Fictitious city

For the course of Pratiques de Lieu, we are continuing work on the motorway rest-stop near Martigny. The collective idea is beginning to take shape in the form of a fictional town, inhabited by the people working at or passing through this place, the experiences they may have there, etc. Temporary residents in a permanent place. As part of my contribution i decided to look up the location on instagram to see if people uploaded photos of the area. There was only a dozen or so, but I thought to add their images onto the billboards located in the car park, so that their personal experience can be shared with other visitors if desired. Here is an example

This past weekend, we had a small workshop at Movimax specifically for the residents of the Auberge, where a lady from the school office taught us how to make our own bathroom commodities, such as toothpaste, face cream, shampoo, etc. She had an enormous range of essential oils and other materials with her, all her own! The aim was to help us become more self-sustainable, and also to give an insight into what we may or may not know we are putting on our skin.

Me and Chelsea also took our first visit to Fribourg, to a tattoo convention, which we came away from sadly tattoo-less because we couldn't seem to make ourselves spend over 100.- 

Aside from this, in my own work I have begun to take a much more personal approach myself. I’m currently adding to a document of memories based around my father, and creating visual work alongside in the process. I already feel both motivated and challenged, but I hope to continue this into my year at Coventry, as I predict it to be a long project with many possibilities. Here I think it will be mainly taking place as numerous paintings and drawings, whereas back in the UK it will begin to take form in larger installations and with use of objects and photographs.

Easter travels

Last Saturday Ash flew over to Basel where I met him and we spent a few days exploring. The airport is actually in France, but it only takes a ten minute bus journey to cross back over the border into Switzerland. Whilst there we paid a visit to the Jean Tinguely museum, where I spent a good twenty minutes looking at one piece in particular ‘Lola T. 180 - Mémorial pour Joakim B.’ which was made in dedication to his Formula 1 racing friend who was killed in a race. The piece is made from two cars and has been made to take the form of a winged altar, complete with a cow’s skull in the middle. It was simultaneously haunting and beautiful. What made this place unique was that all the pieces displayed in the museum were able to move, each piece controlled by a mechanism which the public were allowed to switch on, and watch. 

We also visited the Kunstmuseum which was divided into three separate building across the city, one of which was home to a few works by Andy Warhol. All the exhibitions forbade the use of photography but we managed to find a little loophole in the corridor of one; there was a security camera and screen up on the wall,  and funnily through the flicking of different cameras in the building you could potentially view every art piece in there without going to find it in person! Of course we did though…

The following days consisted of going to the zoo and general exploring, then back to Sierre for the rest of the week. On the Friday we took a day trip to Montreux, where a comic-con event was being held, and I attended a talk with an actor from the tv show House of Cards! On the Saturday Ash left and then my friend Danielle came to visit from the UK! My last visitor, just in time for the Easter holiday. I went to meet her in Geneva, and we spent the majority of the week sunbathing and exploring. I took her up to Crêt du Midi, where Ash and I had visited over christmas, and then we took a little detour to Sion on the train where we hiked up to the Tourbillon castle.

Collage pieces

Some pieces I have recently been working on in Movimax. I feel as though here I somehow am finding more interesting material than I would in Coventry. Possibly because the things I find here instantly come with a different aura and feeling, purely because they’re from an entirely different country which I have no previous history with. I have pieced them together with mainly aesthetic in mind but also individual narratives I associate with the images.

April fools

To begin the month, we had the workshop with Kris Vleeschouwer. The week was based around involving interactivity within our own work and we were given several presentations by various other artists invited by Kris. I had meetings with Beate Engel and Navid Tschopp to discuss my project and the theme of interactivity, and played with the idea of painting over old vinyl discs to make them unrecognisable and place them on a wine bottle stand, so that it made an alternate way to select music without knowing what it is you’ll be playing, whilst involving the relationship between music and alcohol with the wine stand. At the end of the week we were to present our ideas, but not before this delicious picnic we had outside on the terrace at school!

In other news, the photos that my housemate Jasmine took for International Women’s Day were displayed in Bolivia! Here they are being put up. My portrait is top left.

