Skip to main content

Sum (LCA Fine Art Degree Show Catalogue, 2014)

The seventeenth century French mathematician, Blaise Pascal wrote, 'our achievements of today are but the sum total of our thoughts of yesterday. You are today where the thoughts of yesterday brought you and you will be tomorrow where the thoughts of today take you.' To the visual artist, the achievements of today, and of tomorrow, are made material and accessible to others through individual works, which are in turn marked by the intentions of those who made them.

Central to this making is the culture of the studio, which within Fine Art extends across all disciplinary approaches and functions as something close to Martin Heidegger’s ‘clearing’ or space, in which practice is allowed to show up as practice. Whatever the material inclination of the maker the practice is rooted in, and never less than, the conditions of its making. Yet in moving beyond material limitations, the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts.

As a spectator it can be daunting to attempt to navigate a route through the maze-like complexity of contemporary Fine Art. As a maker the problem is magnified. In 1979, American art critic Rosalind Krauss mapped out an expanded theoretical field for sculpture in order to account for developments within recent practice. In so doing she drew from the history of modernism, from the logic of evolving forms, and from the traditional function of sculpture in the West.

Today, the speed of expansion within all areas of Fine Art has outstripped the capacity of the artist, critic, or even the art historian to comfortably fence off, sub-divide or sum up the conditions and objects of practice. Meaning has become more localised, more dependent on personal and cultural narratives and on drivers outside of practice itself, to the extent that practice is now, in spirit if not in form, perhaps closer to what it once was.

Within this climate, the contemporary Fine Artist is confronted by difficulties that can become burdens—history, technology, the sheer plurality of ideas and objects. Yet in spite of this burdened condition the Fine Artist is still able, through patience, application, imagination and intelligence, to find freedom and a personal space to think beyond and behind what has been, to test material and theoretical boundaries and to draw and re-draw lines of limitation in the sand. In sum: to understand that meaning functions ‘in relation to’ what is and what has been.

In the course of three years of study these young artists have met their challenges with vigour, sensitivity and humour, and in that time have striven to develop individual voices made audible along material channels of their choosing. The Fine Art programme requires students to acquire knowledge of a wide range of methods and practices, through workshops, studio development and critiques. History and theory are woven into this fabric in order to embed the notion of practice more firmly in the personal, cultural and material constituents of the discipline. Students are equipped with the tools to excavate their own field to reveal the interconnectedness of its layers.

The works of the students on show here bear testament to the accumulation of thoughts and the search for creative freedom. The paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, photographs and films are evidence of separate journeys across choppy waters. Happily, all have reached the other side—to embark once again. This exhibition is, therefore, an aggregate of parts and a point of location for future engagements. A sum is both a conclusion and an acknowledgment of identity, insofar as its particulars must remain visible, knowable and discrete from other things.

You will be tomorrow where the thoughts of today take you. 

Tom Palin, 2014

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Involvement, Inbetweenness and Abstract Painting

To come to an awareness of painting in the period after abstraction – by which I mean after the emergence and development of abstract painting – i s to contend, to a greater or lesser degree, with the idea, language and look of a large assortment of painted objects from the past hundred or so years; dissimilar in form and content. The figurative painter Paul Winstanley goes further, stating that: “It is […] impossible to make paintings of any sort now without an internalised vocabulary of twentieth-century abstraction (2018: 13)”. For him, this is especially apparent in the manner of painting’s particular pictorial arrangements – in the ordering of space – but also in a call to its own condition as object (in respect of its surface/image or object/edge). Together, to Winstanley, these elements serve to: “heighten the metaphysical nature of the painting surface as a reflection of the depicted surfaces and space” (2018: 13).  Notwithstanding, it is permissible t...
Post a Comment
Read more

To See or Not to See: Pareidolias and Abstract Painting

This is a presentation about what abstract painting looks like, and about the extent to which  looking like  can be written into the possibility of how it is that abstract paintings function. It might seem odd that, in a paper about seeing, there are no images, but more on this later. For now, a few words on limitations and intentions: I will not dwell on arguments for or against abstraction as  idea , or privilege one form of painting over another (or painter, for that matter), although I will, on occasion, consider types of configuration. I will deal mostly with the possibilities of picturing, and therefore my points don’t, as such, come with strict temporal handles. However, a consideration of British abstract paintings of the 1980s affords an opportunity to think through some ideas. The pluralisation of approaches to painting in the aftermath of debates around the legacies of Minimalism and Conceptual Art; the lavishness of installation practices; the re-emergence o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Exhibition in a Box Proposal

Exhibition in a Box  is a collaborative project centred on the notion of travel, difference and the testing of artistic and cultural boundaries. The limitation of form and space necessitated by the physical restrictions of the specially designed box permit a rethinking of the relationship between form and content. Participating artists are required to embrace processes of replication and reproduction, working to re-consider the physical dimensions of the work whilst retaining an element of authenticity in respect of the drivers of divergent practices. In coming to terms with what appears an artificially imposed restriction, the exhibiting artists will provide a shifting commentary on the historical function of boxes within practice, where the box has been put to work for the purpose of entertainment, ideological critique, aesthetic refinement, as a challenge to the free-market system of exchange and as evidence of a need for spectacle and division. The box, as a containe...
Post a Comment
Read more