sustenance


Loving these installation shots of Xin Cheng's exhibition project 'Sustenance' at Split/fountain in Auckland. I am heading back there next week - (this time next week I will be in a plane, hopefully fast asleep) and am looking forward to seeing what has been happening in the Auckland art scene in my absence (if everyone is not on holiday at the time, but really who can blame them).
Will be bring some works with me, so if there exists anyone who actually bothers to read this and knows of any suitable spaces to exhibit some works on paper, inform me! (or inform the space of my awesomeness, if you hold that belief).
Be seeing you, Auckland!

In my own backyard

images via we find wildness, but really via neeve

It is odd when you discover things happening a stone's throw from your house on the internet. I was stopped in my tracks on a daily scroll through my reader, by the captivating image by Georgian artist Thea Djordjadze. The images are brief glimpses of her exhibition 'Our Full', showing right now at Malmö Konsthall. Right in my back yard.

Tomorrow I will take an hour out of last minute christmas shopping and the like to chill out in what seems a really fascinating show. The more shows like this I see the more excited I get about my own art practice, and my efforts to uphold it against rather minding numbing library drudgery.

Autumnal Afternoon


Taking photographs around Malmö with my visiting friend Bree / archery in autumn / probably Malmö's coolest car / good scenic Autumnal vibes, complete with dancing plastic bag / attempt to document wildlife failed miserably - the downside of the point and shot camera.

Anyone who doesn't believe that Autumn is the best season is surely deluding themselves. It is an amalgamation of the wind-down of summer and the anticipation of winter, which you know will wear off a few weeks in. A season where it is perfectly acceptable to still have a gin and tonic on a crisp sunny afternoon, then warm up with some roasted vegetables (pumpkin and parsnips cannot be beaten) and a delicious autumnal ale. It is the perfect time for reading in parks and admiring the gradual shift of hues in the trees. It is not yet too cold to wear a beret, and your coats don't have to be for purely practical reasons.

Autumn also has the coolest songs about it: my two favourites being 'Autumn Afternoon' by The Teddy Neeley Five, and 'It's Autumn' by The Hamlets. Autumn Afternoon has, hands down, the best 'ooo-ing' in a song, ever.


April in New Zealand is the height of Autumn, and I therefore count myself lucky to be born in that month. However, now everything is topsy-turvy, in Sweden my birthday falls in Spring.
And now I am writing this in the middle of winter. If anyone wants to visit me next year, come in Autumn.

Diagonal tourism


When your camera takes film and you only seem document your holidays, it sometimes takes many months for images to see the light of day. These are a few more from my summer touristing in Stockholm in August, these four taken at Drottningholms slott, the private residence of Sweden's Royal Family.

It appears I have a propensity for taking photographs on an angle, perhaps to make them more "dramatic". I think I just rue the fact that a camera does not have the same peripheral scope as my eyes.


Gaze and Glaze

Ceramic cups and teapots by Isobel Thom as part of the exhibition 'The Berlin Years' with Saskia Leek, shown at the Hamish McKay Gallery 18 October - 10 November.

Sometimes objects are so beautiful their presence overwhelms their functionality. I have always liked to think that I would be the person who would use such things in my everyday life - and thus get the most pleasure out of them, having been incorporated into the drudgery of my routine. Then again, I broke one of my prized glasses with a picture of a vintage car on it, and am still ruing my carefree attitude towards possessions I do actually care about.

The angular shapes of the tea sets and the stackable nature of the cups are so alluring - all those modernist sensibilities captured and executed on a small scale, while imbued with a sort of zen calmness and the practiced movements of the Japanese tea ceremony. The tea pots themselves have an almost Communist feel about them, their shape and twisting lid seemingly reflecting the hammer and sickle.

I am drawn more and more towards art and designs more closely aligned with craft arts - textile crafts such as embroidery and knitting, ceramics, whittling, jewellery, the making of objects. I am at a sort of cross roads in my life at the moment, and I am not sure what I am wanting to do. All I know is that I do not want my career to be 8 hours a day sitting stationary in front of a computer, and I want to do something with my hands. I believe this is why my artworks are delicate, time consuming and hand made. It is a way of combating the pull of the internet - a direct backlash to the power of technology. Crafts seem to defy the claims that everything can be done on a computer.