Zurich

We had a class trip to Zurich this week, visiting a few large exhibits in the Migros Museum and the Kunsthalle. There was a fascinating series of graphic illustrations in the Kunsthalle, by artist Sarnath Banerjee. They were presented in glass frames too, which is a display method that i’m currently working with! Just before arriving in Zuirch we stopped off at The Kunsthaus in Aarau, which was hosting an exhibition solely based on cinema in art, here . One work on display was an arrangement of cushions placed in front of a television, on which was being shown the original animation of The Jungle Book, and every character spoke in a different language! It's a pity it was relevant to my last project but it was still intriguing to watch. Funnily, the one english speaker was Sher Khan, the evil tiger.

As I realised this may be my last trip to Zurich, I decided to stay the night in a cheap hostel to make the most of it, and I discovered that the area closer to the lake seemed like an entirely different place to the the north of the city, which I had based my original depiction of Zurich on. 

Three weeks worth of workshops kicked off last week, beginning with video/animation artist Peter Aerschmann , then performance artist Dorothea Rust , and finally the last week Belgian artist Kris Vleeschouwer, who’s workshop is the one I have chosen to participate in.

darkroom photography

For the Indesign course, we requested if we could be shown how to use the darkroom studio in Movimax, so that any time we could just book it and use it. Since buying the polaroid camera, and re-discovering my digital Sony one, i’m trying to involve photography in my pieces more, as so far I’ve been using images that I’ve found instead of ones i’ve taken myself. My plan is to make a pinhole camera, purchase some photo paper, and see what comes out. It's been a few years since I tried this, the last time being at college before I went to university... I did some experimenting with the images in our introduction session

It’s always nice to rediscover an old skill! I hope to make use of the photography facilities when i return to coventry

Genève encore un fois

This past weekend was the 87th international motor show in Geneva, and so I went over on the Sunday to meet up with my uncle and two cousins who had been at the show since friday. They were expecting me to show them around, but sadly I know the airport better than i know the city, and they had actually been there more times than me! Anyway, I took them to visit MAMCO to see some art, I’d like to say that they were impressed but I think they were longing to go back and continue looking at lovely cars.

Concerning school work, for the Location Practices (Pratiques de Lieu) we took a trip to Martigny, as our collective aim for this class is to create art pieces to place within the grounds of the Marché Relais Saint-Bernard, a rest stop on the motorway outside of the city. 

2nd semester + reflection

My visit back home was wonderful but strange, and has helped to realise how far I much I have progressed in terms of my work ethic and other personal attributes. As i mentioned in an earlier post, being a step back from everyone here due to the language barrier, it has in fact benefitted, and not solely hindered my experience on the course here, and i’m hoping that with my new found determination to go above and beyond to achieve, I will succeed even further at Coventry when I return. This year out has also offered great inspiration concerning my dissertation - which i plan to begin researching in the summer when I return home - and also has broadened my desire to work in other mediums and experiment with new processes. I want to make full use of all facilities that are available back in Coventry, as sometimes I am restricted from doing so here due to the communication difficulty.

My studio here is excellent, as it’s so close I often spend full days there, and wish that I had spent more time at the studio I had last year. I’ll certainly be spending plenty of time there next year, and I plan to try and get the same space which was given to me last year. Because of the fact that I’ve been learning french here, it has tempted me to possibly choose it for my addvantage class as its seems like a bit of a waste to not continue, but I am still leaning towards my original choice of Creative Networking Skills.

Right now I’m also enjoying creating my work a lot more, again despite being limited sometimes as to what materials i can/cannot afford. For this next semester I’m shifting away from the topic of language and instead focusing on a narrative of objects and photos that I have found and created in my time here, and combining old and new matter together.

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..

Sound workshop photos

Exposition !

On Tuesday (29th) we went to Yverdon-les-bains to take part in a sound workshop led by the school, and were booked to stay in the Hôtel de la Source for the whole week, the breakfast oh my, I think I may have eaten well over my fair share of croissants… Me and Chels were kitted out with the sofa bed, right next to the kitchen, sharing with two other girls, and i swear every channel on the tv was broadcasting I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, much to my horror. The first couple of days were spent wandering around the city - my plan for the workshop was to focus on the water systems within the area - so I followed rivers or streams that I came across, and luckily one of the rivers leading into Lake Neuchâtel had frozen in parts at its banks, and so i was there for a good half hour playing and poking away at the ice trying to see what unusual sounds may occur. Further down to the lake there was some nice sloshy/bubbly noises being made naturally. 

