Indeterminacy

Am loving the John Cage Indeterminacy random excerpt generator. A wonderful appropriation of Cages' ideas around chance and spontaneity  in art and music making. Cage defined Indeterminacy as 'the ability of a piece to be performed in substantially different ways', and with the random arrangement of the stories, each telling, each performance is unique.

I like the simplicity:
I tell one story a minute, and, when it’s a short one, I have to spread it out. Later on when I come to a long one, I have to speak as rapidly as I can.”

I am looking to explore ideas of indeterminacy through installation, where objects become like characters, works have the ability to be displayed in substantially different ways, and display takes on aspects of performance. 

And I will continue to write down stories, sans time-frame. 

generate your own Cageian lecture HERE

Att plugga

             

                                   

A portrait taken by Jane where I am slightly obscured by the ongoing, never-ending, cascading knitted fishing line project which has now taken on so many possible exhibiting forms I can't remember them all. It is like a security blanket in some ways, something to work on as a way to just to keep working. It is filled up with scores of ideas both related to the work itself and of other works, as I sit and think and knit, plugging away at it. 

In swedish 'att plugga' means to study. I like that. 

All these ideas have accumulated within this knitted mass, and have lost their original form - instead morphing into the texture of the knit, becoming transparent, a tangled mess of lines of thought and streams of consciousness. Sort of how I am writing about it now. 

Sometimes the futility of the whole thing gets me down. I don't even what it is meant to be anymore! I jokingly (not so jokingly) cry to anyone within earshot. First it was to be stretched between the floor and ceiling, then laid out like a wobbly rug on the ground, anchored by some small island like objects. Then it was a wave, a waterfall, a galaxy - a hammock, a camp bed, a curtain. Just now I think of it as a sort of wrap - like the suitcases you see at the baggage claim swaddled in Gladwrap. 

As a thing in itself it is aesthetically pleasing, and tempting to touch. And it's malleability is it's strongest asset. The longer I work at it, more manifestations will emerge. This is as much about the process as the end result. 

I fret too much about the end result. 

"To be installed in a manner which expresses the amount of ideas that were thought of during the making of this large knitted beast."

        A working title.

Or

"All of my ideas from the past 2 years are tangled up in here somewhere."

A prop. I feel an artists book in the works. The various forms of the knitted fishing line project in a long accordion book. Apropos Ed Ruscha or some such. Black and white. 

I should just let it grow as long as it needs to. The practice is being maintained, and it provides me with time to wonder about what is going on, what I want to be doing. It is relaxing. Right now it feels like I am finally admitting all I want to do is knit a seemingly endless train of fishing line, without really knowing why. 

I am constantly reminded of the Mainland Cheese ads from New Zealand - (not the one where they replace musicians with cheese, "Chubby Chedder! The Brie Gees!" but the "Good things take time" one. As in cheese.) 

I wonder why I always try to be so serious in my art practice, when in general I am really quite silly. (re: cheese ad. I spend a lot of time knitting and thinking of more cheese musicians.) A recurring thought as I knit, and one I believe more firmly in with each stitch, is that Art is too serious. 

It will be finished at some point - and the best thing will be deciding it is finished due to some occurrence in my life: an outside influence will decide its conclusion. And then, holding all my ideas, I will decide how it will be. At least in it's first incarnation. 

It is my 27th birthday on Sunday.

Follow through

2013 has drawn to a close and 2014 has commenced. I spent 10 days in Stockholm where it wasn't snowing and not that cold. This was the warmest December in 50 years, I was told.
I walked around, visited the monument of the Andrée Expedition, the graves of the three Swedes who attempted to reach the North Pole by balloon in 1897.
The monument is a tall concrete sail, depicting the efforts of the party and charting the haphazard journey of the balloon, the three graves facing outwards from this point. It is on a small hill, surrounded by trees on three sides, and I felt a stillness there that I still think about.

Like balloons being controlled by the wind, most things rarely go in straight lines. I think Agent Cooper mentioned that in an episode of Twin Peaks (I added the balloon bit to reiterate the pertinence of this phrase). Though everyone has pretty much uttered that sentence in one form or another at one or more points in their lives. Sayings like that make sense because they are true. An occasional reminder however, never goes amiss.

I have been thinking about following through. Usually when I think about following through, I am thinking about cricket, as that is what bowlers do once the ball has left their hand. As I have now retired from my cricketing career (as of 10 years ago - I decided to quit while I was ahead, I had peaked by 16 I believe) I apply this thought to myself in terms of ideas. I have ideas all the time, sometimes words, sometimes images, written on post-it notes at the library, sketches masking taped to the wall at home by my desks, laboriously scrawled in my journal, mentioned in passing to a friend.

