wet hair

Hair on bath tiles - an artwork by Jeanette Mundt from the group show "Reckless Head" at Michael Benevento, and a drawing of a head with  my own hair done while showering one evening, 2011. This probably means I need a better conditioner. Would like to return to this idea however, though now it may be difficult as I have just had my hair cut.

Surface details.

Kilmartin House Museum, 2013, Bronze Thirteen pieces, overall size 3 m diameter / The Perpetual Plannist, 2012, Artist’s pages for Un Magazine 6.2, December 2012 / Floor Work, 2012, Acrylic, Dimensions of the floor, less 30cm at each edge

All works by Ash Kilmartin.

I love these three details of works by my clearly talented good friend Ash Kilmartin, which I have blatantly thieved from her website with only the best intentions.  The separate works were made over a  period of two years, but the repeated use of specific colours, shapes and scale create a sense of a continuation or investigation of a larger theme or project; ongoing research which manifests itself in different but familiar ways as her practice evolves.
The considered interferences on floorboards, the oval shape of the front pad of a shoe sole is mirrored in the stripped back paint surfaces which surround the embedded key. All surrounded by a particular shade of orangey pink, which sooner or later could be known as 'Ash Kilmartin Salmon' (which doesn't really sound like a colour at all but hey) in a similar vein to Yves Klein Blue.

Possible colour names for that particular shade welcome.

Paper grain

Hand drawn woodgrain paper created to wrap christmas presents last year. I envisage them framed and hung, a little torn, creased, with traces of sellotape still attached. The traces of the objects they enclosed, personalised by the recipient, showing their efforts to preserve/destroy the paper.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

You I'll Be Following

On my final day in Stockholm, Claire and I went to Moderna Museet, to primarily see the the Yoko Ono exhibition Grapefruit, a collection of films, sculptures and text-based works all stemming from her 1964 self-published book of the same name. Grapefruit contained a collection of 'instructional pieces' describing actions to either be completed in a tangible form, or to exist solely in the imagination. Numerous film works of Ono's are visual interpretations of these instructions.  

Film No. 5 (Rape, or Chase) Rape with camera. 

One and a half hours, colour, synchronized sound. 
A cameraman will chase a girl on a street with a camera persistently until he corners her in an alley, and, if possible, until she is in a falling position. 
The cameraman will be taking a risk of offending the girl as the girl is somebody he picks up arbitrarily on the street, but there is a way to get around this.
 Depending on the budget, the chase should be made with girls of different age, etc. 
May chase boys and men as well. 
As the film progresses, and as it goes towards the end, the chase and the running should become slower and slower like in a dream, using a high-speed camera. 

Rape was the most intriguing film, made with John Lennon in London in 1969. While watching I could feel the twist in my stomach and a tension in my chest related to the precarious, downward-spiralling situation of 'the woman' (Eva Majlata, a 21 year old Hungarian actress who couldn't speak English) as a couple of men relentlessly pursued her through London - on foot, by taxi, even into an apartment. It readily captures and (due to the year it was made, clothes, make-up and therefore perhaps a detachment from one's present reality) inadvertently glamourizes the thrill of the chase, and the perverse nature of what is actually happening. 

The decadence in the style and aesthetic of the late sixties, are so embodied in this film I feel it has become a sort of time capsule. And what once was intended to have a more gritty, documentary presence about it, now is more fictionalized, just another glimpse of 'The Swingin' Sixties', no part of our present reality. The longer you watch the film, the more engrossed you become, but at the same time, the sense you, as the viewer is being taken for a ride, strengthens. It's all a set-up, just like every other film, and all other 'reality tv' - the woman was in on it all along. I guess it give us comfort to think like that, as to accept that she was involuntarily hounded makes it more difficult to watch - especially from today's viewpoint.

Rape succeeds because it interacts with the audience on many levels, as many Ono films do. It can be a heavy-handed social commentary, as John says - "We are showing how all of us are exposed and under pressure in our contemporary world. This isn't just about the Beatles. What is happening to this girl on the screen is happening in Biafra, Vietnam, everywhere." - or just a standard chase scene, albeit a rather subversive one.

