our lady of

Well, finally I can get photobucket to work again, and so am putting up some posts about the last part of my stay in Japan.

At the end of the CCA residency we showed our work inside the studios. I made two works for the show, the more successful work was a pickle making sculpture, called ‘portable ends (things under pressure)’ , the work is a wood and concrete structure that applys pressure onto the vegetable contents of various vessels making tsukemono.

The CCA also published a sort of collective artist book as an exhibition publication.

Sorry for the long hiatus, the weather is getting colder and colder here, which makes me want to stay lazy. I have just pulled down a small group exhibition of CCA participants at the Maeda community centre in Kitakyushu. I showed a sculpture made out of seeds from fruit, a cast metal sculpture and two watercolour drawings. The work is part of a series I am working on in Japan called ‘portable ends’, dealing with time, preservation, decay and errr pickles. In addition to these works I made Amazake (a fermented rice drink) and served it at the opening night along with tsukemono (japanese pickles) made by Mrs Nomoto-san a very sweet lady I met at the Maeda centre.

Portable Ends (heavy necklace), seeds from fruit, thread and varnish

a detail of Portable Ends (heavy necklace)

Portable Ends (ending), Cast Sterling silver

I can tell group photos of the CCA artists are going to get pretty boring - there are only 7 of us, which does not really make for endless interesting permutations for the camera. So today other things…

A mikan. Takako gave me one, as you can see it is green on the outside and orange in the inside. It tastes like a slightly tart mandarine. Mikans are grown on Kyushu, they are delicious.

And some Daikon drying in the sun. The project I have started at the CCA is called ‘portable ends, portable beginnings’ or maybe just portable ends. I will be making several sculptures out of rope, string and seeds and skins of fruit, BUT currently the most interesting part of the project is the pickling. I am making several quite complicated Tsukemono- japanese pickles. The first of these is a Daikon pickle which needs to sun dry for 20 days and then be pickled in Rice Bran.

The idea is i guess to suggest portable time.

 the following post is part of a conceptually tedious  essay i am writing for the research group i work for. it is in regards to our ephemeral public art project ‘there-forever’ at the Port Adelaide Festival in april 2007. but i seem to be writing it about my own state of mind. 3 days to go.

 

In Jorgan Leth’s 1967 film ‘The Perfect Human’ the narrator speaks over his mute subjects, ‘ See the perfect human, see him sit, see him tie up his shoes.’ Public space, (including architecture) always posits the perfect human as its inhabitant. The perfect human strolls down a boulevard, the perfect human drinks coffee at a street-side table, see him, see the perfect human, see him flying in a plane, see him enjoy window shopping in the sunshine. But we are all imperfect humans. What happens when we abandon timeless universal perfection as a goal? The unplanned (or that which punctures the dream of continuity) interupts the no-time of utopia.

 

Interruptions:

Something scraped smeared across a table top with a thumb.

Closing time in a pub

A spectacular dress

Hard rubbish

Spit

Dog shit

Road works

Sandwich board signs

skateboards

Big hair

Itchy foot

Bright light

Trucks passing

A greeting

 

 

Today a bird pooed on me twice. Another interruption

 

All is interruption, there is no ongoing-underlying continuum

How can you make one intervention into a permanent series of interventions.

All travelling is an interuption. It should(at least in the movies) be smooth, a creamy seamless moving through time disconnected from worry. Carving an effortless swath through places and things. Instead i am an interuption, and effortless is boring.

 

 

 

On sunday night I flew down to Mt Gambier in order to give a workshop on installation for Country Arts SA. I am included in an exhibition called ’snapshop’ that is touring around regional SA; this show is now in Mt Gambier which is why I find myself on the ‘limestone coast’ giving a day workshop on installation. The workshop consisted of three parts: me talking about Installation as a practice and showing some images of installation works, working on a series of Ink drawings of ‘left overs’ or ‘remnants’, and the making of three group installations using the cut out ink drawings and white thread. Riddoch Gallery director Lucia Pichler very generously let us use three great sites around the gallery and to leave the works up for the duration of the ’snapshot’ show.

The group was a lively class of local TAFE visual Art students, who had not really encounted Installation before, but put in some good work. The image below is one of the finished installations.

our lady of rinds and parings

open us from the outside, and be our soft shell peeled away.

our lady has been making some sculptures of tangelo peel. They are cast in plaster and dipped in golden resin, and so look like a gudgey gooey dripping peel, covered in golden juice.

Tomorrow (sunday) I fly down to Mt Gambier in a teeny tiny plane, to do a workshop for country arts sa. 18 people are coming to hear me talk about Installation and do some ink drawings and make a very minimal installation with thread. It is fair to say I am a bit nervous.  It is also strange for me to talk about, installation, a concept that I have a  leary view of. In preparing I have been re-reading Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” one of my fav texts about Minimalism and Modernist sculpture, Fried attacks the ‘theatricality’ in installation. I think respond negatively to this too - although there are many very subtle installations. It is more the fussyness and the over determined ‘rules of engagement’ for the viewer that I object to. But having said that I still desire to control and direct spaces and people’s negotiation of space. Such a difficult line to straddle, sometimes I wonder if neat little paintings are the most humane forms of art - they give so little offense to daily life.

Still feeling like I have a little of the post show blues, ‘years without magic’ came down on tuesday. I have a bad cold and it seemed like a huge and melancholy task moving the work back to the studio. I was lucky enough to find a whole heap of very nice flat carboard boxes on the street a few months ago, so the work is being stored in these.

I have purchased a bag of stoneware clay and some new clay tools - might have a go at some small scale sculptures. I also drove out to Adelaide Casting Supplies on Marion rd. and got some great silicone material for casting. It is a fabulous store for anyone who does any sort of work with resins or casting process.

http://www.amcsupplies.com.au/catalogue/

Itching to get back into the studio but also feeling a slight pang of reluctance after the gargantuan effort of 5 shows in the last 6 months.