TULCA response video

We needed to choose a way of responding to the TULCA festival so with the help of my daughter Niam and Lynn helping showing me 'movie maker' I did this 1 minute video.

Nailing Down Vision Exhibition

25/11/2013

Our Nailing Down Visions exhibition went well.  My piece was called Pareidolia.  It was a 10 minute video installation.  I will add in my artist statement, mind maps and write up of the exhibition; but at the moment I've attracted yet another gremlim that will not allow me to copy and paste!  I wrote about two artists works Tim Kelly and Mary Lally.
 

TULCA curator Valerie Connor

15/11/13

It was a great honor to go to a talk by Valerie Connor in the Fairgreen gallery space today, I got an email invite that it was opent to all TULCA volunteers as arranged by Gavin Murphy.
She was very forthcoming about all aspects of being a curator, so it was very helpful and interesting.  I'd love to curate an exhibition! 
She spoke about how she felt it was important to spend time visiting the city first (she lives and works in Dublin) before coming to any decisions on the direction and theme of the festival.

Friendships and 'getting on' with people, building kind,careful and respectful relationships are very important. This is needed in the whole multi-venue, press, volunteers and of course artists contacts.

Valerie has lots of experience, connections and ideas so she seems ideal for the job which started it's process in April and gathered speed and large input of energy by September.

As she teaches photography I thought she'd be horrified by these photo's I took after the talk; but she just smiled and said 'misty!'...very kind!

    

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

sorry, sometimes it just has to be voiced!   (I'm sure I'll be fine now)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!

GOLDEN MOUNTAINS

11/11/13

Trip to the TULCA festival gallery (Fairgreen)

I love going round galleries; but it definitely has some negatives and positives for me as doing it as part of a 'trip'.   I may as well explore them here....who knows maybe my views will change over the course?

In relation to going as a group instead of singularly....

My current negatives:

The waiting for everyone (to arrive and leave)
The crowd..it didn't effect the viewing of all the works; but definitely some of them
Noise

My current positives:


We were the first tour, that was pretty cool!
The tour and inside information
The artists talks- first hand accounts
A shared experience-different viewpoints and discussion



Joanna met us and gave us an introductory talk and explained about not taking photo's.  She introduced us to the first exhibit, The Speedy Telstar, by Neal White and Tina O'Connell. It was inspired by the computer museum in Galway...I took the kids there a few years ago and we all really enjoyed it including the lively talk by Brendan Smith whose baby it is!
All photo's therefore are from the official TULCA photo's.



Quoted from TULCA website, artist information

"Emma Finn currently lives and works in Edinburgh, UK but was born in Galway, Ireland. She recently graduated from Edinburgh College of Art with a BA (Hons) in Intermedia. Finn also holds a BA (Hons) in Psychological Studies and Classical Civilisation from the National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland. She has exhibited in the UK and Ireland and has been selected for The Royal Scottish Academy’s New Contemporaries 2014. Recently, Finn was awarded the RSA John Kinross Travel Scholarship to Florence."
"Nuala Ní Fhlathúin is from the Gaeltacht area in the West of Ireland. She received a BFA in Ceramics from GMIT, Galway and an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Washington, Seattle. Her work has been exhibited in Ireland, the USA, Portugal and Georgia. She also edits Nua-Ealaín, an Irish language website for the contemporary visual arts."

I loved hearing from Emma Finn and Nuala Ní Fhlathúin about their work.  Emma's was a video piece called More or Less.  It was HD DVD on a 10 minute loop.  As there were so many of us it was impossible to watch it properly at the time; but I will be visiting all the venues myself anyway.  She seems to work very quickly in her chosen area from what she said, that suprised me.  I also found it very interesting to hear both artist talk about what inspired them.

Nuala's installation was called ...agus thuig mé ansin/...and then I knew.  She explained how it was very site specific, so again the installation had been constructed in a relatively short amount of time ( afew weeks).  It was great to walk around the pieces and see how they related, or didn't relate, to those around them.  The lack of emotion aspect struck a chord with me as my own family showed very little emotion and I think if the events of an Agatha Christie book had occured there would have been a similar atmosphere!

 

I really enjoyed most of this experiece...thank you!

