Contextual and professional studies interviews.

Samantha Cowie's statement for my work: 

Kate's work is video based. It is a continuous film using a tripod to shoot and then edited on the computer. It was filmed at a National Trust house at Redditch.

The video was shot at 9-11, as the lighting around this time is good, and so the video had really interesting shadows. Also the video had to be shot at this time, as this is when it is closed to the public.

The video is also going to include sound, such as sounds of the house. Kate has recordings of birds and the wind which are going to be edited into the piece.

She focuses on the details of the architecture and interior, such as cracks in the walls and personal items which belonged to the people who used to live in the house. It creates a story for the audience of the video as they are left wondering what is the story behind the items left there, and why were they left there?

I feel that Kate's video is trying to make the viewer think, and create the answers for themselves about what happened in this house, as she is not providing information about the people who used to live there, she is just letting the video speak for itself.

Kate has been looking at video artists such as Zarina Bhimji, Bhimji is a clear influence as her photographs look at human traces in landscape and architecture. She looks at walls a lot in her work as she looks at who built them, who lived within them and who abandoned them. Kate has also looked at Paul Winstanley who paints from photographs; he mainly focuses on interiors such as waiting rooms.


My thoughts:

I thought that Samantha Cowie explained my work very clearly in the statement and it will influence how I write my statement for assessment, it really helped make my work clear to me and how it is perceived.

This is my statement for Samantha Cowie's work:

Samantha Cowie's work explores the idea of sleeping, the concept of not being able to control your body. She does this by creating scenes of people sleeping; some photos are genuine poses of people sleeping. Whilst others are staged. The medium this is being explored in is through film and paintings in acrylic that seem to explore the use of colour in skin.
Artists that have influenced her work are Ted Spagna, Richard Billingham, Sophie Calle, Tracey Emin and Nan Goldin.

I think that it is a very interesting topic to explore. As it makes us think of something that is a normal everyday action. The choice in which to express ideas though painting and film is interesting as you get two different viewpoints. I think that the paintings are more successful because of the colour palette used. But then I think it is stronger to have the videos shown beside the paintings to see where she got her ideas for compositions.

For the next stage in her work I think that it would be visually interesting to explore scale with her paintings, exploring on a larger scale could make the brush marks and colours more prominent and make you look harder to view the painting.

My thoughts on improving this statement that I wrote:

I think now looking back at this statement I could have improved it a lot before handing it over. I think I explained it well, however I could have gone more in depth about what it explores and influences making it a stronger statement. 

I found her work really interesting and thought that it would be a different subject to explore than normal.