gemmajouquesresearch

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Alongside jobs and other creative opportunities, I have also been looking at internships. I aim to start applying for a few possible ones for over the summer, so I can begin to gain some experience once I have graduated from university. Ideally, I would love to participate in an international internship, but I would have to consider more external factors such as visas, accommodation and travel. 

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Application to Ashurst Emerging Art Prize 2018

I would like to enter this competition as it appeals specifically to the medium of my practice, with many previous winners being painters, and is an opportunity to enhance my national and international profile whilst studying on the course.

For me, while my practice verges on sculpture and textiles, it is the method of painting that is always at the very core of my work. I would value highly the chance to participate in a prestigious national competition, particularly as an opportunity to test myself in a challenging environment.

Pieces for Application:

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Application to the Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize 2018

I decided to apply for another competition because I am interesting in the possibility of expanding and adapting my artistic profile.  

The Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize 2018 will be awarded to artists that show significant potential, interesting ideas, a relevant message and skillful execution. We understand that talented artists exist in many forms, so endeavour to appeal to emerging artists of all ages and career paths, whether student, graduate, full-time or part-time, and from any country.

Ashurst’s aim in sponsoring the Emerging Artist Prize and Emerging Artist Programme is to find, build and support the careers of talented international emerging artists and get their art seen by a wider audience.

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Troy Paiva

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Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration

Light painting photographer Troy Paiva has been capturing night imagery since 1989. He considers himself an “Urban Explorer” and says that his light painting photography is a byproduct of his passion for investigating the ruins of “Lost America”. Troy spends much of his time alone, in the middle of nowhere, photographing abandon building and places that America has lost to time. The sense of isolation and loneliness draws Troy to these locations, he says, “I love the surreal feeling of wandering through an abandoned subdivision, alone, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. Your senses become heightened and you feel the weight of time.”

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Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre

Detroit (2005 - 2010)

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Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre

THE RUINS OF DETROIT (2005-2010)

At the end of the XIXth Century, mankind was about to fulfill an old dream. The idea of a fast and autonomous means of displacement was slowly becoming a reality for engineers all over the world. Thanks to its ideal location on the Great Lakes Basin, the city of Detroit was about to generate its own industrial revolution. Visionary engineers and entrepreneurs flocked to its borders.

In 1913, up-and-coming car manufacturer Henry Ford perfected the first large-scale assembly line. Within few years, Detroit was about to become the world capital of automobile and the cradle of modern mass-production. For the first time of history, affluence was within the reach of the mass of people. Monumental skyscapers and fancy neighborhoods put the city's wealth on display. Detroit became the dazzling beacon of the American Dream. Thousands of migrants came to find a job. By the 50's, its population rose to almost 2 million people. Detroit became the 4th largest city in the United States.

The automobile moved people faster and farther. Roads, freeways and parking lots forever reshaped the landscape. At the beginning of the 50's, plants were relocated in Detroit's periphery. The white middle-class began to leave the inner city and settled in new mass-produced suburban towns. Highways frayed the urban fabric. Deindustrialization and segregation increased. In 1967, social tensions exploded into one of the most violent urban riots in American history. The population exodus accelerated and whole neighbourhoods began to vanish. Outdated downtown buildings emptied. Within fifty years Detroit lost more than half of its population.

Detroit, industrial capital of the XXth Century, played a fundamental role shaping the modern world. The logic that created the city also destroyed it. Nowadays, unlike anywhere else, the city's ruins are not isolated details in the urban environment. They have become a natural component of the landscape. Detroit presents all archetypal buildings of an American city in a state of mummification. Its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great Empire.

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The Ruin As Matter Robert Ginsberg, 2004

The ruin liberates matter from its subservience to form. As the chains of form are smashed, matter emerges in our presence, reformulating itself for our refreshed experience.

Matter flexes its being in the absence of the formal whole. Yet exultant materiality brings forth form.

The destruction of the structure is rewarded with the resurgence of the substance. Matter builds its own unities amid ruin.

Not inert and dead, but moving and vital, the materiality of the ruin awakens something substantial within us.

‘Untamed by form, Matter reclaims the force of its own shaping within the smashed.’ Pg.2

The matter in the ruin is not rendered back to nature. It resides between nature and artifice.

The matter has more than survived; it strikes back. It takes over dominance of the space voided by form. In a word, it matters.

