Tuesday, 6 May 2014

Contemporary / Peer / Current / Practice / Artists / Issues / Concerns / Research

I am looking to make and identify connections and parallels between my work and practice and that of others working today, with a view to locating myself in contemporary practice.

What a moveable feast, or ever shifting smorgasbord.

It's not easy to summarise what current concerns in art might be, out of the multiplicity of possibilities. I prefer to look at artists' overall reasoning rather than details of their individual practice. I'm interested in contemporary ideas about what art is.

Elizabeth Price notes that Like many artists, I am preoccupied with the histories and debates that shape 20th-century and contemporary art.

Whatever its form or medium I think art is, or should be, a way to understand our time – the time in which we live. It is a way to apprehend and influence it. 

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/20/elizabeth-price-art-understand-time-annual-award

I admire Elizabeth Price and find her words and ethos convincing, and yet for myself, I conclude that we share less a shared time, but an overlapping series of times and concerns. I know that in art history we are always considering work in its contemporary context and try to get into the mind set of other times, but I have always tried to make work that could not be dated. Perhaps that is ridiculous, and some sort of cyclic oxymoron, especially considering my main medium of digital video. Perhaps we can only ever be informed by our own age, but anyway I do not make work which deliberately deals head on with contemporary political and social issues. Having said that, my work and ideas are of course totally informed by what happens in the here and now, in events which happen in my own life and the world.

I look to realisations, to the lens of understanding.

6th May 2014

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Me

My photo
Thinker of thoughts, mother of adults Shadows Echoes Stories Dyslexia London Scotland Drawing Sewing Research Tutor Mentor Books Trees Clouds Quartz Magnets. I review and write about art and culture.

Followers