Everyday processes

"Dead Legs" (from here)

Celia Pym works with processes and ways of recording activities -- the holes in people's clothes, and the stories that accompany them; the ways of going about daily life.


She says: "I started knitting in 2001 as a warm up activity. To get me settled in my studio I would knit to ready my fingers and get thinking. I soon discovered that I would knit for whole afternoons. The warm up became my main project. The wool I had decided to knit with, at that time was red since the most exciting wool in the shop was red coloured. Since there was a red line on the subway system where I was living I would knit the red knitting riding the red line. After the red knitting, the next idea was to measure a journey around Japan. I was sponsored by the Gardner fellowship and made a journey to collect yarns from all over Japan, to knit everyday and to climb mountains. And in my everyday knitting I measured out the journey I was making. I work with process and ways of recording activities. Now I darn and am looking for holes in people’s clothes and the stories that accompany them; repairing these holes and returning the mended garments. It is a way to briefly make contact with strangers."


Two aspects of her work resonate with me: measuring a journey, and representing going about daily life... "making the invisible visible" in yet other ways...


Also, the idea of having a warm-up activity in the studio is really useful - obviously you do have to be careful it doesn't take over.

Art I like - Robert Breer

Avant-garde animation legend Robert Breer (1926-2011) made "A Man and his Dog out for Air" in 1957. For nearly two minutes, lines move over the screen, to a soundtrack of loud, synthetic birdsong -

Eventually you see, briefly, the man and his dog -

Watch the entire film here, and read more about Breer's animations here. You might enjoy his 1980 animation "Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons" here - or "Eyewash" (1959) - or "Fuji" (1974)

House dust

... or rather, dust house -

We had to move some really heavy furniture, and behind it on the skirting board I found a lovely line of dust - can dust be an art material? Seems it can...

Pic above is from here, whereas this one (seen here) is made by Paul Hazelton - carefully collected, wetted, shaped, dried -

A book and its background

One of my ongoing personal research projects concerns the different ways that artist's books are presented on the internet, and indeed in print sources. In a book, you might see the book stood up with pages spread to give an intriguing glimpse of what's on the edges of the pages, or laid down and opened up to one spread, or perhaps unfolded to show the structure. The internet, of course, offers many more possibilities - a clickable sequence of pages, a video of the book being "read" - and web pages that let the reader delve into the history and components of the work, as here - you can watch an animated video clip, see the studio sketch and the finished page, as well as click to read the text and the colophon -

Not quite as good as handling the actual book, but "it's all there". Completed in 2009, "Fabulous Fictions / Peculiar Practices" is the result of a collaboration between artist Tony Calzetta, writer Leon Rooke, and master printer Dieter Grund of Presswerk Editions.

Nine texts and drawings are housed in folios inside a slip case. One of the drawings and its text was re-imagined as a paper sculpture and attached to the front of the slip case. Ten texts and drawings are published  as a separate project--a series of black and white broadsides presented in a red clam box.

Art I like - Shawn Quinlan

Shawn Quinlan has been making quilts since the 90s. This one is from 10 or so years ago. I like his themes (subliminal stories often with political undertones) and the non-regimented way he often builds up the surface. Not to mention the skill involved - and the fabulous improvisational backs of the quilts! See all that and more on his website, www.shawnquinlan.com.

Here's another from the same gallery on his site, with its source -

While I was scrolling through a set of images on can't-remember-what, this image caught my eye (and continues to intrigue me) -

It's by Patrick Pound and is called Writing in a Library. It was part of a small exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne, "Order and disorder: archives and photography", written about here by photographer Marcus Bunyan. The review raises questions about the kinds of memory held in archives and the role of the institution as custodian (and interpreter). The exhibition, held in 2009, did not mention in the catalogue "the crisis of cultural memory that is now permeating our world ... how are digital technologies altering our re-assemblance of memory, altering photography’s ability inherent ability to record, store and organise visual images?"