Nailing Down Visions and Tulca

4/11/2013

We didn't have a lesson last week as it was a bank holiday; but we've had loads to do...of course!
The mind maps for the concepts for the Nailing down visions project.  I took loads of notes and have come up with a few different ideas to explore.  What to look at is the visual concepts that interest me and explore them with the view to having a piece and a statement at the outcome.  I will put up the photo's asap; but I can't get them to load at the moment.
We have an extended deadline due to Tulca and due to the bank holiday...phew

This was the good news (extended deadline) the bad news was...another project! (surely there aren't enough hours in the day!  -the workload is huge at the moment )

We had a talk from Joanna McGlynn who is the education coordinator with TULCA, she is an intern with them.  TULCA is an art festival in Galway, running this year from 8-24 November.
I have volunteered to be an invigilator during TULCA, this basically just means keep an eye on the art installations in a particular venue, answer any questions if possible, report any problems and keep a tally of who visits.  Joanna explained that it's the 11th year of the multi-venue festival.  There are 47 artists taking part, there will be exhibitions, seminars, age related tours and talks.
For artists there is an open call for submissions in approx. August, the board and the curator choose the artists.  The curator can also personally ask artists who haven't put in submissions.
The curator this year is Valerie Connor who is a photographer, the theme is 'Golden Mountain'.

The idea of the Golden Mountain is the idea of those imaginary mountains of gold, conjoured up during the 'gold rush'.  There are no mountains of gold; but because we've imajined them they do exist and there lies a paradox.

There is a competition open to students to do a video response to TULCA.




So that was all very interesting and Joanne went off, lovely to hear from her...but then John broke the news of another project to do with TULCA...aaaah! more details to follow.  We will all be visiting TULCA main gallery next Monday and Joanna will be meeting us and giving us a tour which will be great, I'm looking forward to that-one of my favourite things is viewing art in situ.

Statements and Practicalities and a new Project!

21/10/2013

I did read my statement out- I had imagined that I had an exhibition rather than just the one piece:

In this exhibition the artist has taken a thorough exploration of the question 'who do you listen to?'
 
We are submerged in a powerful stream of media, sometimes distracting, insidious, misleading, creative, insightful and surprising.
 
The exhibition at times redolent of 1984 and more extreme conspiracy theories seems to push, tease, lead and soften; merging and diverging in the rhythm only present in the human sub culture and connected world we now find ourselves in.

!!

There were varying views on the validity and purpose of artists statements.  There are of course many examples of all sides to this discussion in practise today- artists vehemently opposed and speaking out against them, artists embracing them and writing lengthy statements and those just going along with it.
John was saying it is a valid thing to learn as we will have to write statements in a number of different situations, including:-
funding
talks
exhibitions
course applications ie masters
job applications
workshops etc

they may have to be written differently depending on who they are aimed at i.e. different ages, government body, general public etc  they should usually be approx. 300 words long (mine is only 75 words!).

We then talked about the ins and outs and ups and downs of displaying work- the practicalities.....great picture above showing a 'suspension' method!

There are ways of working with glass, perspex, magnets, thread, latex compound, wires...
It is worth considering this as part of the making process.

We then met up with the other 2 groups in the main room and watched an episode of How Art Made The World.   We had to take a lot of notes as this was the starting point (the initial inspiration) for a new project entitled 'Nailing Down Visions'.  The episode that we watched was called 'The Day Pictures Were Born'.  There were plenty of the beautiful cave painting to look at, which was a real treat.  I'm not keen on the series in general; but I do really appreciate the access to the footage of the artworks...made me really want to see them first hand.
So now we need to start an investigative process...ideas, mindmaps etc to produce a body of work.  More details will follow.


 

Gremlins, Art Audience and Artists statements!

I have been bogged down by a hundred gremlins (mainly different) whilst learning how to do these blogs!
On some of the computers I couldn't get pictures to load, on others an 'error on page' sign very persistently popped up as I tried to edit or add to posts day after day.  I haven't been able to resize some of my photo's and others disappeared.  There was also a very strange session where all of the drop down editing menu was spread out in a kind of code-which I could actually work out how to use!  The other day disaster, no save button was there and I wiped everything off the entry by mistake.....I really am learning to learn!

 We did not have to present our response to the newspaper article in L2L today so I've (hopefully) put a video of it on the page.  We had an interesting talk about newspapers.  We need to put together (write) an artists statement to do with the piece.  I am thinking about this at the moment..what do I want to say? how long will it be?
We were then discussing our audience...who 'they' are, how they will be viewing the art.  This is quite an open ended subject I think as we could imagine new ways to reach this audience maybe as creatively as the artwork itself?

I've written my artists statement; but am feeling a bit ambivalent about it for a few reasons.  Part of me is thinking really the artwork should stand on it's own merit, sometimes artists statements come across as pretentious.  Also generally the ones I've read would be about a body of work (that the artist has been studying and producing for a while) this is just after the one piece.  I have decided to write it as if I have done a load of pieces on the particular subject and I suppose what I imagine I would have achieved....I think I will not put it on the blog....ahh, chicken!  (I may change my mind depending on how the next class goes).

