Norman Rockwell's 'Connoisseur,' The Saturday Evening Post, January 13, 1962 (cover). Private collection.

I would like to open this blog entry with a confession:

I have never read any Marcel Proust.

Or is that a disclaimer? I just thought I’d get it out of the way, because what I’ve been mulling over these last few days seems to keep bouncing back to the French author and his À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past).

I’ve been thinking about methods of describing emotional responses to art.

This is intertwined with the physical act of looking at an artwork. I recently discovered the horrors of having to attempt this in a short story – the first of the term (and it shows). My protagonist embarks on a journey to discover a portrait of Rubens’ wife, Helene, and on encountering the object becomes enraptured. Sparks fly, emotions soar, tears are shed. You get the idea.

Except sparks didn’t really fly. Emotions did not soar. It had never occurred to me before: I have no idea how you write about art on an emotional level. I’m not talking about art as an object ripe for description, but instead about the personal, emotive affect that it has on an individual. I fell prey to this struggle more recently with my post about British Art Show 7, for which I intended a follow-up entry regarding the artworks that particularly enamoured me and my friends. Listing them was instinctive enough, but trying to type their significance wasn’t just problematic…it was embarrassing.

And this leads me back to Proust. Edmund de Waal, in his recent and wonderful book The Hare with Amber Eyes, describes Proust’s mega-prose as being “suffused not just with references to Giotto and…Renoir, but, by the act of looking at paintings, by the act of collecting and remembering what it was to see something, with a memory of the moment of apprehension” (p106).

The “moment of apprehension” is an ideal way to describe one aspect of experiencing an artwork. Perhaps, as de Waal goes on to consider, it is also about learning to “stand back and then move forward,” both in front of an artwork and in your subsequent recollections of it. How well this will translate into writing, or to other people, I can’t say, as it doesn’t just depend on the artwork but on the writer, too. And that’s what terrifies me.

Christmas is a strange time. Every adult feels the pressure to feel joyous and generous with one’s friends and family, to the point where you’ve written the fiftieth Christmas card and want to tear your own face off. Not that I’m proactive enough to actually bother giving Christmas cards, but I imagine that’s what it feels like. It’s as if, as a nation, we depend on Christmas to make everything OK. From having various discussions with friends and acquaintances, most people instead seem to feel an inordinate amount of seasonal guilt whilst being manically stressed. It’s like New Year, but masked underneath a mess of tinsel and questionable good-will.

And nothing is quite like the guilt I feel after years of not buying my friends Christmas gifts. Year by year they always surprise me with beautiful and thoughtful presents that they have slaved over or bought months before because they saw it and knew I’d adore it. So why, after such a prolonged time, am I still crap at even thinking about presents for them? After all, I know what they would appreciate, what they would love and, most importantly, what they would despise (or find hilarious – it’s a fine line). But don’t ask me to make something; I don’t do craft, for other people’s sake.

I think I can get away with it this year. Not because of my sad puppy face, but because (let’s face it) no one actually has any money these days. At least not the people I know (and by people I mean ‘students’ and ‘recently graduated’). As a group of friends we can avert ourselves away from the festive season. I think a mediocre Italian meal and a drink will do the trick. After all, the Christmas season is all about the people you spend it with, right?

And finally, to my friends who have already given me presents: I am extremely grateful. And I sincerely apologise.

It looks like I’m not the only one who’s had thoughts of time on the brain recently. The British Art Show 7 (BAS7) also seemed to be concerned with the ticking clock. In this instance, however, the artists and curators were not just observing the linear passage of time but were considering it from all angles. Hence why they borrowed H. G. Wells’ title In the Days of the Comet for the show’s subtitle, as one of the two curators, Lisa Le Feuvre, explains in her essay Present Tense:

“BAS7 uses the motif of the comet to locate artists’ responses to our own uncertain and inconclusive times. Due to their looping, recurrent nature, comets are simultaneously of the past, present and future.”*

So in the BAS7 we are faced with art that addresses the future and the past whilst simultaneously confronting and existing in the present. Yikes.