In fact while I was immersed in this film I couldn't help but notice a young two year-old girl in front of the monitor next to mine fascinated by Ono's Film No.4 (Bottoms) - (the title tells you all you need to know really), and having a great time, much to her brash American mother's horror/ my amusement.

After wandering around a city for three days, it was quite nice to site down and follow someone else.

Warm knits

One of perhaps three or four large knitted lampshades hanging over the bar at the Grill Room, Barcelona. Evocative of bait catchers and fishing nets, made with slightly fraying twine, it looked much more robust in real life. They immediately caught my eye due to the current knitting work I am making at the moment, one of those pleasing coincidences in life. The wooden frame and brown twine complement each other nicely with the natural colours and materials, I am thinking of marrying my fishing line knitted pieces with the shiny copper wire, for a more sparkly effect.
From the restaurant's menu I chose their 'Japanese burger' - a pattie marinated in soy sauce, accompanied with Japanese mayonnaise, and the usual salad-y suspects. There was meant to be tofu in it as well but I couldn't see any (the possibility I ate it without realising cannot be ruled out). It was pretty damn delectable, but anything with Japanese mayo in it generally is. 

A couple in Barcelona

Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider at La Pedrera, during the filming of 'The Passenger', Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975.
Have just returned from an amazing 4 day sojourn in Barcelona, wandering the streets, cooling off with 'Majorcan Milk', and finally being able to experience Pierre Bismuth's work 'Postscript/ The Passenger (OV)' at Barcelona's Museum of Modern Art. Also mingled with tourists for the chance to be inside Gaudí's 'La Pedrera', trying to do some nonchalant Maria Schneider posing on the rooftop terrace but instead just ended up getting in the way of hardcore German tourists. 50 or so people holding up their cameras in the air simultaneously was rather like watching interpretive dance.


It feels right that one of my first adventures to a different European city should be the one featured in my favourite film. Basically I just wanted to stroll around Barcelona like these two.

As yet untitled

Florence Wild
Untitled as yet, 2012, 500mm x 400mm, fishing line 

An almost square of knitted fishing line. Strung up in front of my living room window. In it's simplified form, displayed in a way I had not intended it, it rather captivates me. The process of making the work sometimes challenges my original intentions.

patterns within everyday life

Patterns are present in every facet of our daily life, tangible ones and abstract. Patterns can be chaotic or reassuring - a hectic psychedelic kaftan or the simple routine of repeated motions.  I have always held an interest in patterns - how can one not when the are the very building blocks of our lives so to speak. Patterns are like clues - to a life/style, in a detective story. One is always looking out for patterns in a hope of building up the larger picture.

I have long thought about creating patterns myself, patterns that can be multiplied and replicated and printed on material, a thought that has wandered in and out of my consciousness intermittently throughout my teenage and adult years, and something I have tried to integrate into my art practice both conceptually and in more literal forms.
Above is a sculpture I made as part of my graduating installation at Elam. Apart from the sculpture papier machéd in fake marbled Formica, on the floor lies a piece of paper - a pattern I made stamping a letter W across the page, first right way up, then the wrong, creating a sort of diamond/chicken wire pattern, though one that was shaky, riddled with errors, obviously executed by hand. The result (virtually indistinguishable in the poor photo above) was a little similar to Latvian artist Viktor Timofeev's 'WWW', which I stumbled upon by chance on the website PATTERNITY.

It was from seeing the designs of Sonia Delaunay as part of an exhibition at Louisiana about Avant-gard in the early Twentieth Century. The designs we simple and intriguing, her involvement with the Orphism movement clearly influencing her use of colour and circular motifs, as well as using rectangles, forming patterns like parquet floors. And while seeing these patterns manifest themselves as clothing and fabric was beautiful, I was drawn to her original drawing and sketches, watercolour and gauche on paper, the illustration of the first hint of the idea. It all seemed so casually executed, yet with great finesse.

