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Goldin, N. (2022), ‘Why “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” Endures in the Twenty-First Century’ Retrieved from:

https://aperture.org/editorial/why-the-ballad-of-sexual-dependency-endures-in-the-twenty-first-century/

[Accessed 2nd March 2023]

Heawood, S. (2021), ‘The Hungover Games’ published by:

Penguin Random House, ISBN: 9781784707644, ‘Chapter 29’ Page 204 – 205

Mendick, L. (2022), ‘Till Death Do Us Part’ Retrived from:

http://lindseymendick.com/c-v

[Accessed 1st March 2023]

Neimark, J. (2022), ‘With memory so malleable, can we ever know what’s real?’ Retrieved from:

https://www.openmindmag.org/articles/it-shifts-it-morphs

[Accessed 5th March 2023]

Robson, D. ‘Our fiction addiction: Why humans need stories’ Retrieved from:

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180503-our-fiction-addiction-why-humans-need-stories

[Accessed 5th March 2023]

Serpentine. (2021), ‘Jennifer Packer: The eye is not Satisfied with Seeing’ Retrieved from:

https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/jennifer-packer/

[Accessed 2nd March 2023]

Takac, B. (2019), ‘How Art Immitates Life in Tracey Emin’s Bed’ Retrieved from:

https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/tracey-emin-my-bed

[Accessed 4th March 2023]

Tate. ‘Turner Prize 1993 Artists: Rachel Whiteread’ Retrieved from:

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/turner-prize-1993/turner-prize-1993-artists-rachel-whiteread

[Accessed 1st March 2023]

The Wardrobe Ensemble. (2020), ‘The Last of the Pelican Daughters’ published by:

Nick Herne Books, ISBN: 9781848429352

The Wardrobe Ensemble. (2020), ‘The Last of the Pelican Daughters’ published by:

Nick Herne Books, ISBN: 9781848429352, ‘Chapter Four: Dinner’ Page 32

Young, L. (2017), ‘“Torso”, Rachel Whiteread, 1988’ Retrieved from:

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/whiteread-torso-t15485

[Accessed 1st March 2023]

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With Memory So Malleable, Can We Ever Know What’s Real?

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Our own skewed memories are part of the misinformation glut, so when you remember something for sure, it can’t hurt to pause and query your truth.

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This subject area relates to the bigger picture of my work because I am fundamentally interested in exploring human interactions, whether that be with people or objects. A conceptually relevant piece I made in specialism was the ‘Conversation Table’, where I investigated bringing a tangibility to the ephemeral nature of speech, specifically capturing a conversation that had already happened between my family in our living room. This was the first time I explored a space in which humans inhabit, deciding to focus on how objects within that space were affected. Ultimately, I immortalised the conversation by painting it onto living room furniture.

Materials I have enjoyed exploring throughout specialism have included ceramics, especially the slab building technique to create crisp, angular outcomes. I have also handmade floral details, focusing a lot more on moulding the clay, a technique which I feel will be interesting to bring into my FMP. I aim to continue painting throughout FMP, especially having explored incorporating other materials to create textured paintings with a strong narrative. In my piece inspired by ‘The Tempest’, I feel I successfully manipulated chiffon with oil paint to realise Shakespeare’s vision of creating a storm contrived from magic. Ideally, my FMP will include both sculptural and painted elements, creating an immersive thought-provoking outcome.

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Our fiction addiction: Why humans need stories

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From fireside folk tales to Netflix dramas, narratives are essential to every society – and evolutionary theorists are now trying to figure out why, writes David Robson.

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Torso' was the first of many castings of hot water bottles Whiteread did and I think it reflects how Whiteread views life as one great event, often casting forgotten spaces of domestic objects. This is quite relevant to my work as the objects she brings attention to often reflect the emotional resonance of everyday objects, by capturing evidence of previous human interaction with the object.

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Nan Goldin 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency' - photography

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Nan Goldin 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency' - photography

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‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ is an honest depiction of New York’s party scene and gay culture in the 1970s and 80s. What struck me was Goldin’s reasoning for creating the work. Her determination to immortalise the memories of her friends through photography seemed to stem from the pain caused by losing the memory of her sister, who passed when she was young. To me, this raises questions for my FMP of the importance of immortalising memory, as in Goldin’s case, it’s to bring comfort in the knowledge that her memories exist in a permanent, physical state and therefore cannot be forgotten.