And then nothing really happens.

An idea doesn't get any better the longer you ruminate over it. It isn't a cheese, or whiskey, or wine, or anything else that matures. It doesn't rot, like fruit or eggs. It is more like a loaf bread that gets left out - it just goes stale.

I have been working on a sculpture for over a year now. Knitting fishing line. How I envisage it now is nothing like what I first considered doing with it. The more I work at it, the further the ideas evolve. Today Kjell asked me if it would ever be finished. I said I didn't know. The process knitting the straight line into interconnected loops functions as much as a way for ordering my thoughts as jotting them down or uttering them aloud.

If there is one thing I have learnt through spending over twelve months knitting fishing line in my spare time, it is that I personally do not make much progress in my thought process if I am not working on something. Need to keep the hands busy so the brain ticks over. I have spent 2013 attempting (somewhat in vain) to figure out 'what it is I want to do'. I have not made any great strides forward in that rather vague endeavour. But I believe, as with the knitted fishing line, that if I follow through on ideas which have occurred to me throughout the past year or so, act upon them, then perhaps I will be closer to realising this. 

2014 is the year of the follow through. I'm calling it now.

The Beatles are holed up in a hotel in Tokyo, I am holed in up a (largish) 1 room flat in Malmö

Here are The Beatles painting their only jointly made artwork holed up in the Tokyo Hilton in June of '66. Paul's cigarette pack poking out of his shirt pocket looks like some sort of egg roll sushi brooch, of all things.
They are engrossed - it seems like a nice escape and probably a relief to be allocated a specific corner for your own artistic style. There is only so much collaborating one can do I guess.

I have been sick today, my body feels like a wet woollen jersey - slow, heavy and uncooperative. My head likewise. I am terrible at being sick, any days not working seem like a wasted opportunity to be productive, and I cannot focus on one thing for an extended period of time. Today alternating between reading snippets of Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem and watching The Beatles Anthology while continuing to work on an artwork which feels increasingly futile and has no end in sight. I wanted to spend today writing: but my energy has been siphoned out of my brain, perhaps through the snot dribbling out of my left nostril - the right one remains resolutely blocked.

I don't write long things, I struggle to maintain words over the length of a A4 page. These texts are just ideas observed and described. I never write dialogue. Like everything, the only way to improve one's writing is to increase one's output, which is a new intention. I had thoughts of three separate texts to work on when I went to sleep last night, I woke up this morning with faint recollections of two of them and a left arm that had refused to wake up with the rest of me and lolled around like a tentacle.

I have spent the majority of today trying to remember my third idea and reading maybe every fourth sentence of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It still counts.

My tutor in my second year of art school, Richard Orjis, asked me once something along the lines of 'What's up with all this nostalgia? What isn't interesting about what is happening now?' and the fact that I am still thinking about this 6 years later means it must have made some sort of impression on me. I am not exactly sure what that impression is, except that I associate the word nostalgia with a sort of menacing dread, and I realise I have spent today (along with many many other days) entrenched in the music and writings of the mid sixties. I am listening to Rubber Soul as I type this.

Perhaps tomorrow I can begin to associate with the contemporary world, for tonight I am feeling irrelevant.

This is a spotlight that can be fixed to any appropriate surface, even the user's forehead.

Small things - clever, perfectly formed. Simple ideas, functional.
I want to simplify everything. I use so many words, smother works with a deluge of different ideas, theories, concepts each trying to justify the other while at the same time elbowing to the front of the queue.
I want to employ a new simplicity in my work - pare things backs, no over-involved plotlines; but to remember important phrases: a wild sheep chase; the macguffin; tangled threads of crime.

Just make statements. Of intent. I feel like I have been drifting aimlessly along for the past while (I don't even know when this feeling set in).
I found these lights in a book I was processing at the library. Great idea, suction cups! Beautiful and useful.
I am particularly partial to the light suction cupped to the forehead.

I want to put caster wheels on all my pieces of furniture so things can be easily moved around. I used to call these wheels 'coasters' because that is what they did, coast around.
Lights/Bookshelves/Cabinets not just tables and chairs. The ability to reassemble your living spaces. Living in movement.
Inspired by book trolleys at the library and a lamp suction cupped onto a dude's forehead.

I would describe my title like this

I don't appear to have many words in me these days, but then I have always considered myself a bit of a rambler. I would like to be able to explain my ideas and feelings in a few well chosen concise sentences. As yet I am unable to do this.