Mick Peter, 'Moldenke Fiddles On' 2008-2009 © Mick Peter, Courtesy the Artist and Galerie Crèvecoeur

BAS7 is the most enjoyable and thought-provoking exhibition that I’ve seen in a good while. I caught it on its final day in Plymouth, where it was pleasantly spread between five venues: The Slaughterhouse, Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, Plymouth Arts Centre, the Peninsula Arts Gallery and Plymouth College of Art. Consisting of 39 artists and artist groups, it has been held every five years since the first BAS in 1979, with each exhibition touring to various cities throughout the UK. The artists were all British or based in Britain, and the variety of work on display was vast; it consisted of sculpture, painting, film and video, sound, installation, performance and drawing, plus all the bits in-between.

Sarah Lucas, 'NUDS' © Sarah Lucas, Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles

There was a smattering of familiar names in BAS7. Charles Avery, Roger Hiorns, Sarah Lucas, Nathaniel Mellors and Wolfgang Tillmans to name but a few. I was unfamiliar with many of the artists (guilty as charged) but was particularly impressed by many of them. Elizabeth Price’s comically philosophical video overlaid with Ah-Ha’s Take On Me, Varda Caivano’s abstract paintings, David Nooman’s astonishing tapestry, Alasdair Gray’s bold drawings and Maaike Schoorel’s ghostly portaits; I could go on, and this isn’t even naming the artworks that really drew me in. I’m still contemplating those.

Alasdair Gray, 'Andrew Gray aged 7 and Inge's Patchwork Quilt' 2009 © Alasdair Gray, Courtesy the artist and Sorcha Dallas

BAS7 was certainly a lot to take in. I suppose that’s where the success of an exhibition such as this lies: in its variety. A show of this magnitude is going to contain art that causes you to recoil in horror, disgust or even worse, boredom and indifference. But there’ll also be work that entices and excites you, that hooks and reels you in. If you got the chance to experience the British Art Show 7, I hope it did both of these things. It’s way more fun if you see both sides of the coin.

Visit the British Art Show 7 website for more information and artist links.

*Page 21, British Art Show 7 Exhibition Catalogue, Hayward Publishing 2011

Last time I wrote a blog it was on a paper napkin. This time it’s on a phone. So why do I keep forgetting to pack my pen and notebook, when previously they were as necessary a part of my daily luggage as my wallet and keys?

In all honesty, forgetting my notebook isn’t the travesty that it used to be. Typing, computers and portable digital devices are here to stay, providing solar flares don’t catch us out any time soon. I could go on about examples of the transformation of analogue to digital but my intention isn’t to patronise; everyone is aware of technology’s increasing omnipresence throughout the world. Our lives are hectic but more efficient, more communicative and yet isolated, and we can be introduced to experiences we may never have had the opportunity to see 10 years ago.

But can digital experiences really be as insightful and exciting as the genuine article? This is a question I continuously asked myself throughout my endeavours as a digital art student, and I have never reached a solid conclusion. Or rather, after considering both sides I was won over by the validity of each argument.

Above is Amit Sood’s TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) video for the Google Art Project: ‘building a museum of museums on the web.’ If you’ve got time, give it a watch – it’s pretty exciting. What with this and the TV/cinematic broadcasting of Leonardo da Vinci’s current exhibition at the National Gallery, it looks like the people upstairs are trying to make art more accessible to a wider audience.

The quandary we are left with is this: what can the digital presentation of an artwork offer us that the original cannot? And, of course, what are we missing when we look at, say, Chris Ofili’s No Woman, No Cry on a computer screen instead of in the flesh?

Chris Ofili 'No Woman, No Cry' (1998) © Victoria Miro Gallery, London. Photo: Tate Photography

'The sleep of Reason creates monsters': Number 43 of Francisco Goya's 80 Caprichos, 1799.

This week I went to a lecture where the guest speaker was author/screenwriter/editor Nicholas Blincoe. In the lecture Blincoe stated that he is “not exactly a keen anti-formalist”. The concept of formalism got me thinking about writing structure and the differences between writing casually and writing professionally.

There is a minor similarity between an art education and a writing education: the former tests just how pliable the rules are whilst adhering to a separate but deceptively formal system, and the latter is primarily (and more openly) based on specific structures. And like any art form, the regulations of the written word are also there to be broken. Problem is, you can only subvert or ignore the rules successfully when you’ve fully absorbed and mastered them.

