What Nikki Did Next

So it's just over a year since I last posted in this blog, and I'll confess I'd entirely forgotten about it. [I only found it just now accidentally trying to sign up for an account on Blogger!] The Drawing Game is currently in the shortlist for the Woolgather Art Prize, so it's interesting to read about it again now!

I originally made this blog from a need to write things down coherently, to work out how I had gotten to that stage in my practice and where I might be going. Somehow the idea of publishing it, even if I didn't draw anyone's attention to it, gave me the excuse to write things down better.

Now I'm coming to the end of my 2nd year, and it's about time for another reassessment of what I've done and where I'm headed. So:

Following on from making eyes on my carpet, I got involved in a collaborative project with 5 other 1st years. me, Frank, Archie and Sophie from the original 'west' group, plus Liam from our studio and Sarah-Louise from studio 1. It's a long story but during some random discussion in the studio we decided to do a project where we lived by rules as if in a 'post-apocalypse' world. It would be a durational performance, mainly lighthearted - we were initially interested in all the crazy ideas online about what will happen in 2012, particularly 'geomagnetic reversal' and its supposed effects on the planet. So the project began with humour.

A month or so after it's conception, the project took a drastic turn. We decided to fabricate evidence that we had done this performance, rather than really do it. We lied to everyone, tutors, peers and friends. People came to our 'exhibition' - SERIOUSLY: a better disaster scenario - and saw 'documentation' of our preparation for and participation in the 5 day 'apocalypse'. As they left they were given a 'goody bag' which contained free sweets [!] and a small flyer inviting them to question our evidence by visiting this blog which revealed the truth.

Some people still haven't forgiven us.

Coming from... Part IV [Chance/Control]

Over christmas I though a lot about the dice game. I read 'The Dice Man' by Luke Reinhardt, I read a lot of Borges, thinking about infinity and probability. I even looked in some stats textbooks to find out more about randomness and chance. My project started to change direction. I realised that by removing myself from the making of the work, I had become unsure about whether or not the work produced by the drawing game could really be called mine. I wanted to 'get back in' the work.
When I was on my foundation course, a girl in my group had done a project when she photographed the mass of torn papers left where the take down the posters on tube platforms, before they put up new ones. She made paintings of them, recognising the interesting shapes and compositions that had been made by accident. I saw a whole bunch of these when my boyfriend took me to see 'Where the Wild Things Are' in Marble Arch, and I took a lot of photographs. I was interested in how something that had happened by chance could be visually so aesthetically pleasing. I felt like the accumulated layers suggested time passed, repetitions, everyday routines. I tried to make a method where I could achieve something aesthetically similar, but using rules and chance to prevent me from making decisions aesthetically, so the result would still be accidental. I made a very complex system of multiple dice throws and picking random options from a cup [every 6 'go's], using 6 different media, 6 different surfaces, 6 different ways for each to be applied and 6 ways to destroy the current layer. I wanted my 'layer game' to capture time passing, but was unsurehow to mark a start and a finish. I could only be in the studio for 11 hours at most, but I didn't think this was long enough to create the number of layers I was hoping for. I would also need to wait, in between applying layers, for paint or wallpaper paste to dry. How often should I add a new layer? What would it mean if I stopped overnight and continued the next day?
To resolve these issues I decided to mark out time by reading a book - therefore, the work would document the passage of time in the book, and time would only be 'ticking' while I was reading, allowing me to break when necessary wihtout disrupting the continuous process of the work. The dice had resulted in multiples of 6 in my rule-making, so I decided to add a layer every 6 pages. The book I had chosen, Jack Kerouac's 'On The Road' [still a kind of travelling artwork, then] began on page 7. Sal travelled south on Route 66. I started to make notes of these kind of coincidences, and write them on the current layer.
But the work did not do what I wanted. I didn't feel anything towards it, it was just what had been left at the end of a long and complicated process, but it suggested to me none of that process. It didn't achieve the aesthetic result I had desired either. I had a tutorial with Kathryn, who was now my tutor. She pointed out the obvious contradiction in using rules and restrictions to reveal chance and accident, and suggested that maybe I move away from traditional media and try and work out when chance made a difference. I needed to 'catch' chance happening rather than showing what was left. I tried following one of the finished drawing games as a map, and documenting what I saw. But this was still too retrospective, too planned. I decided to try experimenting with anything that took my fancy to try and make chance reveal itself. I scattered letters on a page and spray-painted around them to mark what they had written [always nonsense]. I bound pages of this non-text into a small book. I still didn't feel like anything was really happening by chance. Kathryn had pointed out that I hadn't looked at any other artists work recently and thta this might help me. I looked at Dada and Gutai as movements that had embraced chance. I found Tristan Tzar's 'How to make a Dadaist poem'. This involved cutting up a newspaper article and picking the words randomly from a bag to make a new sentence. I thought, the sentence was what was left. Chance was happening in the bag. So I filled a plastic bag with text and put my camera in, filming while I shook the back around. The film I made caught glimpses of words that the eye could never really settled on, though i slowed it down to half speed. I edited several clips together and experimented with different soundtracks, settling on the sound taken from another clip where I walked around uni with the camera swinging from my wrist. I felt like the film was a step in the right direction, but I had not solved the problem yet.
I was tidying up my room the night before our group presentations when I noticed a false eyelash was stuck to my carpet. I thought it was pretty funny, it would be funnier if I added a little eye to go with it.... why not? I made a paper eye. I made another paper eye, stuck the other eyelash next to it. My carpet stared up a me.
I suddenly felt like this was something, this spontaneous decision to recognise chance and respond to it, to act on a whim.

