We have now come out the other side of our Masterclass experience with Estela Saez. It was a fast-paced time of invigorated energy put into quick-fire unfolding exercises and sessions of feedback and discussion. It was a lively time and I did enjoy the respite from having to do too much thinking, and just focussing mostly on responding.
the outcome was works that I may have not come to investigate in my own practice but have fed into a body of work that I produced for a group exhibition that opened in August at Season in Tamaki Makaurau/Auckland.
So it’s no surprise really that now as we are to have our jets firing to produce work for our end-of-year Handshake exhibition, I’m finding myself misfiring with false starts and feeling grounded not prepared for take off. The double whammy of post-exhibition blues and ending something you’d just gotten in the groove of is a little demotivating. However, this is not an unfamiliar feeling, It’s almost an inherent part of the practice, the pain of the artist’s life!
In the midst of these events early in August, we had our first coaching session with an assigned international guest artist of prominence. I was paired with German contemporary Jeweller, Iris Bodemer. Iris was very generous with her time, feedback, and consideration of what she could garner from the presentation I had prepared for her to give feedback on and answer some questions. I felt for her. My head had not been in the space to really know what to prepare or questions to consider to ask at the feet of a living jewellery demi-god. The takeaway given to my broad question for an idea of what I should proceed to explore and develop was a necklace I’d created in Estella’s class, where I worked with string, PVA glue, and a devised technique that produced a wooden-like effect applied to with charring to blacken. “Make 10, in different colours.”
I went away and began to explore, repeating the known technique and adding twists. But it felt ‘dead.’ I tried more in differing ways, the effort to produce barely anything feeling like an absolute feat.
Meanwhile, I was due to head south for a weekend for work reasons and wondered if the change of scene might splinter my melange with some kind of shift in inspirational motivation. Funnily enough, as I went to kill some time with a walk around the gardens by the water one morning before a boat ride, I found myself in awe of some great and grand trees. The texture of the bark, the colossal feeling of standing in the presence of something that’s stood for so long, long before my own existence, its powerful, yet quiet force and way of being. I took to searching the ground surrounding the area to find evidence of the type of branches, seed combs, and twigs they might have shed, and from there I was on my scavenger buzz!
From previous work with found materials, I observed that there are so many differences in twigs as material and what properties are good for making in the way that I do. I have a background in horticulture from my high school studies and a past life where I once studied Landscape construction and design, though it was something I didn’t pursue. So it was exciting for me to pick up a twig and make the connection to the tree it had belonged to and what qualities it possessed noting if it was specific to this area/had I observed these types of trees elsewhere. I soon had a bundle under my arm like a strange mad woman on the loose which I shuffled into my suitcase for my travels home.
It was interesting to become aware of a familiar feeling that arose in me as I fervently hunted and scavenged. In 2015 when developing work for my solo show in my post-graduate year of study, I got into the practice of gathering waste material from various environments that I perceived had a quality of potential ‘jewelleryness’ to them that I would then reproduce through casting methods to be made into finished pieces. It had also become an interesting study of what was common in some places that weren’t in others and what this can say about these areas and how they are used.
So now I’m at a point where I must again leap into the unknown. I can no longer remain standing on the platform too paralyzed by fear to jump. I seemingly have two paths to explore and push myself along, and will need to just force myself to get the wheels in motion and hope that the engine will kick into gear and set things in motion!
TBC