Wednesday 19 December 2012

Estuary Eulogies





At the end of November I visited the Thames Estuary site at Cliffe again. It was a cold Wintry day and magnificent for seeing the place in its harshness and greyness. I took a different pathway whilst there without a map and ended up seeing the seawall but not being able to navigate a way through due to the ditches that criss cross the place. I liked being reminded that this place is not easy, has geographical resistors and is not a visitor park with carefully laid down tracks. I spent time just gazing to industry laying heavily on the horizon with a fascinating collection of pipes/chimneys that were stacked together which I began to draw from. In front of me lay an apron of tough marsh grasses and then a smattering of these pipes poked up like a grand collection of organ pipes in a cathedral. Except these emitted no Bach, Mozart or Jeruselum. Far from a 'green & pleasant land' the marsh was soon subjecting my hands and body to the damp and 'rimy' cold. What I kept seeing though was the container ships and oil tankers entering and leaving the estuary. One in particular was piled so high with containers of every colour that I became intrigued upon what was inside the containers or what had been delivered. The sheer volume of commerce in one ship coming into the estuary was incredible. Our hunger for stuff, visually apparent.
Later I ventured back to the car and drove further up the marsh to access the seawall (a tried and tested route without watery traps). There I came across the remnants of consumption; finger prints of our capitalist obsession with possessions. Objects, intact and the remains of plastic and metal corpses lay scattered on this shoreline, brought up by tidal waters. A bereavement for short lives lived, for real lives sacrificed to fabricate these objects. I recorded individual pieces with a camera, plucking out and elevating objects that seemed especially poignant like the single mattress or just odd like the handle of a fire extinguisher.
When I came home to my studio, I reviewed the images from the camera. There seemed to me an immense beauty in some of these objects and their stripping away of manufactured gloss to reveal ugly materials like foam, nylon or plastic tubing. I began to imagine the brief period of use, the owners, the point of rejection when objects ceased to have value or use. I wanted to write obituaries for selected objects. Aiming to re-elevate these objects I wrote eulogies instead.
Each object was translated into a simple line drawing rendered by means of tracing paper on the computer screen. This seemed to me to remove sentiment or my own interpretations. I wanted to achieve a clinical kind of drawing. I've always like the Haynes car manuals and those wonderful diagrams of the casing for the gear box of a Vauxhall Viva or Mini Metro. I then wrote individual eulogies which accompany the drawings. If any emotion or sentiment is present then I wanted it to be through the words. Eulogies would celebrate these objects.







Some images have returned

Some of the images on the blog have returned. Rick and I are still trying to resolve the problem. Answers on a postcard please. Thanks :-) Now I know the official name of these symbols by the way (emoticons). Thank you to Mr Goldsmith for keeping me current.

Monday 3 December 2012

Images are temporarily unavailable

I am sorry to say that all of the images on Estuary Dialogues have mysteriously disappeared and we are working on retrieving them.
Apologies for this technical blip. Hopefully normal service will be resumed shortly.
:-(

Tuesday 13 November 2012

The Wonderful LV21

This is the wonderful LV21, a retired Lightship now rejuvenated into a floating arts venue. We are hoping to screen the Estuary Dialogues moving image piece here when it is made, in Autumn 2013. I think the space is just so perfect for the work.
The Captains of the LV21, Gary and Paivi have taken this vessel on and are lovingly regenerating and restoring it, preserving the a part of our marine heritage as well as creating exciting spaces and opportunities for contemporary art in North Kent. Moored at Gillingham Pier, LV21 is a sturdy steel riveted vessel with a tardis-like internal space. We visited her in October and Paivi and Gary kindly took us on a tour around the ship. The best part was climbing all the way up a vertical ladder to the actual light itself. Standing inside the glass case for the light, we had a panoramic view of the Medway and could even see Upnor Castle. (O.k., Paivi's coffee was a contender in the highlight section too with introduction to LV21's resident volunteer maintenance mariner, Dave a close third).







