Kingston University: Year One
BA(Hons) Critical Fine Art Practice, London 1993-1996
In the Fall of 1993 I moved to London and began attending Kingston University, enrolling in the Fine Art BA(Hons) course, specializing in sculpture. Mid-way through the first year I changed my course to Critical Fine Art Practice - splitting my time between pure art historical studies and an increasing interest in the emerging field of digital photography as a double honors student.
Over the course of three experimental years I mainly focused on a practice that explored different representations of body, media, art history and cultural appropriation / representation. I was influenced by the then current wave of Young British Artists who were showing in many places across London, as well as emerging New York artists such as Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Matthew Barney and Paul McCarthy. However, over time, my interests became more focused on 1970s minimalist practice, culminating in a final dissertation exploring cinematic and artistic representations of time travel. By the end of my time at Kingston, I became increasingly interested in making work in the computer, something i was able to greatly accelerate immediately afterwards at The Jan van Eyck Akademie.
This is the first time I’ve attempted to house all of the work which remains from those three years into a single location, and the exercise of digging into the archives has been wonderful, nostalgic fun. Unfortunately much of the work has been lost to time, especially work which only existed in video or slide form. However, in an attempt to show my development and progression, I’ve organized the work into three distinct years, which reflect three distinct chapters of my work during that time.
In particular, my first year at Kingston saw me living away from home in Somerset for the first time, and all the adjustments that takes on a 19 year old from the countryside. I’m especially indebted to sculpture professor Brian McCann, who very much took me under his wing, encouraged me, challenged me, and made sure I was on the right track. It broke my heart to hear of Brian’s passing in 2014, as I never got the chance to tell him what a difference he had made.
Photographic Experiments
Short Film: Missing The Train (1994)
Unfortunately there’s not much work from my first year at Kingston which has survived, outside of the large collection of slides I still have yet to digitize, and I wish I had been able to preserve the large format printmaking work I fell in love with. It was a truly experimental year, with lots of work in video, photography, and to some degree, sculpture. Looking back on this work over 25 years later, I was still very much influenced by the Post-Human work coming out of America, but can see some of the kernels that would later surface in terms of video photography, an obsession with late-night pop culture, b-movies and the general weirdness of European television. For as confident as I had arrived at Kingston, I was still very much finding my voice, and very much given the freedom to explore, fail, experiment and break a tremendous amount of ideas.
Photographic Experiments
Printmaking Experiments
I loved the time I was able to get in the printmaking studio, and managed to make some large-format medical silkscreened prints. Not much remains of the work I did there, but I was able to recover a few pieces.
Sculptural Experiments
Friends & Acquaintances
An early low-fidelity version of the social networking we all take for granted today.
Seminar: Artist As Superstar (1994)
I wish I still had the recording of this session, as I’d love to watch myself back all these years later. The t-shirt I’d made with Sue Webster, and I’d sprayed my Doctor Martens boots yellow and painted them with stars just for the occasion.
The Myth Of The Artist: Short Film (1994)
I really wish I still had a copy of this video that Crispin Jones and I made together. A parody of traditional artist biographies, it was just a plain and simple attack on the educational pretense at Kingston I was at odds with, which was very heavily pushing a traditional materials agenda on the students, not something I bought into. I was particularly influenced by Alison Wilding’s Turner Prize short film, which I felt was just ridiculous. Set to Trini Lopez’s ‘If I Had A Hammer’, it featured me in various states in the nearby woods of New Malden, ‘being a sculptor’. I gave myself penance with lines over the summer.
Photographic Experiments: Nostalgia
A lot of these stills were taken from a documentary about Pan’s People. There’s an interview with Chris Tarrant in the film that describes how as a kid he used to look down from the top of the television to see if he could peek down their dresses. Something I later took as inspiration for the photos I took of Valeria Marini.
