Bicycle ideal

































I am scouting about for a new bicycle. At present the Pilen Lyx is the clear leader, preferably in forest green with a brown Brooks saddle, because one can choose things like that. This is most likely my equivalent of buying your first car.

Sea Legs
































































The RMS Queen Elizabeth on fire and as a shipwreck in Hong Kong Harbour, 1972.  While being converted into a University cruise ship (a rather amazing idea), the world's largest passenger ship mysteriously caught fire as her refurbishments neared completion.  So much water was poured into her, in a vain attempt to combat the blaze the ship eventually capsized from the weight, and lay wrecked in Hong Kong Harbour for many months, until eventually being partially scrapped to be used as landfill for Hong Kong Airport. Parts such as the keel and boilers still lie on on the seabed, and are still marked on local maps as 'Foul', an unsafe area to anchor a boat.


The wreck of the RMS Queen Elizabeh made for one of the more interesting film locations and sets when used as a covert MI6 headquarters in the 1974 Bond film 'The Man with the Golden Gun'. To accommodate for the capsized liner's continuous lean, the Secret Service apparently constructed new floors, ramps, staircases and bookshelves, making for excellent clashing wallpaper patterns, bizarrely distorted corridors,and staircases upon staircases.







Some Windows / Blinds



































Alex Philip Fitzgerald
Some Windows (2010)


Printed acetate and colored vellum layered on the windows of my studio in Malmö, Sweden.

 




























 RED OAK / FIRST DOG (2010-2011)
An imagined space where Walter de Maria's Broken Kilometer exists as a story of the separation of a boy and his two coon hounds.

alexphilipfitzgerald.com


friends making great art. more to peruse!

Spectacles spectacle
































My new pair of spectacles - to seemlessly maintain vision inside and out. I never realised how poor my eyesight was until putting my glasses on -
akin to Dorothy's transition to techni-colour in The Wizard of Oz - entering a whole new world.
Now I just walk around looking at things, marvelling at how sharp and bright everything looks.

Smörgåsbord





































Tapas & type: colourfully arranged morsels and letters. The former last night's dinner, the latter a wedding gift for two friends celebrating wedded bliss last weekend in Copenhagen. Corresponding colours and composition almost. I like it when circumstances in my daily life visually reflect each other in an sort of aesthetic coincidence.

Hopefully 'Tapas Saturday' will become a monthly/summer tradition. I feel like I am in the time of my life where I would like to start building up a collection of my own 'traditions', instead of following someone else's. Perhaps this is another goal for the year.

Roarin' Around





































It was back in the 60's that department stores really stocked everything, and one could wander into Harrods and casually purchase a pet lion cub from the 'exotic animals' department, on your way past haberdashery and manchester.  Christian the lion spent his first year of life living it up with his Australian carers in their London flat, cruising around in the backseat of a Bentley, dining at restaurants, and reclining on the chaise longues  at his digs in the furniture shop aptly named 'SophistoCat'.

The vicar of the Moravian Chapel nearby was approached to allow Christian the run of the graveyard, and every day he was taken there to roar around and play football.
Once, when he was brought along to a seaside picnic, he dipped his toes reluctantly in the water and intimated with a shudder that it was disagreeably cold. But he was eventually persuaded to swim in the English Channel.

"Sometimes, he'd see people staring at him through the back window of the car, keep very still on purpose - and then, just when they were convinced he was a stuffed toy, he would very slowly turn his head and freak them out."

excerpts from The Daily Mail

Ljus utan skuggor












































































































Kah Bee Chow
Ljus utan skuggor
2011

concrete, glass, cyanotype on silk, broken glass and mirror, globe pendant lamp, sanded floors, blanket, digital print, towel, sawn homeware catalogue, cup, steel chain, steel tube, found rocks.


A glittering array of carefully contructed mountains of polished glass, gently draped printed fabric, stoically robust grey columns and the reflections of plants/chains/crystals/aforementioned items caught in broken shards of mirror, while bright sunlight bears down and casts shadows that perhaps weren't meant to be there.

Kah Bee Chow's installation for the Malmö Konsthögskolan's annual exhibition open days was indeed a highlight. I love the feeling of seeing your friends make great work, which in turn inspires your own efforts.

Notes on a Scandal

 Crowd scenes from Malmö Stadion, where the game was held and eventually called off due to hooliganism.

Yesterday's 'derby' was the show-down between the two rival footballing cities of Skåne, Helsingborg and Malmö, whose teams (HIF and MFF) are also sitting first and second  respectively, on the Allsvenskan points table. Every time these rivals rendezvous the police are out in force on horseback on the streets, cautiously eyeing up raucous revellers. Chartered buses roll in from out of town, and patrol cars cordon off roads around the train stations to direct the flow of human traffic alighting from them, mingling with the sky-blue clad Malmö supporters wandering around the streets drinking cheap beer, letting off flares and chanting incomprehensibly.