Some text that was taken from NGV website (but no longer on the site):

“Archives contain elements of truth and error, order and disorder and are infinitely fascinating. As both collections of records and repositories of data, archives are able to shape history and memory depending on how, when and by whom the materials are accessed. Their vastness allows for multiple readings to be unravelled over time.
" Photography is naturally associated with archives because of its inherent ability to record, store and organise visual images. With this in mind, this exhibition brings together artists drawn largely from the permanent collection of the NGV who explore the idea of archives as complex, living and occasionally mysterious systems of knowledge. Several of the selected artists act as archivists, collecting and ordering their own unique bodies of photographs, while others create disorder by critiquing the ideas and systems of archives.”

The photograms of Penelope Davis are wonderful -

She makes resin casts of the books and puts them directly on the photographic paper - they become "liminal images that hover between what is known and what is imagined". Davis has said: “Most people assume that when they look at a photo that they are looking at the thing photographed – but they are not. They are looking at a photo. Books and photographic images and archives are enigmatic – you can’t be sure of a singular definition or meaning.”


But to get back to Patrick Pound and that intriguing image - he has said "I am an artist working at the categories of things. Whether categorizing thousands of newspaper cuttings in albums by subject, or photographing people taking photographs, I am an artist who reads the world as an endless series of overlapping lists. From a collection of Lost Bird posters culled from the streets to a collection of early postcards of a single street I am copying the world in the form of the index. These works call into play the limits of description and the description of limits. From the collection of 365 unremarkable brown things, to twenty-six pieces of evidence lifted from my street and placed in bags, my work has the look of being made by someone who upon trying to explain the world, and having failed, has been reduced to collecting it."

Xmas pop-up at Artisan till 23 Dec

17 artists are exhibiting - tapestry, photography, glass, ceramics, knitting, jewellery, cards, lamps, even furniture -

and the gallery looks filled & festive -

The bags and t-shirts have "a certain presence" -

The unisex t-shirts are organic cotton, available in white or grey in sizes S, M, L, and sell for £22. The bags are priced at £25 - each is unique, with comfortable handles and inside pockets.

Art I like - "Truism" by John Squire

'Truism' (16" x 14", lead  sheet on board) was  (it says here)  part of the 'Heat Light Death & Industry' series which consisted of massive-scale sculptures based on smaller scale cardboard packaging and paintings that centre around the flattened out maps of the packaging and euroslot packaging hole. 


For this series, John Squire taught himself to weld the huge rusting steel structures, which are large-scale versions of cardboard boxes, unfolded. 


The inscription on Truism reads - much was decided before you were born.

Impressionistic

Display "wigwam"

My London Journey bags will be part of the "Xmas pop-up" at Artisan galley (8-23 Dec). My idea for display is a mix of beanpoles and seasonal symbolism, and is made out of bamboo from the garden centre. We painted the sticks red first, then gold ... which took ages but was definitely worthy it.

If you're trying this at home, don't depend on ribbon to hold the sticks together. Tape is a must, especially at the top - the ribbon is mere embellishment.

Flamboyant

The Stinging Rose caterpillar - its colours announce how dangerous it is (this is called aposematic coloration - who knew!) If you touch it, the tips of the spines break off and venom enters the skin.

See more toxic caterpillars here (but don't click on links on that site - they are embedded ads, unfortunately).

Graphic impact

Quote of the day

"We imagine in the shape we know ... metaphor leading us backwards" - from Jan Bervin's "clouds" book, which is actually titled A Non-Breaking Space.

This is one of the early spreads -

There are 27 spreads - do go look at them all at http://jenbervin.com/html/clouds.html#

She says of the book: "I determined from the start that this book would be scanned and viewed online through Ugly Duckling Presse. This allowed for a certain abandon in making it—no editioning process, no worries about whether the materials or methods were archival, and no production budget. I wanted it to be a free book, one called up on screen by demand—for it to exist as needed. When I give readings from this text, I bring the paper book for everyone to handle. I like to think that the object will eventually die from touch."

Train of thought

"The puffadder cannot fly but it still catches the hornbill" by Gillian Lowndes was shown in "Constructed Clay" in 2003. Lowndes spent time in Nigeria in the 1970s, which clearly influenced her work. The "ceramic collages" incorporate other materials, such as wire and fibreglass. She broke the fundamental rule that a ceramic artefact must be fired in one piece. Many of her works are in the Anthony Shaw Collection.

