An imagined space

One of the challenges of pulling together a body of work for my MA this year has been the uncertainty surrounding whether or not we would have a physical show on graduation. We were all faced with the challenge of making work that would potentially only be viewed digitally, rather than in real life.

It turns out that these questions prompted some interesting new experiments, which I think are likely to continue to influence my art practice. The first of these involved my attempts to build my own virtual gallery space using Cinema 4D. I know you can use various platforms to get this built for you but I wanted to see what could be achieved if you started from scratch and without the need to follow a template.

I started out thinking that I would be able to build a space that could use virtual reality so that people could walk around it and get up close to the paintings and appreciate scale and texture in a way that is often lacking on a static webpage. However, the computer gremlins had other ideas and after my Mac bit the dust I ended up having to rebuild the space from scratch on a new machine. Getting this as a VR enabled space is probably not going to happen imminently. The learning curve seems vertical at the moment but I’m really enjoying what these new tools offer and the artistic questions that they pose.

Below are some initial plans for how a virtual gallery space might look that holds all the paintings, videos, photographs and installations from my MA portfolio. One day I hope to be skilled enough to be able to create a space that will allow people to walk around it virtually from the comfort of their own home. The artistic possibilities for creating bespoke spaces is really exciting. And of course, why constrain it to existing gallery models? What is the best way of showing art virtually? Well, that’s a question I’ve yet to resolve but exploring the possibilities I think will lead to lots of exciting times ahead.