My Nan's Little House Photography

After taking a series of photographs at my own house, I realised that images were sparse. I wanted to capture those marks of everyday life, the evidence that we as people existed in that space. I am not sure if it was because I was so familiar with my surroundings, or if the house itself didn’t hold enough evidence of the people that live there, but the photos were just not working. There was a disconnection between the idea I was trying to get across and the image in front of me, and if that was the case for me, then that would certainly be the case for someone else looking at the photograph. 

I considered what I needed to take photos of. In order to show this human connection with a space and surroundings I needed to look at a house that has been lived in, loved in, one that holds memories and treasures of things that have past, a older house. I decided that my Nan’s small bungalow would be perfect for this. I spent a lot of time in her house when I was younger, with my two cousins, after school and during the summer holidays when our parents were at work. We used to play and watch videos, and ride carts up and down the hill. I visited my Nan, took my camera, and whilst having lunch and talking I photographed her little house, capturing the things that I not only remember clearly, like her chairs or the phone on the side by the front door. But also the things that I saw that reminded me of my Nan, that had her personality and her life captured in the object or the surface. I am very close to my Nan, however, with everything being so hectic I don’t have much time to go to her little house for a visit as often as I used to. 

It was very emotional taking photos of my Nan’s house, there were so many things that I remembered from when I was smaller. Painting her step, planting her flowers, the birds nest in the post box. Seeing the photos on the film was even more so, by looking through the images I could see my Nan, everything that I love about her, captured in the stillness of the picture. The photos seemed to speak of her life, and everything that has past in that house. I realised then that I had hit on something powerful, something that I really connected with. 

There were many photos that I liked, but I understand now that this is because I felt a certain pull towards the objects that were in them. I have been re-reading Barthes’ Camera Lucida and the idea about how we cannot separate the photograph from the thing that is photographed, I really felt this when looking through these. I had to try and detach myself from the objects and look at the photos themselves with a critical eye to consider which ones worked better in relation to the brief that we were given and the proposal I had decided on. I also asked my tutor Jane which one worked for her, and it was different to the one I had chosen, it is virtually impossible to detach yourself from something that I felt such a connection to. 

There were three photographs that for me stood out from the rest. The first was this photograph of the railing on a set of steps leading up to the bungalow. Visually it is simple, again I know my appeal for the photograph was the story behind the steps that I remember. My family was building that front step when I born, my Dad, run up shouting that he had had a baby girl, and none of my family believed him because he had spent the last month joking with them that I had been born. That’s an extremely happy memory for me, my Dad passed away when I was younger so that step feels like a connection to him. This photograph, although not necessarily working for the brief, is something that I will be looking further into in the future, separate from this exhibition piece. It made me extremely emotional to look at and that is something I cannot ignore. Attempting to detach myself from the photograph I get a sense of age, the elderly needing a rail to be able to get up the stairs. Even though my Nan is 80 I do not see her as old, she is very young for her age so this for me is not an accurate representation of who my Nan is. 

The choice of photograph that I had made was this image of my Nan’s bedroom at home and the lovely tall mirror that she has had for as long as I remember. I really loved this image because I like the idea of a narrative of a scene, we look for the signs in the room and read about the space. Again, when trying to detach myself from what I know the room to be I see that it is quite an old fashioned room, the furniture is the part of the photograph that I feel emphasises this point, particularly the old wood of the mirror. It feels very lonely and quiet because you can see through the mirror into the room but there is still no one there. I think that instead of it feeling like the person is lost, it feels more like they are absent. Which is exactly what I wanted from these images. My connection to the photograph is that I know it is my Nan’s room, so when trying to capture her, this space, other than the kitchen, feels more like her than the others. Although visually, there is no focus on a particular object, the space creates a narrative but I am not sure that it is quite the right one.

The final photo, and the one that I chose to use for the exhibition, was one of a chair in my Nan’s spare bedroom. My Nan gets ready in this room and sits down here to do her hair and puts her jackets on the back of it. My tutor picked this one out from the series of photographs as the one that she thought presented the idea the best. I wanted to capture the presence of my Nan, and the solitary chair worked for the representation of her. The more I looked at it the more I saw my Nan in the chair, it was sturdy and soft, it looked comfortable, and strong. However, again I think that this image feels very sad, which is perhaps the absence of colour as well as the fact that the chair stands alone. The images feel very aged, which I think in this case gives the impression that the person who sits in the chair is gone. This is not quite my intention, the photo is perfect but I knew that I needed to include a small piece of writing that connected with this as an integral part of the work. I needed to write why the chair was my Nan, what made me choose this picture in relation to the brief. 

The Hyperdrawing Brief

Hyperdrawing is the current phase of a research project that aims to: 

Investigate the ambiguity that emerges from the artificial boundaries employed to subdivide contemporary fine art drawing practice.

Within this Hyperdrawing’s specific aim is to:

To investigate the opportunities for the prefix ‘supra-’, meaning ‘above, over’ or ‘beyond the limits of, outside of’, within a hypothesised hierarchical representation of drawing within contemporary fine art practice.

Our tutor Jane set us a brief titled ‘Hyperdrawing’ for the first semester. We are to explore and push the boundaries of what drawing is, how far can we take it? The aim is to produce a piece of work for an upcoming exhibition at The Waiting Room space in Colchester, where all three years from the degree will be exhibiting in the working and original space. 

Last year I experimented with the idea of drawing as photography. It was a personal approach as I am not one to sketch something out first, to plan things I take photographs. This is an idea that I pulled on throughout that module, working with projection and photography to capture figures and lines through light and shadow. 

I decided that I really wanted to continue on with this as I had been experimenting with film photography towards the end of last year and this is something I am absolutely in love with and wish to learn more about. For me it wasn’t a question of whether I could use photography as drawing for this brief, I decided to work with the idea, not the medium. 

