first sighting


Florence Wild, The Love I Saw In You Was Just A Mirage (detail), 2011-2012, white embroidery thread on white shower curtain.

I made a large embroidery in white on white. It was installed in a rather dimly lit corridor with a very strong, very bright spotlight upon it, giving it a startling presence. However in turn it was, almost undocumentable.
I am working hard at procuring some images which adequately reflect the whiteness/shimmering/textural differences/handwork or at least where the entire image is visible. At the moment all that is captured is the surface area, some vague outlines, and blinding lights. Like a mirage on the horizon perhaps. Quite apt, that.

I am a rock, I am an island


Part of a sculpture - knitted fishing line gathered into a type of bindle, in which lies collected rocks and stones from various Swedish Islands - Gotland, Fårö, Venn; limestone from the quarry on the outskirts of Malmö; coloured pieces of glass that have washed ashore at Matakatia Bay in New Zealand.

This is the first 'bindle' I have made, knitted with the finest fishing line I could find - perhaps it was too fine, I was forced to knit it using wooden kebab skewers instead of knitting needles. The line shimmers and flickers in the early morning sunlight, while it hangs in my bedroom window due to a lack of studio space.

More are being made, and using the thickest fishing line I could find, I will encase a large limestone rock and use it with a pulley system, which reminds me of sailing and boats, to be a counter weight to the smaller, more delicate bindles of stones and pebbles, which will hang in the air and slowly rotate, as hanging things are wont to do.

I vaguely rambled to my friend Claire about it:

                       Florence:
but now i think i might suspend them with pulleysreminds me of boats                        Claire:I'm not sure they gave me an associationI was just struck by the mesh...and strange silkiness of the rock  Florence: to me they relate to islands
  like the islands that were thoght to exist but were actually mirages
hence the shimmery fishing line
  and the rocks within and i wanted them to be like baskets or specimen collections
  and they deal with loneliness too
like how i think of islands and boats being self contained entities
  alone in the sea
  and i like the idea of suspension
  how it relates to balance
  and also the word
  suspence
  tension
  waiting
  Claire:Its poetic
  I saw something more akin to strange fisherman like practices
 Which May seem unnecessary but which one doesn't question since
Fishermen and the practice of fishing as generally free of the unnecessary and all about purpose...

There are always more things to think about. And one does start to feel like a fisherman repairing his nets in the winter, and it gives you time to think about how the work will look, and how it will function, and what it means. The ideas about it and around grow as the work does.

A trick of the light

It's not often an idea or an artwork will stop me in my internet/google reader trawling, but whenever it does it is always instantly rewarding and I (metaphorically) give myself a withering look and disappointedly shake my head, wondering why I don't make more of an effort.
Via Junkculture I stumbled upon these remarkable photographs of Antarctic icescapes, by Belgian architect  Francois Delfosse, deftly created with simply a plastic bag and some clever lighting. The trick with the scale is beguiling - I originally saw these as a sort of large scale sculptural installation: as if the plastic had frozen and gallery goers were free to traverse it.
And as one commentator noted on Delfosse's flickr, it is reminiscent of the crevasse Tintin falls into in 'Tintin in Tibet' - the bowels of the icy abyss illustrated by Hergé in blues, greys, purples and blacks.

On his website a series of postcards are available, including the series of Antarctic 'scapes, and a particularly wonderful image of the Bermuda Islands, as a quavering mirage. I especially like the way the dark, faceted and enclosed plastic bag Antarctica series feel when juxtaposed against the flat, one-hued and sparse open water surrounding the scarcely visible islands. I also have no idea of its 'authenticity', and I think I prefer to keep it that way.

I am always interested in people who appear to share interests of my own, ongoing projects which have been on a bit of a back burner of late involve both icy landscapes and mirages, in however a non-photographic capacity. I also seem to have compiled a large amount of primarily blue postcards, in particular from New Zealand, which I am wanting to do something with, but may also have to add these three images to the growing pile.

Wayward Land



































Chart of Segment of the Western Arctic North and Northwest of Grant Land by Edwin Swift Balch, 1912, showing the unexplored 'Crocker Land', sighted by Robert Peary in 1906. This fabled land lead to an ill-fated expedition to explore the nature and possible inhabitants of Crocker Land, however they discovered the land in fact, did not exist, and was actually a type of mirage known as a Fata Morgana.

The day was exceptionally clear, not a cloud or trace of mist; if land could be seen, now was our time . Yes, there it was! It could even be seen without a glass, extending from southwest true to northeast. Our powerful glasses, however.. brought out more clearly the dark background in contrast with the white) the whole resembling hills, valleys and snow-capped peaks to such a degree that, had we not been out on the frozen sea for 150 miles, we would have staked our lives upon its reality. Our judgment then as now, is that this was a mirage or loom of the sea ice.

 This imaginary land mass, created by a trick of the light, and the subsequent effort of the Crocker Land Expedition, is the basis for a new work I have begun in my new studio space. A hand embroidered rendering of this map on a white shower curtain, stitched in white thread and fishing line, blurring outlines with surroundings, incorporating materials which will shimmer in the light, reflecting upon ideas of mirages and mistaken realities, and the feeling of being small and inconsequential in a vast, cold landscape.

This is the first work of a series I am working on involving ideas about loneliness, solitude, islands, ships and the sea.

"...the Crocker Land mirage could symbolise the loneliness of the sea in another way. It is almost like a delusion instead of an illusion, something Donald Crowhurst may have imagined seeing, to convince himself of his sanity (or lack thereof). The sense of false hope a mirage can cause, just like how a weary traveller in the desert believes the mirage he is seeing is an oasis, it is uncanny how it appears to take the form of the thing one most desires, and the opposite of what is actually there - in the desert one believes he is seeing water, whereas at sea, one thinks he has sighted land."
- notes from my art journal about Crocker Land and mirages.

FATA MORGANA [part I]


[click image to enlarge]

An example of a Fata Morgana mirage, a rare and complex type of superior mirage. Here, an illusion of a large 'wall' of land is created, upon what is actually just open water.
The name of the mirage stems from the Italian for Morgan le Fay, the sorceress of Arthurian legend. In Italy, she was believed to be associated with the sirens, who lured unwary sailors to their death in the waters around Sicily.