Coming from... Part III [Drawing Games]

After the Derive project Simon set us a group project called '500 drawings'. We decided to divide the drawings between the 3 of us and experiment with what constitutes a drawing. I made a stop motion animation with 170 frames, working on the definition that a drawing is a mark made on a surface and therefore every mark made would count as a drawing in itself. I liked how this revealed the process of creating a 'picture' through time.

I combined the 500 Drawings and Derive projects together in a body of work that became the Dice Game. Taking the rule and walking elements of the derive and the definition of drawing, which did not state the necessity of an author or artist, I drew up 6 directions I thought I could try next. These included drawing machines, drawing by rules [eg. throwing a dice with every number equating to a different mark or direction]. I couldn't decide and so I decided to throw a dice to decide. [ the use of dice was one method of rule-making used in the derive]. It chose the walking drawing where I would use a rule to follow a route and make a continuous mark using some kind of drawing machine. I had a basic design that was something like the things they use to mark the lines on a football pitch. Simon suggested a craft shop in the Merrion Centre where I could buy wheels for my machine. In the shop I noticed they sold blank dice, so I bought thinking that instead of using a number to equate to a mark, I could put the marks straight on the dice, and create a method for drawing like a 'walking drawing' on paper.
It was reading week so I went home, planning to take the wheels and get my Dad to help construct my drawing tool. Somehow I forgot them, so instead decided to look round some charity shops and see if there were any wheeled toys that could give me ideas. I found one, which was a push along fire engine - a fireman bear ascended and descnded the handle as you pushed it. I attached a pencil to the bear so that when he reached the lowest point of the handle he would draw as I heeled him along a roll of paper. I adjusted the angle of the pencil so the pressure on the paper would cause it to rebound and make different kinds of marks.

I was pleased with my drawing machine as it required me to participate, pushing the toy along, but it was not my hand marking the paper. However, unsure how to proceed with the construction of my own 'walking drawing' machine I picked up those blank dice I had bought and put a different mark on each side, some which would continue the line straight and some which could change direction. I still had some free choices of where the line would head but not what mark I would be making. I develped this into a 'drawing game' where multiple players rolled the dice together and raced to cross a 'grid' on their individual 'playing boards'. Later this became one giant grid where 4 players each started at a corner and raced towards the centre, by taking it in turns to roll the dice.
This bigger board game became much more interesting when I asked the players to repeat the game on the same board. In the first round, everyone made clear choices about which was the quickest route to the centre, and they all finished pretty much simultaneously. However,, once the board had rotated 90 degrees and everyone was starting on the next corner along, drawing over previously drawn line, they started to become confused and disorientated. Logically, the quickest route would be to follow as near as possible to the previous line. Instead, people seemed to want to avoid the line - their desire to win the 'race' conflicted with their desire to make a clear line. Could this be part of the act of 'drawing', making a mark that was distinguishable from the surface on which it is made?

Coming from... Part II [Flip A Coin]

In our second Derive project we made a rule that we would follow a thrown coin, with the outcomes giving different directions. If we guessed heads and got it right, we went forward. If we guessed tails and got it right we turned and went backward. If we guessed heads and it was tails, we went left, and if we guessed tails and it was heads we went right. We decided to start from the corner of Henry Price/ St. Georges Field as we'd been told St Georges was an interesting area. The coin took us right round campus finishing round the back of the Marjorie and Arnold Ziff building.

Coming from... Part I [Going West]

So this is the start of my final project for the first year of Fine Art at Leeds. I've been keeping a scrapbook, but pretty much all my work is digital or so big that I just record it via photograph anyway, and I just spend all my time cutting and sticking!

Our project brief is really just to develop our practice on from previous work. For me, this started at the beginning of the year with the West project and the Derive. Both of these were group projects and involved walking, obeying a rule which dictated where we went. In the first one, the studio group split into 4, one for each compass point. My group travelled west and gathered evidence of where we went and what we saw. There was a bin strike so there was a lot of stuff about, including a sofa which we carted round for a bit, posed for a group photo on, and then eventually took back to the studio, where it is to this day :)