Ruminations, Rambles, Reflections

I have just got the photos of the small exhibition we put up in college before the Easter holidays. In just a couple of hours we converted a sitting area in the studios to an exhibition space. We fitted it out with 8'x4' blockboard, painted the area white and put up the work we had finished that afternoon in Stephen Felmingham's 3 week Masterclass - the theme was FAILURE, a bit of a paradox for second level degree students. After exploring ways in which artists have responded to uncertainty and instability in contemporary society, nine of us produced a final piece of work from the idea we developed in the first week. My work was based on trying to produce parts of a single image using 12 pin hole cameras (stacked together 3 x 4) made from black film canisters and of course it failed because each canister had a small square of photographic paper inside which produced a tiny image of the room (my bathroom in this case) So I ended up with 12 different images of my bathroom - it was a fascinating experience!

I returned on Sunday from a few days in Wales where I visited the Artes Mundi exhibition in Cardiff. I loved the work by Lida Abdul and Dalziel+Scullion The exhibition is prestigious and one artist will receive the winning award, a prize of £40,000, on 24 April. The work in the exhibition explores who we are the today's societies. I would award the prize to Lida Abdul, an Afghanistan artist - her film 'What we saw upon awakening' is both beautiful and haunting. I won't forget the pulling of the ropes and the sound they made in a hurry. 'Source' the video made by Dalziel + Scullion, Scottish artists, is very beautiful but very different from the rest of the work in the exhibition, which seemed more socially political. It dealt with the natural world rather than societies, so only for that reason would I personally place it second.