Going with the 'Flow" - Modern Art Oxford

Being involved in the online exhibition and collaboration ‘Flow’ at Modern Art Oxford has been both a joy and a revelation to me, particularly at a time when I had more or less written off 2020 as an exhibiting year.

It has been wonderful, too, to have a space in which to connect with other artists, even if this is still severely limited. There is so much to learn and enjoy from being able to talk about art with other artists and I do thank the team at Modern Art Oxford and all the participating curators and artists for bringing us all together and being generous and interested. I feel sure that this is a good source of reflection, development and future ideas for all of us.

The exhibition continues at Modern Art Oxford until 11 October but will continue on their website beyond that date. This blog entry is to pull together all the different strands of my contribution and all the activity around the exhibition as a whole:

You can visit “Flow” at Modern Art Oxford here: https://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/event/flow-online/

Laura Cumming’s review in The Observer (20 Sept 2020) can be read at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/sep/20/danh-vo-chicxulub-white-cube-bermondsey-review-flow-modern-art-oxford

Video extracts of my interview with Flow Co-Curator Jack Carrera:

"FLOW" - a collaborative online exhibition

The art world is beginning to open up once again after the coronavirus lockdown. I’ve used the time to try and be proactive about what might come after my MFA, and make some proactive applications to competitions and collaborations.

So, I’m especially excited that my drawing “A Crack In The Record” will be a part of a collaborative online exhibition called “Flow”, led by Modern Art Oxford and Oxford Brookes University, and I’m delighted to see it featured in part on MAO’s webpage. The show will open as an online exhibition running from 4 September to 11 October.

Click here to visit the MAO website: https://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/event/flow-online/

Image: Screengrab from the Modern Art Oxford website, showing details of “A Crack In The Record”. (July 2020)

The title “Flow” refers to the immersive, focused and productive state of mind which many people seek to cultivate as a means of being at their most productive, effective or creative,. It applies equally to sportspeople, those in business or academia, and of course to those in creative or artistic endeavours: musicians, writers, visual artists… the list goes on.

“A Crack in the Record” was the perfect piece to submit to a collaboration such as this, because it sits at the centre of a many of the conceptual and practical ideas in my ongoing MA project, the disused railway line to Amlwch, on Anglesey; and also because it works as a telling visual metaphor of the idea of “creative flow” itself. The process of making a large ink drawing by drawing approximately 150 concentric lines itself also opened up a highly absorbing and reflective space in which I could think deeply about what I was doing, and why, as I worked, and to witness that happening in real time throughout the process of creating this piece, which took place across five days. One has a lot of time to think in five days and it was highly beneficial and rewarding.

I’ll be exploring this more with my collaborative partners during the course of “Flow” and writing some more of my thoughts and experiences here on this blog.

Stay tuned!