This year in university we have started working in collectives. My collective is made up of 7 of us, 6 UAL chelsea students, and one on Exchange from Germany. (Anna Castro, Georgie Field, Mimi Ratcliffe, Natalia Furland, Sven-Julien Knsklski, Xenia Miltitadou, and myself - Rivka Cyprys)
collective blog: https://a223collective.tumblr.com/
As we are working together we have created a collective blog to share our research there, (https://a223collective.tumblr.com/)I haven't been blogging my own personal reflections much on any other forum besides for my sketchbook. I am going to try take it back a little and start reblogging some of my information here and maybe add in some more personal reflections, ideas and research.
As a starting point for our collective we chose to all take walks to gather information and find more common ground and interests that would create a starting point for our projects.
(screenshot from collective blog)
The idea being not to lose our individual practices as artists, but to share our research and work with common interests that would lead towards an exhibition in which we would create a piece of work as a collective. Going into this I felt rather unsure, as an artist there is often a lot of attachment to work and to ideas. Retrospectively writing this a good few weeks in, and nearer to the exhibition - there wasn't need for the anxiety and fear about losing my passion and originality in work, but rather it has been a group of people to bounce ideas off, to share, to further my research, to push me out of my comfort zone - as far as in my artwork, and even the way I tend to work which is more insular and introverted in a sense. It took me awhile to get used to the idea of sharing my ideas and research directly to a group of people who at that point I didn't know all that well, I didn't know how it would be received, it made me question the validity of my work and ideas and if they were worth sharing to others, it made me question everything more than the regular self-reflection, as this was now also going to be seen and weighed up by others. I really appriciate being pushed out of my comfort zone as far as that was concerned. But as it was initially I did feel a bit unattached and worried. When I went on my walk I had things I was looking to find, but as I tend to work there were many of those, and they were rather conceptual - just ideas.
Ideas I was looking at:
-SPACE. (Always space, it's always going to be a bit about the physicality and freedom and constrictions of space for me.)
-Light and reflections
-Words and thoughts (Mental maps)
-Sounds
-Reflections
-Transparency
-The way reflections and transparency interplay especially with more than one viewing field.
-The individual in a social world
-Ready-mades and found objects (Also as a testament to human presence)
-Human traces
-Car rides (sitting still but covering ground)
-CCTV's - 'big brother is watching' the sense of being seen. On the flip side the world of imagery (selfie generation?)
-PERCEPTION. I thought it would also be interesting to observe how we were all going to go on walks and see what we find, which is likely to be different things.
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