Mangled brains and Growing Pains

(Originally published on the 'Daear A Thir' student online exhibition website for my course at Carmarthen School Of Art in 2020)

This is an attempt at organising my thinking..

“An idea is always worth having, you just need to know what the idea is for”

-The Clangers

I was flicking through Netflix a few weeks back and came across the Clangers, it was the first time my daughter had seen it, but was nostalgic for me. I never realised how much wisdom the shoe handed out. This was my favourite bit of wisdom from our viewing that morning, and it seemed very relevant to my current work, and how I’ve began to develop a ‘style’.

I saw a graph recently on Instagram, this graph explained why artists sometimes feel terrible about their work, and why you can sometimes feel that your work is the biggest piece of shit on the planet, I’ve been there, many times. This graph explained the idea that its all about a relationship between what inspires you, and your skill level. As your taste changes, your skill base is slower to develop to the standard of work you may be looking at, and so in your head your thinking I want to make something this good, but your skill base is only allowing you to make something of this level, and it just makes you feel a bit rubbish. It makes sense, as your influence matures, you have to learn to create to that standard. The post I read went on to say something along the lines of, stop comparing yourself to your influences, make your work and be proud of it. I mean yeah, but, it’s not that simple is it?

This all seemed relevant to my recent work, and specifically the ‘styling’ of the series. I come from a film and animation background, being inspired heavily by Directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Neal Blomkamp, I created my own stylistic approach, I called it ‘Cinematic Grunge’, and I would explain it to people “It’s like Tarantino in space”. The problem was, my personal filmmaking style never left my sketch books… I had an expensive vision, and so the films that I did make and could afford to make, I thought were pretty dull.

I quit my job as a pizza delivery driver and started the sculpture course at Carmarthen, and I instantly started to put together a style of which would be recognisable as who I am as an artist, and then realised I was a bit rusty, as I hadn’t sculpted for a while, and even my best work, still wasn’t anywhere near the standard of modelling we were being shown, but I kept trying to find my style, pushing really hard to make my work look this way, or that way. In all this trying too hard I got lost, and had no idea what sort of artist I was when I started this current module in January.

This current series of work has taken me on a journey around my brain, and I’ve discovered some mad stuff along the way. It started when I began to look at the work I had created, I’m Quite messy with the way I work, and still hadn’t cleared my workspace from the term before, so i had past and present work all piled up. I took them all out onto a table and played with different compositions (I go into more detail about this in my first blog post) and I took a few things away from that, one being that I had kind of been developing a style without realising it. I wanted to carry on looking at my own work, and so I spent a day looking through my old sketch books, looking at all my old ideas, sketched and artworks, and I took photos of most of the relevant pages. I spent a while scrolling through my past work and when I had them all together, next to my current work I discovered a theme that kept coming up, interests I have, that haven’t really been clear before. Whilst trying to find a style I ended up making things I didn’t really want to make, but looking back on my work, it’s reminded me of my favourite things to create.

My first short film was a mock advert for a robot kid, called I-Child. it was made as part of a 48 - hour sci-fi film challenge. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been making films long, and I had no idea what I was doing, the film was shit. But, without knowing it, it was the start of my discovery. I found lots of sketches, fake advertisements, satire and political themed works. Looking at the work all together it was clear that I had been working in my own style this whole time, I just hadn’t noticed the elements come together as I was too busy trying to create a new one.