Bringing my practice to University of Herts Postgraduate Studios September 2019

As an introduction to my post graduate experience at the Creative School at University of Hertfordshire, I am showing here what I am bringing to the cohort and a short explanation of why I am here.

I graduated from the North London art school based at Quicksilver Place, Middlesex Polytechnic, in 1991, the final year of the Polytechnic degrees being issued. Our graduating year had a disrupted year of tutors refusing to teach, many lock-ins and an Alumni Anish Kapoor being nominated for the Turner Prize that year. There was a great deal of unrest and the tutors glibly gave the whole cohort 2:1’s as a protest. I had worked through my degree to support myself so this crucial year was disappointing for me and very upsetting.

Jumping forward I had a long interruption of my true practice and only in the past three years had returned to a dedicated and serious practice. Long story short, I was no longer going to let my history, my gender, my story rob me of the art practice I knew I was capable of. My tutor Marc Camille Chaimowicz had said the art world would never be ready for my work. He had said my work was too different to what was happening with the YBA’s. I felt disenfranchised by this, and the other notable head of sculpture(Google will find him, but I am not naming him here) breaking my work because it was too feminine and flimsy. I had been told by another tutor nobody was interested in drawing, I was wasting my time making large scale drawings.

As a reaction to this, I instead made performance and video mixed with photography my medium because it couldn’t be damaged and they in turn didn’t mark it. Tutor Tansy Spinks was really supportive and showed me around the darkroom, I used the editing suite and super 8 and S-vhs became my mediums. I ventured into the Mac suite and made some early forms of computer generated chaos drawings and installations.

After graduating, I jumped ship out of the artworld because I couldn’t afford to keep up, I couldn’t afford to live and make work. I lost touch, and I lost myself for many years until through a need to survive just life, I moved to Hertfordshire, with the wolf at the door, I tried to start a new life. I was off grid, in contact with no-one from former lives because it was just too painful to be so, I cut all ties.

I made that new life, I boxed up my contemporary, conceptual art, lost it in a garage and started a new life. Bumping along, making occasional break throughs with my painting, ignoring the vivid dreams of making sculpture, making the “lost works”. I connected with other artists at Wysing in Cambridge and in Hertfordshire, continued what I thought was a professional, although not exciting, art practice. I had a presence and I was making work.

But then one day three years ago, I made a connection to my past. This connection ignited in me the urge to jump back in and make my true work come alive. I connected with people who had that vitality and hadn’t been asleep like I had. I needed to work, not what I had been doing, but the real work, the truth, that which has followed me since childhood. This world lived in my sketchbooks, like many conceptual artists. I acted by destroying all the work I had made that was unsold and irrelevant to my true practice. I kept those pieces, mainly paintings, that meant something towards this truth.

I was offered a studio outside of the home, then I started looking for a masters degree to really push myself forward in this trajectory I found myself on. I built a website and portfolio and started to gather ground on my practice again. Below are a gallery showing all of the work made during this period in a loose chronological order from 2019. This is what I bring to the postgraduate degree.