The Studio as both a physical and mental space.

It's nearly time to return to college. This week is Fresher's week and 2nd and 3rd years come in and get studio spaces next week.

One thing you will have to do reasonably quickly is to establish a point of view. You will need to think about what drives your practice forward, and where your focus will be for the next term. In particular 3rd years will need to be writing their Context of Practice (COP3) statements and rationales, so will need to have thought through a position statement, which is effectively an outline of their point of view.

However, no matter what year you are in, the first few weeks of any Fine Art program are as much about setting yourself up in the studio, as about deciding what sort of work you will be doing. In fact the two things are closely connected.

For some people the studio is initially for a space for ordering and collecting, but it may at an appropriate moment have to then be converted into a technical drawing studio or small scale assembly area.

Nathan Shedroff proposed that there were seven ways to organise anything: alphabet, location, time, continuum, number, category and randomness. You may or may not agree with him but organisation and selection of materials are key ways for an artist to reflect on how a point of view can shape practice. You might for instance organise everything in terms of size, or colour or use value. You will have to select out of the infinite possibilities available to you, if not you won’t be able to do anything, you might select things I have touched this morning or films I have watched whilst drunk, selection can be idiosyncratic and very personal, it doesn’t always have to be logical.

Nathan Coley at one time was looking at places of worship, he found as many as he could on a map of Edinburgh and had models built of each one. So how would his studio space look? Initially it would be like an office. It would consist of maps pinned to the wall, photographs of buildings found and then the office would be converted into a drawing studio. Plans of building would be drawn up, isometrics made to visualise each building, side elevations added to plans, until there was enough information to begin making models from the drawings. At this point it depends how the models are made. If cardboard models are needed, a cutting board and sharp cutting knives are required, but if wooden models are to be made he would need access to a wood workshop. Finally as models were made he would need a space to see how they would look as a collective, perhaps getting access to a school hall or similar space, big enough to get an idea of how to organise them. As you can see from Coley’s example, space needs change as an idea evolves, you may start off needing an office and then need a workshop and then an exhibition space.

Nathan Coley: The Lamp of Sacrifice, 286 Places of Worship, Edinburgh

Drawing as process would require a very different studio setup. For instance if the work is done in sequence, you need to be able to work from one piece to another. This may mean having a stack of ready cut papers ready to use, a surface pre-prepared to work on, a space to put up each image as it is worked on, so that you can see the results of this unfolding process. Ignacio Uriarte’s investigations into how many things you can do with a white piece of paper need a good clean space and a place to put each variation made. His workspace becomes a cross between a factory and an office. A stack of paper is placed on one side of a work table, he then gradually works his way through the stack, developing a new, ever growing pile of ‘variations’ on the other side of the table.

Cutting into A4 paper

Ignacio Uriarte, Diagonal Triangles (from the series Monochromes without ink), 2014, Empty pen on cotton paper.

Uriarte working in his Berlin studio.

Read an article about Uriarte’s studio here.

Drawing as observation may mean that you have to construct a situation to work from, or make a travelling drawing studio if you are working from a particular location or site. For instant Uglow’s studio has a whole network of marks and taped crosses so that he can place his subject within his matrix of measurements, while Paula Rego builds situations more like mini film scenarios to work from. A Birmingham landscape artist I know has converted an old van, so he just parks up where he wants to draw from and works on the side of the van.

Robert Perry and his van.

Some artists such as John Virtue, have had to work small because they didn’t have a studio, but produced large scale observational work by fitting sections together, if this is the case, wall space becomes a place to fit things together rather than a space to create imagery.

John Virtue

Drawing using animation would require a place to work either with a fixed camera or other device that would let you see how one frame works in relation to the next. William Kentridge works in animation but uses traditional drawing techniques such as charcoal on paper; his studio has no windows, because he needs to light his images artificially but he also needs room to build small sets, because he sometimes moves from drawing into making.

William Kentridge's studio

Of course once a space is set up to use artificial light it can be used to construct ideas based on the control of lighting sources, therefore shadow play or immersive light environments could be added to the possibilities that the studio offers. For example look at how Tim Shaw brings together the emotive possibilities of blue light with the concept of the out of focus shadows from Plato’s cave.   

Every artist adapts the space that they have to best fit in terms of how they are set up. Space will always be a hard thing to manage for an artist because it is very expensive, but if you get used to using it profitably you will waste less time and become more focused on the central concerns that you have, (point of view) and less distracted by working in an environment that doesn’t support your working process.

As always if nothing is working try reverse thinking.

Artists sometimes become fixated by the studio idea. Not having their ideal studio stops them functioning, and they spend more time worrying about how not having the perfect space is impacting on their work than just getting on with it. This is how one artist saw the problem.

 

 

 

 

If you have to do something you will always find a way to do it. In my experience inventive thinking to get around restrictions often makes for far more interesting work, because you are forced to work in the gap between art and life. If for instance the only space available to you to make art was underneath the kitchen table, I’m sure the work done would be shaped and changed by the very nature of an under the table space, and as very few artists are working out of spaces of that sort, there would be  a fair chance that if the artist was sensitive enough to this tiny studio environment, the work done would be unique.