Coleen SelfBorn in United Kingdom. Lives in: London
The Slade School of Fine Art
I Have spent the past three summers in the United States, travelling mainly in the desert of California, where I took photos and gathered work ideas for the academic years following. I continued this investigation with my dissertation, completed in year three of my BA of four years. I studied Jean Baudrillard and Robert Irwin concerning the desert of America and how this specific type of travel might affect an artistic practice and the mind. It is a place of freedom, expression and pilgrimage yet paradoxically a very controlled space where all sorts of gang culture exists and governmental experiments and testing goes on beyond the surface. With this as my starting point of interest I continued to translate my ideas and in my final year I focused on more sculptural pieces, where I used found objects, manipulating them and playing with fact and fiction and storytelling. I tried to escape from the white cube gallery format with the installation of work, I borrowed aspects from museological display, I manipulated the space using lighting and choice of floor colour. I visited the museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles which was an influence when considering the installation of my work. One piece in my degree show was 'Goodluck darlin' I hope you win', a 1964 Honda motorbike which I worked on from january-March 2012, using various different fillers to build up the body of the bike and then completely covering it in sand in order for it to become a desert bike, a modern day fossil which could have been abandoned on the road. Through this simple combination of elements it enabled me to talk about the nature of time in the desert, abandonment and fate with both speed and stillness, the bike is the lone rider's weapon of speed and the sand represents thousands of years of geological time passing.
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Work of art I would like to makeIn the previous section I spoke about the desert bike, which was one of the main pieces I installed in my degree show, I had a lot of interest and feedback from this piece and I think that out of all the pieces in my show it has potential to expand on, I would like to make an entire body of work using this technique. I visualize creating an installation of sand sculptures from existing objects, potentially larger than the bike, an all encompassing installation talking about life, disaster abandonment and time, referencing the remains of mount vesuvius, which is a place I would love to eventually visit. I am interested in the work of Paul Thek and Mike Nelson and I envisage the installation having a similar flavour to their work, I am excited by the work being about discovery and would like it to be unconventional in the sense of actually being able to discover the work in a gallery, come across it in a similar way that one may have wandered across the Chauvet caves of southern france, tucked away yet strangely powerful. A few examples of objects I have considered using are cars or parts of cars, a caravan, a crucifix, a tree, exercise bike with mannequin. This piece is sincere and from a keen interest in the merging of history and present day, questioning and breaking down of belief. |
My Artworks (6)
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