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Why “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” Endures in the Twenty-First Century

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Thirty-five years after the publication of her iconic photobook, Nan Goldin reflects on a record of life that nobody could revise.

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‘My Bed’ intrigued me because of its reflective tone, laying bare the objects that Emin frequented during a depressive period. This work has led me to think about who I want the audience of my work to be, as here, the female items e.g. period stained clothes, elevated the anxieties of life as a woman, allowing it to resonate strongly with a female audience.

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The end of the 1980s brought the emergence of a generation of artists determined to reject the artistic traditions imposed by the academia and present an entirely new and, at the time, rather shocking aesthetic. Those young people were the graduates of The Goldsmiths and Royal College of Art classes 1987 - 1990 and they became known as the Young British Artists - YBAs. Some developed successful careers and gained international fame, despite the enfant terrible behavior, the best example being Tracey Emin, who even became a Royal Academician of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Emin had her first solo show in 1993 titled called My Major Retrospective. She also ran The Shop with the fellow artist Sarah Lucas (where the two used to sell merch) and made the now iconic tent Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995. Emin became publicly noticed as a demanding, difficult, and some may even say scandalous figure, after appearing on a Channel 4 television program in 1997 while commenting that year's Turner Prize drunk and apparently ignoring the topic.

Just a year later, the artist made her most famous work called My Bed, an installation or rather a ready-made; it was Emin's actual bed in which she spent a couple of days while struggling with an emotional breakdown. With this work, she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999 and the same year My Bed was exhibited at the Tate Gallery.

One of the most controversial artworks of the 1990s, still perceived as a powerful manifestation of vulnerability, My Bed is a specific self-portrait that offers everybody a chance to identify or project one's own painful experience.

Tracey Emin - My Bed, 1998. Mattress, linens, pillows and objects, 31 x 83 x 92 1/8 in (79 x 211 x 234 cm)

Tracey Emin - My Bed

Tracey Emin was inspired by the difficult depressive phase she's been through while just lying in bed without eating and just drinking alcohol. After coming to her senses, the artist realized the horror she found herself in. After the work was shown publicly, it stirred various reactions, and some critics even ridiculed it by stating that anybody can display a messy bed. My Bed was especially targeted for having sheets covered with menstrual blood stains and secretions, as well as items gathered from the artist's room such as underwear with menstrual blood stains, condoms, and everyday objects such as slippers.

My Bed has to be perceived in the context of the Emin's background, especially the fact she was sexually assaulted at the age of 13; five years later, the artist became pregnant and had an abortion - two crucial traumas which framed her practice in the realm of confession.

A few scholars even made a parallel between the practice of Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois, who based her oeuvre on personal experiences and explorations of the female body and sexuality, while the press made a comparison to the French artist Sophie Calle, known for producing artworks based on personal emotional and sexual struggles.

Tracey Emin Speaking About My Bed

Further Interpretation

There is also the context of the time in which My Bed was produced. The late 1990s were marked by the rise of reality TV, the emergence of social networks, and public personas. Emin's work is, therefore, not only personal but also performative and participative, since it invites the beholders to (metaphorically) plunge into it and delve into their own experiences.

There is also a feminist connotation of the work which recalls the famous maxim "personal is political". Although Emin does not consider herself a feminist artist, she stated once that she is a feminist. In favor of this claim is the fact that the artist did not just employ themes of her own female experience, but she also used textiles, a medium reaffirmed by the 1970s feminist artists.

Editors' Tip: Tracey Emin: Works 2007-2017

Moving chronologically through a prolific decade of work-from major public installations to recent reflective paintings and sculptures-this book shows a coherent vision that defies the idiosyncrasies of Emin's evolution as an artist. The same mixture of anger, hope, curiosity, and vulnerability that informs her delicate drawings and handwritten neon works can be felt in the darker tones of recent monoprints and the weight of later bronze pieces. Written by Jonathan Jones, whose text places Emin's work in a broad art-historical context and sees this recent decade of her artwork as an entry point to examining her full career, this is a beautiful monograph on one of the world's most influential living artists.

