The progress was slow and frankly at times difficult. It was a strain physically and mentally. which is odd because it is just banging in nails right? But it was tough. It is the most challenging work I've done, period. It is my own journey though. Whether i do well or not in terms of marks is a different issue entirely. i have LEARNT so much this term. This is expression, it has made me happy. As odd as that sounds but it's true. I am happy to be working on this.

The thing is. During my first year i really fought hard to be the same as i had been at sixth form. I painted and i drew and people liked that. I did too. Hyper real stuff or expressive painting was fun and i wanted to stick to that because it worked. I think i properly dug my heals in to stay exactly the same as i had always been.

This year, well this term. I think i have stopped trying to fight the idea of staying inside my little bubble. This is so far from my comfort zone but the more i have worked the more i have had fun. This isn't leaving my comfort zone. This is making my comfort zone bigger.

  The grid was a great idea and i am so glad i stuck with it. It's uniform nature is stunning to look at it. it is a scale that is so vast you don't know where to look. Its inescapable and impressive if i say so myself. 

However i didn't just jump straight to the grid. Several ideas were scrapped or developed in the early stages. Nails brushed under a rug was an idea at one point. The Cliche of a coffin filled with nails (awful i know), even an upturned chair with the nails hammered in underneath it. 

This curious creature is one of those tests. It is possible that this is the next step along this evolutionary tree of mine from nails to nails. This is the latter. Its funny how nails and a glue gun molded base can form such an organic object. I had thought of it as 'the nails deforming the glue'. During my tutor time, another spin was placed on it. That the objects are without form until they are put together. this isn't deformation. It its formation. It is creation. 

It offers up the prospect that there may well be progression for what i have started in first term. I cant wait to get started. 

the sign of progress...

Sooooooooo... This is my new workshop. Seriously... Look at it! i love it, its perfect.

 Long story short i was previously in the LICA building but apparently i was making so much noise that it was bugging the office. Downstairs. I am about 2000 nails in and a lady came in, looked at me and asked if i would be done any time soon... with 6000 nails or so to go i said no and gave an involuntary and possibly comedic glance from work, to lady, back to work and then back to lady... apparently hammering is all the office can hear and its deeply annoying for them. Silly them for getting a career in an art studio if they don't like noise. However i asked around and have been given asylum in the theatre workshop which suits me just fine. 

When you mass produce and package nails, there are bound to be a few mistakes in the machinery. a few tiny little errors which allow the wrong nail on accident into the box. Round heads winding up in oval head boxes, that sort of thing. I really didn't mind that at all. i felt it added far more than it detracted. Especially given their representation. I began to imagine these oddities that the keen eyed audience member would likely spot and draw attention to. They remind me of the stories that make the headlines. The one in one million photos and stories that reach us. the ones we spot and care about and forget the millions just like it. That is why i hammer them in just like the others. Because they will be spotted and talked about. Whilst the others will be forgotten, lost in the masses. 

These are the photos we see. The boy on the beach in Turkey. The girl running in Vietnam. The falling man on the 11th of September 2001. They are the round head nails in a sea of oval ones.

  Progress is slow. it is time consuming and a surprising stretch on the mind. The rhythm of the hammer i could get used to but accidentally catching my own thumb now and again. Nope that sucks but at least i can say that i'm giving it a good go.

The more i went about my recording the more i generally from the nails more aesthetically pleasing as well. As weird as it sounds, when they are uniform in large groups, equally spaced. They look, kind of cool.

 A fifth or so of the way in. Its funny. This project to do this single piece, it was, still is, my own journey. Not like those who have traveled by sea and faced death, lost loved ones for which this piece represents. But a journey non the less. I have stepped well beyond my boundaries and have become a refugee of my own experiences. Forced away from my comfort zone of what i accept to be 'good' art and into this new and hostile world of art. I'm alone on this journey, searching for new things, hoping to expand and find a new safe zone somewhere out there. For now however i have made this journey beyond painting and drawing and you know, this piece means more to me than a lot of my work, and i want it to find success.

 

Below:
A long day of nailing in several hundred nails by hand. I wondered about fiddling with the pressure on a nail gun so that the nails came out with less force, thus giving the same effect. Somehow though given the nature of the work. I felt it almost my job to do it by hand. For the sake of those i am representing, i owe them that much at least.

 The confident beginning.

Why nails?
was what i was immediately asked. out of all the building materials i had available it seemed like rather an odd call. I remember during my tutor session that it had been an early question. lacking the funds, resources and time of Ai Wei Wei but still trying to achieve that level of awe was challenging but ultimately nails are a good source to use. i mean yes they are cheap and plentiful from an art perspective.

But go deeper than that. Nails are many, forgotten, hidden away, we use them and ignore them. They are needed and are everywhere yet we don't care for them despite the fact that they are essential. We lose them and replace them without thought. There is an irony to this and a relation to the Refugees.

That is why i chose nails.

 There was a problem with the glue gun work. frankly i found it boring. i'm writing in the past because although i have recorded, made notes and sketches along the way. i have not made it digital until now.
but yes the polygon stuff was boring. i mean aesthetically it was pretty and interesting but it was a cosmetic project, it was skin deep.

 i began looking into things which actually interest me. the news of the world and the train crash that has been 2016. through it all though the refugee crisis in Syria struck a cord with me. the iconic images yes of course but more than that i was moved by the scale of it. the numbers involved. it seemed like a human migration on a biblical scale as four million people in Syria became refugees. 4 million. 4,000,000!. after a little while it hit me that this was something that i was interested enough in. Something which meant something more. the aesthetics came second place to expression. isn't that what we are all about?
i looked at art by  Ai Wei Wei and his work which saw 2,500 life jackets placed in neat rows in parliament square and took inspiration from looking into the representation of massive numbers behind the headlines. whilst i didn't have the resources he did. it was a challenge and something i wanted to tackle head on.

i came up with this.
A 90cm by 90cm grid with 10cm worth of border round the outside. The board would be filled with ninety rows of ninety nails, with eight thousand one hundred in total. Making each insignificant, one and a half inch boring, low quality oval head nail (the most common in existence) represent five hundred men, women and children... each. as there are four million refugees who have had to flee their homes since the war began in Syria.

So each nail is representative of 500 individuals.
once i had mapped out my grid, the seriously grueling task of hammering began.