A drawing of mine currently hangs in one of the corridors at my work. It reads:

OM NATTEN ÄR ALLA KATTER GRÅ

in capitals.

I thought about why I chose this phrase for this drawing. Why any phrase? And then I realised I could have chosen any phrase, in any language. But in my head, whenever I read any sort of statement, film/book/article title, tag line, slogan, my voice takes on a grandiose tone. The phrase is read as a actress making a melodramatic climax accompanied by the sweeping gestures of her arms. 

The thing is, in your head, it always sounds different.

It has become important.
Perhaps it's the Capitals.

The Gallery at the library has a standard template of questions the exhibiting students are required to fill in. The one I am always frustrated by (perhaps due to the fact I am an artist/library assistant, not a student, and this template is not really catered towards me) is:
Mina verk skulle jag beskriva så här: (I would describe my work like this:)

I didn't want to describe my work. That was too difficult. I wanted to title it. So I looked at it, and thought how would I describe what this phrase 'OM NATTEN ÄR ALLA KATTER GRÅ' is. The title would simply describe what the work is, as titles used to. Do they still? Don't know.

SAGE ADVICE FROM A HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE.

this is to be my method for titling from now on. "I would describe my work like this..."




inadequate photo documentation courtesy of instagram

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.

Rain check

It has been raining heavily. It's the end of August and I can feel the seasons changing. Today is the last day of my holiday, tomorrow I will be back at work, and the beginning of the Autumn term will be underway. The Autumn season of Cinemateket commences on Tuesday, which will bring an extra couple of hours of culture and enjoyment to every Tuesday and Saturday, and a means of easing into the habit of stockings and more than one layer of clothing. There is something appealing in entering a cinema in daylight, then emerging again in darkness. A way to acknowledge time passing.

Time is passing, even though it feels as if I have gone back in time three months right now, and that will change again at the end of the week. I think I need the rain at times like this, when one is sort of stuck in the middle. August has been a surreal month, great excitement and happiness rubbing shoulders with anxiety and sadness. I think I would like my Autumn a little more constant.

rainy views from today's window. it cleared up later on.

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.

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.

Interiors (Sweden)

A few views of our new room, main feature our new multi-purpose Ikea book shelf/desk unit. Kris's old lamp, a classic 1970's design by Anders Pehrson for Ateljé Lyktan called 'Tube' has pride of place.

The room has two large windows with both bamboo rolling blinds and a lucky find of some perfect sized second hand curtains in a rather thick luxurious fabric. (I don't want to be awakened at 3am every morning during summer with glaring sunlight, when sunrise is early and streams through our eastward facing windows. However, during winter it has been a pleasant wake up call, when the sun doesn't rise often before 8am.)

In one corner Kris displays his his collection of guitars, he took an acoustic one from his parent's house upon which to teach, but no evidence of this has yet eventuated. Diagonally opposite is a bookshelf housing his vinyl collection, with maybe a dozen of my own slotted in at the end. Moving countries requires much downsizing and I have not started to rebuild what records I had except for somehow finding 4 Fleetwood Mac records, and miraculously, the self-titled debut of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which at the moment rests in front of all the others so I can glance over at it and not believe my luck.

Above the secretary which I adopted from the kitchen hang an embroidery Granny made for me, and one I made for her. It is nice to have a piece of furniture where I can put my knick-knacks and jewellery and such, and then fold the top up to keep secure all the daily detritus I deem important in spilling over.

It is strange looking critically at the room sometimes and realising how few possession I have accumulated, even after two years of living here. Yet I don't feel like I am lacking much (saying that, I would like to funnel some of the funds I currently spend of clothing into other endeavours: books, records, paintings and drawings, nice plates, jewellery.) When I think of my room in New Zealand, I can remember having so much stuff, but hardly any particular objects spring to mind.

Off Vantage Point

Felice Varini
Zigzag entre le cercle at la tour (Niigata, Japan), 2009
Castillon du Gard n.1, 1981
2006 Huit carres (Versailles, France), 2006


Felice Varini was one of the first artist models I chose for myself, (back in the days where artist models were the way ideas came about) in my sixth form sculpture class. I was drawn to his disregard for reality, treating the three dimensional landscape as a blank canvas, and the masterful illusions he created. The tangible illustration of this fictional plane place on top of the world as I knew it impressed me. I was always more interested in the ways the work changed once one abandons the 'vantage point'. The spot where Varini pulls the strings, and seemingly halts movement, slows time and flattens space. (for some reason, probably due to photographs, I always imagine viewing the works as being a solitary endeavour - only one person can be at the precise vantage point at one time, and the view is never hindered by the presence of living things.) And instantly, one is shown The 'ANSWER'. There, laid out bare and perfectly formed, waiting to be accepted, when you are in 'the right place at the right time'. In that respect, apart from their unfailing apparant solidity, the works are similar to mirages.

