Taking Over.

Undertow Projects is a new platform for emerging and established artists to share their art practice on Instagram and beyond. It is an artist-run collective set up by current MA Fine Art students at UCA Farnham, in part as a reaction to the lack of physical spaces available in which to show work, due to the pandemic, but also as a springboard and community that will endure beyond graduation.

I was honoured to be the second artist in the programme of artists’ takeovers hosted on their Instagram account. This entailed being given access to the account and being free to post on it for a week. I do have an Instagram feed but my usual rate of posting is around once every two weeks, so the prospect of having to post three times a day for five or six days was really daunting. What on earth would anyone want to see? How would I give glimpses of my practice without revealing too much personal detail? These questions were a constant worry.

Planning was a key to getting started. I knew how to post videos and photographs to the feed but wasn’t confident with the ‘stories’ part of the platform. I devised an arc for the week and broke each day up into three possible posts. The first two days were going to very busy with MA symposium presentations so I did some pre-recording on the Sunday to prepare. My arc started with walking in the landscape. I was very fortunate to have landed a week of snow and frost allowing for a variety of atmospheric images and sounds. Video soon felt like the best way to show the processes of walking and picking up detritus. Usually just hand-held footage, but I did also put the phone on a little tripod, that can be strapped to a tree, to film myself squelching through the mud.

The arc was to span walking, collecting materials, observations in the landscape, sorting out materials in the studio as well as preparatory work for sculpture and drawing, and to culminate in pointers towards current work in progress and future projects. I definitely shied away from speaking directly to the camera, partly because I always look at Instagram on silent mode, but also through a reluctance to reveal that much of myself on social media. The discovery of the time-lapse option on my phone’s camera was great for the studio sort-out and drawing in progress shots. In fact, the images are the easy part. Its the words that are much more tricky. It feels like there is an obligation to say something to expand on the image, or perhaps to confuse slightly by suggesting a tangential proposition. It is a space where you can quote from texts that are related to your work, and I did find some opportunities for that. Then there are the hashtags to think about. They do have to be thought about and researched, which takes time. Its really worth visiting any you are thinking of using so as to avoid linking your post to anything inappropriate. Finally, you have to remember to tag in other accounts, including your own so that viewers can find out who might be making this post.

The experience was a very positive one, generating encouraging feedback. I managed to get into a rhythm of daily posting, and in doing that discovered a huge amount about the platform, both in terms of what you can make work through your own phone, but also how other artists and arts organisations are using it. I picked up some more followers to my feed and discovered new artists and arts organisations to follow back. Thank you Undertow Projects.