The Death of Pottery.

I've always hated ceramics, let's start there. Clay doesn't agree with me, when we had to do it on my foundation course the tutor told me my hands were too warm, which is why my clay stuff always fell apart. I don't really like doing things with my hands anyway (apart from drawing/painting). But I like the idea.

Recently I've entered an "old crap" phase. It started with charity shops, like all good art fags I always go in charity shops to look for AWESOME CLOTHES. But lately I've become interested in bric-a-brac. The other day I was walking through Stoke with someone and, glancing into a charity shop window, exclaimed "oh, look at that plate!". I think part of it is having my own place (university accommodation hovel) which makes me infinitely fascinated with interior decoration. Basically I'm turning into my mum. Joy.

Anyway, back to my art project, as you avid readers will know I was interested in the old royal doulton factory and this lead me to think about the decline of the pottery industry in these parts. It's weird to think that the main industry could be something so creative, wheras where I'm from it was all about cotton.

I'm in the early stages but here are some photos of my first idea of how to represent "the death of pottery". Of course, as my lecturer pointed out today, it's not really dead, it just moved to China.
Anyway:





Awesome. I love blood dripping from stuff, from an aesthetic point of view anyway. I had a phase of drawing and painting everyone with nosebleeds.

I don't really know where this is going, right now I'm toying with the idea of printing stuff onto plates, to sort of tie up all the loose ends of this project so far. But I've yet to have a tutorial about last semester's work. I'm not optimistic. I stayed in bed a lot last year. But this year I'm determined to work. And to be less socially introverted...

Royal Doulton

The old Royal Doulton building is representative of the ghost of the pottery industry in Stoke-on-Trent- the conurbation of SoT is known as the Potteries and each smaller town within the city was built up around pottery.
Anyway, I was supposed to be in Burslem looking at haunted sites but I happened upon this, and now my main aim is to do some site specific art around this area. Of course I'll probably change my mind when it comes down to actually doing it.
With conceptual art, I'm far too indecisive, maybe because there are so many possibilities compared to the visual stuff I did last year and forever.
What I really wish I could do is break in there and throw light reflective paint everywhere and then do some long exposures. That would be totally awesome, but me, breaking into an abandoned site? I don't think so somehow.
I need to think long and hard about this.

Ghost Stuff.

Ok, so I can't really decide what I want to do at the moment, all this freedom of expression means a lot of scope for pissing about. But I decided through one thing or another to do stuff on ghosts. It's kinda impersonal. Seems like everyone else on my course is doing something pretty meaningful, but I'm like screw meaning!

I'm doing a faked history of a Staffordshire Ghost Hunter. This is one of the photos. I've not really done much yet, I waste so much time. It's not like before when I was in class drawing all day.
Conceptual art feels like a sort of cop-out, almost everyone else seems to be doing the obvious while I'm planning out pretentious conceptual masterworks that never go anywhere.
I'm just unsure at the moment because we don't get any critical feedback til Christmas, so I don't know if I'm supposed to do what I've always done, work through a project and do ideas and sketches and little swatches and be bored, or go out there and DO IT.
Probably the latter. I do worry though. No-one's told me if I'm on the right tracks so far.