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.

Adrenaline junkie in the making?

On Friday myself and Chelsea took the train to a little town called Gordola in the Italian canton of Switzerland. Why? Because on Saturday, we did this……….

First ever bungee jump! And not just any old jump, this famous jump from Goldeneye film. It was an exhilarating experience to say the least. 

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.

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

More Crans Montana

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

I need a pedometer

Last Saturday I finally went to Geneva! This time the city part, not just the airport. I pre-planned my trip on google maps, starring all the interesting looking places, which i’ve been doing a lot (thankyou google) and managed to make my way to the majority of them. At one point i stumbled across the Plainpalais flea market, which was accompanied by a circus that was either opening up or closing down. Stall after stall of junk and goodies and i came away with nothing. How terrible 

I visited the Fonds municipal d'art contemporain (FMAC) (or Le Commun?? i can’t quite figure out which is the correct name) nearby, where I saw the works of the winners of the Kiefer Hablitzel Prize. There was some fantastic work here and the one i found pretty mesmerizing was Chloé Delarue’s installation ‘TAFAA - DOUBLE PEEP AREA / IN SOLD WE ARE’

Later i visited the gallery Artveras in the old town part of the city, near the cathedral, which held an exposition titled ‘Red Desert’ covering themes of the many issues in todays society. Here is John Isaac’s ‘What lies behind what lies before’. I think i have a thing for fluorescent lighting tubes. To me these pieces portray a sense of nostalgia and longing, the neon lighting being something associated with retro bars and clubs and here are used for something almost quite the opposite. I would love to begin involving this material in my own work

Other places i visited included the resident Natural history museum, which was home to Big Al 2, the Allosaurus skeleton discovered after the original Big Al which I’d seen in Berlin earlier this year! The Reformation Wall was another, situated in the grounds of the university, and was pretty intimidating, especially the main five metre tall figures carved into the wall’s centre.

Later in the evening I went to Topic to see an expostion created by Lora and an ex-masters student of ECAV; Erika Pirl. it was a great night! Lora’s piece turned out to be very interactive as we found out after five minutes of wondering what to do with it. The idea was to scrape away at the silver coverings, like on a lottery scratchcard, until words were revealed underneath. Took a lot of muscle

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

Fête de bienvenue

Just one more photo of Thun because I couldn’t resist. Theres more on my instagram.

A few weeks ago we received invitations to a welcome party/meeting/shindig at the town hall, and as two of our friends in the inn are fairly new too we added them as plus 1′s and brought them along. Boy, the food…. We were introduced to our english translator for the evening and then listened to the mayor’s speech, a local band group, all whilst eyeing up the plates piled with swiss delicacies. The vast majority of people there were families, some I imagine had come here with much more need than us. It was a really good night, on the way home paid a visit to the infamous Les Wagons, a music/social venue, which we sadly found had closed for the remainder of winter.

Fun in Thun

The views were spectacular at this place. snow covered mountains to the south of the lake, and a castle!! I arrived early to explore so wandered around and made friends with an elderly thai lady who tipped me off about a great viewing spot. Despite it being a city with a vast array of shops, it still had quite a quaint feel to it, as i found myself walking down narrow cobbled streets. The river which flowed through the town was full of ducks, and friendly swans??

In the late afternoon we met the rest of our class at the Kunstmuseum to view the exhibition ‘THE FORCES BEHIND THE FORMS’ which displayed work by numerous artists from all over the world. Some of the most eye-catching works consisted of Nina Canell’s installation ‘In Absence of Satin Ions’ and Julian Charrière’s ‘Tropisme’, as seen below.

Typical thing to say but the aesthetic of these pieces was wonderful. The plants were so perfectly preserved, in their own little winter universe. Another piece of Charrière’s which stood out to me was his photo series ‘The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories’ which i stupidly didn’t take a good photo of so here’s some help from google images. 

