Inside- Artists and Writers in Reading Prison

"In the great Prison where I was then incarcerated, I was merely the figure and the letter of a little cell in a long gallery, one of a thousand lifeless numbers as of a thousand lifeless lives."

- Oscar Wilde, De Profendis, 1897

Today I visited the Inside- Artists and Writers in Reading Prison event. .The exhibition is centred around it's most famous inmate Oscar Wilde, containing paintings, sculpture, photographs, videos and writing in the cells, along corridors and in the prison chapel. It is the first time HMP Reading is open to the public, after it was closed in 2013.
Taking place throughout the original Victorian architecture, the exhibition featured work from artists including Richard Hamilton, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Wolfgang Tillmans and readers including Patti Smith and Ben Whishaw, among others.
As well as being eerie and ghostly, the exhibition was also very touching at times. The graffiti on and scratched into the cell walls bought the exhibition back to reality, making it really thought provoking. I highly recommend this exhibition and feel as if the atmosphere of the building can only truly be felt when inside, walking up the stairs, along the corridors and in and out of the cells.

The outside of the Inside Reading Prison Exhibition

Exhibition info

HMP Reading from level 3

Wolfgang Tillmans video 

A cell on Level 1

Part of an installation by Doris Salcedo

"I'm stood in a field in a scarecrows hat"

Graffiti in a cell

Weight (2016) by Steve McQueen in a cell

Oscar Wilde's cell door in the former Prison chapel

Details of Oscar Wilde's door

For more/detailed information on this exhibition visit:
https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/inside/

Experimenting with sound

One of the things I noticed whilst on the London trip was that I was attracted to works which were loud, slightly chaotic and not necessarily still, so it became clear to me that I should consider adding these features to my own work. 

I used Adobe Premiere Elements to edit my audio clips, piecing them together, and overlapping them to create a continuous sound that brings the audience into my work. All of the sound was recorded on my camera, a Nokia D3100 to ensure it was of the same quality. I think it works in terms of creating an atmosphere and giving narrative to a piece of art, as my main goal is to bring a viewer closer and make them think.

A photo posted by Rosie (@rsprcy) on Oct 8, 2016 at 12:03pm PDT

You can listen to it here:

Moving forward I need to consider ways of linking this to wallpaper (through the patterns and repetition).

How do you draw sound?

What does sound look like?

How can I transform vibrations into an image?

Digbeth First Friday

The train's at 6.20, don't miss it...

Before Friday, I'd only been to Birmingham once before- and that was for a shopping trip with a friend. This time we were headed to Digbeth's 'First Friday'- an event which sees the first Friday of each month come alive with open studios, live music and street food.

Digbeth, although obviously run down, to me had some kind of industrialised magic about it. I don't know whether it was the eerie atmosphere but I felt inspired to create something walking through the streets(almost definitely just me). I mean maybe it was just dark and I couldn't seen properly but I felt like I was in a movie and I was a really cool DIY scene artist walking through the wreckage and on my way to making some kind of masterpiece which would then make me rich, famous and never have to work again... so I recorded it.

I took sound recordings of the train journey and walking to the studios which I want to edit as a part of my sound for an enclosed space. I personally find trains (Especially London midland ones) quite claustrophobic, and the noise can be quite overwhelming- so there we have an enclosed space. In the future I hope to create my own area, with physical artwork that mirrors the sound. I am also going to layer the audio clips to try and make my audience feel involved in the whole narrative of the work, as if they're there with me, at the station, on the train, walking the streets.

Digbeth's first Friday, October 2016 

London Gallery Visit

Are we nearly there yet? 

I feel about 10 going on a school trip, walking with partners in a line. We leave the university at 8 and don't arrive in London til 12, suddenly I'm taking back every time I moaned about the 2 hour journey from Norwich to London.

James Richards at the ICA

Requests and Antisongs

Sketchbook page from the exhibition

William Eggleston at the National Portrait Gallery

Portraits

Sketchbook page from the exhibition

Tate Modern

Sketchbook pages from the exhibition

What comes first, the material or the idea?

Here are some photos that I look during the day. I wanted to look for structures and architecture that might be useful in my own work.