Kingston University: Year Two

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.

My second year at Kingston was dominated by my ERASMUS scholarship to study in Milan for four months. An incredible experience to study abroad, the longest I had ever been truly away from home, and I have wonderful memories of my time in Italy. I lived with a non-English speaking family, in parallel with 3 hours of Italian language tuition every day. I studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Art, but primarily made work at home and around the city, especially building and collecting images from Italian daytime television, and I brought back hundreds of photographs of things I’d found on TV there.

My scholarship also exposed me to the commercial side of the art business for the first time, where I was offered my first solo show at Luciano Inga-Pin, and returned to Milan during my third year.

I Must Learn To Respect… (1994)

As part of the final assessment of my time in Milan at the Brera Academy, working under artist, critic and curator Diego Esposito, I created an installation in one of the great sculpture halls, which slowly deteriorated over the course of a week. This was captured and documented in a collaboration with Milan writer Cloe Piccoli in ‘Polarised Lollipop (Antidote)’. I also exhibited a sound installation in a nightclub, which periodically played recordings from an ‘Learn English’ tuition tape. An image of mine was used on the show’s postcard.

I almost wasn’t part of this show, and remember walking for 90 minutes around the perimeter of Milan to get to the nightclub meeting where they were planning it out. If I hadn’t been part of that meeting, I would never have gotten the exhibition at Luciano Inga-Pin.

In and around my time in Milan, and inspired by the city’s huge influence on fashion, I also experimented with a number of low-fidelity advertising campaign remakes, the longer-lasting output of which was an interest in the digital manipulation of images, and an introduction to learning the then nascent Photoshop. An obvious nod to Britpop, which was on the rise at this time too of course.

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: A Contemporary 3 Graces (1995)

For my second year’s thesis work, I explored the notion of tying together the principles and values of Antonio Canova’s 3 Graces with the contemporary practice of Sam Taylor-Wood, Sarah Lucas and Anya Gallaccio. this project allowed me to interview numerous primary sources (including Michael Archer, Sam Taylor-Wood and Sarah Kent), as well as learn how to handle a large volume of material and distill it down into a meaningful, manageable, clear form for readers.

I also held a seminar in the main lecture theater at Kingston University, which was really the first time I had publicly spoken or presented anything of substance during my degree.

None of this project has ever existed digitally, most of it being produced on an old-fashioned typewriter and hammered out by hand. This written work was also the first time I’d made a physical object out of anything I’d written, and I worked closely with the legal bookbinding firm R.G. Scales who were located in Inner Template near the Embankment in London to bring this project to life. This project allowed me to learn how to produce a large-scale piece of writing, and those learnings ended up defining a lot of the following year’s Time Travel thesis.

Kaliski Gallery Experiments (1995)