Fine Art During Lockdown
Ths was the week before lockdown (March 2020), when I had access to a Columbus print-press and oil-based inks. This lino-print depicts a Mediterranean Citadel, which is a symbol of Heterotopia. In other words it is world within a world attempting to keep the bad outside. This concept informed my decision to use the defining colours of the background, hence the blue sky hovering above the Citadel and then the black outside world.
This lino-print of a typical English prison defines the Heterotopian qualities of a citadel but in reverse. This time the building is keeping the bad confined inside, rather than the bad being on the outside. Due to the lockdown, there was no access to a print-press machines or oil-based inks. This print was acheived only using manuel bodyweight pressure and water-based ink which have remained unused for over 4 years.
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EXHIBITION STATEMENT - ‘I N S I D E - I N'
It is now the purpose of my curation to demonstrate to the audience the ability to exhibit a show through improvised methods and a compromised space, in the name of heterotopia and isolationism.
My recent work focused on heterotopia and prisons. Over past couple of months there has been a slight shift in my work. I am continuing with exploring ideas around heterotopia, but have centred on experiences resulting from the national and global lockdown situation and the consequences felt on a personal and societal level. I have been reflecting on isolation and its relationship to heterotopia, but also making work as an artist under restricted conditions. There has been a great deal of improvisation in the making of new work.
The home has become the prison where different rules of engagement and different codes of behaviour, apply. A planned collaborative collective to develop and realise an exhibition has now ceased and a sense of alienation and isolation has replaced it. Yet despite this the ‘show must go on’ and the individual has to improvise and work in those parameters; a heterotopia.
Whilst I had been intending to produce prints, I was also intending to use pin hole photography and other mediums at University, but felt that I needed to concentrate, just on lino prints to show restriction but elaborate on those prints, providing different prints with ever increasing complexity.
Starting with three layers on one design, with another increasing to four and finally the last one defining it by five layers with an element of collage. The work for the exhibition is based on the development of work good or bad and how it progresses through trial and error, whilst having the continual thought process, at the back of the mind, as to whether we will ever get back to University and having to adapt the mind set into an isolationist state making less elaborate material somehow interesting.
Part of that mind set variation, is the preparation of a virtual gallery space in the home environment, turning a bedroom into an austere, white cube (with window) and examining how a room can be part of that artwork. I intend to show elements of the artists processes from start to finish, exclusively concentrating on painting and repainting a room five times in different colours – this one however was just three coats of white with monochrome affect, using black frames creating a feeling of confinement and building a sense of anxiety, which, I would imagine we all have become sensitive to. I feel right now a kind of dystopia coming out of lockdown. The rules of engagement are to be interpreted as we move forward to survive but thrive.
Whilst the concept of showing art in a home is not a new one, the virtual tour is something embraced since the lockdown commenced, towards the end of March. The British Museum in London have such tours and many more throughout the world allowing the public to see incredible work that they would otherwise have missed the opportunity to view.
Click link below to see my first virtual exhibtion I N S I D E - I N hope you enjoy it.
https://www.facebook.com/jacob.lingard.16/videos/646772532569684/