The artist is using a blow torch to melt the ice beneath his feet, in short symbolising the process of climate change, however viewing them in the gallery, my initial thoughts were the photos came across rather lonely and fearful, as they appeared a lot darker in contrast/brightness placed on the wall. The setting looks almost alien, dwarfing the lone traveller at the centre. made me think of the experience David Attenborough and countless other nature documentary narrators/crews must feel when surrounded by such a vast landscape and how in that moment you are completely at the mercy of nature

I have a meeting with my main tutor this week, and praying that he likes my sudden abundance of ideas and work and forgive me that i took so bloody long to decide on what i want to do. Pictures to follow, maybe. adieu

San Junipero blues

My means of transport are gradually shrinking in size. I began the summer with a car, moved here and bought a bike, bike got poorly and now i have a scooter. The next stage is a skateboard and i don’t fancy publicly humiliating myself more than i already do. The bike has a puncture but i’m being awfully lazy in the “fixing it” process. The scooter is pretty nifty though

I’m really struggling to come to any sort of definitive stance on where my work is at. I’m basically just making random collages entwined with paint and illustrations in the hope that something jumps out at me. I’m enjoying making illustrative portraits which i’m trying to go about more loosely with, and attempting to write some sort of narrative to fit alongside, but then i also just want to grab a ton of paint and smear it all over that huge board i’ve had sat in the studio for over a month now, temporarily abandoned because i’m scared i may ruin it

Wishing so much that i could understand the entirety of the content discussed in this Monday’s class. Speaking to the teacher afterward, she explained about how we were exploring the idea of the unconscious thought and how artists responded to it and involved it in their work. She suggested how the things that we do, without thinking, the way we speak our native language, are all unique to us but yet are not really a part of us but more of an addition. Something considered separate from who we actually are. the dream-state

In other news i attempted to walk up one of the mountains outside my window. I got what i thought was quite a way up, but looking at it the next day i realise i wasn’t even halfway. I was determined to reach the part where the snow began, but after zig zagging for over an hour (with no water oops) i decided it best if i returned down to normal ground level. The snow is just sat up there laughing at me

We took our third trip to Lausanne last week, did some more exploring and then went to the Cinema Bellevaux to watch/listen to “NEW METHOD GRAPHIC” by Julien Prévieux and “PORTRAIT OF FILMMAKER IN PSYCHOLOGY OF PERCEPTION” by Dork Zabunyan, the first presentation was in french, but which i have since read up on here. The second was in english, albeit American-English, and focused on the measurement and tracking of eye movements, taking into account the aesthetic created.

We’re taking a trip to a place called Thun tomorrow, which i’ll report on another time

ciao

Film workshop

Despite only being here for just over a month, when I heard the workshop leader’s voice (he was english!!) I felt a bit nostalgic for home. I love the diversity of this place, all variety of accents, but when you suddenly hear someone speaking in an english accent in this little town it can be quite nice.

The aim of the week was to create our own short film in groups, and me and Chelsea were paired with two other girls, Julie and Heloise. We were instructed to choose a text in light of which we would structure our filming and acting around, and somehow we ended up with Samuel Beckett’s play ‘Waiting for Godot’. Some parts of the dialogue were quite humorous and involved only one or two words from each speaker so we thought it would be fun to try reading it out in both french and english.

We were given the recording equipment and sent off to try it. I chose an acting role in the film and surprisingly found it quite fun, although i hate to watch myself back afterwards. Once we had all of our footage we set about editing it on Adobe Premiere, which gave me some handy new tech knowledge

The workshop leader himself, Redmond Entwistle, gave us a presentation of some of his own films at one point during the week, excerpts of which can be found here .

Is it the year 99?

We went to zurich !!!! Beforehand i’d made notes of a couple of art galleries i wanted to check out, which turned out to be pretty far from the part of the city we’d arrived in, so after gawking at all the make up counters in Manor (the swiss alternative to Debenhams) and looking for a Primark that didn’t exist, we headed off over the river into the north-west part of the city. All the galleries were due to close at 5, and lo and behold, we came across a market/car boot sale thing which seemed endless. Of course we had to look around….

When we eventually found the galleries they weren’t what i’d expected at all. hidden away in a towering apartment type block, we found the Eva Presenhuber on floor 2 and the Peter Kilchmann on floor 4. The work exhibited, some of which i’d seen on instagram, was as interesting and amazing as I’d hoped. Kind of like seeing a famous person in real life and realising that they are actually 3d beings with skin pores and consciousness just like the rest of us.

On the walk back from the galleries, MORE galleries just started appearing out of nowhere. BolteLang, Soon-Art, and Hauser & Wirth (which sadly had no works exhibiting but we spent a good half hour in the book shop)

To end the day we went to Hooters, who are not all just about the iconic staff outfits by the way, the food is the best. And the beer 

Here are some pieces from Michael Williams at Eva Presenhuber

And Saype artiste at Soon-Art Galerie. This guy’s work was crazy good. The steamed up window effect was obviously a main theme, along with the layering effect as if you were looking through some thick window pane.