The second night there we went to the infamous thermal baths, coincidentally located at another hotel 2 minutes around the corner. It felt like we were cheating on our hotel, but the baths were amazing… the Thursday consisted of editing the sounds together and figuring out how to place our speakers in the space we’d chosen. Our ideas ended up working pretty well together and we played it numerous times throughout the night, and there was a pretty decent turn out from visitors! About an hour prior to the opening we all went out in to the town square to hand out some more flyers, and lo and behold, the local christmas market had just opened, so there were plenty of people to entice, that is however until an ice sculptor caught everyone’s attention and drowned out any nearby conversations. The final exposition was a success! Complete with vin chaud.

From the exposition at Topic in Geneva (i’m in the grey fluffy hoody scratching away for eternity)

Class update

I’ve been attending an InDesign class every Thursday morning for the past month or so, specifically catered for us two english folk, as the normal class is taught in French. We’ve mainly been learning about how to begin layouts for books, adding images, creating the correct guidelines, using all the tools (and learning a bit of french as we go along). Last lesson we finished making the leaflet about our chosen artist, which we have now printed as a template and must cut out.

In french class we’ve been given exercise books to help us learn at home alongside duolingo, but in class so far we’ve mainly just been learning the terms for other countries and nationalities. I’m still on a very basic understanding

For our History and Theory of video lecture on Tuesday, we’ve been given an assignment to write an analytical piece on a video/film of our choice. I think it must be art related though, I doubt something like Shrek is permissible. I chose Mark Leckey’s ‘Dream English Kid 1964 - 1999 AD’ which i’d seen earlier this year at the Liverpool Biennial. For our other classes, we must also write a piece for Philosophy based on the relation between art and history, then in our contemporary art class and history art class we will eventually be taking tests in January i think, to test our knowledge.

Some illustrations concerning my ideas. I’m planning to expand on these a lot more instead of keeping it to just simple figurative drawings.

I’ve been reading up about words which are literally untranslatable in English, and the way multilingual people perceive their ability to transfer between talking and thinking in different languages 

It’s odd, here I feel filled with so much more motivation to put myself out there and really put myself into my work, I think possibly due to the fact that i am in a way isolated by my inability to fully communicate with people, thus i must strive even harder to prove myself!

National hummus shortage

Seriously. Nowhere has had hummus in stock for weeks. We kind of had a spontaneous Inn film night on sunday, watching The Mummy and realising how awful the graphics/cgi were. Monday was back to same old 9-6 lectures, but afterwards we went down into the town to explore the ‘Foire de Ste Catherine’ (a fair celebrating St catherine). we had looked round some of the stalls on our lunch break, which consisted of speciality foods/sweets, clothes and other items. We had a taste of all the free samples we could, especially nougat, which i then went on to buy in denner (175g for 2.95.-!!) later on we met with a few friends from class and had some vin chaud (mulled wine, new favourite drink). There was a huge tent by the train station which seemed to be full of the entire population of Sierre and more, we left quite early because we were tired and hungry, and found out the next day that there had been a knife attack in that same tent! I think the victim survived… switzerland is sounding less sweet and innocent by the month

I now have a swiss bank account! Going to have to take out swiss franc using my british card as usual, and then pay the money into my new account, so to avoid the ridiculous £22 fee that incurs when sending money internationally through online banking (thanks natwest). Received my parcel from home which consisted of thermal underclothes and chocolate rice cakes, which didn’t last long.

Spent a lot of time in the studio this week throwing out some new ideas and trying to paint without using it all up. Kind of takes the fun and freedom out of it if you’re feeling limited by your materials. We went to have a look in another classmate’s studio, who has an entire room to himself, filled with random items and trinkets that he finds. He said he buys nothing but hot glue, for everything he finds he believes already is art itself and does not need major editing apart from maybe the combining of it with other items. very ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’. With my work (finally decided) i am trying to explore the concept of the language barrier and communications being lost in translation, through a whole range of mediums, planning to attempt at some photography and sound, which isn’t normally my forte

It’s getting really cold now. Missing the brief warmth we had when we arrived