The match was aborted after thirty minutes of play; after HIF scored a goal, enraged Malmö supporters pelted the Helsingborg goalie with firecrackers and one crazed fan brazenly burst onto the pitch to attack the goal keeper head-on. The man was carried by police, pall-bearer style, off the pitch and play abandoned.

The match is being referred to in Swedish press as 'The Scandal Match' and the HIF goalie keeps stating he is 'very shocked'.


Photographs via Sydsvenskan

From a Holiday































Diffust Deren - Sarah Jane Gorlitz / Ubåt U3 at Teknikens och Sjöfartens hus, Malmö / Chilled lobster on the street, Copenhagen / Window display at a Danish Auction House with polar bear and reflected surrounding architecture / Façade of Frederiksborggades Is ice cream parlour, Nørrebro, Copenhagen.

A small collection of photographs taken over Easter, 2011, when friends visited. Travels and adventures in Malmö and Copenhagen, when the weather stayed warm just for them it seemed, and as soon as the last one left, reverted to windy, chilling, and grey.

I prefer looking at holiday snaps in groups of five or so. Too many, and I lose interest, not enough, and I am unable to build up some sort of narrative or aesthetic connection between each image. I like to think of photographs 'fitting' with other photographs, I suppose that is why I have always held an interest in diptychs, jump cuts, film stills and so on and so forth, and the implicit/explicit nature of the pairings or collections - whether it be by colour, light, composition or subject matter, or the background and storytelling behind the images themselves.

One criticism about the referential nature of my art practice is that the audience is not necessarily privy to all the links, hints, references, plays-on-word and in-jokes behind them. Perhaps not, but maybe there is enough to build on by the aesthetic of the image/artwork itself.

Song Choice

On Saturday my friends in New Zealand banded together to celebrate one of my best friend's birthdays in true karaoke style. It pained me not to be there to join in the hours of drunken fun, but at least gave me a moment to ruminate of what I would have sung had I wished to assault them with my strained vocal chords.
It is quite hard choosing a truly worthy karaoke song: you want a song everyone knows, so that they can join in on the chorus or take over if you are truly mutilating the said song. You would not want a song to be too long, with a drawn out guitar solo, as no one goes to karaoke to hear someone sing an instrumental. Preferably the song should have a poignant or meaningful memory associated with it and others present, possibly you have drunkenly listened to at a previous time. I have discovered that the most enjoyed karaoke songs are ones people don't take seriously - its is most likely they have been played on solid gold - perhaps even over the christmas period.

And, if you are someone such as myself, the song should be relatively easy to sing. Therefore, as my now preferred karaoke song of choice, taking all of the aforementioned points into consideration, I can only conclude that next time I am in a karaoke room I shall break into a slaughtered rendition of

Rod Stewart's Maggie May

Items of Interest












































































Isamu Noguchi / My Name Florence Tee / Buoy Rope Bag / Ngaio Marsh / Lady Michael Balcon as Minerva by Madame Yevonde / Danger Man

Some recent items of interest and things that have caught my eye: portrait of Isamu Noguchi in one of his elegant chairs - one thing I would like to do with my life is make chairs; recently I bought this tee shirt from the Swedish shop weekday - ironically (or fatally) it was named the 'My Name Florence Tee', and after that there was no looking back; have started another art project knitting fishing line whilst probably diminishing my already failing eye sight, the main inspiration for this stems from various rope covers for buoys; I also recently completed reading Ngaio Marsh's autobiography, she will always stand as one of my favourite authors alongside Raymond Chandler, Haruki Murakami, Joseph Heller and Herge; Lady Michael Balcon as Minerva looking rather similar to a cover of a Chandler/James Bond novel, with shades of Twin Peaks thrown in for good measure; Danger Man, perhaps the precursor to 'The Prisoner' - I swoon every time John Drake says his token catchphrase 'I'm obliged' and wish I could incorporate this into my everyday parlance except no one else would understand what I meant by it. I also appreciate Danger Man's relatively realistic fight scenes, at least compared to other spy programmes of the time.

Studio Visit

April contained a bevvy of exciting experiences, including the start of a new, full time, Swedish speaking job, an amazing Easter sojourn from aforementioned job with visits from three wonderful friends, the commencement of time spent in my new basement studio, and the beginning of a new project mentioned here previously. Hurrah for April, I say, as I still come to terms that today is in fact, the first of May.


























































The white striped shower curtain I am at present embroidering on in my new studio / close ups of the North Pole, which Robert Peary reached on the day of my birth in 1909, and the mystical 'Crocker Land', of which the map claims to have plotted / Ryan documenting the work in progress /studio portrait of the artist with invisible artwork.

Plans for May include afternoons after work sewing white on white, and perhaps fitting a couple of afternoons playing basketball in between.

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.

Diet

As 'The Thin White Duke', Bowie's persona throughout 1976, his diet consisted of 'Red pepper, cocaine, and milk".