The project I developed for Underbelly was related to the Filling the Cracks brief by Reefknot to produce public artworks in and for the vacant spaces on Kensington St. Living in a similarly old brick terrace on George St in Redfern gave me a feel for life on the inside of these tightly clustered homes and I frequently visited the site to explore the atmosphere of the buildings and the street and to find possible locations for my work. The idea I developed was in response to former inhabitants and workers in the terraces and factories, finding traces and stories of the lives and activities that had gone on there.
I focused on the idea that the terrace row was entirely vacant and had been locked up and unused for years, and then decided to use the doors as the basis for my explorations and subsequent work. As audience interaction is a key element of public art, I considered the role of the viewer by imagining and documenting various views through the little one-way spy holes which are on most of the front doors along the street, cracks below blinds and letterbox openings. I took photos through these 'cracks' as view finders/ frames and used them as a motif to suggest portals into the interior worlds of the different houses.
I appreciated the opportunity to share a studio space in '104 Nevermore' with the other artists involved in Filling the Cracks as it was open for several evenings to the public we also had interactions with the public. On one tour of the building I met a previous inhabitant, an artist who had owned of one of the neighbouring terraces. We had a moving conversation with her about the process of eviction, holding on as long as possible to her home and eventual settlement and removal of a lifetime's worth of possessions, memories and dreams. Michele an Al from Reefknot facilitated this kind of dialogue between the artists and the public- artists briefs were displayed on the walls and textas and butcher's paper were provided for people to define public art and write down ideas.
Fortunately Alex Davies took some shots of my works installed during the festival. Check them out in my flickr favourites...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/59171532@N06/favorites/
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Sunday, April 25, 2010
layer upon layer
In 2008-2009 on studio residencies in Paris and Berlin, I trawled markets and op shops to collect illustrated books of European cities, photo postcards of the Alps, city maps, guide books and other ephemera about travel, people, landscapes and European cities. This paperwork was repeatedly compiled and culled each time I found a new refernece source, and before each 20kg limit international flight. I archived my collection in the 'Secret File' a weighty brown vinyl concertina file, replete with steel bar locking system, a relic of an office circa 1970 in Paris. The Secret File was also reminiscent of the offices in the Stasi museum in Berlin-Lichtenberg, former East Germany in all it's brown and olive bureaucratic wonder.
I created simple photo collages from these pages. I juxtaposed landscapes, people and architecture- Romantic glaciers and mountains in the Alps; brutalist and Modernist concrete buildings; people in parks. I played with scale, referenced different periods, the occasional book, film or narrative in art history. I repeated motifs and used images that resonated with me to create fictional scenarios or construct new meanings.
In the collage below Child's Play, children playing at the edge of a sandpit have been transposed to the edge of a vertiginous mountain glacier.
I'm currently developing a new series of mixed media works on plywood, continuing to draw on this found material called My Field Notes, for a conference and exhibition at Serial Space called Open Fields.
My focus is on experimenting with collage and different forms of reproduction, scanning, photocopying,creating digital or manual effects by degrading, erasing, flattening images and manipulating gradations of tone and colour in layers of painting and sanding back.
One of my intentions in this series was to move away from using the original. Why? I wanted to move beyond a reliance on the precious, sometimes fetishistic quality of the original and to foreground the degraded, creased, marked qualities of the reproduced image. By repeating motifs I could create patterns, emphasis and rhythm within the series; allude to narrative but denying or disrupting it, trying to create elliptical structure, placement and ordering parts of the series can be more flexible. I like multiples and am interested in more sequencing, or maybe displaying future works in a regular or irrecular grid rather than a row. Wolfgang Tillmans displays his photos loose grid pinned to the wall. I did this with the photo collages in Your Truth is My Fiction, and like the puzzle nature of this layout.
I like these qualities because they reflect the process of memory and forgetting- the familiarity of favourite postcards that you see again and again on your studio wall or iconic images which are etched in our collective visual memory or memories that gradually erode and fade over time until just a trace remains. I'm interested in deconstructing images whether they be from personal or collective image pools and banks, possibly to create new meanings,to consider and question our relationship to other people and places, our closeness, proximity or distance. How we know the iconic Opera house so well yet may not have every been inside.