So each area has rules. Both (Fine) art and (Professional) writing have structure. The minor differences become major, however, when you try to move from one to the other. For instance, moving from a fine art environment that encourages the search for boundaries and their attempted debilitation (usually an unsuccessful search, of course), to a professional writing environment that warns of the perils of non-structure unless one is Tolstoy, is daunting. Neither approach is better than the other but they feel worlds apart.

The chief perpetrator of my confusing shift from fine art to professional writing is Christopher Vogler, author of the ubiquitous The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structures for Writers (1998). This book has been surfacing indiscriminately throughout the last year of my life, long before I decided to re-enter education. A few months ago a friend warned me that his filmmaker acquaintance had given him the book, and as he handed it over he had said: read this book, absorb everything it says, memorise it – and then do the opposite of what it tells you to do.

Now, this could be construed as still technically following Vogler’s archetypal template for storytelling, which I’ll expand upon in a moment, but I think what his friend was getting at was that formal and fixed structure may have its uses, but it can also be suffocating. Vogler himself states this; he refers to it as a “skeletal framework” (19:2007) ripe for tampering. It’s just that a lot of projects remain completely un-tampered-with; the unknown provokes fear, and this leads to low box-office sales, so it’s easier to conform to the formula.

Before I digress into Hollywood-induced diatribes (joke! As if I know enough about Hollywood to slander it), I’ll run through the principle concept of The Hero’s Journey: There’s a hero in every story; they must be active (not passive), thereby causing things to happen; they must go from the Ordinary World to the Special World and return to the Ordinary World with new experiences and wisdom. All other characters are facets of the Hero, no matter what archetype they are; wise man, trickster, lover, villain, and all the rest. Karl Jung and Joseph Campbell are the source of Vogler’s extensive archetype collection:

“[Archetypes are] constantly repeating characters or energies which occur in the dreams of all people and the myths of all cultures. Jung suggested that these archetypes reflect different aspects of the human mind – that our personalities divide themselves into these characters to play out the drama of our lives.” (Vogler, 4:2007)

For this post I have simplified Vogler’s concept horribly. Like the hero, every journey undertaken contains a multitude of layers and stages. The annoying thing about all this is that I can’t stop seeing it everywhere. Every film I watch, every book I read; the hero’s journey is there. The Call to Adventure, the Refusal of the Call, the Threshold Guardians, the Approach to the Inmost Cave, the Return with the Elixir. There is nowhere that it doesn’t exist.

This is why it could be so easy for me to grumble about the Hero’s journey, but I’m finding it to be a useful tool as a newcomer to fiction writing. Whether or not my consideration of it enhances my work or enervates it is unclear at this point. Having read Raymond Carver’s article Principles of a Story (Prospect magazine, 2005), I don’t intend to let careless ruminations cause “careless, silly or imitative writing,” even if I am mostly relying on persistence to carry me through. The Hero’s journey doesn’t prevent the bad writing that Carver is referring to, but it does teach you to constantly consider your audience and that, I think, will make you a better writer.

I can’t dispute Vogler’s template for the Hero. However, allow the art student in me to play devils advocate: does knowing the Hero’s journey spoil the fun? Archetypes, after all, are apparently inherent to human nature, therefore surely all The Writer’s Journey is doing is partly eliminating spontaneity and instinct?

Nicholas Blincoe, in his talk given earlier this week, quoted the author Martin Amis as saying: “as writers we’re five years behind where we are as people”. So I presume I’m not supposed to know the answer to these questions yet. Hopefully I’ll find out in five years time.

‘The Writer’s Journey’,  Christopher Vogler, 1998, Michael Wise Productions. The edition I reference in this post is the 2007 edition.

Other useful books on the subject of the Hero and other archetypes:

‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’, Joseph Campbell, 1993, Fontana Press

‘Man and His Symbols’, Karl G Jung, 1978, Picador

'Woman Reading by Candlelight' by Peter Vilhelm Ilsted

A year ago I wrote a blog in which I asked myself the question ‘why can’t I read books?’ As with most people my life has meandered through an array of events and emotions since then, and I’m happy to confirm that I now have no trouble immersing myself in a novel. In fact, there are so many books sitting on my shelf, both read and waiting to be read, I occasionally wonder where I found the time to indulge myself in anything other than prose. Now I’m speculating about where I will find the time in the years ahead, not just to read but also to be active in other walks of life.