Considering the Emma Dexter text I wish to explore the way we symbolically draw in life. I spoke before of that connection to the Human Presence, how we show that we exist in a space. I noted my intention of exploring the way my close family and friends make marks on the spaces that they live in, personal things, that hold memory and meaning. I plan to take photos of those things, attempting to capture their ‘marks’ as such, not on themselves, but the space. I will not be taking images of the people, but the way the essence of those people are contained in a room, a chair, a surface, a wall. 

I will be exhibiting work in the ‘Draw Slam’ exhibition at The Waiting Room, Colchester, along with 35 other artists from B.A. Fine Art from Thursday 20th of November to the 30th November. The work is based around a set brief titled ‘Hyperdrawing’. As artists we have challenged the conventions of drawing by going outside the boundaries and testing the limits. The fantastic working space offers an exciting location for the work, I will be doing a speech on the night of the Invited View (20th November), food will also be available cooked by The Gamekeeper's Daughter.

A little bit about me...

My name is Jenna Lockett, I am a 21 year old student from Essex. I am currently in my third year of a B.A in Fine Art. I have started this blog more as a record of my thoughts on the various goings on of this final, and extremely busy, year. I hopefully will be including reflections on different texts: considering why they have had such an impact in either a positive or negative way. As well as any exhibitions that I have done or participated in and those of other artists that I have found particularly influential. Most importantly writing about my own work, trying to analyse and consider it more critically, along with anything else in between!

Before and since starting the degree I have always been interested in writing, and over the past few years I have realised that I like to write about art. Recently I have been writing more about my own work and reflecting on successes or failures, key influences and how processes have altered the way it looks and how my ideas for the work change as I begin to delve deeper into a subject. The medium I work most with is photography but I have also experimented with video, drawing and sometimes painting. What the work is about depends greatly on things I have read, that I have enjoyed and wish to explore more thoroughly, as well as briefs that we are set in the studios by my tutor. My work is very versatile, and as I have come to discover, it is a way of developing and working visually with my thoughts or opinions, its about being able to question myself about why I am thinking this way and trying to come to a better understanding of not only my own work but its influences as well, I find exploring this visually is extremely helpful.

This year I will be writing my dissertation. This is oddly enough something I am looking forward to doing. The critical and contextual studies module is most definitely my favourite part, and I love everything about it, from doing the research and gathering sources to the actual writing of the work. The subjects that I focus on for my own writing has always strongly influenced the work I have been doing in the studio. An on-going theme throughout has been artistic intention; why we do things in a certain way, what ultimate ‘idea’ we are trying to get across (if there is one at all!) and whether this can be easily perceived by the viewer, or even if this actually matters. I think its a fascinating topic and one that I have remained interested in throughout the degree. I started off with looking at what is termed as ‘Conceptual Art’; ideas and key artists that were important in the movement, if you can call it that! I then went onto questioning artistic intention and wrote a very brief yet personal essay on what I felt that artistic intention was, and how my studio work reflected this. For my dissertation this year I will be studying Roland Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’, questioning points he makes throughout that text and comparing those to the ideas of others like Joseph Kosuth and Foucault. I plan to include some aspects of the research I am doing for my dissertation in the blog as I am hopefully doing an MA in Contemporary Art Theory after the degree, therefore writing is going to be a crucial skill that I need to continue to develop!

To draw is to be Human

To draw is to be Human is a text by Emma Dexter on drawing. Dexter suggests that drawing is something natural; its a part of life. She writes of how drawing is dreaming, we dream in notes and scribbles, we make plans. A point that she makes which I am going to explore is that the essence of drawing is mark making. She mentions marks as a term very loosely, from “Neolithic marks on cave walls to lines of telephone wires…” She goes on to say that these all can be seen as a form of drawing. 

What I wish to question is how far can this be stretched? How far can we push the term ‘drawing’? If drawing is a mark we make then the answer to this question has just become very open; to mark is a very loose term, as the examples that Dexter makes suggest. 

“Indeed, drawing is a part of our interrelation to our physical environment, recording in and on it, the presence of the human.”

This phrase “the presence of the human” stuck with me when reading this text. This sentence not only poses a much more bodily relationship with drawing (a connection physically, perhaps within a space) but also a much more personal and emotional approach. This interpretation of drawing being something that we do, as people, as humans, suggests a primal nature or a natural instinct, this is emphasised by Dexters use of the cave painting example. Dexter suggests that drawing has an elemental character, a part of what it means to be human. 

These carnal impressions of drawing make me what to move away from the traditional, from a mark on paper or canvas, away from a line or a shape, what I have come to know as drawing. I’ve started to consider the possibilities of a more personal approach, one where life itself becomes the page you work on, how we mark our place in the world; our human presence. 

Cornelia Parker, in her text “On Drawing” says that “Drawing seems very elemental and inherently human, it is the most ‘true’ art form in a way". Dexter suggests there is a transparency with drawing, not hiding the mistakes, seeing everything for what it is. I am particularly interested in seeing the power of those things that are not usually seen, the things we do that we wish to hide or get rid of, honesty with who we are and what makes us who we are. 

Dexter mentions the way that as human beings we leave traces, tracks or “shadows to mark our passing”, I have been considering this not only on a global scale (in the way we make our marks on the world) but also on a much more personal level. Those things we do daily that mark ourselves in that space, the way we leave traces that show that we exist. Our essence gets pulled into these places; distinctive characteristics or smells. I want to consider the earthy, the private things that we do, the habitual, the personal. I plan on exploring the spaces of my family, the people that I love, knowing that person; what they are like, who they are and how that is reflected in the marks they make.