The Popularity and Art Commercial Status of Tracey Emin's Bed

Just after it was installed in 1999 at Tate Gallery, performance artists Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi felt inspired, so they jumped on the bed with bare torsos and had a pillow fight to improve the work. Their action was simply titled Two Naked Men Jump Into Tracey's Bed, and it lasted fifteen minutes until they were removed from the premises by security guards.

Despite various speculations regarding the originality of the work from the press, scholars, and fellow artists, Emin's piece gained the cult status that was confirmed after My Bed was purchased by the famous patron of the YBAs, Charles Saatchi, in 2001 for £150,000 and displayed in the first exhibition at the opening of the Saatchi Gallery.

However, in 2014 it was announced that the work is about to be auctioned, so David Maupin of Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Emin's dealer in New York, estimated it is going to be sold for the £800,000 - £1.2 million. Finally, My Bed was sold via Christie's for a sum of over or £2.5 million.

During that time, Tracey Emin already earned a prestigious professorship at London's Royal Academy of Arts and was named by BBC Radio 4 as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom. Her works found their way in the collections of Elton John and George Michael, and the market value of her works is not in decline for years now.

It seems that My Bed paved the way to the critical reception of Emin's practice by making her an authentic art figure whose specific approach differs from the rest of the Young British Artists.
Featured image: Tracey Emin - My Bed, 1998. Contemporary Installation. Image via Flickr. All images via Creative Commons.

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How Art Imitates Life in Tracey Emin's Bed | Widewalls

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The end of the 1980s brought the emergence of a generation of artists determined to reject the artistic traditions imposed by the academia and present an entirely new and, at the time, rather shocking aesthetic. Those young people were the graduates of The Goldsmiths and Royal College of Art classes 1987 - 1990 and they became known as the Young British Artists - YBAs .

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Sophie Heawood 'The Hungover Games' - memoir 

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Sophie Heawood 'The Hungover Games' - memoir 

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This extract from Heawood’s memoir stood out to me as it memorialises her memories of going to raves through the written word. She relates the feeling of freedom she felt when raving to her experience of becoming a mother, expressing how she wishes her daughter “the joy of being anyone, lost in the darkness, answerable only to the molecules”.

This relates to the subject I’m exploring interestingly as Heawood compares the feelings experienced during the event of a rave to the feelings experienced during the event of everyday life. I feel that through Heawood’s words, a sense of longing for her memories of raving to be physicalised is created. She also talks about the disconnect between different people in everyday life disappearing at ‘the dance’, and I think it could be interesting to explore the liberation that comes from feeling like “nobody and nothing” and whether this ceases to exist after the party is over.

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Jennifer Packer 'The Eye is not Satisfied with Seeing' - paintings

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Jennifer Packer 'The Eye is not Satisfied with Seeing' - paintings

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Painting is a medium I want to explore throughout my FMP, taking inspiration from Packer, who utilises the fluid qualities of oil paint to mirror the fluid qualities of memory. I want to explore applying the paint to create suggestions of objects and their relationship to people.

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"My inclination to paint, especially from life, is a completely political one. We belong here. We deserve to be seen and acknowledged in real time. We deserve to be heard and to be imaged with shameless generosity and accuracy." - Jennifer Packer

This exhibition, the artist's first outside of the US, includes paintings and drawings from the past decade alongside recent work.

Combining observation, improvisation and memory, Packer's intimate portraits of friends and family members and flower still paintings insist on the emotional and physical essence of the contemporary Black lives she depicts. While the casual repose of her portraits is the result of her care for the sitters, Packer acknowledges her choice to paint figures as political, stating: 'Representation and particularly, observation from life, are ways of bearing witness and sharing testimony'.

Jennifer Packer's paintings recalibrate art historical approaches to these enduring genres, casting them in a political and contemporary light, while rooted in a deeply personal context. On occasion, Packer describes her flower compositions as funerary bouquets and vessels of personal grief; these paintings about loss are often made in response to tragedies of state and institutional violence against Black Americans.

Featuring 34 works dated from 2011 to 2020, the exhibition presents portraits of artists from Packer's New York circle, monochromatic paintings, intimate interiors and flower still lifes including Say Her Name (2017), painted in response to the suspicious death of Sandra Bland, a Black American woman who is largely believed to have been murdered while in police custody in 2015. The exhibition also includes drawings which for Packer are rarely just a study but hold a weight of their own that differs from paintings.

