Statement October 2008 (extract)

Heres a section of a statement I'm working on for my creative enquiry module:

The major turning point in my development as an artist, crucial to my practice, is the realisation that the process is equally important as the exhibited work. This illustrates a shift in position and understanding, a shift away from any notion of finality; from understanding artworks as ‘end products’ to reading them as documentation of a process. A recent article on the MA Fine Art show at the University of Central Lancashire addresses this very issue. In it Chris Young refers to Site specific art in the late sixties/early seventies and Lucy Lippard’s 1972 book ‘Six years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object’. Young poses the question of how the process of engagement and exploration, which is where the interest lies, can be communicated to an audience?

‘Thirty-six years on , the case of process-based work takes the issue further still – where the outcome of a project is uncertain there may be no physical end product at all. The interest is in the exploration of ideas and the process of investigation. How can this be communicated to an audience expecting and deserving an involving visual experience?’ (Young, 2008, p6)

With regards to my own practice this question is crucial, and one which, at this stage in my development, I have yet to find a satisfactory answer to. The important point is, to reiterate, the shift from reading the artwork as an ‘end product’ to reading the artwork as documentation. Two bodies of work from my practice highlight this shift, work that illustrates crucial points in the development of my practice. The first of which is a large body of photographs of the various studio spaces I have worked in over the last couple of years. The practice of photographing my studio and work in progress was one I picked up at foundation level and continued through my undergraduate degree. The photographs often depict unfinished art objects (paintings), and as such are documents. The essential point is that these are, at the same time, also ‘end products’. The major revelation was that these photographs of my studio were to be valued as much as ‘end products’ as the paintings they depicted were. They are ‘end products’ in as much as they are produced by a process, but it is a process that is theoretically endless, and so they are also documents. The defining factor is finality. The difference between the two terms is the degree of finality inherent to the work: An ‘end product’ has a heightened finality as it is the end point of the process. A ‘document’ is its polar opposite having little or no finality, as it comes during the process, a process which, theoretically, may have no end point.

The second body of work I produced for my undergraduate degree show. It consisted of a series of paintings, drawings and a video/performance work that utilised the Dadaist/Surrealist technique of the automatic. The paintings were made by covering the canvas in one or more layers of automatic writing. Whilst there was a certain amount of chance involved in this process, it is a controlled amount as there were conditions (Number of layers, size of text etc). This marks a major shift in my practice, in that the work actively privileges the process over the ‘end product’: As there is little aesthetic interest in the finished works (many of the canvases were completely covered in either black or white paint, a deliberate choice to minimise the aesthetic value of the works), the artworks as ‘end products’ approach redundancy, as the art objects exhibited become interesting only because of the process. While this work was produced at undergraduate level, it is only in my current practice I am able to fully comprehend the implications of this shift. My current practice centres on the word ‘Psychogeography’, a word that has a long history but whose major touchstones, for my own practice, are the Situationist International and the revival psychogeographical practices had in 1990’s London by authors such as Iain Sinclair. This work consists of going on walks and documenting them through film, photography, drawing and writing.