We expect the ruin to cringe and shudder under a negative space and show its unprotected frailty in regrettable nakedness.

We venture our experience upon the possibility of unity among fractured matter and fragmented form. We, then, are the matter of the ruin, reshaped by creative interaction.

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Rust Belt

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Dust Bowl

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Drosscape

Rust Belt

The Rust Belt is a region of the United States, made up mostly of places in the Midwest and Great Lakes. Rust refers to the deindustrialization, or economic decline, population loss, and urban decay due to the shrinking of its once-powerful industrial sector. The term gained popularity in the U.S. in the 1980s.

The Rust Belt begins in western New York and traverses west through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, ending in northern Illinois, eastern Iowa, and southeastern Wisconsin. Previously known as the industrial heartland of America, industry has been declining in the region since the mid-20th century due to a variety of economic factors, such as the transfer of manufacturing further West, increased automation, and the decline of the US steel and coal industries. While some cities and towns have managed to adapt by shifting focus towards services and high-tech industries, others have not fared as well, witnessing rising poverty and declining populations.

Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl, also known as the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent wind erosion (the Aeolian processes) caused the phenomenon. The drought came in three waves, 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940, but some regions of the high plains experienced drought conditions for as many as eight years. With insufficient understanding of the ecology of the plains, farmers had conducted extensive deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains during the previous decade; this had displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds. The rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline tractors, and widespread use of the combine harvester contributed to farmers' decisions to convert arid grassland (much of which received no more than 10 inches (250 mm) of precipitation per year) to cultivated cropland.

During the drought of the 1930s, the unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away in huge clouds that sometimes blackened the sky. These choking billows of dust – named "black blizzards" or "black rollers" – traveled cross country, reaching as far as the East Coast and striking such cities as New York City and Washington, D.C. On the Plains, they often reduced visibility to 1 meter (3.3 ft) or less.

Drosscape

Drosscape is an urban design framework that looks at urbanized regions as the waste product of defunct economic and industrial processes. The concept was realized by Alan Berger, professor of urban design at MIT, and is part of a new vocabulary and aesthetic that could be useful for the redesign and adaptive re-use of ‘waste landscapes’ within urbanized regions.

According to Berger, drosscape, as a concept, implies that dross, or waste, may be "scaped", or resurfaced, and reprogrammed for adaptive reuse. Berger goes on to explain that this phenomenon emerges from two primary processes. Firstly, Drosscape surfaces as a byproduct of rapid urbanization and horizontal growth urban sprawl. Secondly, these spaces arise as a consequence of defunct economic and production systems. For urban planners, architects and other design professionals, drosscape may offer another creative way to envision space and landscape design in a city. According to Berger, “Adaptively reusing this waste landscape figures to be one of the twenty-first century’s great infrastructural design challenges.”

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Pripyat, Ukraine

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Urban Exploration: what is it, who does it and is it legal?

As austerity has taken hold in the UK, urban decay has become more prominent, with abandoned factories, amusement parks and other man-made structures increasingly common across the country.

At the same time a desire to explore and document the history of urban areas has led to a rise in the popularity of 'urban exploration' and 'place hacking'.

Last year the UK's most famous urban explorer Dr Bradley Garrett – who found fame after scaling the Shard during its construction in 2012 - went on trial for conspiring to commit criminal damage following a number of visits to disused London Underground tube stations as part of his research for a PhD in geography at Oxford University.

What is Urban exploration? Urban exploration or Urbex, as it has become known, is the exploration of man-made structures often abandoned or hidden from the general public. Photography plays a large role in the popularity of the hobby but historical documentation has also become a factor as urban landscapes change ever more quickly over time.

It is generally accepted that the term 'urban exploration' was coined in 1996 by Canadian explorer Jeff Chapman. However The Scotsman reports that urban exploration was taking place as far back as 1793 when Philibert Aspairt, a hospital porter, is believed to have "got lost in the limestone quarries beneath Paris supposedly while searching for some ancient bottles of chartreuse". His skeleton was discovered 11 years later.

The old adage "take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints" has often been applied to urban exploration. However the recent rise in popularity of the hobby has brought claims that this rule is no longer being followed.