Thoughts of time are beginning to occur quite frequently in my head. Childhood seems to stretch itself out like a stalled train, painfully slow and impossible to depart from until you reach some tantalising and mysterious place. This place doesn’t really exist, of course, but I was convinced that it did. Being an adult doesn’t appear to be either tantalising or mysterious. Books, on the other hand, can be breathtaking, devastating, captivating and they are full of what we lack. As people were bustling about and performing their daily tasks this morning, it occurred to me that I am living other people’s stories, the stories of an authors protagonist, of their villain, their landscapes, their desires and motives. I don’t have a journey of my own.

This problem can no doubt be solved by finding a balance between fiction and life, by knowing when to read and when to walk out the front door and go somewhere. And the more I read the more my imp mutters into my ear: as your life goes on, words are meaningless and experience is everything. Surely there is more satisfaction and significance in having travelled the world, met an array of people and immersed yourself in a diversity of cultures than there is in having read an impressive handful of literature? My imp is also fond of reminding me that the great works, the monuments of the written word, are almost always the product of a life that is ‘worn in’; lives that have been tried, tested and verified.

These thoughts are provoked by my return to England and into education. The contrast between a city and a seaside town is palpable; the minute amount of time I have spent here has expanded and filled my head so that I feel as if I have been here for months on end. In reality I have lived here only fifteen days. The intense bouts of feverish reading, the endless cups of tea and the incorrigible musings over fictional characters have made me feel as if I am living in a hybrid land that I can’t yet fully comprehend. I live in Cornwall, but my mind is crossing the Texan plains; I sit in England, but my thoughts are in a French prison; I think of Scottish air and the café’s of a European city and yet I can’t name a street in this town but for the one I live on.

It’s time to regain my balance. Perhaps then my own words will become more than just shapes on a page. After all, it’s life that creates stories that are worth sharing.

'The Open Door' by Peter Vilhelm Ilsted

'Inhale (Yellow', 2002, Michael Craig-Martin

I think very well in lectures. That isn’t meant to be insulting to the speakers, because I genuinely try my best to listen attentively. Maybe it’s just the concentrated atmosphere of listening and thinking from the general audience. Today, for instance, I went to see a talk given by artist Michael Craig-Martin. One of the perks of being a student again is access to events such as this, and I felt a calming rush of excitement (contradictory, I know, but that’s what it was) as people thronged in and settled in their chairs. Once the infectious buzz abruptly receded with the first introductory taps of the microphone, I almost felt at home again. It didn’t matter that I was in a new town, with new people. Art is home.

That sounds hopelessly tacky, but I’m all for being honest and that’s how I felt. Comfort wasn’t my immediate reaction, however; whilst the audience had been buzzing, two women were talking across me about various goings on in the art world surrounding us here in this little town, prompting an initial rush of displeasure. This didn’t stem from the two women, who were pleasant and enthusiastic; it stemmed from my sudden awareness that I am completely out of the loop. Clueless. I’m having to start all over again.

When London-based curator David Sturgess began his interview with Craig-Martin I started to pay attention. And a focused mind for me is a productive mind; strangely, I can’t concentrate on one thing without concentrating on another.

Michael Craig-Martin’s work is not to my taste, although I can greatly appreciate his talent and boundless dedication. I can see the value in what he does. Whether or not I like looking at it seems irrelevant. You don’t have to like a person’s work to like them and their philosophies.

And so I started thinking about images. That sounds broad – bear with me.

I was thinking about images through time, and how certain objects (for the sake of argument I’m including living beings in this definition of ‘objects’) have appeared continuously through time, and how their representation has changed. It sounds so obvious it almost appears a worthless topic to mention, let alone write about. But I can’t shake the idea of an object existing hundreds of years ago and existing now (I’m not talking about literally the same object, but the same type of object) and it being represented in completely varying ways over time.

