Opening of the Exhibition

The opening of the exhibition went really well, a lot of people came and the feedback seemed to be good. One of the issues that a few of the people that I chatted to was the lack of explanation or title next to the pieces. This was a major problem that seemed to have been completely overlooked by the curators, even after we submitted an artist's statement and a title for our pieces. Ideally I would have liked to have my artist's statement displayed next to my piece, or at least my title 'Carcinoma Series' - just to hint at the idea behind the work. Or the statements could have been printed up in a small leaflets easily, similar to the ones handed out at the opening, if people did not want text next to their pieces. The fact that there was no explanation with the works meant that a lot of the ideas were lost and the audience was left confused by some of the pieces - basing whether they liked the pieces on purely aesthetics.

The idea behind my final pieces was to take something horrible, in this case brain cancer, and make it seem beautiful and for people to admire it. The fact that the drawings were cancer was significant to create some intrigue into the pieces, however without the title displayed the fact that these weren't just healthy MRI scans was lost.

One successful part of the pieces I presented was the engagement with the audience. I forced people to get close to my pieces, wanting to break the invisible barrier often found in the gallery space between the viewer and art. I wanted to get the viewer to get as close as possible, so using a magnifying glass and removing the glass from the frames I encouraged them to do this. I had also been looking at how other tiny pieces of art had been displayed and really liked the way that Adele Lack had presented her 'Small Miracles' micropaintings. Initially I had the magnifying glass mounted onto the wall using pins, however this made the glass look like it was part of the piece and I was afraid this would deter the audience from using it. This is why I decided to use a small white shelf attached to the wall below the frames to sit the magnifying glass on. This was really effective, and whilst observing the viewers interacting with my work I noticed that almost everyone picked up the magnifying glass straight away. One problem that I hadn't considered was the fact that the wall behind was made of plasterboard, so was not thick enough to hold the screws into the wall, and therefore the screws were not solid enough to hold the shelf straight. This meant that at the opening the shelf was wobbly and was slipping forward off the supports. The Friday after the opening I had to go into the space and try and figure out how to attach my shelf more effectively, the major problem being that I couldn't use brackets because of the plaster board. In the end I used a very strong adhesive to join the back of the shelf to the wall, and then painting over any places where the glue was visible.

Please Do Not Touch

The image below was another piece at the exhibition at Harewood House, one that I think epitomises what I said in a previous post about the audience being kept at a distance from the artwork. The sign at the bottom says 'Please Do Not Touch' and is a phrase I'm tired of seeing at galleries. Throughout my experience as an artist I have been constantly aware of texture in my pieces, as have most other artists. Texture is one of the most important things in art and being forbidden from touching a piece or getting close enough to see the detail means that you cant often experience the art to its full extent.

Harewood House

I went to Harewood House over the weekend to have a look at the exhibitions that they had on at the moment. It was a really interesting venue, in rooms of the massive stately home. I found it a bit bizarre that the galleries were at the end of the tour of the house, so one minute you're in an old house with Victorian furnishings and the next you're in another room converted into a modern gallery space. The exhibition took place in two rooms which led to a third room which was a cafe. This all seemed a bit disjointed, like the exhibition was an afterthought and had been put in the only available rooms. Something we have had to consider while planning our final exhibits is the space in which we are displaying it. The fact that it is in a shopping center, in a shop that has closed down, has to correlate to our work in some way. I didn't realise until going to Harewood House that an exhibition in a place that is not a traditional white cube gallery is actually quite difficult to pull off.

The way the pieces of work were hung was interesting too. Quite a few of the pieces had been attached to the wall using small bulldog clips or pins. As the pieces were quite small themselves this worked really well. The pieces seemed to hang in the air and the colour was not lost against the black walls.

A common way that pieces were hung was by wire or chains from the ceiling. The transparent wire was really effective as although you could see it, it worked with the piece and as they were all parallel they didn't detract from the work at all.

The pieces that were hung by the chains were more grand pieces, in large frames, mostly in the period style rooms within the house itself. This meant that the paintings had more of an impact on the room, drawing the viewer to it with ostentatious gold frames and chains. This technique of hanging didn't work that well on some of the pieces, especially the smaller, subtle paintings as they were drowned out by the grandeur of the display. I found that I preferred the pieces where you couldn't actually see the hanging mechanism - where the frames had been mounted onto the wall at the back and lay flat against it. This method meant that you weren't distracted at all from the art itself and is something I want to achieve in the way I display my work.

Displaying my work

My final piece for the exhibition is going to be a series of microscopic images created by drawing onto a paper that shrinks when heated. My plan is to display them framed, alongside photographs taken with a microscope so that the detail can be seen with the naked eye. I have also been looking into a way of being able to view the pieces directly through a microscope.

I found these display cases by Jerry Elford, which are individually designed for viewing microscopic pieces of artwork. They are really inventive and a mean that the pieces aren't lost in the gallery space.

This is a problem that I have to consider, as a lot of the pieces exhibited by other people will be larger and more eye-catching.
The initial idea behind my final piece came from wanting to encourage the audience to look closer at artwork, getting as close to the piece as possible, something which is often frowned upon in art galleries. The gallery experience for me is somewhat ruined by the rope and alarms making sure you don't get too close, touch or steal any of the artwork. You can feel alienated from the work - as if you're kept at a distance, making sure that every artist has to fight the urge to feel the textures in the paint.
Jerry Elford's display cases enclose delicate and tiny pieces of work, with built in microscopes so that the audience can view the pieces easily but with as little physical interaction as possible. This is why I don't want to use a method like this to display my pieces. I want the audience to feel involved with the work and not feel like they're separate from the art experience.