von Rydingsvard

Uncomfortable relationships /  by Justin Harrison

I am starting to from an uncomfortable relationship with UVR and her work. One minute I love it and the next I am uninterested. I keep returning to it though I love the forms and  textures she creates and uses. It’s deeply satisfying the shapes she discovers the way they articulate the unknown. Her prolific generation of different forms feels so intentional and yet unplanned. Great forms sweeps across a plane or intricate animated forms like barnacles cluster together, mouths open feeding on an invisible source, an implication that there is more in the unseen around us. Yet when I listen to interviews and read I find little spoken of other than the process and begrudging concessions about the past.

It appears that much of UVRs work is automatic and whilst there is nothing wrong in working this way, I can’t help but feel that something is being missed here. When UVR talks about her work it comes in simple safe statements. Yet the work has way more going onthan just the surface.

But how can we ignore the significance of who the woman UvR is and what has happened and informed her life and therefor her work?

 

There is nothing new /  by Justin Harrison

In researching for my art and paper - I am on an interesting/infuriating and yet somehow not surprising route. By ‘interesting’ I actually feel like none, a non route, nowhere. The more I read the less sure I am what it is I am doing. (Standard MA Fine Art emotion)

Frustratingly, but then perhaps mercifully I see work that I am making, or about to make, or want to make. With Theaster Gates I see the shingled roofs I begun to explore. The RePlacement of materials, I like to choose. Especially reclaimed wood.

With Von Rydingsvard, I see the paddles I have been drawing and want to carve out of wood.(She make shovels to be specific, but they are so close I can’t ignore them).

Repetition feels like a little death. I need there to be a significant departure from what has gone before to justify my making. Especially If I am going to ask others to view the work.

I also struggle as an artist, with the continual re-presentation of objects and images to be interpreted again only slightly differently, with the burden of interpretation on the audience to discover the newly imbued meaning. Especially with my own work. Originality is a troublesome notion. Very little is new, yet creativity for me requires a healthy does of originality, rather than a nuance one.