Literal flow

Set of open plan book shelves seen on small spaces - a tumblr with a serious case of indoor-outdoor flow, showcasing architecture and design that will make you want to vacuum, put things away, and wipe down table surfaces with a great feeling of inadequacy. Working in a library, I have a great affinity with shelving. Or at least, I feel that I ought to.
These shelves at common room - "a non-profit exhibition space that supports artistic experimentation and dialog in contemporary culture", and described as "bookshelves mounted between the wood studs create a bookstore and social bar on one side of the partition and a more private archive on the side of the artists space" are great because they are accessible from both sides - just like all good things (cloths racks, buffet tables, christmas trees), and provide incentive to collect volumes of books by which to fill out the space into a complete wall.

Sometimes there are so many inspiring things in our alternate reality known as the internet, it makes me want to erupt into a flurry of creativity and then destroy everything in the throes of self loathing. A bit heavy from just looking at a set of cleverly made shelves, perhaps. 

Stills from the weekend










Film stills from 'Suna no Onna (The Woman in the Sand) /  newly acquired record rack (made in Sweden!) / pie / Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl
The weekends become increasingly more important as winter inches nearer, and the nights grow even longer, dusk now falling some time between 4 and 4:30 pm. By the time I leave work during the week, it has already been dark for about an hour, skewing one's perception of time. So I try to take advantage of my weekends, the only time I can go out and wander around Malmö without turning on my bike headlights. 
Saturdays are the best days for doing things. On Sundays nearly everything is closed, or at least feels that way. Sundays are good days for cycles to the beach, which is a rather soothing place when it is cold and grey. Last weekend when I saw an old man swimming - it was probably 6 degrees at best. I am sure he has been swimming in November for many years. Old people are very resilient, I find. 
Yesterday was a day of small achievements for me. I saw a fantastic film at Cinemateket, Suna no Onna  (The Woman in the Dunes) as part of the Japanese New Wave series they are showing this season. Though visually captivating, I was also able to actively engage myself in the narrative as my Swedish comprehension appears to have reached the level where I can easily follow Swedish subtitles. A small coup as I continue to attempt to carve out a life for myself here.
After the film I challenged myself to make a meat pie, including the short crust pastry shell. My culinary skills are pretty hit and miss (though somewhat improving) and I began to think I had bitten off more than I could chew. (this would literally, be the case when it came time to consume the pie.) I conveyed my fears to a pie maker of some repute, who told me it would be a success and that I was "excellent at making mince". The pie, I must admit, turned out better than expected. I even went back for seconds. 
Sunday I went to a second hand store, ostensibly hunting for a  gift for someone and naturally coming away with a few for myself instead, coming away with a near perfect condition record rack in handsome navy to house my slowly expanding collection of singles, and a lucky find of a collection of short stories by Roald Dahl, the blurb on the back cover proclaiming "If your taste is for the macabre, the sick, the outrageous, the unexpected, the horrifying - Roald Dahl will give you orgiastic delight. If not, you are going to miss one of the most sophisticated collections of short stories in print."
I look forward to some sophisticated orgiastic delights  from Roald Dahl, starting with my lunch break at work tomorrow.








Book pile


My pile of novels which I have on hand right now, including a few library books, which probably need to be returned. Two are in Swedish, and are children's books. One of them is the first Famous Five story. When I told some friends I was reading it to improve my Swedish, they laughed and said my language would most likely come out sounding old-fashioned. Can't say that's  a bad language quirk to have, to be honest.

Collection bound







One thing I would like to achieve during my lifetime is to collect all of Ngaio Marsh's 32 detective novels. I unashamedly call Ngaio Marsh my favourite author, and along with Raymond Chandler, Joseph Heller and Haruki Murakami, it is due to her amazing use of language. She uses some wonderfully obscure adjectives.
I am one who generally judges books by their cover. And I mean that literally. I try not to apply that phrase to people, but will stand by it when it comes to literature. There are some wonderful Ngaio Marsh covers, from the hand illustrated to the more boldy graphic as the editions move through from the 40's and 50's into the 60's. From the early 70's onwards, as photography was commonly used, the covers progressed steadily downhill.
So I am keeping my eyes peeled for striking covers that proudly proclaim the amazingness of the words which they contain. Above are some of the best. 

