Just some tests on 35mm film.
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Since 2007 I’ve been involved with a project initiated by The Salford Restoration Office called Centrifuge. It started with a field trip for 20 (emerging) artists from across the North of England to Documenta. Frankly it was advertised as professional development which sounded pretty dull, but I thought sod it it’s a free trip to Germany I’ll see what happens… Once we were all in Kassel we started to understand the project as James and Lesley (from the Restoration Office) pretty much laid it out as “we’ve got about £10,000, what do you want to do with it?” So then the arguing started and it was really fun. In the final day of our stay at Documenta we had possibly the longest meeting I’ve ever attended, where we discussed everything from buying an island to just splitting the money up and going home but eventually settled on the idea of organising an art prize.
An art prize seems straight forward enough but I think everyone in the group had a different idea of what that meant and had different motivations - whether that be a genuine reward for good work, a critique of the structures and hierarchies in the art world, a parody, an opportunity to speak to a really established artist, a way to give some under-represented local artists some credit (and cash), a counter-capitalist experiment, a name for something completely different and all the different permutations and combinations of the above (and their opposites).
So after what must have been nearly a year of intermittent discussions, group pub meetings, a few drop-outs and several structures that collapsed under their own weight (with a few angry meetings/emails along the way…) we finally decided in early 2008 to proceed backwards and decide once we had nominated artists what the prize, the criteria for winning or even if it was going to be competitive at all.
I nominated an organisation called The Institute for Figuring a science education project based in Los Angeles with a very unique take on that idea. Run by twin sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim a theoretical physicist and a poet respectively who amongst other things teach knitting circles about higher mathematics, topology and higher dimensional space through crochet.
So in April 2008 I went to LA to meet Margaret at IFF HQ, her home in Highland Park. To be honest I have to admit being a little nervous, I made sure I read Margaret’s book Pythagoras’ Trousers in the weeks preceding our meeting and this only seemed to heighten my nervousness, not only is she an extremely intelligent theoretical physicist but a staunch feminist described as ‘fiery’ in every bio that I could find online. What was she going to want to say to a male artist from Hull who has come half way around the world to vaguely waffle about an as yet undefined art prize?
When I eventually got to Margaret’s house it was very pleasant, I had stayed for a week in LA already and was in desperate need of tea, a weak pot of which was already being made when I arrived. We discussed the IFF, science education, science funding, the maleness of the methodologies of science and how craft is an overlooked means through which women have been educating themselves in mathematics, the fact that the art world had really embraced what they were doing and she showed me around their woollen coral reef. I left feeling like I had learned a lot but had absolutely no idea what to do, she seemed totally indifferent to the idea of winning a prize - what she was after was recognition of another way of doing physics, maths and for the scientific establishment to become more flexible - and even if she won (the now diminished) whole £10,000 I don’t think that would make the kind of difference that I would want to be able to offer and they already seemed to have all the publicity they could handle - articles in the New York Times, shows in the Southbank centre and even a TED talk in the pipeline and the idea of trying to engage her in a critique of the art world seemed completely irrelevant.
Back in the UK, I got to thinking about how we could make her a more relevant prize. I considered making an imitation Nobel prize after looking at the skewed gender distribution of the physics prize. I thought it would be fun to try and make a gold medal and I had a vague plan about asking my uncle Alistair, a goldsmith, to help me out. I soon realised that was condescending or even rude - like saying: “we know you won’t get a real Nobel, here is our forgery to make up for it.” But through this process I remembered my other uncle, Maurice, has always given as Christmas presents little keyrings and jewellery made from his own designs of knots - what if we commissioned him to make a knot for Margaret? I spoke to him and he seemed generally keen for a new challenge so he set about designing it - before we had even confirmed it as a winning prize. Then I approached the group and asked if we could pay him in a way that would help him out rather than in cash and so Ruth volunteered to help him for a day photographing his knots for an instructional book he is trying to get off the ground.
To cut a long story, well, medium - we sent the knot to Margaret who returned these photos of the knot surrounded by the most feminine mass of the crochet that she could find, a kind of orgy of fluff that I can only imagine made my uncle (a former catholic priest) blush.
This week the books arrived, they are a documentation of all the artists and their nominees projects including an essay ‘On Feral Art’ about my experiences in Los Angeles and the nature of grassroots arts projects. But there are essays, pictures and documentation by everyone else involved. Please ask me if you would like a copy - I’ll happily sell/swap/give you one but I only have 20.
I’m not sure if I have developed professionally but as a consequence of participating in Centrifuge flown half-way around the world to perform at a festival, interviewed someone who I never would have had a chance to meet otherwise, worked on a project with the quiet one of my family and got to know him better, written stroppy, overly earnest emails - I guess all that counts as development. Mostly what has been great was meeting lots of really interesting people (and debating, collaborating and negotiating with them) - the other participants were: David Baker, Alice Bradshaw, Chris Henry Clarke, Matthew Cowan, Katie Davies, Kate Day, Catherine Elvin, Rosie Farrell, Evi Grigoropoulou, Laura Harrington, Zoe Johnson, Gaz Leddington, Rebecca Lennon, Tim Machin, Daniel Simpkins, Nick Thurston, Ruth Todhunter, Tom Watson and Penny Whitehead. Imogen Stidworthy and Dirk Fleischman who were our mentors on the project and James Hutchinson and Lesley Young of The Salford Restoration Office.