"I have done fifty designs, relationships of colour using pure geometrical forms with rhythm. They were, and remain, colour scales - really a purified version of our concept of painting. (...) The rhythm is based on numbers, for colour can be measured by the number of vibrations. This is a completely new concept, one which opens infinite horizons for painting and may be used by everyone who can feel and understand it."
- Sonia Delaunay

In a time where I feel I am surrounded by art that is grandiose and powerful, large-scaled, minimalist and monochromatic and technical, it is a wonderful feeling when such small, old, basic illustrations of ideas can capture so much of my imagination. And with the hectic pace of the fashion world, and the types of prints fabric and textile designers are creating: digital, luridly coloured, computer generated, to look back on the prints of Delaunay is not such a bad idea.

And maybe this will be something I will continue with, interesting fabric patterns for and from everyday life. My first one (apart from the W netting) is a pattern of boots and noses.

an idea and something to accompany it

Leonor Antunes at Marc Foxx via Contemporary Art Daily.

"assembled, moved, re-arranged and scrapped continuously"

(excerpt from press release:)
In this exhibition, Antunes considers Brazilian modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi in “lina” 2012, a delicate brass and silver constructed curtain which is a reflection of the parquet floor design in the immanent modernist house she designed, known as the “Glass House” built Sao Paolo in 1951. Bo Bardiʼs influence can also be seen in the soft red leather floor work, “discrepancies with L.B.” which takes its form from the hard gridded window treatment of Bo Bardiʼs building “Sesc Pompeii”, also in Sao Paulo.

“lina” is installed upon “assembled, moved, re-arranged and scrapped continuously”, 2012, the exhibitionsʼ title and largest sculpture. The 9.5 x 9.5 foot walnut wooden pavilion is also the venue for “chão”, 2011, a 12 part hand- knotted and incrementally increasing, gridded series of delicate black nets. The canopy itself delineates the room, asserting an almost domestic feeling and providing an exhibited arrangement of grid upon grid within the show.

Hanging from the rafters and breaking her gridded constructions is the organic work “random intersections #7”, a sculpture made from handmade black leather straps, similar to horse bridals and referencing Carlo Mollinoʼs equestrian school in Turin “Società Ippica Torinese”, built in 1937 but destroyed in 1960. Antunes, like Mollino, has a great appreciation for the movement of material and this work brings her materiality back to a more corporeal connection.

The marriage of the fine black netting, the metallic glimmering curtain and the robust and darkly slick wooden structure upon which the works adorn, makes for an interesting and pleasing relationship. It reflects various thoughts I have myself had recently, revolving around an abandoned metal spring-bed base (which has since disappeared, and whose disappearance I may not fully get over for weeks or months) and a large pile of flaccid overstretched rubber bands.

I think it is only recently that tactility has taken on such importance in my work. The overwhelming feeling of wanting to touch something is luring me into the photographs of Antunes' work.

Knotting, linking, twisting; connecting ideas and materials is a common motif represented in my practice, building up textures and surfaces, images from small marks or gestures - stitches, knitting, creating patterns, repetition of shapes, reshaping the line - whether it is a length of embroidery thread or a pencil mark on paper.

(some notes from my journal)
"an interesting object (the bed base), black and silver and brown, stripped bare of any embellishments. skeletal. the bare bones. structural, architectural. the inner workings, masculine. Uncovered, exposed.
a single bed, only room for one.
standing upright, no room for anyone.
removed from it's original function/identity.

the coils and springs have a hypnotic quality, round & round.
rubber bands - the opposite of the coiled spring: soft, flaccid, stretchy.
mirroring the circular motif of the springs but out of shape, wobbly, chaotic, disorganised.

spring : springa sprang har sprungit (run, ran, have run)
spring is run in swedish.

a netting of rubber bands, covering the upright bed base. draped over the frame like a caress, an arm across the shoulders. a shroud/net encompassing it.
the bands are like thoughts, ideas, anxieties, unanswerable questions, dreams.
what fills the mind and what weighs one down.
tangled threads - made even worse with no beginning or end, circles connected to more circles, no straight lines here.
rubber bands with the ability to be stretched and reached through but can they ever be escaped from?"


just some thoughts to be thought about.
first item of business, sourcing another perfect spring single bed base, and ruing the missed opportunity of the one I thought was languishing casually waiting for me to get home from work to be rescued.

Out & About: Lousiana

Seen here with an Alexander Calder mobile while wandering around the sculpture garden at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark.

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.

