The Waiting Room exhibition

Installing

The Waiting Room is an old bus shelter space in Colchester, Essex. It has been converted into a communal area that is run by volunteers. The Waiting Room has lots of different events going on throughout the week, like fish & chip nights, bands and even yoga, it is a very versatile and bright space. There is also an old London bus that is a part of the Waiting Room building, which we will be using for our exhibition. The site has two kiosks which are rented out to artists in the area to use as studio spaces, one of which we will also be using for the exhibition. The title of the exhibition is the ‘Draw Slam’ and is the students of Colchester School of Art’s reaction to what they consider to be drawing; pushing the boundaries and interpreting personal approaches to drawing. 

The space itself is very different, the bright green walls are unrelenting and were relatively difficult to hang work on. The entire room is windowed, with a very high ceiling which is adorned with fantastic strings of bulb lights. The place looks very contemporary and casual, the back wall is a white wall space reserved for artworks from the colchester area. We will be using the entire space, however it still has to function like normal so floor space is restricted, something we needed to consider when hanging the work. It proved quite difficult at times to work around the space; the bar and the tables, but it was a challenge and very different to anything we have worked in before. You need to consider what the space is used for and the style, it needs to be appropriate and versatile, I believe as well not very precious because the security of the building is not particularly good, its a public space after all that is open regularly till very late. This is something we really needed to take into account when installing video works with televisions, headphones and DVD players. The bus and the kiosk would remain locked throughout the time the exhibition is on, and it would be the students responsibility to unlock the shutter window of the kiosk throughout the week, which is a role that we are all going to share. 

My friend Sarah Edgington was in charge of curating the exhibition, which was a big role, organising 35 artists from different years. It made the work very diverse and the experience a positive one because of the range in ages and people who were at very different stages in their education. The third years, like myself, who are edging to refining their practice for the degree show to the first years who are just starting to experiment. It gave opportunity for engaging with these different levels, and the ability to give some good feedback and advice. For the first years particularly I felt that it was fantastic that they were thrown into the exhibition so early on in the year, which would have really pushed them to start producing work, which is something that I really struggled with at that time. It also gave them experience of putting work into a show and having to meet deadlines and work with people who they are unfamiliar with. The older students were able to have a go at organising something of that size with so many people to consider. Everyone worked really well together, although there were a couple of incidences where people were inconsiderate of the space and the Waiting Room as well as the other people in the show. Considering the amount of work in the space as well, many students produced very large pieces of work, and expected everything to be as they envisioned it but in reality this just could not happen, as we really had to consider the space. I helped Sarah, with a few others, to co-ordinate the people and the work, as well as the opening evening and entertainment. I was impressed with the precision of the artists in the show, including fixings and instructions for their work, it made actually hanging the work a lot easier, and a much more enjoyable experience because we were able to concentrate on the important aspects instead of worrying about things other people should have already thought about. 

It was a long few days installing, with so much to hang it was a daunting task. Luckily Sarah is very organised and had already made plans for the work she had seen, so ideas were mapped out before we even stepped into the space. It was important to hang the really key big pieces first, we had co-ordinated the help of some fabulous technicians, as the ceiling of the building was far too high for any of the students to reach. A fantastic sculpture, made by a third year student Polly Rowland-Castle was the first piece to be hung, the sharp edges posed a problem because as it was hanging it needed to be well above head height. It was tricky to hang from the tall rafters but in the end looked fantastic and was, most importantly, safe for the public to walk under! The next task was hanging all the very large paper pieces which were positioned around the room. On the back wall we considered relationships with the bright colours and co-ordinated these pieces together. The far windows had two monotone pieces which were large enough to fit the entire panes of the windows. The kiosk became a white wall gallery space that was integral for the exhibition as we had a lot of pieces that would only work in a space like this, we created a small side exhibition room that had a brilliant sound piece by a first year artist, Jo, which contained noises of him marking paper, a hypnotic view of what drawing was. The sound drew the audience into the space. We had two people putting films into the exhibition, which were placed on either side of the main doors as you come in, both with headphones attached. The smaller pieces were easer to place, mine for example was a small photograph in a black frame with a piece of writing which hung on one of the pillars as you entered the room. Small canvas pieces collected together on the walls on either side of the back white wall space. On the evening, a collaboration of two artists Hailey Ryan and Jess Perry, were creating a performance drawing piece in the upper level of the bus and projecting a film on the bottom level. This was mainly for the night although they would be continuing work in the space throughout the next week. The work mixed well together, creating a level of difference that was striking in comparison with the brief. The interpretations of drawing were varied, and many mediums were used. An idea that the space suggests is a very unfinished quality, the mis-match approach of the furniture makes it seem very rough and ready, the work was very vibrant and fitted well with the bright colours of the wall and the communal space. 

For the invited view night, we produced numbered artists statements gathered onto one page which allowed the viewers to see the short descriptions of the work that the artists had provided, an insight into their ideas of drawing and the origins of the work they had created. We included a written description of the brief to give the viewers a context in order to connect with the work. 

The 'Invited' View

The invited view was held on the Thursday evening from half 6 in the evening. Lots of people were invited and food was provided by a fantastic Chef, The Gamekeeper’s Daughter. She made a delicious curry that filled the entire space with intoxicating aromas. We wanted to include food to keep with the informal nature of the space, the tables had to be out so we might as well use them! It also meant that people would stay longer, instead of having to leave to grab something to eat. The bar was also open; stocked with various local brews that fitted with the contemporary edge of the show. I had sourced two songs from each artist that I put onto a playlist which was played throughout the evening, at half 8 a local band came in to play and practice, which really changed the atmosphere of the place. With this we managed to have a few different spaces throughout the evening, the first being a much more formal view of the work, then everyone ate, then the people that stayed were able to drink to some very soft and relaxing music played on a variety of instruments, the musicians were particularly skilled but you can tell that they were still in the practicing stage but this worked with what we were trying to do. The band was one of those hiccups that you always have on the night of an opening, we were not sure if they were playing at all until they turned up halfway through but it was meant to be for the night and the feedback they got was very positive. 

I did a speech at the beginning of the night introducing the audience to the brief and giving some general information on what the exhibition was about. Also thanking various sponsors we had had and any help that we received throughout, I also included a rough guide for the plan of the evening. It was very daunting, as this is the first time I had spoken out in front of people like this, and I hadn’t really had much time to practice reading the speech through that many times. I hadn’t really had a chance to be nervous about it which I feel was a positive thing. The feedback I got was good, hopefully I didn’t sound as nervous as I felt just before I started. 

The night was incredibly successful. The performance went off well, and the bus was an exciting space that people were intrigued to explore. The building was lit bright against the cold, wet night, and made the place look very inviting. There was plenty of positive feedback about the work in the show and many artists were approached by people interested in learning more about the work. Perhaps next time a good idea would be to have name tags, this way the guests could connect the faces of the students with the work that they were seeing. More conversation with new people would have been nice. The food was delicious and the chef did a fantastic job, the atmosphere was comfortable and relaxed the entire night. When you experience an evening like that where all the hard work has come together it makes you feel very proud of everything that has been achieved and of all the students that took part. It was a very different space to what we are used to and that was mirrored in the more casual approach we took to the opening night. The guests all looked like they enjoyed themselves and everything went to plan!

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.