Currently I'm questioning the construction of art works in terms of "support" and "traces/threads". The support is often invisible - in the way the paper supports the drawing, subtly influencing it through the nature of its unnoticed qualities. The trace is the "drawn" line and "threads" are the inter-weaving of those lines to make a surface.

Perhaps what I'm looking at is "empty space" - and how that space isn't really empty. Somehow all of this swirls round in my brain, with no articulable resolution, as I look at this piece - which is presented in 2D. Would the same questions arise if seeing it in 3D?

Relocation

There are two sorts of places: places where things belong, and places where things end up. Corners of tables are notorious for being places where things end up... and sit, and sit ...

This shelf is, or should be, a bit of prime real estate, handy for the work surface so it should hold tools or materials that are used frequently - but at the moment it's a place where things end up. It's right near the door, in a prime "hot spot" for things to end up on, especially when the living room needs a quick tidy-up.

Taking an objective look at the photo, I can see several "collections" on the bottom shelf that need to be moved to "safe places" where they can continue to grow, or gather dust, without occupying space that would be so much better used by actual projects-in-progress.

The upper shelf is used for papers relevant to my course, and for documentation of the work that's related to the course. These  will need reviewing in the next few weeks, before the "unit 1 assessment" - after which we move on to focus on the project for the final show. Hopefully the review will help start the process of focus.

Meanwhile it would be helpful to have that bottom shelf ready to receive the bits&pieces relevant to that final project. (Less is more, I keep saying to myself, less is more....)

"Something almost being said"?

Arthur Renwick is a Canadian artist who combines punctuation and landscape to make a re-reading - something beyond the usually-written text ...

This is Man Afraid of His Horses

And this is Sitting Bull -

"Totem Cafe" takes me back to the B.C. of my youth, but - considered in the light of the photos above - makes the kind of statement that hadn't even started to be articulated back then -

I first saw his work among a set of photos of Photomonth in Montreal. He's probably best known for his "Masks" photos, "a repositioning of First Nations identity".

Timing

A clock at Senate House - somewhat out of keeping with the 1930s architecture of the building.

I was there for an eye-opening conference on The Future of the Book, run by the Book History Research Network, membership of which is open to anyone interested in the history of books.

From the Small Publishers Fair

The fair was a couple of weeks ago; I'm trying to catch up with myself!

Treasures include a vintage ticket (from "my" station - to somewhere I'd never heard of) made into an entire journey by Hazel --

Of course I had to have the book that consists entirely of proofreading marks (The Ghost in the Fog) -

Rhiannon Williams' "cloth" is made of lottery tickets -

This group of tickets was an exchange - I contributed a short pink pencil from the Affordable Art Fair, with a note that it was better to make your own art -

Tony Hayward's books were irresistible - photos of wonderful objects -

Art I like - Jen Bervin's Dickinson Fascicles

Jen Bervin's "Dickinson Fascicles" are based on the punctuation (the "non-meaningful" marks) on the pages of the poet's manuscripts. She says on her website:
"I wanted to see what patterns formed when all of the marks in a single fascicle, Dickinson's grouping of poems, remained in position, isolated from the text, and were layered in one composite field of marks. The works I created were made proportionate to the scale of the original manuscripts but quite large—about 8' wide by 6' high—to convey the exact gesture of the individual marks."

These marks were omitted from typeset poems and only became available to scholars when a facsimile edition of the poems was published. Since then there's been a lot of literary theorising about them.

Bervin also says:
"I have come to feel that specificity of the + and – marks in relation to Dickinson’s work are aligned with a larger gesture that her poems make as they exit and exceed the known world. They go vast with her poems. They risk, double, displace, fragment, unfix, and gesture to the furthest beyond—to loss, to the infinite, to “exstasy,” to extremity."

She speaks about the work in the Threads Talks, writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Threads.php.

Another hoop jumped through

The essay - "Between mark and script: reading ambiguity" - has been written, edited, checked, and handed in. (An electronic version is now hidden on my website.) The library books have been returned, and this heap of papers is about to go into the recycling bin -

Meanwhile, the house elves have been busy making the studio nice -

Tomorrow, or later this evening, I'll be in there sewing "travel bags" for the xmas pop-up at Artisan, London NW10, which opens on 8 December.