Interesting Artists and Newspaper Inspiration!

7/10/2013 Our L2L group today had the fear factor!  It's safe to say that the majority of us were crapping ourselves, sorry, scared!.  Part of learning to learn is to learn how to do presentations.  We need to be able to do justice to our artwork, or the artwork of other people by being able to present well.  So we talked about how to do this, with gestures, eye contact, posture, visuals, engagement, interest etc...
It was brilliant watching the presentations about artists many I hadn't heard of and am now delighted I have.  I will be looking up more about a good few such as Virginia Davies, Gerhard Richter and Andy Goldsworthy.  
My presentation went okay, I was nervous and my voice sounded weird, I forgot to say how the background was supposed to be like 70's wallpaper and a few other things; but I was happier than I was the last time I had to stand up in front of everyone so that was something.

Our assignment today is to buy a newspaper, read it, pick an article and then to create an artistic response to it!.........................   there was also a short talk about politics; social, cultural and economic-connected to destinies, hmmm


I started to plan out possible lines of
investigation from the article with a mind map.  The article itself, taken from The Guardian newspaper, was about Peter Higgs, The Higgs boson and the Nobel Prize.  Although I am interested in these I found that my response just had to be about how I feel about the daily newspaper being a source of information (or misinformation) in the first place.  Something I feel strongly enough about to quite shamelessly say I NEVER buy a daily newspaper.  There are some possible reasons that I could think of to buy one such as listings: births, deaths, marriages, sports results and fixtures, events both local and global, cinema, TV, radio etc   For a truthful in depth (or even surface) look at a subject a daily newspaper would not even rank at all in my mind.  I did have a look at Peter Higgs online an saw that he has several videos freely available where he is explaining the Higgs boson.  I'm sure there are books too; but that is something I'm yet to check out.  There is an official site for the Nobel Prize with listings of winners and history.  For a more in depth look again I think there is a lot of information out there and being discerning about the sources could lead to a true picture of it's part in society.  There are many questions to answer in this regard!

So I personally think if there is any subject that you care about it is well worth the time and effort to go searching out truth for yourself....it leads you to a greater understanding and ultimately I feel much happier when I do that rather than relying on shoddy journalism filling my head with nonsense.  We have access to information like never before=lets use it!

Nb this article said 'continued on page 2'.....it wasn't and no sign of it in the rest of the paper....

Clare Won and Nan Goldin

30/09/13 Our rainbow group went well today, I had the sketches done- no presentation pressure.  Clare won the hurling so there were colourful stories of tribes mixed in with the great discussion that we had about where and how artists can get their ideas.

Here's a taste of the tribal colours near where I live


Claire came in and we had to pick an artist randomly out of a bag to research and do a mind map and presentation on.  I got 'Nan Goldin'.  We had to only use books for the research and had to visit the library.  John was saying about the joys of losing yourself in a book.  I love reading; but am pretty slow so when I decided to throw myself into reading about Nan this wasn't the best idea (for me).  I came out of the library as I was feeling a bit hungry and checked my phone and it was 13.50!!! I'd missed lunch and was 20 minutes late for life drawing.....  I guess in future I will have to keep a closer eye on the time.

I really enjoyed the focus and investigation of the research.  Not only do you get an insight into what the artist does, you get to see the context, what was happening at the time, influences, politics, life experience, other artist connections, inspirations etc.. it's fascinating. 

Something that is also interesting is that in the space of a week you can feel that you've discovered something new, something that you weren't aware of before and know that there is way more that you don't know that is there if you want to find out.  And even better that you can evolve any of those ideas, thoughts, images into your own way, your own ideas, views etc and those in turn can be worked on, by yourself or someone else who takes the baton and runs with it.

Here's my Nan Goldin mind map and also a Nan inspired photograph, entitled "Niam Drinking Hot Chocolate In Butlers"

I would like to make the images a little bigger; but I'm still having a few glitches with the blog so will have to keep it as it is for now....go away gremlins!

Doing a Presentation and Making A View Finder

23/09/13 This L2L session was about presenting our mind maps that we made about ourselves...why we are on the course. It was very scary, which I know when you say it logically not in the moment sounds very silly. Never the less my heart was beating faster, palms sweaty, dizzy, throat tightening etc! It's definitely something that I need to learn...how to stand up in front of a group of people and do a presentation without having a melt down. The actually presentation was v.short and I was given the advice, to look up more, address the audience, relax. So I will try to take this on board for the next time. Having the mind map there did help a bit as a prompt and as a focus. I really enjoyed hearing about the other members in the group, their goals and plans. We then made a viewfinder and got given the homework of 5 sketches using the viewfinder. Do lots of drawing practice, basically, draw, draw, draw, draw!!!

