Future Plans....

After failing to even get to interview for the PGCE teacher training (this was due to only Eight spaces being up for grabs!!) it has meant my reconsidering my next step.

As I now have the luxury of time, I have decided to make sure that 11-18yrs is the age group for me. To achieve this I have started a placement working in the art department of Hayle Community School. I have already been in to help with a Primary Day, where children from local primary schools come into the school to enjoy fun workshops. This was easier than I anticipated, the children were great and I enjoyed the making of olympic medals! I have started to work with the GCSE students, giving ideas, looking at their coursework and encouraging them. I look forward to seeing them progress.

I hope to gain some experience in College aswell to see if I'd prefer 16yr+.... watch this space.......

Chiharu Shiota

Like a dark obsession with arachnids, Japanese-born artist Chiharu Shiota wraps objects from floor to ceiling in miles of black wool, as though clambering around in the skeins of our unconscious. In her best-known installations she has weaved black yarn into hectic webs that take over entire galleries and in which personal objects are found cocooned. Shiota has ensnared everything from the wedding dresses seen in her Walking in my Mind exhibition at the Hayward gallery, to a grand piano and childhood toys. In one of her sleeping performances, you might even find Shiota herself ensconced beneath layers of mesh. Her work, ambiguous and stunning, leaves you curious about the strangled objects seemingly suspended in time and space.

Personal experience is central to Shiota's work. For a project initially staged as Dialogue from DNA in 2004 in Poland and then recreated in Germany and Japan, she invited people to donate footwear with a memory attached – resulting in thousands of old shoes, many of which had belonged to loved ones who had died. She attached each to a taut red thread, a symbol of the path through life as well as the imprint of journeys taken.

There's a similar push and pull between closeness and separation in her sleeping performances, where women doze on neatly arranged hospital beds beneath a canopy of black threads. However intimate watching these people sleep might have felt, the artist implies that we can never know what's going on behind their closed eyes.

'The hinterlands between waking life and dream states' ... An installation in the "House of Imagination", Berlin (2008)

'She weaves black yarn into hectic webs' ... Chiharu Shiota's installation During Sleep (2010)

Assessment Presentation

For my assessment I was unfortunately unable to use a space that would have been more suitable for the presentation of my dream frames. In an ideal situation I would have hung them in a dark space, the viewer then having to use a torch to view the pieces, giving a more personal interaction with the work. Valuable feedback was gained during assessment on where my work could lead, to expand on my exploration into the boundaries between the conscious and subconscious, and how I do and don’t control my work.

BAS7

 The opportunity arose to be part of an exhibition connected to the British Art Show 7. The show was for the partner colleges of Plymouth University, as an ex Camborne College student I was put forward for this opportunity. The BAS7: In the Days of the Comet looks to art made in the period 2005-10, paying particular attention to the ways in which artists make use of histories. The subtitle was taken from the book by H.G.Wells, set a century ago in 1910, the date of Halley's Comet's last-but-one apparition. From the five themes to choose from, I chose Parallel Realities. I was able to show the dream text I had been producing along side the time lapse of myself sleeping. It was a great chance to really consider the presentation of my work, and what I wanted to convey to the viewer.

Video work

Sleep. Something I was finding I had a distinct lack of! Whilst documenting my dreams through written means I decided to document it though video too. I was researching video work and came across time lapse footage, the condensing of time in a video. I created the following film on my laptop using a time lapse program called Gawker. The quality wasn't as high as I hoped, but I am pleased with what I did achieve with such amateur equipment. Next move will be to get hold of a better set up and play with what effects I can create.

 

Susan Hiller

I have been looking at the artist Susan Hiller. In the 1970's she created a body of work concerned with dreams.....

Dream mapping

In 1974, in conjunction with the writer David Coxhead, Hiller published the book Dream: Visions of the Night. The previous year, while working on the book, she conducted a group investigation into the 'origin of images and ideas' called The Dream Seminar (1973). In this work, twelve participants met for twelve weeks to discuss their dreaming and their subconscious interaction or 'dream meetings', documenting their progress in notes and audiotapes. For Dream Mapping, Hiller invited 10 participants to develop a graphics system of recording their dreams.

Then, for three nights, they all slept outdoors in an area of the Hampshire countryside with an unusual occurrence of fairy rings, or circles formed by the marasmius mushroom, chosen because of the myth that if you sleep within one of these circles, you can enter fairy-land. Each participant was given a notebook with a map of the dream site on the cover. Every morning they recorded their dreams using the system of note-taking that they had developed earlier. They noted the similarities and differences among the dreams by the making of collective dream maps, in which they took all of the individual diagrams from each day and superimposed them to create a group notation.

For her solo exhibition at the ICA in London in 1986, Hiller evolved a form of presentation for this material, displaying the open notebooks in individual vitrines, and reproducing a considerable number of the participants' dream maps and diagrams as large wall drawings. 

More Dreams....

I am continuing to record my dreams. I had a break from recording them and it has become less stressful. I record my dreams as remembered, in language that reflects the memories, using commas to show the constant flow of a dream world. As time goes on I find I am able to remember my dreams more vividly, they come back to me with less effort, I find this interesting, it is as if I am training my conscious mind to hold on and retain the thoughts of my unconscious mind.

 

To cope with and to gain control back from the uncontrolled subconscious dream world I am exploring I have began to make strong, sturdy frames out of rough wood. The rough wood reflects the wear and tear my body has through living life. The frames are my way of containing my dreams, controlling the dreams that I feel are out of my control.