I experimented with RISO prints in some works. I selected a shadow of a building, and printed the flat area of colour over a b/w photocopy of the street from a 1960's guidebook to Prague. From there, I tried a transfer technique onto plywood.
I tried a new transfer technique using acrylic medium that Mia suggested on some of these RISO prints. I noticed that the soy ink didn't fix completely to the regular photocopy paper I'd used so they were crying out to be transferred.
PROCESS
-Paint layers and layers of matt/binder/gel medium onto the print.
-Wait until medium is dry.
-Soak in a tray of water and rub paper off easily. The ink adheres to/impregnates the medium and creates a plastic skin. mmm memories of peeling dry pva off hands. It's a bit fiddly and tricky if it folds or gets crumpled or torn while floating around in water, but the translucent quality was great to layer into collage works that I'd developed on plywood. I glued the acrylic skin down over another b/w print which was already fixed onto plywood, building up hazy layers and washes of colour and binder medium.
This idea of selecting an area of colour and superimposing it was developed from a series of Sharpie pen drawings I did in 2008, where I isolated and emphasised one shape within photos of a landscape and colouring it in flat colours- red, pink, yellow, blue. At the time I was concentrating on the symbolic or communicative function of colours- a peaceful blue lake filled in hot pink, an avalanche in restful turquoise. This was after delving into the largest Baldessari book the library in Paris could have loaned me.
The limited but choice selection of RISO ink colours matched the colours I chose in these Sharpie drawings well and the fact that you can make a quick photoscreen master of an original, with extra contrast, marks and general degradation made the rza a fitting tool.
FIN
I created simple photo collages from these pages. I juxtaposed landscapes, people and architecture- Romantic glaciers and mountains in the Alps; brutalist and Modernist concrete buildings; people in parks. I played with scale, referenced different periods, the occasional book, film or narrative in art history. I repeated motifs and used images that resonated with me to create fictional scenarios or construct new meanings.
In the collage below Child's Play, children playing at the edge of a sandpit have been transposed to the edge of a vertiginous mountain glacier.
I'm currently developing a new series of mixed media works on plywood, continuing to draw on this found material called My Field Notes, for a conference and exhibition at Serial Space called Open Fields.
My focus is on experimenting with collage and different forms of reproduction, scanning, photocopying,creating digital or manual effects by degrading, erasing, flattening images and manipulating gradations of tone and colour in layers of painting and sanding back.
One of my intentions in this series was to move away from using the original. Why? I wanted to move beyond a reliance on the precious, sometimes fetishistic quality of the original and to foreground the degraded, creased, marked qualities of the reproduced image. By repeating motifs I could create patterns, emphasis and rhythm within the series; allude to narrative but denying or disrupting it, trying to create elliptical structure, placement and ordering parts of the series can be more flexible. I like multiples and am interested in more sequencing, or maybe displaying future works in a regular or irrecular grid rather than a row. Wolfgang Tillmans displays his photos loose grid pinned to the wall. I did this with the photo collages in Your Truth is My Fiction, and like the puzzle nature of this layout.
I like these qualities because they reflect the process of memory and forgetting- the familiarity of favourite postcards that you see again and again on your studio wall or iconic images which are etched in our collective visual memory or memories that gradually erode and fade over time until just a trace remains. I'm interested in deconstructing images whether they be from personal or collective image pools and banks, possibly to create new meanings,to consider and question our relationship to other people and places, our closeness, proximity or distance. How we know the iconic Opera house so well yet may not have every been inside.
I experimented with RISO prints in some works. I selected a shadow of a building, and printed the flat area of colour over a b/w photocopy of the street from a 1960's guidebook to Prague. From there, I tried a transfer technique onto plywood.
I tried a new transfer technique using acrylic medium that Mia suggested on some of these RISO prints. I noticed that the soy ink didn't fix completely to the regular photocopy paper I'd used so they were crying out to be transferred.
PROCESS
-Paint layers and layers of matt/binder/gel medium onto the print.
-Wait until medium is dry.
-Soak in a tray of water and rub paper off easily. The ink adheres to/impregnates the medium and creates a plastic skin. mmm memories of peeling dry pva off hands. It's a bit fiddly and tricky if it folds or gets crumpled or torn while floating around in water, but the translucent quality was great to layer into collage works that I'd developed on plywood. I glued the acrylic skin down over another b/w print which was already fixed onto plywood, building up hazy layers and washes of colour and binder medium.