Is it safe and is it legal? Urban exploration can often be dangerous and illegal, a police spokesman said ahead of Bradley Garrett's trial. Garrett was also accused of breaking into Transport for London property to access disused rail tunnels. "The railway, whether disused or in operation, is a dangerous place for those not meant to be there and access restrictions, which should not be taken lightly, are in place to protect members of the public from harm," said the police spokesman.

Urban explorers are often the first to acknowledge the danger of their chosen practice and one such explorer Richard Shepherd told the BBC that he never explored alone. "It's all about being careful. If I'm stuck in the middle of a derelict asylum and I fall and break my leg I need to know there's someone who can show the emergency services where I am," he said.

Exploring commercial properties, even disused ones, can also mean trespassing if explorers go onto property without the owner's permission. Many Urbex websites have a list of tips for keeping within the law. Would-be explorers are advised to "ask permission", "contact the local police beforehand" and "don't take souvenirs".

What locations have people explored? Participation in urban exploration is "high in profile but small in number (perhaps 20,000 globally)", according to the Guardian. However the array of different environments that explorers have photographed and discovered continues to grow. In the UK, explorers have taken pictures from atop skyscrapers such as The Shard, sculptures such as the Angel of the North and bridges such as Tower Bridge and the Forth Road Bridge in Scotland.

Across the globe, abandoned amusement parks have become a particular target for enthusiasts, as Weburbanist.com explains: "When an amusement park becomes abandoned and an eerie silence descends to blanket the decay, the atmosphere seems to twist and takes on a nightmarish vibe."

The images captured from exploring the Six Flags Amusement Park in New Orleans following its closure after Hurricane Katrina have become a hallmark of the Urbex movement.

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Ghost

Rachel Whiteread began working in London during the mid-1980s when she was a student at the Slade School of Fine Art. For the past fifteen years she has pursued and developed various approaches to casting as both a process and a vehicle for content. Working initially in wax and plaster, then later in resin, Whiteread created uncanny replicas of ordinary objects, parts of the body, and eventually, empty space.

In its scale and ambition, Ghost is her breakthrough piece and, by far, her best-known work. Approximately nine feet wide, eleven and one-half feet high, and ten feet deep, Ghost is a negative plaster cast of the space of an entire parlor in a modest Victorian townhouse. Intending to "mummify" air, Whiteread worked in an abandoned building at 486 Archway Road, North London. She first stripped the room down to its bare architectural décor, and then, using compositional proportions derived from Renaissance paintings by Piero della Francesco, gridded each wall into units that could be handled easily. Over a period of three months, Whiteread then covered the interior walls with multiple plaster molds, each about five inches thick. When the plaster dried, she peeled the molds from the walls and reassembled them on a steel frame. The result is a spectral monument: a structure composed from a void in which the architectural elements defining that space -- windows, doors, a door handle, soot-streaked fireplace, tile grids, moldings, light switch -- all appear in reverse.

The tomblike appearance of the aptly named Ghost emanates stillness and quiet, a mood reinforced by the unassertive pallor of the plaster. Fixed in time and isolated from its conventional cycle of use, Ghost triggers memories of something familiar that has suddenly become strange -- a once lively domestic space frozen in rigor mortis. The association of Ghost with death and loss is reinforced by the artist's reference to her experience on the grounds crew at Highgate Cemetery. Fascinated by the moldering graves and crypts, she found herself compelled to peer through the cracks. Viewers find themselves doing the same thing as they walk around Ghost, translating its cavities into protrusions and vice versa. In so doing, details -- the smooth black hole of the door handle or the circular depression of the light switch -- that normally would be overlooked become unexpectedly prominent. Even if the volume of the room is physically clear, it is, as one critic noted, "psychologically impossible" to comprehend, for Ghost places viewers inside and outside the parlor at the same time. We are on the outside, locked out as we gaze at interior walls. Simultaneously, we are on the inside, unable to escape, and it is the tension between exclusion and entrapment, between absence and presence that makes the sculpture at once alienating and compelling.