(I’ve gone on far too long so I’ll come back and proof-read and put links in later…)
I’ve been doing these long drawings on continuous computer paper, below is one I have stopped working on and above is one I’m just starting. They should really be horizontal, as a reference to the scrolls I saw at this exhibition of Chinese 17th/18th century artist Wang Hui’s work at the Metropolitan in NY which made me think a lot about space/landscape as a kind of temporal structure. At the time I had also just bought Brian Chippendale’s Maggots, which is maybe the opposite - breaking time into a million fragments (hemidemisemiquavers?).
Wang Hui’s scrolls felt like a primitive but highly honed film language with mountains used as travelling scenes between the set pieces in the cities. (The first road movie maybe?) They also made me very aware of the fluctuating connection between calligraphic marks and the structures they represent - undulating mountains made of thousands of very specific flicks of the brush-holding arm.
After sticking this up on the wall for a while I thought the form was a bit too arbitrary and I’ve now started to fill the paper - looks like I’ve got a long way to go…
The video above is a short test, using screen captures from Google Mars. I really like the intricacies of the jpegy compression and the bizarrely coloured artefacts that appear in the noise. Not sure where to go from here, I think I need to apply some kind of logic rather than just an intuitive scanning around and capturing. I really want to avoid Koyaanisqatsi-esque nonsense, maybe I would be better off using something else as a source, or finding some method to organise the images. I quite like the idea of collecting thousands of images and which could then be compared to frequency graphs of audio (maybe Mars from the Holst’s Planets) but then sonograms are very dull to watch and are in many ways an arbitrary representation of sound. Or if there was some way to compare to other images, find the images that are the closest approximation of the video for Pump Up the Volume. Hmmm…
(above) the layout for Anti-Narrative Comic #1
I’m currently starting a residency as part of the Artists’ Access to Art-schools (AA2A) scheme at Nottingham Trent alongside three other artists: Ruth Scott, Priya Mistry and Georgina Parks. I’ve been catching up on technical things that I never learned at Uni the first time I was there - So I’ve been doing some print making, making screens etc. I’m trying to find ways to make quick turn around publications and artist’s books, to get things out of my sketchbooks and into the real world… I will be adding a publications section to my site very soon.
It’s early days but it looks like it is going to be a really useful and fun experience, as the staff seem keen to make more of it than the minimum requirement of allowing us to use the equipment.
The main piece of work I’ve been making here in Sandnes is an installation called Isostasy. It consists of a drawing and an 8 minute video loop. Here are some images of the drawing, which will become the screen for the projected video.
The video consists of thousands of individually captured images of the drawing stitched together as frames, creating a shifting network of lines and textures.
I got hold of a large roll of paper 1.5 meters wide and I’ve decided to make a drawing that fills a 4:3 rectangle with the rocky images from the previous post. The goal is to project a video made form the drawing either back onto it or onto another screen the same size. I’m about 2 thirds through and as much as I say I am interested in ‘the process of drawing’ its a little time consuming especially when I’m in a strange place with a lot to see….
So the past couple of days I’ve been hiding from it - yesterday I stayed at the flat and did some doodling and music and today I went to a charming gallery in Brusand in its old train station: Nordisk Kunst Plattform. And I don’t use the word ‘charming’ lightly - its in a village near the beach with a population of around 300, it has retained the original luridly patterned wall paper and is run by the friendly artist couple that live above the gallery space. Only open for 4 hours on a Sunday, it seems to be a small bastion of culture as the train heads south into increasingly christian (kristian?) territory. I’d also like to note that it is beyond Time (see map).
It rained all day yesterday so I didn’t want to brave it into the studio. So I sat next to the window in the residency accommodation doing some work. The window opens on a hinge and the familiar sound of the rain is like white noise. Closing the window acts like sweeping a filter, cutting out more and more of the top-end as the window closes and flooding the spectrum as it arcs open.
Above are just some notes I made, about a theoretical performance - often in cinemas there are speakers placed behind a perforated screen to let the sound through, I like the idea of being able to slowly reveal the sound from behind the screen. I did a little searching around and found that drive in theatres frequently use inflatable screens -endless possibilities of puncturing the frame spring to mind.
I’ll probably have a less speculative post soon…
Some test footage of horizontal channels in rocks at the top of Dalsnuten. (If you’re reading this on facebook, you need to ‘view original post’ to see the video (apologies for the bad quality… )).
And some ’story-boards’ drawn afterwards.
I went for a walk yesterday up to the summit of Dalsnuten, a mountain that overlooks Gandafjorden on the opposite side to Sandnes and Stavanger. The walk was exhausting (mostly because I mistimed the bus and had to walk back to Sandnes) but really beautiful. The drawings below weren’t done at the time but in the studio and are attempts at generalising (or abstracting maybe) patterns in the rocks on vertical edges of mountainside. I’m not sure they are really there yet, but they’re only really the first attempts. I’m thinking about maybe another trip to get some more/better footage for the video, perhaps then I’ll get a bit more insight.