Empty or full? The eternal question. Sheila Ross on the Locked Room

Sheila Ross was a student of the Locked Room at St Martin's School of Art in 1970.  She is an installation artist and photographer and Zen practitioner. She has recently returned to the UK after 40 years in New York, where she worked as an artist and designer and also taught visual arts at Hunter College and Fordham University. In this blog, she reflects on emptiness in the Locked Room.

Was there an “ideas vacuum” at the heart of the A Course?

Nick May first suggested this at the 2010 symposium, The A Course, an inquiry, organised by CSM in 2010. I think he was talking about the structure of the first year, starting with the materials project. The empty studio, the 13 of us, two tutors, 13 blocks of polystyrene (I have no recollection of the brown paper).

Empty or full? The eternal question.

And answered largely according to the expectation of the asker.

Sheila Ross, Slipping Across, a video still from JumpStart or Whot?, part of NightVision

A school renowned for its faculty and former students, the heart and hub of London, the year 1970 when new ideas were bouncing off each other—and the faculty have no intention of speaking to you. Possibly ever.

Instead of an opening into all that potential, the studio door is opened to what could be seen as a wasteland, an empty studio that became increasingly dusty and dirty and filled with the detritus of us working through all of our preliminary ideas of what could be done with a block of polystyrene, with or without brown paper, and reaching ground zero. The wasteland—wasteland?— of ourselves.

Time stretching away even in its carefully allotted increments: 10-10:50; 11:20-1; 2-3; 3:30-4:30—each of these swelling to the enormity of nothingness. What to do? What lies on the other side of boredom and all the things we know to do?

Were we empty or were we full?

And in giving us emptiness were they (They!) giving us in as open-handed and non-directed a manner as possible, ourselves?

Because it seems to me now—did it seem to me then?—that that is what each of us had in that room. The boundless territory of the perhaps (we were only 18) previously unexamined self. The freedom, the inescapability of observing our own minds.

For me, that was the fascination of it, but also the difficulty.

Sheila Ross, 15th March 2018

sheila-ross.com