The Wellcome Collection's "Souzou: Outsider Art from Japan"

My friend and I would like to know: if the term "Outsider Art" just means what it says, why do exhibitions always make it mean something patronising? Something like, "Outside-Our-Culture-Oh-Wow-How-Quaint Art" or "Outside-Art-School-Wow-How-The-Hell-Did-They-Learn-To-Use-Paint Art" or "Hey-Let's-Give-A-Prisoner-A-Crayon Art."

Lichtenstein Exhibition (Tate Modern)

My eleven-year-old self would have probably flipped out (silently, because I was that kind of eleven-year-old), because I was really into Lichtenstein back then.

I found myself preferring the relatively less familiar black and white illustrations of objects. There's something really complete about the illustrative simplicity.

I tend to be fairly drawn to drawings of objects.

CABIN Exhibition

Four of us had an exhibition together a little while ago. We shared a cabin-like structure in a park for a few days and made up rules, did tasks that were chosen at random from a fish bowl, and went on adventures such as shopping for Astroturf. Our outcomes aimed to document the process and were all very different. Despite being work created and curated by art students, there was something very "outsider art" about it. It was not researched in the traditional way, and it was unapologetic and did not aim to be anything other than exactly what it was. Maria made a book about a sandwich because that was exactly what was on her mind. Bruna wrote down her thoughts on the process. Yejin and I both collected sketches and snippets of writing and presented them as a book and an assemblage respectively.

I realised how intuitive my work has been recently because of how easily the work I produced in the cabin slotted into the collection of work I'd been building up. I created a little cuboid of clutter which meshed the childlike and the marginally upsetting and presented our feelings (or mine). The theme of taking instructions from a fishbowl and from other people was also hugely relevant to what I'd been doing.

(Above: Bruna's photo, because my feet will get cold if I have to go and get my camera and find my card reader and put the card in and plug it into my computer and transfer the photos.)

My Work Currently

I'm no longer consciously thinking about mood, optimism and perspective, and I seem to be moving away from the theme of sarcastic/ironic happy visuals. I think I'm going to run with the idea of taking orders from people.

Currently a lot of the work I've created doesn't have a connection that's immediately obvious without explanation, but I've decided that worrying about that (that is, the fact that my process appears more disjointed than it is) isn't a priority (especially since over-analysing the themes in my work makes the process feel even more disjointed to me, when actually if I don't over-think it it's fairly logical, organic and intuitive).