The poetry and power of Ghost derives from the unexpected emotional, psychological charge elicited by this minimal form. Neither abstract nor representational, Whiteread's sculpture references numerous art historical themes: the history of memorial architecture and symbolic space; the history and temporal implications of plaster as a medium that preserves an original; and the extension of minimal and conceptual art at the end of the twentieth century. Ghost has already been acknowledged as a new "classic," one that resonates deeply with the history of Western art and architecture, and Whiteread is now recognized as one of the most important artists of her generation.

https://www.nga.gov/Collection/art-object-page.131285.html

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Rachel Whiteread is Britain's greatest living artist

A few weeks ago I was in an American art museum looking at the modern masters. Pablo Picasso and Richard Serra share space with Sol LeWitt and Jackson Pollock in the tremendous collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. But not far from Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross paintings, an unexpected thing from home caught my eye.

It was like seeing a ghost. In fact, I was seeing Ghost – a sculpture by Rachel Whiteread that I first encountered, what, 20 years ago, in the London whose Dickensian chill it reproduces. Ghost is a cast of an entire room in an old-fashioned, perhaps Victorian, house. It is the solid trace of all the air that a room once contained. Empty space has become solid. Because it is solid, it is closed. Nothing can get in or out. On this side of the white surfaces of the massive block, engraved with negative images of fireplace, door, window and light switch, we wonder at the dark invisible silence within. Vanished lives, lost voices, forgotten loves are trapped in that fossilised room like prehistoric creatures in limestone.

Ghost is the closest living relative of Whiteread's destroyed artistic masterpiece House. She made Ghost in 1990; three years later she took the same casting process to its logical conclusion by preserving the inner world of a house scheduled for demolition.

The subsequent destruction of Whiteread's House by an unsympathetic council did immense harm to British art. Amid all the sound and fury that young British artists generated in the 90s – often signifying nothing – House was the real thing: a modern masterpiece.

And Whiteread herself is the real thing, a first-rank artist, as I realised with a new clarity in Washington. It goes to show why it is sometimes foolish to want to "save" British art for British collections. If all British art was in Britain, how would it become known internationally? In the absence of House, Whiteread's Ghost is the single most important British sculpture of our times – but I am delighted it is in one of America's best galleries. Here, among some of the key works of the modern age, you can truly assess Whiteread's achievement. It is one of the most powerful things in the museum. Whiteread is abstract, serious and profound. She is the modern British artist who matters.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/dec/14/rachel-whiteread-greatest-british-artist

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The Man Who Destroyed All His Belongings

By Alastair Sooke 14 July 2016

One day in the ‘90s the British artist Michael Landy came up with a radical concept for an artwork: he decided to destroy every single one of his possessions in public. The idea was simple. But executing it proved surprisingly complex. So, in order to make it happen, he teamed up with Artangel, the non-profit arts organisation, which specialises in realising extraordinary one-off projects with contemporary artists, and set to work.

Three years later, in 2001, having compiled an exhaustive inventory of his belongings that ran to 7,227 items, he found himself standing in an empty shop in Oxford Street in central London. Before him, in yellow trays placed upon a conveyor belt, were the belongings that he had amassed over his 37 years, destined for landfill.

‘When they had finished, the artist owned nothing at all, apart from the blue boiler suit he was wearing’

During the course of two weeks, every single one – clothes, love letters, artworks, his Saab 900 Turbo car, even his father’s sheepskin coat – was stripped, shredded, crushed, dismantled, or otherwise destroyed by Landy and his team of 12 assistants, while listening to David Bowie and Joy Division. When they had finished, the artist owned nothing at all, apart from the blue boiler suit he had been wearing throughout. He called the project Break Down.

Smashing effort

As a result, even when the venue contained thousands of visitors, the mood was often sombre, as people began to think about their own relationships with possessions and objects. On one level, Break Down was a kind of bonfire of the vanities for the 21st Century, excoriating the waste and excess of the West. “In a sense, the message was: where are we heading?” Landy explains. “The more stuff people have, the more successful we perceive them to be – but if we all end up with 7,227 things, then we won’t have a planet.”

There was something exhilarating about seeing somebody liberating themselves from the tyranny of ownership – James Lingwood

In addition, Break Down functioned as a contemporary memento mori: all of us, to differing degrees, use possessions to construct our identities and project ourselves to others – yet here was a man wilfully obliterating his material existence to the point of total annihilation.

At the same time, says Lingwood, “There was something exhilarating about seeing somebody liberating themselves from the tyranny of ownership. The work pointed in two directions – and perhaps that’s where its genius lay.”

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160713-michael-landy-the-man-who-destroyed-all-his-belongings

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Tyneham Village