Visit our online shop here to purchase a copy of the exhibition catalogue, Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing.

To be kept up to date with ticket releases please sign up to our e-newsletter here
For further information on facilities and access please visit here

Listen to Jennifer Packer in Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

https://serpentine-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/03/Jennifer-Packer-x-HUO_mixdown.mp3

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Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing

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New York-based painter Jennifer Packer's first institutional solo exhibition outside of the US.

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Through the work I’ve created so far, there is a link to the idea of memory as memorialisation, so I want to explore this further in my FMP. I need to think about the type of event I am going to explore, as I’ve looked at both grief and parties, which have very different connotations. I also need to explore the many manifestations of memorialising and what forms my work could possibly exist in.

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I explored my experience of this in my work, creating a photography-based publication, with pictures during and after various parties. It struck me how photography acted as a means to memorialise an event, capturing a moment in time, acting as a catalyst for the viewer to remember what happened in the moments prior or after. From creating this work, I feel that an interesting starting point would be to explore ways that parties, as an event, are memorialised. I’m often fascinated by how many social interactions involve the telling of stories, often involving events from various parties. I could explore how the influence of alcohol can impacts the events that occur during a party, as they break social barriers and allows people to become closer faster. I want to explore the act of telling stories as a way to memorialise events as a potential starting point. It’s interesting how the recounting of an event, if communicated in verbal form, will slightly change with every telling. I feel this has links to the idea of memory being fluid and constantly changing. It begs the question, if something is memorialised, does this have to be in such a permanent fixed way?

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Another point of inspiration for my chosen subject area was a publication I made. I drew inspiration for this publication from reading ‘Chapter Four: Dinner’ of that same play. Although I looked at the same play, the tone of my work was very different, as I brought out the humour of the ‘messy memories’ I had from attending various parties. From looking at this scene of the play, I mostly wanted to channel it’s ‘dinner party’ aspect, looking at the idea of people coming together, with the sole intention being to have a good time.

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The outcome of this exploration was a tactile piece, making a ceramic tissue box with printed tissues for the audience to extract from the box and keep. Whilst creating this box, I was looking at flowers as a motif, especially exploring funeral flowers and how they are used to decorate death in an attempt to honour the beauty of life, distracting from the pain of the early stages of grief. Here, I was inspired by ceramicist Vanessa Hogge, who creates intricate floral vessels out of porcelain, of which I see as having a gentle, calming quality that I wanted to mimic in my piece. I could use the significance of objects and possessions for memorialising an event as a starting point.

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Inspiration - objects  influencing grief

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Inspiration - objects  influencing grief

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I was inspired to explore this concept from previous work I’ve created where I explored objects left behind after someone’s died and how this affects grief, especially as one’s possessions can often act a trigger of memory. This idea stemmed from reading the play ‘The Last of the Pelican Daughters’ by The Wardrobe Ensemble, where four daughters visit their family home and reminisce about their late mother. It was lines such as “a strange smell that never quite goes away” and the stage direction “the four daughters enter […] wearing the same red dress”, that reinforced this idea of the mothers looming presence within the house, a presence that would linger as long as her objects continued to existed within that space.

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The Last of The Pelican Daughters

by The Wardrobe Ensemble

The Wardrobe Ensemble, Complicite and Royal and Derngate, Northampton co-production

Written and created by the company

​

Cast

Tom England, Emily Greenslade, Sara Lessore, Kerry Lovell, Jesse Meadows, Helena Middleton, James Newton, Ben Vardy

​

Directed by

Jesse Jones & Tom Brennan

Design

Ruby Spencer Pugh

Lighting

Jessica Hung Han Yun

Sound

Benjamin Grant

Dramaturg

Bea Roberts

Assistant Director

Georgia Tillery
Wardrobe Supervisor
Hannah Marshall
Associate Sound Designer
Joe Dines

Production Manager
The Production Family

Technical Stage Manager
Fergus Waldron
Stage Manager
Maddy Wade
Assistant Stage Manager
Will Edwards
Production Photography
Graeme Braidwood
Show Image
James Bullimore
Poster Design
Will Brady

Additional material by Oliver Alvin-Wilson, Kayode Ewumi, Paul Hunter,

Shaheen Khan, Temi Wilkey and Edythe Woolley

The Intergenerational Download the workshop Email
Workshop Pack

A digital version of the company's Intergenerational workshop. Created for the tour of 'The Last of the Pelican Daughters' (Spring 2020) and adapted to respond to the Covid-19 crisis.

here.

emily@thewardrobeensemble.com

In folklore, pelican mothers feed their young on their own blood. In 2019, four sisters are trying to divide their mother's house between them.

