Recent Blog Posts

"If you're not loving what you're doing and really enjoying it, even if the process of doing it is hard and difficult, your best stop doing what you're doing and find out why you don't love it and start doing something else you do love ."

This week was our last guest speaker for the year. Which is really scary because this means my final year is almost at close. This was by far one of my favourite talks. Sian Bonnell is one of the most adorable people I've ever had the privilege of listening to. She had nothing but words of wisdom to share with us and I feel have benefited greatly from her talk. Her work is a this steady stream of quirky creativity, it's really something to behold!

Sian is at the end of one chapter of her life and is now moving into a new and exciting chapter, she is retiring. What she's finding both exciting and daunting is launching off into this new experience as a practitioner and an artist.

The first thing she shared with us was a three month residency in Rome at the British School at Rome in around 2011. Here she was reperforming renaissance gestures and movements that included Saint Dominic's Manners of Praying, paintings in Fra Angelico's cell Frescoes at S.Marco. She'd become interested in belief structures and instruction manuals. This project had been an overwhelming experience for her so much so that she couldn't talk about it. She actually felt shame in regards to this project and her experiences during this time.

Unsure of what she actually created why, she decided to do a PHD as a retrospective overview, which she completed in a year. This helped her to understand what she's been doing which was following something she calls 'wilful amateurism'. She describes this as practise functions within a paradoxical space between sculpture, performance and photography. It's made through her own lived domestic experiences and features play, imagination, dysfunction, irreverence, absurdity, chance and fiction; all which she uses in a photography setting and to inform her own understanding. 'Wilful amateurism' focuses on doing something because you love it.

"My camera became my sort of driver, my partner in crime, my provocateur and it still is."

She took us back into her past to 1979 when she was a sculpture student at Chelsea School of Art. Here she spoke to us about how she works by asking questions and through her second year project she thought 'what happens if I was to make my own rough elements and then put them together quite playfully' in response to the paintings of Cézanne who kickstarted Cubism. During this project she became infatuated with performative space. As she made it she had no idea what she was actually doing she was just following her gut instincts and only now, years later she can look back and understand what it was she was actually doing.

"You just need to replenish yourself, it's okay not to produce."

She went on to do a Masters but during this she struggled to make work for about 4/5 years as she questioned everything so much that it had brought her to a creative halt. Another piece of advice she gave us is that it's natural for us as practitioners and artists to stop making work at certain points. She informed us it was okay to become creatively stuck and that we just need to take a break, revive ourselves, and sure enough you'll be back doing what you love in no time.

As she moved even further into her practise she became more interested in the shape of land and what it signified. In around 2001 she had some Arts Council Funding and so she went to Holland. She'd been to Holland in the previous summer and had been fascinated at how flat the land was. This inspired to make the project 'Hills in Holland' where she set about using domesticated objects to create symbolic hills on Holland's very flat plains.

She spoke to us about a lot of work she's still working on and a lot she's already done. But these were my favourite parts of the talk. I love her work, and while her work won't influence how I make work in terms of aspiring to create similar work to hers, the words of wisdom she's parted with will influence how I practise. One of the last pieces of advice she gave us that I'm going to share with you was "do not be afraid of looking idiotic if it's going to get you to make some good work ... if you get ideas, no matter how daft you might think those ideas are, follow through always because you just don't know what's going to happen."

The talk has inspired me to be as creative as I possibly can within my own work and explore as many things and experiment with as many things as I can because even if it turns out horrible I will have gained something from it. Even if I come up with the most insane idea, that isn't entirely plausible, I can gain from it, I can learn from it and at the very least I can make some very interesting work with it. So once again, thank you Sian. It was an inspirational talk and I adore how fun, playful and creative your work is.