Suddenly noticing

During and since the CQ retreat I spent much time looking at and thinking about books and websites about Sian Bowen's work, and have been happily piercing different types of paper with various implements ... but this process lacked something important, namely subject matter. Instead of working on a theme or towards something, I've merely been working with materials.

Reading the Nova Zembla book at my usual place at the kitchen table this morning, I suddenly noticed the so-familiar shapes of stairs and the door on the landing, ajar and lit from behind, and started thinking about light and shadow and thresholds and perspective and liminality and transience and luminosity and lumens and photons and how light doesn't bend around corners, so what's happening when the light we see comes from around the corner?

It took only a moment to catch these thoughts (=light) via the camera -

Once invisible, these have suddenly become unavoidably visible spaces as I move around and pay attention to them. 

Elsewhere, on two floors, two doors occupy a corner -

As I think about this, the "empty" space reconsitutes itself (is this what happened to Rachel Whiteread at some point?)

Rachel Whiteread's Stairs (via)

Doors and stairs were my chief fascinations during the foundation course, and house plans have always been an interest, thanks to living ages 9-18 in a house under constant construction or extension - I'd spend hours imagining the 2D plans in my father's building magazines as 3D, real, houses. 

Looking just now for a remembered painting, or photo, of some "impossible" doors (was it by Duchamp? - yes!)

Sometimes you hit it lucky with the sites you find things on .. this one helpfully adds: "door frames set at right angles with one door between them so that when the door closes in one frame it opens  in the other. A clever way to illustrate contradiction and transition at the same time" - transition yes, but contradiction I'd not thought of, and it's intriguing to think of light being a contradiction (literally, "saying against") of dark ... and its transition - how it weakens, through distance, into dark. And then the blockage offered by walls, making it possible for light to fill a space. 

Duchamp, that useful artist, also offers this installation, His Twine - 

in which the "rays" occupying the space remind me of the way light can bounce between mirrors. Somewhere I have a wonderful photo taken inside a mirrored cube, showing a million points of light, but it's not easily findable at the moment.  (Instead, have a look at the space-filling work of Monika Grzymala.)

Ah, mirrors - another dimension, a trickery! Consider these, taken at BMA House, or these -

But I digress. The starting point was light behind a door, outlining its fore-edge, spilling(?) over the other edges ... no, more of a seeping beyond them. Doors, thresholds, spaces, light ... vestiges, or stirrings, of an idea that may prove ephemeral or may morph into something else.

Windows and doors

My selection of doors and windows in Arles to photograph tends towards the time-worn, rather than the grandiose.

Though this one dates back to the 16th century, and there are lots of "old bits" around in walls.

Not to mention the Roman stuff, for which it's on Unesco's heritage list.

Some doors of Portland Place, W1

More from Redchurch Street

Sticker-grafitti - embellished tube maps and a cutout rabbit. Nature abhors a vacuum?

In the snow

With more snow predicted in the UK, an "igloo village" seems apropos. It's called Kakslauttanen - and it's in Lapland.This is the door of the ice chapel - see more photos here.

Sculpture, week 2

Making models - with foamboard and paper. I used an "old" piece of foamcore, with circles already cut out, rather than start a fresh one - and the lines that were already on it made for a more interesting "inside" -Lots of fun -- but where's it going? I made some foamcore models of stairs, too...
but preferred the little houses ("safe as houses") ... only to be told (gently) by the tutor that "a lot of people did houses and sheds - and boats - in the 80s". OK, I get the hint!
He preferred my "corners" and mentioned that the "kind of charge" that was put on them was important - ie, where is the energy coming from, negative or positive - or both? I need to rein in and clarify what's being ... [word missing in my notes]. And define the scale. Give viewers access to the idea - if they're confused, they won't be interested. He suggested focussing on one specific door or wall or whatever, and working from that; giving viewers a set of clues, but leaving just what's necessary. Clarify what it's being set up for - and starting with something that you know.

"Time to take control" it says in my book, summing up nearly an hour of discussion.

So ... here's an abstraction of a door - embodying "gaps, tension, door ajar, light" -
But it's supposed to be about specificity - so as a first step I went to look at some doors around the building -
This view is rather reminiscent of "one I prepared earlier" - in February 2009, to be exact -
"Being an illusionist" was also among the notes.

Doors within doors (and Piet Stockmans)

A double door within a double door? And what happens on the other side of the building? Certainly the doorways are aligned, as in some traditional house designs where the animals lived on one side and the humans on the other - they're called cross-passage houses and date back to late medieval times.

The lovely door is showing a piece by Belgian ceramicist Piet Stockmans. Starting as an industrial designer, he's been working in blue-slip porcelain for years, making cups and shards and body-based work and installations. A similar piece is in the ceramics galleries at the V&A.

Back to class - term 4, core 1

This term "core subjects" will be a day of doing personal work, most of the time. Several of us went down to the caf for a coffee and spent a good hour talking about exhibitions, sketchbooks, artists, what we did at New Year, how confused we are about the final project....Timetables, forms, the inevitable to-do list....
My "inside outside in between" theme seems to be developing into safety vs danger, and the "tipping point" or threshold of moving from one to the other. Finding this book in the library was useful -Not only did it have a variety of doors pictured portentously, it had renderings of mysterious atmospheres -


I filled a "research" worksheet by the end of the day -
The tutors were talking to individuals about how to fill in the "statement of intent" about their project for this term - the modus operandi is to be vague, to talk about "exploration" in terms like "previously I worked on ... and discovered that ...; I am therefore doing ... to extend this to ..." and make links to previous learning. A section that's difficult for people is "method of evaluation" - how will you know that what you set out to do is actually working? (Keep the words "appropriate visual language" in mind here...)