Syd Foster
Artist

United Kingdom

I've always been a poet (at least since I was about 14) since it was the only artform that you can do without money... Having been made redundant in 2009 from Waterstone's book shop (the only job I've ever kept for more than a few weeks), I began to think about going to an art college in order to gain access to the art world in the hopes of finding some funding for various ideas I have had over the years and been unable to do anything about through lack of money/equipment... a recurring frustration in my life! As it turned out, since I had studied various courses with the Open University over a ten year period from 1986 to 1996 (unemployed the whole time, I was lucky to live in Britain at a time when the Local Education Authority would pay the tuition fees for the unemployed!) and gained a BSc (mostly physics and maths), Swansea Metropolitan University offered me a place on their MA programme and I was able to start straight away without doing any foundation studies. With the pitifully small amount of redundancy money I got from Waterstone's (12 and a half years meant nothing to them.... I have heard since that when the company was sold the entire board was fired... instant karma!), I bought myself a HD camcorder and was able to get Apple's Final Cut Studio at student prices, and proceeded to teach myself to use them. (I got into the idea during the last year of my employment, because when my long time partner and I got married in 2008 I had just got my first iMac, and a friend filmed our wedding and the party afterwards, and so I edited that together with photos from other friends and made a movie with iMovie that came with the iMac, and fell in love with editing).

I've just completed three years of a part-time MA in Fine Art & Photography, graduating in June 2012. As of now I have no income, and I'm getting desperate to earn some money, but really enjoying redefining myself as a Fine Artist (as a conceptual artist: I've always, as with Allen Ginsberg and other Beats, and the Ken Kesey Merry Pranksters tradition, thought of myself as an artist whose work was my life, that I am my own art work, and since hearing in the early 1970s of Richard Long's conceptual art involving walking, that all the shamanistic time of my attention to the forms and states of my surroundings has been Art Work)... my practice now is a continuation of the concerns and modes of my poetry through alternative media, eschewing words for more immediate tools/materials/forms.

Update Nov 2012: Ironically, my Final Project wound up requiring a lot of words to introduce the conceptual sculpture, and I've just brought out a free book to present that work, and its many ramifications, to the world. See the Journal entry above.

Current Residence: Swansea, Wales, U.K.
Favourite genre of music: psytrance
Favourite style of art: installation
Operating System: Mac OS X
MP3 player of choice: iPod Nano
Wallpaper of choice: planet earth in space
Favourite cartoon character: Bugs Bunny
Personal Quote: Don't let the bastards get you down.

www.asydhouse.co.uk/