​

Joy wants a baby, Storm wants to be seen, Sage wants to be paid, Maya doesn't want anyone to find out her secret and Granny's in a wheelchair on day release. Mum's presence still seeps through the ceiling and the floors. The Pelican Daughters are home for the last time.

​

The Wardrobe Ensemble, creators of their acclaimed Education, Education, Education, use their trademark irreverent humour and lovable characters to tackle the idea of what it means for young people to grapple with inheritance, loss and justice in this comedy about four sisters trying to come to terms with their mother's death.

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The Last of The Pelican Daughters | thewardrobeensemble

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Written and created by the company ​ Cast Tom England, Emily Greenslade, Sara Lessore, Kerry Lovell, Jesse Meadows, Helena Middleton, James Newton, Ben Vardy ​ Directed by Jesse Jones & Tom Brennan Design Ruby Spencer Pugh Lighting Jessica Hung Han Yun Sound Benjamin Grant Dramaturg Bea Roberts Assistant Director Georgia

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The general subject area that I would like to explore throughout my FMP is the aftermath of events. Specifically, looking at ‘the aftermath’ as evidence of a previous lived experience and how the objects left behind after an event allude to the human emotions experienced during the event.

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Through exploring the concept of a lingering presence after death, I've been looking at memorialising objects or events to capture the human activity that once took place within that space/involving those objects. By casting the negative space of a house in concrete, I feel that Whiteread is materialising the intangible - capturing suggestions of a previous existence within that space.

I think Whiteread's work has a strong link to the themes explored in 'The Last of the Pelican Daughters', with the exploration of life as an event. Through her work, Whiteread honours the mundane, picking up on the way that human interaction with a domestic space forever alters the objects existing within that space. Granny's quote, explores the same concept but in a more human way, instead looking at the lasting impact one persons life has on another.

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Rachel Whiteread House 1993
Photo: Sue Omerod © Rachel Whiteread

Employing traditional casting methods and materials that are commonly used in the preparation of sculptures rather than for the finished object, such as plaster, rubber and resin, Rachel Whiteread makes sculptures of the spaces in, under and on everyday objects.

Her art operates on many levels: it captures and gives materiality to the sometimes unfamiliar spaces of familiar life (bath, sink, mattress or chair), transforming the domestic into the public; it fossilises everyday objects in the absence of human usage; and it allows those objects to stand anthropomorphically for human beings themselves.

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Turner Prize 1993 artists: Rachel Whiteread | Tate

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Employing traditional casting methods and materials that are commonly used in the preparation of sculptures rather than for the finished object, such as plaster, rubber and resin, Rachel Whiteread makes sculptures of the spaces in, under and on everyday objects.

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I have recently been exploring the material quality of clay and the connotations it holds in terms of its fragility and longevity. Mendick displays her ceramics within installations, playing on conventions of traditional ceramics by adding elements of the grotesque and the absurd. During my FMP, I want to follow this idea of worldbuilding, creating a wider space for my artwork to exist in. I've began exploring immersive artwork, an idea I want to bring through to my FMP, by thinking about the audiences experience when engaging with the art.

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“I could have never imagined giving birth to such a family. To such a group of people. Look at them. Look at the way they move. All of this, through me. Through my daughter, my granddaughters. Same blood. Very. Different. Life. Carrying this blood, into what? Into heaven knows what. Tearing each other apart.” – Granny

A sense of connection across generations is present in this extract, heightened by the fluid language, with ‘through’ and ‘carrying’, repeated throughout the quote. This reflects the journey of blood through generations, as granny continues to feel her daughter (who's passed away) presence through her granddaughters, suggesting the idea that an individual does not cease to exist after they’re dead, but instead continues existing through family, most strongly through life they’ve created.