Translations Show

'Rooms'

Links

'Projection 27', Rosie Keane, 2012, digital collage / installation.

Links can be found in the way that the structure of building, the grid like connections is essential to my practice, although the structures I exploit are concerned with an aspect of the domestic or the faux domestic, furniture, home or hotel room based, and now for my degree show piece a dialogue between the doll's house and memory of public place and ownership.

Reduced to it's very basics the structure of the grid has appeared somewhat unintentionally in my work for years and for me, I think somewhere subconsciously it must represent some kind of personal association with interior vs exterior, internal vs external and fixed space vs transient.  To be within the grid offers shelter and protection, but also enclosure and imprisonment.  Just as a prison cell, a hotel room, a bedroom or a house conforms to my obsession with 'The Grid'.

'Ornaments', Rosie Keane, 2012, photograph of installation.

It's only recently that I've become aware of the recurring 'grid' in my work and it's only now that I am trying to understand what this means.  I feel the above piece, 'Ornaments' is able to illustrate the borders between the bordered enclosed and the unmapped exterior.  The visual structure of the shelving unit echoes that of a high rise block or a filing cabinet where objects or people are confined and compartmentalized, we order our possessions in this way, we decorate our enclosures to disguise the actuality of the grid, to denote our ownership over the space, to make it our own and in that way we feel as if we belong to it as much as it 'belongs' to us.  What lies outside the grid of comfort is the unknown, without ownership and colonization of it, it becomes empty, a void and a vacancy.

A vacancy, the uninhabited, also refers to a hotel room or a property which is waiting for something, for inhabitancy, so in that way the vacant and empty can lie on either side of the grid.  What this grid means in terms of my practice I still don't know, but somehow I feel as if it is important.  It is now that I release that the three figures in Bacon's triptych are also enclosed in the grid.  Perhaps this was something I was aware of all along. Not only compartmentalized by their arrangement within their frames, but also by the lines within each separate painting, the figures exist within the enclosed.

Building

1949-1955: Hunstanton School and the Photography of Life and Art.

How to get to Bacon to building?  I'm attracted to The Tate's current exhibit on The Hunstanton School, an architectural exhibit displaying the process of collaboration between sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, photographer Nigel Henderson and architects Alison and Peter Smithson to create, Parallel of Life and Art, an exhibition at the ICA.  There is something reflective of my own work in these images, an absence of person within structures built for occupation, for purpose of human use.  The images shown are of a school, the abject enters our senses in the unnameable jarring of a school without children, without teachers, without objects of use.  

          
How then does this collaboration relate to my own practice?  It relates in the way that it is concerned with the transient place.  Not in the way of a place where people wait, in the liminal, like the Hotel or the airport, but in the way that these are places waiting for something of their own.  To be fulfilled with the use of their design and intention.  Also in the way that the large scale photographs move across the wall, across the space and drift into to distant when encountering the crease where to walls meet, the place in the wall which does not serve the purpose of wall, especially in terms of the white cube.  The creases in the wall belong to Derrida's undecidables, both supplementary and absent of purpose simultaneously.  Perhaps this is something that could be useful to think about during my practice.  I'm told this process of the film moving into the distance at a certain point in this way is called a squeeze, or a grab, I need to look this up.

From Bacon to Building

Where to start? Start at the beginning, but then if you are starting something you must already be at the beginning, so why worry about where to start?  What's important is that you are starting, that you have started something, that you have put idea into action, at least that's what I'm telling myself right now.
Writing for me is important.  It is a way to assess and evaluate my thoughts, which without the act of writing never develop further than the chaotic transient.  So now, after completing my thesis I have come to the realization that despite my unwillingness to sit, think, and write, I am capable of a deeper form of communication, through writing, than my often unfocused daily conversations would imply.
So without any further speculation I begin at the beginning, at the start, with Bacon, Francis Bacon.

Site:  Tate Britain  Date: 09/03/15

My intention for my visit was to find  inspiration to kick start my writing and with that in mind I start with Francis Bacon's triptych, 'Three Studies for the Base of a Crucifixion'  c.1944, a personal favourite in The Tate's permanent collection, however I do not intend this to be a review / critique on every famous piece of art out there but rather a vessel for connecting my research and interests with my own artistic practice.
How to connect a personal favourite with my own practice? Especially when the form of my own practice is still in the process of becoming? I could go into the context and intention of Bacon's triptych, but this will only serve to broaden and parade my knowledge of fact and speculation and would not inform the reader of anything new or original about Bacon that cannot already be read elsewhere.  So I intend to review by comparison, with something that is closer to the form of my becoming practice, also to be found in The Tate, in one of their temporary exhibits:

1949-1955: Hunstanton School and the Photography of Life and Art.