Turner Contemporary, Margate, Portfolio Competition
SHORTLISTED ENTRY
Sustainability is a day-to-day concern for me particularly in the challenges we face in order to change for the better. My preferred starting place is the home. The domestic tasks we do everyday, although essential currently lead to a mass disposal of plastic waste. Then I thought of my use of the modern liquid soap dispenser. I realized how convenience, colour and variety sucked me in and I wondered if I could ever return back to basics. The solution evaded me, so for months I just continued making art and teaching.
Soap-making was a relatively new addition to my courses and I found myself wishing to continually trial my samples. Each new soap bar was a delight. Washing hands with soap that I had made felt joyful and more mindful.
As an artist/educator and person responsible for two children, the journey doesn’t simply stop at the end of an exhibit or project. I’m continuing to think about how I can reach and persuade others to turn back to soap making.
SHORTLISTED ENTRY
This year’s theme is Place and Space. I’ve currently got 3 ideas that I want to develop and then consider. The first plays with ideas of place and space and is a bit like the bar of soap will do. I’m thinking about a glass jug which is filled with earth and plastics to represent the ground and to then plant a tomato seed/plant in the container which represents how I think of the earth which is filled with plastic. I then want to photograph the jug on a kitchen table and next to a bowl of food. This is about the food chain. This mixes up notions of place and space: as if the earth and plastic shouldn’t be at the table and indeed plastic has no place at the table or in the food chain but it will ultimately affect it.
My second idea is more about flux compositions and feeling. Its simply a painted diptex of Margate beach and concerns the temporal nature of reality or of place and space. The painting conjures up the sense of joy when looking across Margate beach and seeing hundreds of people having fun, with less and in nature. The subject choice represents my own love of rapidly changing compositions made up of human shapes and colours which form rapidly changing compositions. Negative spaces and forms in a familiar place to conjure up the sense of a familiar and joyful scene is the point of fascination.
My third idea, is possibly too complex visually for a competition (particularly one which is judged via a photo. This idea is to paint on top of perspex panels which are filled with plastic objects and eludes to hidden pollutants and material footprints.
March 2020 – Work in Progress