This thought may sound broad and slightly objective, as I could refer to variants in social trends and cultural ideologies when I talk about the re-representation of an object, but I am also considering it from a smaller, more subjective standpoint. This was prompted by Craig-Martin’s discussion of his own representation of images. He draws an object, a table for instance, depicting only its most common features, its edges and surfaces. He uses line to create a universally recognised image of that object and when he needs a picture of that object once more, he reuses it. Perhaps its proportions will change in relation to other items surrounding it, but it is essentially the exact same image. So throughout his painting repertoire we are presented with reproduced images again and again.

'The Ambassadors', 1533, Hans Holbein the Younger

It was the globe in Craig-Martin’s Reading With Globe (1980) that sparked questions about representation through time. When I saw it I immediately thought of Hans Holbein’s Ambassadors (1533). It is one of my favourite paintings and I spent many an hour studying reproductions of it when I was young. I used to suffer a sense of awe and wonderment when I looked at it, an experience magnified a thousand-fold when I visited it in the flesh.

And here was Craig-Martin’s globe, simplified and reproduced. It didn’t tantalise me in the same way that Holbein’s did, but the contrast between each artists’ portrayal of this object fascinated me for new reasons.

Reading with Globe, 1980, Michael Craig-Martin

An image of a globe in one painting symbolises power and omniscience, in another it represents normality and mass production. One object, two images and various interpretations and meanings.

As of yet I haven’t quantified whether I’m trying to come to some conclusion about artists or about objects. It may be that I care about neither and instead am interested in social and cultural trends in representation. Umberto Eco records these developments magnificently in his book On Beauty (Maclehose Press, 2004), in which he charts our depictions of Madonna and Christ throughout history. The array of contrasts and transformations are intriguing.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi 'Akashi Gidayu Writing His Death Poem Before Committing Seppuku in 1582' (around 1890)

This is the first time I have written anything on a napkin. Anything coherent, that is; I can’t count the hours me and my classmates wasted doodling obscenities on school canteen napkins. I don’t intend for this post to match those expletives in quantity (or quality), however. No, this is more intended as a harmless meander through my thoughts right now.

Depsite leaving the flat unarmed, my mind immediately set itself the task of writing something, anything, as long as it wasn’t about art. Fine Art that is; I’m still open to thoughts and ideas about the wider arts.

The previous statement no doubt sounds more pessimistic than my disposition genuinely is toward Fine Art at the moment; I’d say that my attitude towards [relationship with] the subject has actually reached a relatively ambivalent level. It’s certainly giving me more joy than it has at any other point since graduating last July. As a matter of fact, I’m beginning to recall some of the reasons why I chose to study Fine Art in the first place, and for once I’m not completely clueless regarding the possible causes of this: it is because, despite my recent silence on this blog, I have been writing about art – and art only – elsewhere. And in order to do that I’ve had to really start looking again.

It’s so easy to forget to look at something, or to forget how it should be looked at. It’s even easier not to bother contemplating or writing about what you’ve observed. Luckily for me the two activities are naturally symbiotic; if I take the time to do one I will inevitably feel compelled to do the other, because I can only discover what I may or may not know know about something if I put it in writing.

So I was really, really lucky when I landed a voluntary job writing for a small art and design column. There is something exciting about having a weekly deadline and knowing that by this time next week I will have discovered another artist or artwork that excites me. It has, for the first time in well over a year, encouraged me to spread my prized art books and texts in front of me, looking and reading for hours until I find that one piece or story that makes me want to devour more. Moments like that are often fleeting but they are precious reminders.

All this time spent observing has also begun to make curiosity re-spark certain queries in my mind. I had forgotten, for instance, how few contemporary women artists are represented in the books that I own. The drastic imbalance is intriguing and is a subject that I don’t wish to shy away from.

Another curiosity is of a more personal nature, one I haven’t properly considered since I left drawing and painting behind: my increasing aversion to oil painting and my affection for monochromatic draftsmanship.

Ernesto Caivano 'Philapore Tug (Due Tension)' 2009

In life drawing classes I was only ever interested in the lines that constructed the form, not in the gradients that rendered it life-like. There is something about a clean, delicate but confidant black line on a piece of quality cream paper that satisfies me more than any other aesthetic. It was the Japanese artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi‘s drawing of Akashi Gidayu (see beginning of post) that first reignited my feelings on the subject, inspired further by my research into contemporary draftsmen such as Ernesto Caivano.

