Discussions with E. Genevier

As a part of this unit's dialogical approaches I decided to approach E. Genevier, a friend of mine who is in her third year of Fine Art. I was told by P. Grant that she would have concepts to the way I would work. If I approached her I would be able to get a more rounded understanding of the concepts that I am exploring.

As a result I arranged a lunch date with Genevier in her studio space, whereby she showed me her works that she was going to graduate with. One of the works includes a massive piece of tapestry where she would continuously embroider a dense stripe across the canvas. This requires a lot of attention and labour, and Genevier even described succumbing into a very meditative state of mind whilst working.

This certainly taught me that there was more to my concepts of materiality and labour. Initially I was slightly upset at how "unoriginal" my choice was to work within that concept. Eventually the realisation came that it wasn't about how "original" my working concept was, because originality as an artist is how I choose to approach that concept through my work.

I started drawing parallels between our work, since I enjoy working with my rice shoes for the same reason. What I enjoy about the concept of labour is the mindlessness that goes behind the act of creating, I enter the same meditative state of mind that Genevier talks about when dealing with her own embroidery.

However, some of the differences in our works is how she seems to be more motivated by the idea of women's communal labour. She describes that when "an entire group of women are sitting down to sew, the labour no longer seems like a chore." As a joke I had suggested that we should work side-by-side to motivate each other.