Sculpture trail

"Animals on Bikes" is a 120-km sculpture trail with 45 sculptures in Australia.
This photo appeared in the online Guardian today, as part of its excellent "24 hours in pictures" item.

Manhattan / Vancouver

In September (when I started this post) the Guardian online showed some gorgeously romantic aerial views of New York - this is one of them.I was in/near Vancouver at the time - so here are some pix of that city... Downtown Vancouver, 1959 (from a miscellany here); it looked much like this for another decade -
But now that same view looks like this (from this site) -
And the residential West End is as dense as Manhattan -

National Film Board

Ah, the National Film Board - a grand Canadian institution - watch its films and animations online here.
"A Chairy Tale" is a classic - "A chair comes to life and protests its situation, refusing to allow a man to sit down on it. The man sets about trying to tame the chair. In the end, they establish a friendship. A film without words by legendary animator Norman McLaren" says the teacher's guide. Um, no - the animator was Evelyn Lambart, according to the website - McLaren had a grander role.

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.

"Travel writing"

If you're travelling on the London underground and see someone hunched over a small sketchbook, pointlessly drawing line after line - that's probably me. I have been doing a lot of "travel writing" - letting the bumps and jolts of the train tell the story of the journey. Here's a selection of sketchbook pages (click to enlarge) -Sometimes the journey takes one page, sometimes two - of course it also depends on how quickly the lines are drawn, and how close together they are. Sometimes I make different kinds of marks when the train is stopped in a station. Many variations are possible -
Here are some of my favourites. An early example -
A lighter pressure. The straighter lines are when the train is stopped -
Finsbury Park to Holborn, my most frequent journey these days. Note the speeding up at the end to try to fill the page -
A change of pen made quite a different - usually I use a fountain pen, but this felt tip just bounced along the page -
Must get a brush-tip pen and see what happens....

Brainstorming

The year was 1996, the place was Central St Martins School of Art - the evening illustration course. The first week's homework, "One hundred sixty plus one", was to do 16 quick thumbnails on a variety of topics: trees -buildings, animal -
suns, mode of transport -
hero/heroine, villains -
household object, types of weather -
death -
So much brainstorming in one week. It felt impossible and you can see there are gaps. But, in retrospect, what a good warmup exercise for the rest of the course!

I wasn't sure then, and am not sure now, whether to gather all possible media and "just start" with one topic, keeping going - and then go on to the next; or think about it, make a list of possibilities, and work down the list....

These surfaced shortly after I read about Liz Copeland's homework assignment to make 50 fabric collages - on one theme - in a week.

Ghost village

Tyneham in Dorset is now a ghost village. Six days before Christmas in 1943 the villagers were given a month to pack up and leave their homes (106 properties in a 12-square-mile area) so that the army could practise for D-Day. They were never allowed back, and the army kept the land; it's now part of a firing range. Clara, who took these photos, reports that when you enter the village your GPS and mobile phone signal suddenly stop working.

The land is now a firing range - and photogenic location. My own interest is the strange spaces that are left in the walls of the roofless, stripped-down buildings - fireplaces and other nooks.





Read more about Tyneham here and here.

Things optical

The quest for new glasses for my difficult eyes led, of course, to a visit to the optician's, where this space-alien instrument for fitting glasses lives. They also use this - a dispenser's rule is apparently what it's called -
And the back has more arcane symbolism -- archaeologists of the future would call this "a ritual object" no doubt -
The assistant dug in her desk drawer and found another of these ritual objects -
Soon to be superseded by digital technology? Fascinating relics. The unexpected encounter softens the financial blow of new glasses (yet again, already) somewhat.

Desired reading

Spotted at Queens Park Bookshop -

and at Mall Galleries -
and in City Lit library -
At the moment I'm reading "On landscapes" by Susan Herrington, found at Tate Britain bookshop.

Sculpture, week 3

The day started well with a discussion about Jane's gloves while waiting for the elevator.In the sculpture room, the usual sculpture-materials smorgasbord -
and a book well worth looking at in terms of how to display work - Unmonumental, the Object in the 21st Century - the catalogue of an exhibition at The New Museum, New York -
My task for the day was to review the work so far - to lay out the pages of "my little books" - compilation of blog posts documenting the course - and "see what you have" -
It's good to see this through someone else's eyes. What struck her was this arrangement in its plaster mold -
the "village" put together out of the scraps of clay on a bit of hessian that happened to be lying around -
and the idea of the staircase -
especially this one -Thinking ahead to the exhibition space for the final project, I'd thought of a (mirrored) shelf of little objects (ceramic?) with a dark hole below holding models of "rooms under the staircase" - you'd have to bend down to look at that -By the end of the day my thinking about the conjunction of all these factors was down on a worksheet. The idea is to make a staircase of fabric as a walk-in space, and in this space to display a few small items.Lots of decisions needed, both aesthetic and practical - light or dark? how wide? how high? how to support it? And of course, what objects to display, and how - shelving, lighting, spacing.... But it's those "technical" aspects, the problem-solving, that I quite enjoy - choosing the best possibilities and getting them to work together.

To start, the bamboo slats in these tatty old blinds may become stair rods, and that intriguing torn paper might have a future too -
"Proper art" starts with the idea and finds the best way to realise it (form and materials) - but I'm still drawn by the materials themselves, starting with them and seeing an idea emerge. Nor am I willing to set aside that way of thinking - it does have its uses!

Plant portraits

Winner of the Plant Portraits category of the RHS Photo Competition is Tony Wallis. The photo (so beautiful!) was taken in the lily-pond greenhouse at Kew, and Tony went back to take other gorgeous photos there. Look at the lovely encrusted window glass - let's hope they leave well enough alone and don't get around to cleaning it!

Ceramics, week 3

Some "corners" came out of the kiln - with additions of hardware -mainly nails -
and sometimes other embellishments -
Those had been pressed into the corners of a mold; are are these -
Mixing intense underglaze colour - a few drops of water on the tabletop, add the powder, stir. It starts to dry out but you revitalise with a bit more water.
The inside is, or will be, "velvet black" - the outside shiny white. Goodness knows what will happen to "chili red" -
Another little structure gets the glaze treatment -
These will be "once fired" - taken straight from wet clay to stoneware, but the kiln temperature will be raised slowly to 600 degrees. The purpley one is meant to be "charcoal" - I dipped it in the bucket of glaze without stirring, so only the downside edge got the concentrated glaze. The rest got wet, and the glaze seeped through the wet stuff a bit. It's all an experiment...
And these have been bisque fired so will go in with a different firing -