This re-acquaintance is tied in with yet another that has technically already been made explicit: draftsmanship. It has been over three years since I completed a painting or drawing that wasn’t a hasty caricature or frivolous parody, despite my dedication to both mediums for the majority of my first twenty years on this planet. I almost feel ashamed that I abandoned them, as if I have callously forsaken a faithful sibling.

I suppose I left drawing and painting behind because I know that one day I will revert back to them; there will come a time when I will experience something and instinctively reach for the pencil or paintbrush. It’s not quite the right time yet, but it will happen. And, as I am beginning to now, I will savor the joy of completely re-acquainting myself with an old friend.

Old school - my last completed portrait (2005-6)

Rhian Haf Jones 'Sense of Place' 2010

Growing up in the small rural village of Gwytherin in county Conwy North Wales, it is easy to see how artist Rhian Haf Jones became fascinated with the historic complexities of ancient ruins and the age-old landscapes surrounding them. Pastoral, site-specific sentiments pervade her work, or rather it is her artwork that permeates each chosen site. With a craft based predominantly around the construction of glass objects, by installing the crisp forms of each piece of glass into an archaic context Haf Jones is drawing the viewer’s attention to both the ancient and the contemporary.

The placement of glass objects into environments that are a far cry from the conventional white cube is a method of challenging the traditional occupation of space typically associated with glass artwork. In the installations Blue Blind and Red Blind, in which strikingly linear pieces of glass were positioned in the empty windows of the ancient Hiraethog Mountain ruin Bron Haul, Haf Jones created stunning aesthetic contrasts that derived symbiosis from the very polarities that they each represented: the rugged, dilapidated ruins of a working farm alongside the clean elegance of glass artwork, placed strategically in the empty margins where windows would once have been placed. Each delicate line of glass transforms what was an unoccupied frame into a new ‘window’, a space to peer through as it responds to the transience of its environment. It is fitting, then, that centuries ago net curtains were referred to as ‘glass curtains’, something that Haf Jones has evidently and eloquently responded to in her artistic practice.

As a Masterclass Artist for the Women’s Arts Association, Haf Jones is currently exploring the development of her approach to site-specific work from a digital perspective. A very specific challenge that this presents is the documentation and portrayal of another major theme within the artists work: light. Its subtlety, its relationship with shadows, the patterns it forms, its ambience and its transience. This in turn evokes themes of the unseen and the unspoken, also reflected by the ancient, derelict buildings that Haf Jones utilises, themselves reminders of past time and forgotten events.

One such building is The Old Salthouse, a 16^th Century ruin located in the renowned beauty of the South Gower coast. For her latest project Sense Of Place, in a similar fashion to Red Blind and Blue Blind Haf Jones has appropriated the voided windows of The Old Salthouse, but unlike the previous artworks the passage of time – and consequently the unseen and the unspoken – is addressed using a less precise and more untarnished aesthetic; each plate of glass, painstakingly placed in its window frame, appears eroded. Using time laps photography with the intention of graduating towards video she has digitally documented this synthesis of glass, brick and the resulting play on light. The transformative nature of the outdoor environment is both literally and emblematically reflected in each clouded pane of glass, forming momentary shadows and patterns that often remain unobserved. Haf Jones’s time laps photography is a determined attempt to give these moments a greater level of permanence; it is a search challenging whether such transient qualities can be successfully translated into a digital object.

The efforts behind such a project require copious amounts of preparation and research. Haf Jones has evolved a practice with foundations based in the tradition of glass-making, but to date Sense Of Place has also required extensive research fuelled by her fascination with windows found throughout Europe, in addition to a historical awareness of the antiquity of each chosen site (for instance, the swash-buckling pirate myths surrounding The Old Salthouse), and an ever-increasing appreciation of digital photography and video. Her practice is loaded with Welsh and nautical history and with the natural and the manmade. It offers us a view into an unfamiliar combination of materials: perfectly formed, ornamental glass with rugged stone, simultaneously encompassed by the unforgiving brutality and beauty of the natural elements. Rhian Haf Jones’s artwork accentuates each of these components through the documentation of the light and shadows that ensue; every piece of glass that she constructs, and consequently each digital photograph that documents, is a window allowing us to perceive a previously unnoticed and revitalised, albeit fleeting, moment in time.

