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.

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.

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.