was another place to present work, a huge warehouse type building called USEGO, about a 5-10 minute walk from Movimax. It was terribly cold in there, I felt you must catch frostbite whilst you’re installing your work! I hope to possibly present there for next jury in June, depending on what work I create, and it will hopefully be warmer too.

We had a party that night at the Auberge to celebrate the end of the semester, and Chelsea and I made cake! Two, in fact! Although i did almost set fire to the second one. The next few days were basically just recovery I think. On the Saturday the 28th there was an open day for the school, free for hopeful students/current students and their families to look around. I was surprised when I received a message saying that my painting tutor had ‘stolen’ two of my works to put up for the open day exhibition! My friend Vera kindly put them up for me, as I had booked to fly home to the UK that weekend, as some high altitude relief from the stress of the past few weeks. Also I haven’t been home in five months and was in desperate need of a wetherspoons.

Jury is coming

The word jury just makes it seem like the most daunting assessment deadline ever. I somehow managed to stick to my proposed project and have been continuing with the language exploration, mainly through portraiture, but have been trying to expand into more installation-type pieces, and even tried some glass cutting to make my huge mirror into smaller sizes, which kind of went well.

I have compiled a portfolio of my work for this project here

I also have a couple of exams to take, which is different to Coventry! One is for my Contemporary Art class and the other for my Art History. Feeling slightly anxious about them as most of the papers we have been given to revise on are in French. 

Some experimental pieces from the studio, making use of the old vinyl covers that i’ve collected. 

A British Spaniard in the Swiss Alps

What a concoction. Well it made for an exciting trip, Ash came to spend Christmas and New Year’s here, much to the disappointment of our families. Including us there was 9 of us still left in the inn, so we had an amazing dinner on Christmas Eve, and I even contributed! (and no, not just crisps this time) We both set about tackling the challenge of making a nut roast which took about 5 hours prep time and then an hour in the oven - but it was worth it! It now has its place in the Inn’s communal recipe book. Christmas day was spent recovering from all that was eaten the night before…

During the week before New Year’s we took a trip to Bern and exhausted it of all its galleries and museums (the ones which were free or reasonably priced that is) we visited the resident Kunstmuseum, The Kunsthalle, The Zentrum Paul Klee, as well as numerous other smaller galleries. In the Kunsthalle I was surprised to find works by two of my tutors from school!

Later in the week we went to explore up the heights up the other side of the valley, which required two cable car trips up to the top point of the mountain called Crêt du Midi, from which you could walk further along to other peaks but the snow up there was a good few feet deep. Whilst we were up there, dozens of paragliders were taking off from the edge near the restaurant, filling the sky with their array of colourful sails.

We spent a fair bit of time in my studio in Movimax, doing some work for my upcoming Juries at the end of January

Nöel

I organised a secret santa for the inn, before the Masters students began to leave mid-December, and it worked! No one was left present-less. We had a party that same night all the presents were opened, welcoming anyone from the school and more, which has apparently put us in the hall of fame of successful parties in Sierre.

I paid my third visit to the MAXXX gallery to see a friend’s work - ‘Notes on Mountaintops’ by Hanne Van Dyck. There was so much magical narrative in her work, including collections of ghost stories which she’d been told about a room in her residency at the Villa Mercier in Sierre, and others. Beneath the main floor of the project space is a sort of basement, which i didn’t discover until after roughly 20 minutes was also being used for exhibiting! It was a projector displaying some fantastic imagery of the mountains, and several pairs of headphones each emitting a different style of musical sound, which when listened to gave varying feelings whilst watching the images of the mountains fade out and into each other. 

Marché de Noël Montreux 

If you want to visit the mother of all christmas markets, this is it. For me anyway, but Chelsea said it even dwarfed the Birmingham Christmas Markets which I imagine must be pretty big. We had our first taste of fondue! Albeit poured into a baguette, but this only cost 9.- whereas the traditional pot costs over 20.-. I hadn’t realised how strong the flavour of the wine is in it, but it was enjoyable.

We paid a visit to the Queen Studio Experience, which was tucked away in a casino. Despite seeing them live a couple of years ago I had never really known much about them so all the information and items displayed were very interesting. We also got a typical photo stood next to the Freddie Mercury Statue on the waterfront.

A couple of days before we broke up for christmas, there was a small meal held at the school for students involved in particular courses, and I went to check it out. Spaghetti galore! And an abundance of funky looking cakes..