Catherine McCaw-Aldworth

As a year group we have recently held a silent auction called stretched to raise money in order so that we could have a show in London. The auction went really well and we raised over £1700 which is insanely good! We were all given a small square canvas and got told to make some work for it, I made a small fluid painting with a classical Greek statue in the middle. A simple style and piece that linked to work I am currently doing. Looking at the other works that were submitted I think that I could have put more effort and thought into my piece but at the time I was not sure what to make and I have also never made work to be sold before and so I wasn’t sure what to expect from it. overall, I am happy with the work and very proud with everyone’s efforts to make this happen!

I have been working towards the first crit show of the academic year, at first, I found it quite difficult to think of a piece that was ambitious and that pushed me enough. After many talks with tutors and crit’s I thought about pushing the small-scale circular paintings and wax figurines and make them a lot bigger. I went into the wood workshop and made a large circular MDF board approximately five foot five, the same height as me. Unfortunately, there wasn’t one board big enough to cut out the shape and so I had to use three separate boards and use metal screw attachments to join them together. This meant that the finished board had two lines on it but I was able to cover the smaller line with paint so that it wasn’t too noticeable but the larger line was very visible, something I need to work on a solution for. I have only done small scale circular fluid paintings and so this size was a big leap for me, I tried to use the same method as I do with smaller pieces but it took about t...

I have had some time this week to play around in the studio and get some larger pieces of work done, trying to push myself with scale and the ambition of my work. A big problem with my work is struggling to let go and allow the work to just happen, I think too much about what others will think of the work. I got two larger canvases and filmed my painting process. The longest part about the paintings is the mixing of the paint with the chemicals and mediums that I use. Overall to mix them all it takes about 45 minutes. Then the painting on the canvas takes 10-15 minutes. I wanted to continue with this experimentation of merging painting and sculpture. I had a couple of body casts from last year sitting in my studio but they were starting to deteriorate and so I took them into the plater workshop to give them a quick go over and build them up to look a bit rougher. I then simply laid them on top of the painting to take some photos. I really like the outcome of these piece...

The Fine Art department in UCA is fortunate enough to have its own show space called the Offside Project Space. We are encouraged to show in this space as much as possible to test new ideas, build up portfolio, to get more confident in showing work and to get more feedback on work. I have been working more with the painting and sculpture merging, experimenting with colour contrast, scale and shape. For this show I gathered three of my fellow students and we decided that the popup show would be centred around the body and fragmentation. The themes that we look at it in our individual practices are somewhat similar with fragile theoretical links, this created a really great tension in the show and in a way it all flowed together to create a sweep of exciting work.

Our show Cut-and-Shut was a great success and I was lucky to receive lots of positive feedback from the show and also some critical feedback suggesting how I could go further with the piece. We were lucky enough to have Jo Bushnell, the director of Aspex Gallery Portsmouth come to have a private look of the show and give feedback of all the work by doing a walk through crit tutorial, it is linked below.