Blog 5
What my essay will be about:
As part the Art World module which spans both semesters this year, I'm going to have to write a 4,000-word essay. It is like an art history essay, other than the fact that we must write about ourselves and our own art practise for one third of it. As my project idea is about running, my essay will look at running as art, the links to the landscape, the body, data, mapping and land art. I need to focus on a couple of artists to study, which I am struggling with currently. As the subject of running within the art world hasn’t been done a lot before, as opposed to walking art for example, then the people that I might relate my practice to are limited. I think that I'm going to go with researching one walking or land artist, someone like Richard Long or Hamish Fulton, then one artist who's looking at the aesthetics of maps, drawing, data, relating to the visual language as opposed to the concept of my own work.
The people I have now chosen are, firstly, Michael Craig Martin, then Hamish Fulton. With Craig Martin, it’s not that his concepts have anything to do with running or even movement, but his philosophy of drawing as taking a line for a walk is very relatable to the way I'm working in my project. I am quite literally taking the line for a walk where I have been on a run. The visual quality of the lines and the clean shapes of my drawings are quite reminiscent of the bold outlined illustrations of Michael Craig Martin. The artists that we study for the essay also must be contemporary and living which has been a bit of a challenge and partly why I've chosen these artists.
I decided for the other artist to look at Hamish Fulton, who is quite similar to Richard Long in many ways, but I feel there is slightly more interest for me in his work related to walks and especially his text work and writing, that I connect to more than Richard Long’s. I have done a lot of projects using text in them which is another reason why I was more inclined to go with Hamish Fulton. He also has a lot of information out there about him as does Michael Craig Martin, so that I have enough material to write a long essay with. Whereas someone more obscure that are closer in theme to my own work, I might not find enough material about them. I now have these two people; one relates to my work more in concept and one relates in visual aesthetics. Then the third person in the essay is myself, which holds that triangle together and the question I want to ask in the essay can running be made into art and what does that look like.