Through my engagement with various contemporary art scenes across and beyond the UK, I became fascinated by the untapped potential of the creative tension between the traditional and the modern in this country. The idea of working within a new city where I could further my ongoing exploration of the interface in a fresh contextual perspective thereby increasingly intrigued me.
The moving process to Nottingham was not easy but worth its challenges. When vacating my studio at the Royal College of Art, I decided to un-stretch all of my paintings to increase storage efficiencies and improve their mobility until the studio move-in date. Regardless of the subject matter of each painting, I assorted them into several groups, primarily by size. Looking back, this reductive process highlighted the materiality of painting for me. Bundles of linen sleeplessly collected dust while stacks of wooden stretchers devoured my temporary living quarters. The heightened weight and volume of the sodden materials instilled in me their physical presence as I heaved them up the narrow staircase of One Thoresby Street in the rain. Weighed down by the sheer heaviness of the materials, my past artistic endeavours to express the idea of weight in painting language for once became an interest on a par with the physicality of painting.
It is with this renewed understanding of the materiality of painting that I would like to revisit my as-yet-unfulfilled idea of conveying ‘musicality without sound’ in painting during my Studio Bursary with One Thoresby Street, Nottingham. By approaching my current concerns from a fresh, experimental perspective, I hope to develop a new visual language that will help to translate key components of music, such as rhythm, melody, harmony, tempo and colour into one of painting.
http://www.newcontemporaries.org.uk/projects/new-contemporaries-studio-bursary-with-one-thoresby-streethttp://www.newcontemporaries.org.uk/artists/seungjo-jeong