Captivating with a caption

Summarising a year's worth of work into a single paragraph was no mean feat...

My Fine Art degree came to a head with the Degree Show, aptly titled Create Curate. Of course, when the show was open to the public, we put away all of our contextual research folders, sketchbooks and copious amounts of lecture notes, so the viewers had to form some kind of an understanding of the meaning of the work, based solely on what they could see in front of them, with only a small paragraph on the wall as guidance. 

I enjoyed the challenge of refining my year of work into a single paragraph - it wasn't just about describing what the viewer could see, but about why I did what I did, and how I even did it. 

For a bit of background, the final piece was made up of a few separate but interlinked elements. The main focal point was the floor-to-ceiling structure, comprised of wooden beams that were seemingly fragile and resting on each other for support, and tied together with duct tape (although really they were safely screwed together and to the floor). The structure was adorned with plaster casts coated in sand that I had made at the beach. I mixed the plaster powder with seawater, and poured the plaster directly into markings in the sand. I filmed the ritualistic making processes, and edited the footage, and then projected it onto the structure, so that the filmed making process flickered and danced over the beams and casts. 

A smaller wooden structure was assembled next to the larger one, and featured a single plaster cast on top. The footage projected onto this was the process of me making the same wooden structure in situ on the beach, and adding the plaster cast - the filmed version of the structure lined up perfectly with its physical counterpart. 

This was the resulting caption:

'My current practice explores the relationship between what we deem to be permanent, tangible and present, juxtaposed with the temporary, intangible and absent, and the extent to which the boundaries between these opposing concepts can be considered fluid. I am exploring this through gestures, as they are ephemeral yet can be visualised on surfaces. This interest was partially sparked by the action of scooping my arm into a bag of plaster, and contemplating how the action of making a work could become the subject.'