Galleries

Turner’s ‘Slave ship’

turner_slave_ship_1840Created performance/sound piece. Exploring human and elemental restrictions and restraints. Turner’s painting of ‘The slave ship’ (1840) based on 1. poem that described slave ship in typhoon and 2. the true story of the slave ship ‘Zong’, whose captain had thrown sick and dying slaves into sea so that he could collect insurance money for slaves ‘lost at sea’. Turner accompanied painting with extract of his own poetry:

“Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay, Yon angry setting sun and feirced edged clouds, declare the typhoons coming. Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard the dead and dying – ne’er heed their chains. Hope, hope, fallacious hope! where is thy market now?” (Fallacies of hope, 1812, Turner)

Turner appears to be pitying the slaves but also the slavers – the slavers had a restriction placed on them, imposed by their greed for their money. I created a short performance/sound piece titled’blood on their hands’, where I tried to represent the slavers.

 

The recurring dream.

Dreams are the unconscious parts of us. Freud viewed dreams as wish fulfillment, in contrast to Jung who looked at them as a form of self-actualisation. Of good and bad. Dreams are windows to our souls. I made a sound and performance piece centered around a recurring theme of trains.

While the sound piece was playing I sat behind a plinth and painted images from my dreams onto glass and perspex sheets. Trains represent ‘power’. In my dreams I am lost, chasing trains, being pulled in different directions. Life is out of control and I am ‘powerless’. When the sound piece finished I awoke from my dream, switched on the light and displayed my painted glass sheets in front of the plinth. I completed my performance by taking a print from one of the sheets of glass.

Dreaming: Intervention and collaboration.

I was given the task of intervening in a friend’s work and creating my own response. Yasmin had used her dream book in the hope of finding answers about herself. Maybe they would give her a different perspective on who she was/is. She saw her dreams in black and white and considered the way they are fragmented so that we only recall parts of them when the light comes on. She wanted to play with repetition and liked the idea of documenting her dreams.

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De-construct / Re-construct.

Looked at liberating the traditional painting from its canvas and frame to create sculptural work. Looked at practice of Alexis Harding, Jonathon Binet, Angela de la Cruz and Mia Taylor. Angela de la Cruz summed up her practice when she said ‘One day, I took the crossbar out and the painting bent, From that moment, I looked at the painting as an object.’

Here are a few of my experimental pieces:

Points of view.

Continuing to explore the concept of restriction and restraint. I had big, but rather physical plans in mind for my work. Unfortunately, as a result of recent surgery I had to re-think my final outcome.I decided to show a performance piece based on the restrictions placed upon my ability to make work following my operation and the frustration, mental and physical disorientation that accompanies it. When you are unable to to the things that you normally would you have to learn a new way. You see things from another perspective.

‘Half a cup of water and a kettle full of tea’. (stills)

 

Following my operation I had been told to lift nothing heavier than half a kettle full of water, light dusting only, plenty of rest and to maintain my pelvic floor exercises! As you can see from the title of my performance I was somewhat confused by these restrictions!

Restriction.

Considered instability/restriction and restraints. Looked at work of Matthew Barney ‘Drawing restraints’. I stood on a drawing board which was balanced on a small spinning turntable. Standing carefully on the stool to try and maintain my balance I then held a long piece of dowelling in each hand, onto which paintbrushes were taped to each end. With these restrictions in place I painted images from my unconscious onto the wall and the floor. I further experimented by laying across a spinning chair and from within the restrictive space of a wooden box.

Disorientation.

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In her essay on perspective, Hito Steryl looked at ‘Slave ship’, painted by Turner in 1840. This led me to look at the way in which Turner had depicted instability / disorientation with the loss of the horizon line. The painting challenges our view. Working with loss of control and disorientation I experimented by filming myself rolling on the floor and spinning. I was able to create a short simple film before collapsing! I tried projecting the spinning film onto the wall and performing in front of it.