Rosalind Barker

The Unit 2 Assessment exhibition.

My work for Unit 2 assessment photographed by Jizella Pigott

Reflections on Unit 2     Presentation paper which I chose to read out.

Lost

It is a disturbing experience to arrive on the MA with the intent to dismantle and analyse your practice then find yourself bewildered, I seemed to have spent most of unit 2 lost but very much in the hope of being found.

I did quite a bit of wallowing, I felt in a void, a place that was frightening. I had put myself back into a university department, where my knowledge, making and exhibiting potential would be judged. I didn’t fall into this void I happily jumped.

Lost is a disorientation of both knowledge and feeling, it makes you question where you are now but more importantly there is a reflexive instinct to find your path. To do this you have to retrace your steps, go back. There have been times when I have thought I can’t do this making art is too hard. By looking back I was able to re-orientate myself to move forward.

I was comforted by Irit Rogoff in her essay ‘Getting Lost’ she comments ‘ In Western modernist tradition, knowledge once gained cannot be lost again; it can only be revised and improved upon or refined.’

What my work is about:

Lost also connects to what makes me create work, my work is about memory, nostalgia, transience.

My origins are in a world of black and white, pre colour era. A solitary childhood spent in my imaginary fantasy world, a time of dreaming and inventing ways of filling time. My childhood pursuits are reflected in my drawings, which tend to be obsessive and time consuming.

This looking back at Childhood created a connecting theme running through my essay:

On page five of his introduction to the MA Drawing Course Handbook, Stephen Farthing discusses people’s first encounter with drawing when they are encouraged to make marks with wax crayons.

‘To fully understand this MA Drawing course it is important to step away from the idea that drawing started in the art room. It did not, it started the day you as a child stopped eating the crayons and started preferring the marks they made to their taste’

My selected essay artists Anna Barriball, Michelle Charles, Chohreh Feyzdjou and Alex Chinneck are highly inventive in their use of commonplace basic materials and processes, replicating familiar everyday objects and offering them to us for reappraisal.

Materials:

I feel my materials are the everyday mundane and overlooked items of domestic living. I am attracted to the potential of using media that has it’s own destructive agenda that will subtly or not so subtly alter the work but this creates its own dilemmas. The materials do reflect the concepts behind the work.

Process:

I am open to fresh discovery. Intensely curious, I am interested in sculptural drawing but on a minumental not monumental scale. A multitude of small items, displayed to create impact.

In Unit 2 I have used mixed media, rubbing, casting, drawing and applied textures to create layers of evocative referencing.

Work presented in assessment

Sellotape Drawings: revolve around issues of the speed and diversity in the technological delivery of the news, always in colour. Newspapers are under threat.

I feel my attraction is rooted in these being the familiar landscape of my own childhood, my early visual experiences and information supplied via monotone photographs and television playing for only a few hours per evening.

I use 50-meter rolls of Sellotape to lift just a trace from faces in newspapers. I only planned to select black and white images and was thwarted by my realisation that 99% of newspapers are colour and I had inadvertently created a challenging task. The bulk of black and white images have a historical narrative, are obituaries or currently vintage trending contemporary adverts, there are usually only two or three per copy.

Finding the result aesthetically pleasing, Newspapers became an obsession.

Being on a reel and a transparent texture this selected media conjures connections to film, especially the cine films of the early sixties.

Issues that arose: The tape sticks to everything and manipulating just the trace of an image selected is a challenging technique. It sticks to itself when the image has been transferred. It collects edges of paper not targeted.

Experiments led me to using my skin cell residue to seal the tape, this maintains softness and causes minimal image disruption, a slight cloudiness.

I was reading Cornelia Parker ‘Avoided Object’ and must have subliminally absorbed the quote from Freud.

‘When I was six years old and was given my first lessons by my mother, I was expected to believe that we were all made of earth and must therefore return to earth. This did not suit me and I expressed doubts of the doctrine. My mother thereupon rubbed the palms of her hands together- just as she did in making dumplings, except that there was no dough between them – and showed me the blackish scales of epidermis produced by the friction as a proof that we were made of earth.’ Sigmund Freud

So now my epidermis is entwined with the imagery and is also ‘sticking around’ I am aware that Sellotape deteriorates over a prolonged time span, it turns brown and fails to maintain it’s adhesive qualities.

The traces left on the newspaper post ‘lifting’ have an enigmatic aesthetic appeal of their own. The strange dislocation in the sellotape drawings not knowing the who, or why of the ‘found ‘photograph…the story is left behind in the paper.

Books:

Ephemerality and monumentality, I had a row of twenty ‘heavy’ in both senses of the word, books sitting in a row, to read, absorb and reflect on for my MA over the summer. Will everything I read be retained or be a fragile fog of half remembered facts, quotes and images.

I started with a playful, whimsical approach to the MA research books, many of them older clothe bound and textured. I decided to experiment with rubbing the covers and spines as a way of absorbing the content! Called Frottage (Meaning to rub)

In his 1960 essay, Berger describes the kind of weightlessness that attends the act of drawing.

The surface of the page becomes instead of volume, a liquid or gaseous medium:’ from being a clean flat surface it became an empty space. It’s whiteness became an area of limitless, opaque light, possible to move through but not to see through. I knew that when I drew a line on it-or through it-I should have to control the line, not like the driver of a car, on one plane, but like a pilot in the air, movement in all three dimensions being possible’John Berger ‘Berger on the Drawing’ p6

I tried out F-8B pencils, wax crayons, graphite powder on supports of tissue, tracing, brown, watercolor papers. Finally using my finger to rub a 19th century Encyclopedia in tin foil.

The Oxfam bookshop is a treasure trove. Asking about old, textured books, I was shown a full set encyclopedias, a 100 years of perusal captured in the apparent wear and tear on their heavily embossed leather covers. They were illustrated encyclopedias, so inside tiny etchings of extraordinary people, maps and objects.

It wasn’t until I got home and settled down with one that I realised they were French!  Only for rubbing then not reading.

Process:

I am interested in reversing or elaborating on a process, so I then started drawing from the rubbing marks onto tissue and tracing paper. It is the translucence of the papers that attracts me.

Anna Barriball is a contemporary artist who takes rubbings of walls, windows and doors.

‘There is a process of bringing things very close to an almost forensic level of engagement and for me the distance comes when the pieces are exhibited. Objects are stopped in their tracks and given a different consideration in the time and space of the gallery.’

Anna Barriball, in conversation with Tamsin Clark.  2007

By currently working in monochrome I can focus on tactility, making and materials that are central to my works effect.

Picasso said ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up’

My four selected essay artists avoid modern technological expression and concentrate on traditional, inexpensive materials that we think we know well, to coax, amplify and enrich what they are doing, I would like to think that I am doing some thing similar

The Unit 2 Peer group assessment exhibition.