Great news from the Bourneville BA Visual Arts Degree Show 2009.

I went along to the Birmingham University degree show at Bourneville last week and enjoyed some high quality work; I think I enjoyed it more because I had a friend Nita Walters giving me a guided tour.

My Guide gives some scale to this piece

Now this is very helpful because the show is spread out over several building extensions and floors, but it was great to have someone contextualize each piece of work, I am not a great one for interpreting artist statements and I find this spoils my enjoyment of art, I really hate it when the artist does not want you to know what its all about. I find its very important for me to spell out the detail of my work and this aspect was discussed at length during my “Artist Talk” at my exhibition “You Will Never Look at Them In The Same Way Again” at the Solihull Gallery back in February this year. But I’m sticking to my guns.

This is Nita’s work she managed to get these old TVs from the excellent recycling site http://www.uk.freecycle.org/

Her statement reads

“As an artist, my interests lie within the relationship between my own personal experiences of neighbourhood and that of my neighbours. My experimental audiovisual pieces tie into the perception of place, memory, personal boundaries and its psychological effect on the self.

Although my current work is bordering on social documentary and anecdote, the act of obtaining interviews through personal intervention is as important as the work itself as I attempt to translate my experiences from my own artistic standpoint within an installation context.

My interventions have led me to collecting digital subjective anecdotal accounts from strangers who pass me from person to person. From these interviews I translate the essence of feeling regarding my experiences of this process through audio and various media. The act of obtaining these interviews has affected how I see my neighbourhood and its openness to exploration within communities that I see as becoming more and more disparate at street level.”

I received a text message to say she achieved a First and also gained the Emma Jessie Phipps award for Outstanding Studentship

Here's some more work from the show and a link to the website

http://38-degrees.co.uk/

Interesting work about a film, this photograph is positioned in such a way that the viewer cant stand back further to focus it.

Nita has a break on furniture made from cardboard

 

Still on the cardboard theme as you can imagine there is something going on in there

and sometimes your not sure if objects are part of the show or not

 

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What a difference a day makes:

The problem with the washing machine was nothing more than the waste pipe coming away from the piping that takes the water down to the drain.

I went to the dentist first thing in the morning and had the tooth taken out, unbelievably I never experienced any pain at all, I was expecting an ache when the effect of the anaesthetic subsided but again not in the slightest.

and once again the pictures are formatting correct as you can see from this picture from the New Photography On Screen exhibion


Solihull College Fine Art Degree Show 2008 Birmingham Institute of Art and Design BA (Hons) Fine Art Degree Show

Its that time of the year when every night there's a degree show of some kind on first I went to the show at Solihull, I graduated here and its good to see friends who have passed through the college. I was very impressed with the work this year it showed a great deal of thought in the concepts. Very good.

I'm fascinated by the way students work develops over the three years of study painters show installations or sculpture and of course there is no better example of this change or evolution of an art practise than myself because when I joined I came from a background in watercolours and pencil drawing and came out the other end as a photographer.

So then onto the City of Birmingham show: This is massive in comparison to Solihull you realise this first as you have to fight your way through the masses congregated on the street outside then inside there are so many students and artwork on every wall and in every space its great fun but little chance to speak to the artist.


I'm not going to change and go looking for burnt out caravans

walking my 3 dogs through the park on Wednesday morning I got very excited when I saw black smoke coming from Slade Lane but it was something of a false alarm as it was only a caravan that had been set alight. The fire had only just been started and at that stage the flames had engulfed the van making it so hot that you couldn't pass it on the road. For once I didn't have my camera with me, I'm always taking shots in the park and nature reserve in particular I look out for a heron on the lake at the other end of the park but I recently gave up trying to get any decent shots because at the moment he is hiding behind the heavy summer coverage of leaves. I was in no rush to get the camera because caravans are made of fibre glass, wood, a very small amount of aluminium and a steel chassis that is generally covered in so much ash and therefore there is nothing worth taking a photo off.


When I returned with the camera I hoped there might be the odd markings amongst the mess perhaps the aluminium would produce a different angle on the metal but there was nothing really exciting to report, this was the first time that I had taken photos while the vehicle is still burning and its not a great experience with the smoke getting in your eyes.


Slade Lane has produced a few burnt cars for me as its an ideal dumping area. Its about 200 yards from any houses and separates the park and nature reserve from the waste ground fields. It used to be a short cut off the beaten track between Priory Road in Yardley Wood and Baldwins Lane in the Hall Green district of Birmingham, there's a ford across a stream of a river. The road was closed off to traffic a few years ago creating a dead end which attracts people dumping anything from building rubbish, furniture and thankfully the odd car.