(Davids Studio and example of work)
Conversation:
'So, I hope you get the idea, looking at landscape/ layering / personal references etc... then I began a different approach by trying to think about layers in a different way and attaching coded autobiographical meaning to the layers. It’s just something I am exploring
Sheet steel, surface manipulated and worked on.
Idea of scale and presence.
Each had an information panel which referred to the object/work.
You may need to zoom in to read as I have obviously changed the geological layer into something with a personal reference.
As I said , still playing with this as I think it’s a bit overt perhaps, but the private view went OK. Thinking of experimenting with ceramic thrown sections as sample layers....just really trying to locate this way of working for my MA .Oh I forgot to mention the exhibition context , it was titled Workman ( Just five of us exploring working class male role models initially) The blurb I put together was also very different to what I would normally write and set the emotional/ social and historical scene rather than discuss the work itself as I would normally expect to do, just to see what kind of response I got.'
"Like these Scott, a lot and all that layering business, very heady stuff really. The more I have involved myself with it the more enthralling and complicated it seems to get especially when you begin to think of laying as a process in making and the analogous relationship it has with the landscape, or aspects of it, that you might be making work about. I am really interested in those stratified image-objects that you have made and I get the need to bring something personal into the formal---diagrammatic format. That interplay between the formal, quasi scientific and a personal response has always been something of a conundrum for me, an exciting one mind, if not exciting and interesting I would have dropped it long ago. It is a fascination that thankfully persists."
At the beginning of the MA during the collaborative project I looked at mapping , narratives and landscape. I looked at ' Georges House' as a case study for a focal point. I was intrigued by the use of local clay's and their use in building both houses and functional ware within them. I suppose these thoughts about location, personal histories and clay being'of the earth'and a metaphor for time took me further along this path.
Images of the clay pit and a cob wall.
Other local clay sources to try could be the ponds on the common:
I have been thinking about using bodily fluids, meat & bone Within clay to fire out as additions, but these things have covered so many times in so many ways and I had to make practical judgements for the kiln and toxicity of gasses. I was intrigued though by the chemical reactions involved in heating calcium in bone and the proteins and nitrogen in blood.