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26/09/2024
In the first week of our program, we visited Tate Britain and was given a task to present the works that we were interested in. During the visit, two artists intrigued me:
Hatoum is a Palestinian artist. In this work, she uses olive oil soaps as her media. I love her choice in using soap; a daily commodity used to clean the body, and how the soaps are made out of olives; the native plant from her home country. I find the contrast of using a mundane yet intimate media to talk about a very serious issue like the Palestine Genocide very interesting.
Through Turner’s unfinished works I was able to see his explorations with the paint opacity to create impressions and blur. Turner also doesn’t clean the edges of his shapes, leaving them blurry, with colors blended with each other…. I personally love his choice of colors where some blues, and light greys and browns are also my favorite combination of colors.
His ‘unfinished’ works in Room 34 were titled ‘Experiments in the Canvas’. It might be categorized as unfinished works, but I started questioning this. How can the viewer, 200 years into the future tell that a work is unfinished? How finished should an artwork be? In a way, I think his works represent drawing a lot. The way he is able to show layers through his works by using oil paint as his medium, and the ‘unfinished’-ness of his work.
Through my visit to Tate Britain, I learned about context. An artwork’s context will always differ depending on when it’s being shown, to who, where it’s being shown, and how it’s being displayed. An artwork shown 50 years ago might have a different context if it is shown now. I also learned about the joy in creation in of itself😊. I was reminded by the gravity and the importance of liking what we do.