Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Ideas/ Sketchbook...


"For you have touched her perfect body with your mind".
INNER/ OUTER



'Poetics of the Body...'


Sketchbook Notes/Reflections...


Themes for 3rd Year...


This drawing was inspired by the book 'Body, Space & Image'. It is an impression of how the inside of my body feels...Part of the 'Autobiography' Chapter. (p102)

LOVE DANCE @ The Fringe...

LOVE DANCE

'Once Removed'...



Once Removed was a great show and the last that I saw of the Love Dance Programme...I felt the choreoraphy of the show explored the nature of male & females and encompassed a very dynamic and intense connection between the dancers...
The dancers were both grounded in what looked like an abstract nest- the stage was marked out with tape on the floor and they moved around the markings, like animals. I really enjoyed this show becuase it incorporated many different mediums, including elements of live visuals and sound.

'When We Meet Again' ...


"The first time we met, you could see me, but I could not see you"...
When We Meet Again was an immersive performance piece, that allowed the audience member to become the performer... I was welcomed into an empty room and given a pair of goggles that had a screen inside them. Then a set of headphones were placed on my head, which made me feel completely isolated from everything and very aware of my body within the space....
As both my vision and sound was lost, my percpective was gone and through the screen inside the goggles I was transported into a completely different mind. There was a mini film playing in the goggles, and through the headphones a voice guided me through the performance. The scene played meeting a woman, and as you went on the journey of the character you had been given, you lost complete sense of yourself...
There was a moment where I danced with the women in the performance. I could not see her, only feel her pressense, and the intimacy of that moment made me realise how wonderful it is to feel a Performance rather than see it....
When the performance ended, the screen said 'If you are still here remove your goggles'...
I removed them, expecting to see the women, but she was not there, and again I was in the room alone. feeling completely overwhelmed and very disorientated.
This is probably the best performance I saw...


'Private Dancer'...


I went to see Private Dancer because Richard Layzell suggested I should come along after his performance workshop earlier this year...He & Janice Parker collaborated together on this piece. and it was themed on the concept of dancing alone, in the privacy of your own space, and it was Richard as the installation artist who created this space...
The show was beautiful...We were welcomed into a room and in the middle was a wooden structure with little rooms formed inside it, and each room was inhabitted with dancers. The experience of the performance was really amazing, every time you moved around the space you experienced something completely different and as the performance unfolded, people were welcomed to venture into the rooms and have a private exchange with the dancers...
The show was very perosnal, I loved the fact that everyone in the room was experiencing something completely different, you could never see the same thing twice and as you walked around the installation, you noticed that sometimes you were being followed, other times watched, other times there was no one there and you were just surrounded by dancing shadows...It was a very magical piece!

Friday, July 16, 2010

Ideas for projects over Summer...


I would like to look at 'movement', and the way people move through space over the summer...
I have been interested in Performance Art and explorng it as a medium for a while, but have felt unsure of how to approach it as an art form...
I've been thinking of ways in which to look into Performance Art as part of our every day lives, looking at the ways we move through sapce as a starting point...
In this project I plan to record myself moving through space, hopefully picking up both my actions and my environment. I hope with these recordings to create different soundscapes, based on themes which I will decide once I have delved into and explored Performance Art and its many aspects more in depth...
I hope to use these soundscapes as inspiration for Performances once I begin college again in September...


Thursday, July 1, 2010

Guerilla Gallery!


The Guerilla Gallery are launching their first event tomorow night at the Hannah Maclure Centre!
There will be live visuals, music and artwork which will all mesh together to create a new form of gallery environment...I have submitted 5 stills of work for the night which will be projected into the space :)
Looking forward to it!

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

WE ARE THE SPACEMAKERS!










'Spacemakers' is a Dundee based collective, looking at interacting with our surrounding environments and general public space in new and playful ways...
We have been meeting weekly since the beginning of June, led by My Dad's Strip Club's Ange Taggart and Jonathon Baxter from D-Air. The group have looked at a lot of environmental and political topics as well as discussing how society use space in everyday life....In the future we will be exploring these themes through group led projects and other interventions!
Watch out for the Spacemakers :)

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Ana Mendieta







Ana Mendieta is my favourite artist. I love the way she really explores the boundaries of the body and its presense wihtin the space that it inhabits through Performance Art. She engages with herself as part of her work and uses alot of visual metaphors to portray the langiage between human & nature, herself and the world around her...

FACE YOURSELF-Overview of my artistic direction...

My direction in art, is still very unclear to me...I feel that this year has led me to begin to understand where I want ot go within my practice, and what I want my work to represent, yet I am still not sure of how to approach my conceptual ideas and conduct them together to create a final peice of work...

I feel that I need to stop thinking of myself outside of my ideas, and see me as part of them, or the ideas as part of me...It is hard for me to percieve myself as the creator of something, or the focus of what I am doing, as I want to get away from that whole notion of the 'artist' and to actually use my art to engage with other people so that they can explore themselves through the work...

I am very interested in Performance Art & Live Art, both being mediums that involve physicality and the engagement with the human body...I feel these mediums help us to look at our pressense and essense within space and to enagage ourselves with our surroundings...
I feel the next step within my practice is to experiment within these mediums and to explore myself through them, yet I am finding approaching both Performance & Live Art very hard as I feel I am still very unsure of how to express myself within these mediums.
I think it is because I still dont the confidence or courage to just let go and explore my concepts, allowing my ideas to evolve and expand physically as experimental performances...

I overall feel very disenganged with the process of performing, and of how my pressense within the performance is going to affect the art form and engage with the audience watching...
I don't want to stand as an artist alone, I am very much about being a part of a collective pressense in which the dynamic energy of the group is what creates the performance and allows the audience to engage and become part of the collective themselves...

The main themes I want to explore in Performance Art are; People~ and the way they move through space, the way we express ourselves, the way we relate to one another, our physcical & emotional self, our social identity-the self, the image of the self, our presense, and our own self awareness...

I hope this summer I will evolve from being in this not so much mental block, but physical block, of not really knowing of how to flow my ideas into physical movements...
I hope to interact and collaborate with many other artists... I feel that through these collaborations and exploring Performance & Live Art with one another, will help me to let go and begin to understand how I can make art freely, enaging with both concept and the physicality of performance...