Sophie Ashdown

I have still been struggling with my research topic but I’m getting closer… I think.

After realising that my last “big idea” to look at artists and personality types was not going to be viable, I went back to the drawing board.

I spent time reading and researching but without a distinct plan. I kept getting sidetracked during the research by finding some obscure artist or art movement that I wanted to find out more about, but it wasn’t ultimately getting me to where I needed to be.

So I decided to take a more scientific approach to the research. (I hope Ben Salt would be proud.) I knew that I wanted to research something to do with Constructivism, but it needed to be combined with something I’m genuinely interested in. And I wanted to learn about new artists along the way.

I started by reviewing the core components of Constructivism, and what it is that keeps me interested in the movement. Key to these are:

• Geometric elements
• Abstract form
• Solid shapes
• Lines
• Mathematical construction
• Architectural references
• Machine aesthetic
• Bold patterns
• Concise colour pallette

What have I been inspired by recently?:

• Electric Dreams exhibition at Tate Modern
• Information is Beautiful book by David McCandless [McCandless, D. (2009) Information is beautiful. London: Collins.]
• Reading “The Creative Act: A Way of Being” (expect a whole blog about this one) [Rubin, R. and Strauss, N. (2023) The creative act: a way of being. Edinburgh: Canongate.]
• My pattern drawings over the past six months
• Feedback at the New Constructivist show in April

Then I considered what are the key things outside of art, that I am interested in? (In no particular order!):

• Patterns
• Everything monochrome
• Music
• Travel
• Technology
• Data
• Wine
• Fitness
• Protecting the planet
• Veganism
• Personal relationships
• My cat

As much as I would love to write 4000 words about my cat, I don’t think that would advance my artistic knowledge nor contribute to the art community as a whole, even if I did include many photos of his cuteness. And besides that, I couldn’t think of a valid link to constructivism apart from his pointy ears.

How can I take some of the elements of Constructivism and combine it with something I’m interested in and something I’m inspired by to form a research topic? It took a while but I’m getting there.

At first I centred on just Constructivism and Technology. There are many obvious links and associations between these, which I started to map out on a piece of paper and started going on all kinds of tangents. Then I remembered that Jonathan said in his email to me about creating a “short, narrowly focused research paper.” I was going too big and too far, but I was interested in the process and the possibilities.

I had been looking at the book “Information is Beautiful” by David McCandless who is a data journalist. He has a collection of different data visualisations and talks about how the way we present data can really make a meaningful impact on the user. I noticed that some of the results were more like beautiful pieces of art, and many had key elements of Constructivism – geometric patterns, bold colours, circles, squares, lines, etc.

However was this art? I then started looking at artists who create art based on data and found that there are many incredible artists that do this.

I enjoyed searching for and exploring these artists, which of course took me hours because I kept going down rabbit holes of investigation into each particular artist.

During the residential week for this course, we went to the Tate Modern and I explored the Electric Dreams exhibition. It was amazing and inspiring. (See my blog about it here.) So in doing my research I started looking at the artists in that exhibition.

I particularly liked Vladimir Bonacic who created what he called “cybernetic art” using technology and data algorithms to produce his work.

After exhausting all of the artists from the exhibition, I started doing normal online searches. I got to one that completely blew me away…

Nathalie Miebach. Wow. She creates incredible artworks based on weather data. Huge collages on walls and also sculptures. I think her work is extraordinary:

Notice how many elements of Constructivism are in her work? An idea was starting to form for what my research topic could be.

At first I thought of something like “How and why the basic geometric elements of Constructivism are commonly used in modern Data Visualisation.” But I realised that this is too broad and I needed to narrow it down.

I thought of exploring the above but by focussing only on two artists – Nathalie Miebach and Vladimir Bonacic. However upon doing more research and forming ideas, I don’t think Vladimir’s work satisfies enough of what I’m looking at with this topic. And today’s Data Visualisation is much different to when Vladimir was creating work in the 60s.

I went back to looking at the work of David McCandless. Is he an artist? Technically no, but it could be argued that he is artistic in how he composes the outputs of the data. To me this is beautiful:

His work is more modern, more graphic, and would provide an interesting counterfoil to the work of Nathalie Miebach. Could I include him in my research?

I’m not sure yet if I’ve found the answer but currently my most recent topic statement is:

“How do contemporary data artists incorporate the geometric elements and industrial aesthetic of Constructivism in their visualisations of data, comparing specifically the output of Artist Nathalie Miebach and Data Journalist David McCandless.”

We will be reviewing our research topics on Tuesday so I won’t have long to find out if I’ve gone down yet another rabbit hole in the wrong direction!