The works 'off vantage point' seem so much more dynamic, full of diagonal lines of motion and distortion. Perhaps this reflects my natural view of the world as a whole, a place full of clues, hints, red herrings and false trails, smaller pieces of information amassing to create something larger than the individual scraps themselves, continuously linked together. One cannot be directed to a static spot, providing the end and not the means, offering only the solution.

I like to reside within the fiction and the reality, so then it becomes up to me, and my existing within the space his works occupy, as to whether I join the illusion. Instead of standing still, I would walk around the works in a semi-circle, crossing the 'vantage point' somewhere in the middle.

I think of one of my favourite quotes when looking at Varini's work, from Dennis Potter's 1987 masterpiece The Singing Detective:

"All solutions and no clues, that's what the dumb heads want. That's what the bloody novel 'he said, she said, descriptions of the sky..., I'd rather it was the other way round, all clues no solutions, that's the way things really are. Plenty of clues, no solutions."

Detail

Detail of an ongoing embroidery work, based on a map of the mirage island 'Crocker Land'.
Done while listening to Neil Young, Paul Butterfield, Lee Hazlewood and James Carr.

Small things slowly accumulate to create larger things - stitches, letters. Built up to reveal an image, narrative, something in which all the tiny stitches are used to link together and form a new idea.
There is a sort of tension within the work: pulling one in to recognise the details which make up the work, and being pushed back to see how each stitch is linked together creating the bigger picture.

3 Grains of thought

Two recent wood grains I have come across over summer, and a close up of LIMBS, a work I did for The Physics Room Kiosk in 2009. The first is the side of a small shack at Helgummanen fishing village on Fårö. The second is a wood grain blouse from Weekday.

If I was a pattern I would most definitely be wood grain. The search continues for more wood grain printed/patterned/covered apparel/furniture/odds and ends.

People these days are always seemingly talking about 'inspiration'. Who inspires them, what inspires them and so on, as though their inspiration divulgences somehow justifues one's idea. People bemoan the demise of originality, the constant complaint of 'everything being done', but if perchance someone unearthed an original idea, it would have to be inspired by something. It couldn't just exist, could it? I was thinking about something along these lines today while I was ironing my wood grain shirt and admitting to myself that wood grain "inspires me".I don't actually know if it is the wood grain that actually inspires me, but perhaps the associations I make with the wood grain which forms a mind map of interlinked and intertwined inspirations.

It is strange thought. One I obviously haven't thought too clearly about. But it is quite nice having half realised thoughts on your finger tips.

I'LL KEEP IT WITH MINE

I'LL KEEP IT WITH MINE - NICO
I'LL KEEP IT WITH MINE - DEAN & BRITTA
I'LL KEEP IT WITH MINE - RAINY DAY








I think I could spend a whole dj set playing multiple versions of the same songs, and no one would even notice.

3 versions of the song I have been listening to most this week, obsessively. I think I spent an afternoon repeatedly playing 5 different versions of this song (including a bootleg version by the author, Bob Dylan, and another by The Resonars), until I had listened to the song about 20 times.
I still keep changing my mind about which I prefer the most. At the moment I think it is Nico's and that is the one I plan on playing when I am djing next Wednesday in the bar under my apartment.
I am really enjoying listening to different versions of the same songs at the moment - 'I'll Keep It With Mine' aside: covers of the Kink's 'Stop Your Sobbin'' has had heavy rotation; I just heard Tracey Thorn doing a cover of Lee Hazlewood's 'Come On Home With Me'; a brilliant cover of Jerry Lee Lewis' 'Great Balls of Fire' by an obscure 60's New Zealand band, The Librettos, all slowed-down and moaning; The Miracles/Beatles/Zombies respective versions of 'You Really Got A Hold On Me'.

Perhaps I should start a collection of different versions of the same songs.
Then I could have an 'I'll Keep It With Mine' for every occasion.
I still think repetitive actions, such as listening to the same song multiple times, give me good ideas.

Mystery Train

image: krister bladh

feeling about as dense as this foliage. photo from another excursion underground in Malmö. seems like the scenery will be changing daily, in the form of a series of projections simulating watching the world go by while sitting in a train. actually, that is a little how i feel right now also.