 I've had all kinds of problems getting this to publish...hence the delay

Mind Mapping

We were shown a power point presentation all about mind mapping, which was very interesting.  It's like a type of brainstorming, very useful for developing ideas, clarifying etc. 

I got a book out of the library 'Tony Buzan Mind Mapping' 'kick-start your creativity and transform your life' he claims to have developed the concept of mind mapping as a learning and memory tool.  It certainly is a very interesting starting point and one I think I will be using again and again over the next few years.  I will add more to this as I find out more; but for now here is an example:

Aah I've encountered a problem, the library computer isn't letting me upload any images at this time.....

So basically I have 4 images that I want to share here on this bog; but I will have to wait until I get home to upload them.  The first 2 are examples of mind maps that I found online.

The next is a photograph of an idea I had whilst doing the mind map and which I want to develop further.  And finally a photograph of the mind map that I created in response to the question 'Why are you here [on this course]?'





I'm back at home and it is now letting me add the images and they can be added anywhere in the text which is great to know for future efforts.  The only thing which was a slight pain was that all the images that I had saved and re sized and put on my 'U' drive are not accessible.  So I'm just having to redo that.  I will ask Lynne tomorrow if I'm doing something wrong as I want to learn!
Here is the next image as promised:

I could learn from this!

Something else that is now great to know is that as I learn more about mind maps I can very simply add to this particular blog, yeah! So it will grow as I learn.  Now to reload my 2 photo's and edit them a bit, well actually just re size them until I learn more.  

 Puzzle idea I had whilst making my mind map.

Why I Am Doing the Art and Design course map 1

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Beginners MISTAKE!

So I realised I made a mistake with my first blog post; but hey I'm learning/ I'm a beginner and that means I don't know it all!!! (or even hardly anything) and I'm really happy to be learning.  Just as Thomas Edison said he found 10,000 ways that didn't work before he found the one way that did finally work to make the incandescent light bulb and he didn't consider this a failure, neither will I (although I hope I get the hang of it quicker than that!).
This is my L2L blog so I'm not supposed to confuse it with a load of Core Visual studies stuff....I'm supposed to make 2 entries or more per week on L2L related subjects/teachings.

So what is L2L all about so far?  It means learning to learn and we are divided into 3 groups for it every Monday, there is a list of aims which I will include at the end of this personal stuff.  We have John Langan which is great as he is welcoming, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, caring, experienced and funny just the kind of person you want to be learning from really in my opinion.  I love this course already as it is so challenging and interesting.  I don't want to get too obsessed with all the information as I'm finding myself thinking about it all the time at the moment so I'll be looking to reach balance with it too.

We are the lovely

 group!

There is a reading list; but I can't find it so I will ask about this.

Usually we will get an essay for homework to be in the following week.  Check moodle everyday if possible for updates to this and any of the modules that I'm signed up to.

This week we have to research Mind Mapping...

We had a great discussion in our group about 'what is art?' and presented it in a mind map format, it looked a bit all over the place so one of the things is to try to get the mind maps to look visually pleasing, showing connections, direction etc, following a path.

My next blog entry will be on Mind Maps and I have been using my A3 sketchbook (a present from my brother) to do loads of sketches so I hope it works out! 

L2L

Description:

The aim of this module is to:

• Facilitate learner’s transition into third level education
• Reinforce and develop essential key academic skills relevant to Art and Design practice, which the learner will require in their studies and career.

Introduce the learner to the core elements of research methodologies relevant to Art and Design practice

Hi I'm started my blog at the beginning today with researching colour!  Apparently Sir Isaac Newton invented the first colour wheel back in the 17th century.  Of course colour existed long before this and is a seen as a very emotional 'element of art'.  We seem to have a natural and conditioned awareness of colour and I just know I'm going to enjoy researching more about this topic.
The above is an image of Johannes Itten's Color Star. 
Johannes Itten has long been considered the definitive colour theorist of the 2oth century.  His books on colour theory and application are standard throughout the world.  Such as The Art Of Color.  His ‘Colour Star’ helps designers explore a myriad of harmonious colour.  Consisting of eight stencil-like disks that can be placed over ltten's colour wheel to compare cool and warm values, complementary colours, and different hues and intensities.
It's very strange sitting in a dark computer room typing this, the only colour seems to come from the bright screens!  Lynne has been great showing me how to do all these things today...very sharp learning curve! thanks Lynne.  Now I will see if this works!