This idea of selecting an area of colour and superimposing it was developed from a series of Sharpie pen drawings I did in 2008, where I isolated and emphasised one shape within photos of a landscape and colouring it in flat colours- red, pink, yellow, blue. At the time I was concentrating on the symbolic or communicative function of colours- a peaceful blue lake filled in hot pink, an avalanche in restful turquoise. This was after delving into the largest Baldessari book the library in Paris could have loaned me.
The limited but choice selection of RISO ink colours matched the colours I chose in these Sharpie drawings well and the fact that you can make a quick photoscreen master of an original, with extra contrast, marks and general degradation made the rza a fitting tool.
FIN
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Boards of Canada Beam me up!
Yellow. Viewed Boards of Canada video vaults on youtube tonight, including found footage of US troops being obliterated by their own nuclear tests... Dayvan of parachutes and water. Clouds and mist covered mountains in Everything you do is a balloon. If my work has a soundtrack this is it.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Application for Open Fields. Q. Is it still sunday if it's 1 30 on monday?
What?
My Field Notes
As an artist who carefully observes and documents subjective and fictive aspects of my travel call their sketch book and visual research 'field notes'?
My Field Notes will include my photographs of places I have visited, notes and sketches, but also source material I have found in Op shops and flea markets, such as a collection of vintage tourist postcards, non-fiction books with printed colour reproductions of iconic natural landscapes, retro urban architecture and old city guides featuring hand-drawn maps and antiquated printing techniques.
Recurrent motifs and themes have emerged in my art over the past few years as I've travelled, lived and worked in different European cities. Reflecting on the cyclic nature of travel, of adventures and returns, I intend to fragment, layer and sequence images in order to create an open, non-linear narrative structure. I plan to show the results of my idiosyncratic process of selecting, reorganising and reproducing found images and explore the effect this has on memory making of places and people real and imagined. I'm exploring the notion of field work in places I may have visited vicariously or virtually.
Why? Since attending the Transmediale Deep North conference in 2009 in Berlin, I have been keen to contribute artwork to the kind of cross-disciplinary dialogue that Open Fields proposes. The Deep North conference and exhibition highlighted many successful collaborations between various disciplines and backgrounds- artists, indigenous communities, scientists, programmers etc., which aim to explore environmental, social, technological perspectives and possibilities for the next hundred years.
If there are opportunities for collaboration or volunteering I'd be happy to help out. I would like to display my books at Serial Space, however I'm open to other display or presentation options that are available. My work could also tie into the Rizzeria zine machine at Open Fields.
My Field Notes
As an artist who carefully observes and documents subjective and fictive aspects of my travel call their sketch book and visual research 'field notes'?
My Field Notes will include my photographs of places I have visited, notes and sketches, but also source material I have found in Op shops and flea markets, such as a collection of vintage tourist postcards, non-fiction books with printed colour reproductions of iconic natural landscapes, retro urban architecture and old city guides featuring hand-drawn maps and antiquated printing techniques.
Recurrent motifs and themes have emerged in my art over the past few years as I've travelled, lived and worked in different European cities. Reflecting on the cyclic nature of travel, of adventures and returns, I intend to fragment, layer and sequence images in order to create an open, non-linear narrative structure. I plan to show the results of my idiosyncratic process of selecting, reorganising and reproducing found images and explore the effect this has on memory making of places and people real and imagined. I'm exploring the notion of field work in places I may have visited vicariously or virtually.
Why? Since attending the Transmediale Deep North conference in 2009 in Berlin, I have been keen to contribute artwork to the kind of cross-disciplinary dialogue that Open Fields proposes. The Deep North conference and exhibition highlighted many successful collaborations between various disciplines and backgrounds- artists, indigenous communities, scientists, programmers etc., which aim to explore environmental, social, technological perspectives and possibilities for the next hundred years.
If there are opportunities for collaboration or volunteering I'd be happy to help out. I would like to display my books at Serial Space, however I'm open to other display or presentation options that are available. My work could also tie into the Rizzeria zine machine at Open Fields.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Monster Morning
Of all the places on earth... starting with this photomontage by Nathan Schroeder for the Monsters in Real Places blog, reminded me of monster grass, an alternative mardi gras party next week.
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