Mates

 


Chess sets designed by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.

Man Ray chess pieces 1926 / Man Ray chess set 1947 / Marcel Duchamp chess pieces 1918-1919 / Marcel Duchamp pocket chess set 1943


The two friends in the midst of a game.

Dust settling




Dust Breeding, 1920, Man Ray

Man Ray's 2 hour long exposure of Duchamp's masterpiece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923), covered in a years worth of dust.

I am at present reading Man Ray's autobiography, appropriately titled Self Portrait, published in 1963. My favourite passage so far concerns his first meeting with Duchamp, around 1915.

"Visitors continued to descend upon us, one Sunday afternoon two men arrived - a young Frenchman, and an American somewhat older. The one was Marcel Duchamp, the painter whose Nude Descending the Staircase had created such a furor at the Armory show in 1913, the second a collector of modern art, Walter Arensberg. Duchamp spoke no English, my French was nonexistent. Donna acted as my interpreter but mostly carried on a rapid dialogue with him. I brought out a couple of old tennis racquets, and a ball which we batted back and forth without any net, in front of the house. Having played the game on regular courts previously, I called the strokes to make conversation: fifteen, thirty, forty, love, to which he replied each time with the same word: yes."

The Large Glass is most likely the one work of art I ardently desire to see in the flesh in my lifetime. 

Den nakna ön









Hadaka no Shima (The Naked Island), has been one of the highlights of this season's Cinemateket programme so far, and it was spellbinding viewing tonight. I look eagerly forward to the remainder of the Japanese New Wave selection.
Kaneto Shindo's 1964 film centres on the continuous uphill struggles, living in isolation on a small island in the Seito Inland Sea.
Shot in black and white, and almost completely void of dialogue, Shindo uses repeated daily actions to spell out the monotony of hardship - the breaks from the constant work (a family trip to the mainland, local celebrations) stand out in stark contrast as short interludes of spontaneity. Dialogue is not necessary; even if there had been a script, it doesn't feel like family would have anything to say to each other that could be conveyed with language.
Accompanying the daily farming grind is an incredibly moving soundtrack by Hikaru Hayashi, perfectly reflecting and enhancing the back-breaking labour, one repeated motion after another. Tending to their precious crops, staggering up the rocky, precarious slopes of the island laden with full buckets of precious water - there is a certain elegance to the characters movements, as the gingerly place one foot in front of the other, sinewy arms supporting the yokes across their backs and shoulders in a delicate tightrope balancing act.

Films like this continue to fuel my love of, and fascination with, islands.

Set it to Music



 The Owl and The Pussycat - The Bards // The Seventh Seal - Scott Walker

 I am listening to a compilation called 'The History of Northwest Rock vol 2: The Garage Years. One of the songs compiled is The Bards' take on Edward Lear's magnificent nonsense poem from 1871. The poem has wonderful memories for me of my grandmother, and the only downside is that they don't manage to fit in my favourite line (someone please put 'runcible spoon' into a song):  

"They dined on mince and slices of quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon"

 This in turn, naturally led me to think of my favourite Scott Walker song 'The Seventh Seal' in which he recounts the events of Ingmar Bergman's cinematic masterpiece as an equally powerful pop song. If you do not have the mettle to sit through the film, you can at least listen to the song, which will give you enough knowledge to follow a conversation about the film with people you are trying to impress, or even subtly divert the conversation with the comment "have you heard Scott Walker's interpretation of 'The Seventh Seal'?" which will surely garner you respect and admiration from all (and therefore continue the conversation along lines well traversed by you. A win-win situation).

 Here are a few choice lines from the song:

Anybody seen a knight pass this way / I saw him playing chess with Death yesterday / His crusade was a search for God and they say / It's been a along way to carry on 

 My life's a vain pursuit of meaningless smiles / Why can't God touch me with a sign / Perhaps there's no one there answered the booth / And Death hid within his cloak and smiled 


 My life's a vain pursuit of meaningless smiles is such a wonderful phrase.