'New Years Day on the Fens' 2010, Jenni Steele

Jenni Steele is a digital video artist with a fascination towards an often-overlooked feature of most outdoor environments: the washing line. In its simplicity is where this concept finds its strength and Steele uses her observations to frame, emphasise and challenge our perceptions (or lack of them) towards this loaded symbol of erotica, domesticity, social unrest and poverty.

Steele’s interest in washing lines is perhaps not so surprising considering her current theoretical studies. Her PhD research revolves around the interpretations and traditions surrounding dress and drapery within painting and how these themes translate into film. This fascination in domestic drapery, from 17^th Century Dutch Curtain Painting to the violently intuitive use of washing lines in contemporary cinema, is far more indicative of the human condition than most people are aware of.

In order to discover the various interpretations and meanings behind the subject Steele has delved into an entire host of content: the news and media use washing lines, for instance, to accentuate poverty; television programmes such as Life on Mars have used them to convey an invasion of privacy; Hollywood films such as Halloween and Girl With A Pearl Earring utilise them to highlight tension, whilst The Full Monty is one of many films that use washing lines to represent men who are outside of their gender’s comfort zone. The list goes on, and Steele has fortified this research by looking as far as The Library of Congress in Washington, by instigating discussions with various directors and staff from television shows such as Coronation Street and Life on Mars, through researching the ‘Right To Dry’ movement in America and much, much more. The result of such thorough research is a body of work that reiterates this array of sentiments, its strength being evident due to Steele’s ability to question and challenge the context that fuels her own artwork.

As a Masterclass Artist for the Women’s Arts Association Steele is applying this body of context to themes of ‘the unseen and the unspoken’. Such an application loads the subject matter even further with connotations that are simultaneously private and public, a contrast reflected in the polarities that washing lines are imbued with: inside and outside, natural and domestic. Her artwork is a direct reflection of this. In her video My Place we are offered a view of the intense and enclosed kitchen environment, a domestically gender-specific place of work as the washing gets done. Following this Steele takes the viewer to a sparse, sandy beach where we see a washing line stand alone as the wind bombards each item of clothing; the wider, open spaces of the natural environment possess chaotic qualities as the clothes billow in the wind. Reiterating this hint at a domestic ‘clamour’, the indoor shots in My Place and other videos such as Encroachment are so closely scrutinized as to be verging on abstract imagery. Not all connotations need be so claustrophobic, however; Steele is sensitive to the positive implications of the washing line, both in an artistic and a domestic sense:

“Generally speaking, I think that women love to see a line of washing hung out to dry.  It is a sign of shared work and experience and women can quickly ‘read the signs’ that various articles imply.  More deeply, lines of washing can represent life’s experiences from birth to death, and what it takes to love and care for a family or an individual.”

As a primarily digital filmmaker, Steele first expressed her artistic inclinations through textiles and then found herself drawn towards video due to its transformative nature; a cameras conversion of reality into fragments and layers is, after all, not dissimilar to the layering and sifting of materials required in textiles. As a result of carefully considering the construction of each video Steele is intending to extend the digital experience for the viewer by maximising the audio as well as the visual, be it sounds from the beach, from a radio or a washing machine. The domestic implications suggested by the contrasting indoor/outdoor sounds are an imperative aspect of each artwork. This in turn may lead not just to sound pieces, but also to poetry and interactive projections.

To summarise, Jenni Steele’s work does what any successful body of work should do: it draws the audiences attention to a highly informative and challenging subject matter, raising political and social questions that the artist, and undoubtedly the audience, can empathise with. This process is executed with interest and inquisitiveness, and, of course, each video is also an extremely beautiful piece of artwork, reflecting Steele’s own view of her subject matter as being “a thing of beauty – sculptural, animated and painterly…A line of washing can be equally spectacular on the beach or on the balcony of a high-rise”. Her artwork is a celebration of domesticity and intimacy, of the natural, man-made, public and private lives that we all lead. As Steele herself claims, “what it shows is who we really are.”

'Hattie's Line' 2010, Jenni Steele

See Jenni’s videos on Vimeo here and visit her website to read more, including an interview between myself and the artist: jennisteele.com.