DEGREES UNEDITED

Hannah Pham, a graduate who featured in a-n’s Degree show supplement 98 publication talks about coming full circle over the past decade and spending time in Japan.

I’m fixing things at the moment. I’ve realised that in the last ten years I’ve managed to come full circle (in terms of themes anyway). My work at degree was to do with the futility of covering up mistakes, trying to make something better but it ending up worse. In that way my concerns haven’t really changed much, I still have an unpolished make-do approach.

I was definitely more productive at college, probably because of the pressure from tutors and the need to produce to deadlines and ultimately to get the degree.

My art-life and pace is a lot slower now. I tend to make only a couple of things a year. Some of those things I’ve ended up giving away to strangers or friends. And not because I thought the work was bad, on the contrary, I only give the good stuff away. I threw my degree show work in the skip outside college because I knew I‘d be able to reproduce it easily both tangibly and conceptually. I’ve never found it necessary to hoard work, I either sell it, give it away or throw it. My reasoning is both practical, having never had a permanent storage space, and also sometimes feeling that the idea precedes the respective thing.

Doing an MA made me realise how little, good funding, support, facilities and contacts can actually affect practice. In my case being spoilt usually has a detrimental effect on my work. Strangely, I’ve found that I work better when I have nothing: no contacts, no facilities and no finances. Ten years ago I wrote that I didn’t want to work in a vacuum because I thought as an artist one should congregate with other artists and be in a standard art environment. I now believe that, that works well for some but not others. It’s down to individual personality really. I don’t think there’s a specific mould or route that artists need to adhere to.

I’m not sure where art is at now but there are definitely more artists riding buses in London and the queue for secret postcards gets longer by the year. There also seems to be an increase in anecdotal and accidental approaches to art practice, which I personally favour.

I spent some time in Japan, whilst there I visited a few temples, as was the normal thing to do. On one such visit I spotted a big fish in a pond, trapped in between two pipes. It was a striking image this bright, glowing, sad, doomed bit of life. I took a picture of it as I was being thrown out of the complex – it was closing time. Up until that point my work had been about sad, wrong things that I’d just thought about or conjured up in my head.

Hannah Pham

Hannah Pham