Attention to detail

two works by Daan Van Golden at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, and two views of Martin Creed's installation at sketch, London.

Daan van Golden
His relatively small but diverse body of work is characterized by an acute attention to detail. References to important works from art history, as well as to less exalted images from commerce, pop-music and daily life are important components of his work. Van Golden has never been too concerned about prevailing artistic trends and has always carved a path of his own. His art does not consist of large brushstrokes, but of a much more modest gesture: his paintings are the result of a labour-intensive process, whereby a visual motive is explored in a very careful and precise manner.

Martin Creed at sketch:
Work No. 1347 consists of 96 different types of marble, in a formation of zigzagging lines across the floor, while Work No. 1343 is a new work specially made for the restaurant in which every single piece of cutlery, glassware, lamp, chair and table is different.

Attention to detail is an important thing. Something I seriously consider and take pride in with my work. While I appreciate the grand gesture, the found object, and the impersonal minimalism, there is something about labour intensive finely detailed craft which resonates with  me. Details are what give things credibility and authenticity apparently - at least this is what people praise and/or complain of in any televised period drama. The measure of something.

I like to think of details slowly building themselves up, accumulating numbers until their presence is inescapable. I strive to create a sort of push/pull effect - where the audience must step back from the work to take in the full picture, but afterwards are pulled close to see how the image is made.

It is in the details that one finds the clues in a murder mystery ("The Murder Mystery" could pretty much be a concept by which I question the meaning of life through my art practice). Red herrings too. It could just be the way a person phrases a sentence that gives the game away. I like to try and watch out for it, pick up the clues en route, and form an educated guess as to whom the perpetrator could be. It rarely, if ever happens like that however.

At this point it feels apt to admit that every single school report card given to me used the word 'diligent' in some capacity. It is a word that follows me around, and during my final year of art school, finally infiltrated my studio.

Before I used to sit on an idea, shape it like a bit of clay in my head, bolstering it with various concepts, cultural references and the like. My idea process changed while my work changed, and it took on a more insular, patient, labour-orientated facet, and all this time spent working, was also spent thinking, and both started to influence and build upon each other, and also from the music playing while this working and thinking process is going on. Hmm, sounds pretty wishy-washy. Bit new-age, 'organic'.

I guess what I am trying to with my writing these days is a similar method to working and thinking simultaneously. Trying to reach some level of clarity just by typing sentences around some of the thoughts in my head. Different ways of saying the same thing.  These days I just start writing things down/typing things out, seeing where they will lead me and how often I repeat myself.

And by-the-by, I am convinced that Van Golden's work of the young girl cartwheeling is out of sequence. Surely the 3rd and the 4th images should be switched around to give a complete cartwheel? But maybe, that is the whole point of it - that the details don't add up.

Lakes of Note

Have at long last been able to hang up my dear friend Claire Cooper's amazing work 'Notable Lakes part iv', a graphically compiled collation of lakes, both real and fictitious. The shapes of the Real Lakes are plotted on one side, and the Fictitious ones on the reverse (or vice versa).

I love the way the semi-transparent paper allows both sides to be visible - the overlapping of the dots creates an interesting variation in tone. After in initial quandary, I decided to hang it with those plastic poster holders, they rather exacerbate the feeling of looking at some kind of high school geography class OHP projection of how the world looked at some point in history.
It does make for an easy and painless transition from Notable 'real' Lakes to Notable 'fictitious' ones however.

Because it does look like a map. Occasionally I will look at it thinking how much lake xxv 'Taal Lake' could almost pass for Brazil. I asked Claire to send me one which she had folded, how she originally envisioned the work. The sharp creases keeps the work from being completely flat, and the poster holders do their job of helping it keep it's shape. The folds give a worn physicality to the work that the flatness and sheen of the paper would have overpowered. I think they give the work more character.

This is the second piece of art I have bought, along with my friend Ash's brilliant piece The Travelling Mime. I look forward to expanding my collection, especially with my works by my exceptionally talented friends.
I would also recommend Claire's various Internet endeavours, Olio Ataxia, as one half of Diamonds & Wood, and not to mention her War and Peace tumblr: dedicated to film stills from the 1968 mammoth adaption of Tolstoy's War and Peace and a personal fave.