4 things




 

4 images that I have been really drawn to of late. Firstly a lovely colour page from my excellent book 'The Lore of Ships' -  the flags make me want to write out mantras to live by in a sort of drape-y semaphore as a hanging soft sculpture. A wonderful knotted sponge-like form, created by Jens Risch, twisting and contorting upon itself in painful confusion. TV series 'Psych' parody Twin Peaks, and include many of the original cast. Here Dana Ashbrook (Bobby Briggs), Sheryl Lee (Laura Palmer) and Lenny Von Dohlen (Harold Smith) discover the body of 'Paula Merrel' "wrapped in plastic". And fourthly, a very large palette with (in hindsight) a rather Audrey-ish looking girl) found in the wonderful image archive that is Old Chum.

Untitled: The 12th Man

Alain Delon as Tom Ripley in Plein Soleil (1960). A great film I watched recently. based on Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Delon's first starring role. Here he is most likely listening to 'The Only One' by Roy Orbison.

I have spent the weekend listening and dancing to some great music on Friday and Saturday nights. Nothing quite like twirling around on an empty dance floor to a favourite song with a Red Stripe in your hand. People watch you and they can see, that for that moment, you are having a good time.
These 12 songs are a collection of Florence staples and recent discoveries, a mixture of songs I own on record, ones sourced through various compilations I have inadvertently stumbled across, and recommendations from certain people who usually know what I like before I do.
I seem to be naturally drawn to songs whose lyrics are of a more sombre nature, and these days, the more organ the better. Great songs to listen to in the evening while nursing a gin & tonic and reflecting upon life, or a soundtrack to accompany a spring clean on a Sunday morning.





Untitled: The 12th Man* 


Hurt - The Futuras
She - The Monkees
Disillusion - The Minute Men
Always With Him - The Living Daylights
I've Got A Way With Girls - Lavender Hour
The Only One - Roy Orbison
Mirage - Tommy James & The Shondells
My Baby Is Gone - The Untamed
Don't Think It's Me - Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
So Many Times - The Sweetarts
Lonely Weekend - The Remains
So Hard To Bear - The Banshees

* I felt the need to give this collection of songs a cricketing title, having had just watched the West Indies' triumphant win over Sri Lanka at the Twenty20 World Cup. Titling things is hard, perhaps I should do the opposite to what I do with artworks, which are often named after songs, and name mixes after artworks. On that note, let's just add an 'untitled' in there for good measure.

Travelogue - horizontal















A collection of horizontally orientated photographs taken from my 2nd hand 60kr Konica camera. Having this camera is one of the best things, and I am happy to eschew a little bit of technology for something which forces me to be more restrained, selective and patient when documenting. It also gives me a chance to actually enjoy physically inhabiting a space, to have a chance to actually see things without another lens in front of my eyes.
My ability to 'point-and-shoot' is also improving I believe, if that is actually possible.

Horizontal images of Malmö, Frederiksborg, Stockholm, plus Claire.

And coming soon: Travelogue - the second installment. Vertical.

I was here


Coming from New Zealand it is not often one gets to see buildings that are so grand, majestic, overwhelming, and frankly, just old. Frederiksborg Slot as it stands now was constructed between 1602-1620, though some parts date back to the original structure from 1560. This notion is rather dumbfounding to me, realising I have wandered through the same spaces as people from 400 years ago.  Every tourist cliché emerges from the woodwork and nestles in my terribly formulaic expressions as I take it all in.
The place is a visual overload - a slight dizziness comes on from turning around in wonder while staring up at the impossibly lavish ceilings, weighed down with ornately carved decorations.
In the end, the place just seemed too improbable, too removed from my reality to full comprehend it's history. It was not until I noticed the few scratches on the window pane, which I endeavoured to photograph above, that I could fully appreciate just how 'old' this place was. (the more I write here the deeper the hole I am apparently digging for myself is getting. It must be impossible to write about this sort of thing with any sort of sincerity without sounding like a bit of an ignorant ning-nong.)
Above a couple of names and a date have been scratched into the glass, a way for other tourists to leave their marks in history, and in a time where it was easier to get away with such vandalism. This was etched on in 1930, and it was quite glorious to think of others marvelling over this fantastically ridiculous building, and creating some sort of perspective for someone visiting 82 years after them.

I was reminded of Highwic, one of Auckland's historic houses open to visit. On one of the windows in a servant's room, the name 'Florence' is etched into the glass. The story goes that Florence was a housemaid who stole her mistress's diamond ring, and used it the scratch her own name into the window pane in her room.