http://www.lv21.co.uk/









Notes on Journeys and Reflections - Jo Roberts and Stephen Turner

UCA Gallery Space
The recent exhibition Journeys and Reflections created by artists Jo Roberts and Stephen Turner in response to a commission from the Kent Architecture Centre was unveiled in the UCA Gallery space in The Pentagon Centre in Chatham in North Kent at the end of October (22nd-27th). Once a beacon of the modern shopping experience, The Pentagon now seems out moded. I used to shop there and never did I think the shopping experience was the pinnacle of capitalist enlightenment that I am sure the architects of the Pentagon had in mind when they designed the concrete arrow of style. Nevertheless, like many such shopping centres from this era, it evokes a nostalgia in me, admiration even. I cannot fail to enjoy this neon stark, retail experience. It's vintage. In this environment a gallery space is a stroke of genius. Artists have a direct connection to untapped audiences, people who may never feel comfortable going to a regular art gallery. They may just be curious enough to come in and engage in contemporary art en route to the toy shop next door. I hope so because the exhibition is all about the margins of life, the beauty and unexpected or overlooked that get caught like flotsam in the edges of places. Roberts and Turner extract these delicacies through hand drawn daily maps (Roberts) and botanical essences (Turner) and encourage us to re-evaluate these places. 'Edgelands...' write Farley and Symmons-Roberts in their book of the same name, '...are not meant to be seen, except as a blur from a car window or as a backdrop to our most routine and mundane activities.' Roberts and Turner have mined this rich, often ignored seam which exists in these edgelands and created work which calls for the senses to take note - to smell, to calculate, to excavate a place off centre, to document journeys or plants. A forensic exploration of a place.
Work by Jo Roberts
Roberts cycled around these fringes of Swale and Medway in Kent asking people where this Urban fringe might be located and subsequently produced hand drawn and painted 70 Maps of the Day. These maps were tweeted daily which I received via my Twitter feed. They were current for a short time on Twitter, soon eaten up by other tweets of chatter. Seeing the collection of 70 Maps hand crafted and of an intimate scale was more beautiful and resonating. On Twitter, the maps were as Farley and Symmons-Roberts noted about the journey through these Edgleland, seen in the 'blur from the car window'. In the gallery space, I had opened the car door, smelt the air (thick with Turner's botanical essences) and seen the fringe. Artists are canny at finding places which are undervalued, grimy: spaces which niggle the obsessive bureaucrats who want to dismantle the uncomfortable truths about the discrepencies of society. These places along the fringes are usually cheap, economically in decline- the scar tissue of constant wounds inflicted. Artists observe though and find value where others see only particles of failings. Turner, like a shaman, has long found the lyrical that exists around Medway and Swale through tinkering with the tricky, the forgotten or abandoned places battered by industry, military or the geographically inaccessible.
Guided by Faith, a fly tipped doll retrieved from Sittingbourne, Turner collected aromatic plants that thrive alongside tips & waste processing plants of the area. Through alchemical processes, Turner collected the individual aromas of specimens which were presented at the opening of the show on Saturday 22nd October to unsuspecting visitors. Like a kind of ad-hoc rogue pharmaceutical company, Turner had created testing stations where visitors were invited to smell these individual aromas and comment on how they made you feel, what they reminded you of and if you liked them. There were cups of coffee grains available to clear your nose from particularly pungent ones and not mash up the essences of these fringe plants. Gathering all of this information, Turner would then select and mix a unique fragrance like a perfumier of the North Kent marshes. The resulting essence is to be named Eau Du Bordure and will be available as a limited edition.
Stephen Turner
This surely is a poignant thing- a scent of a place that will change, will move from borderlands, may be gentrified one day under a canopy of red and buff bricks and promised lifestyles that will teeter along these fringes. The notion of what constitutes the fringe will have been archived for posterity and the hand made maps by Roberts will be charming vignettes of a life that used to exist, briefly, before Boris's army invaded.
Bottles of plant essences collected and arranged by Stephen Turner. Sample of Yarrow, gathered from the Urban Fringes by Turner. Edgelands; Journeys into England's True Wilderness,2011 Farley, P. & Symmons Roberts, M., Jonathan Cape, London.

Friday 2 November 2012

An extended version of Misplaced

This is the extended version of the test film Misplaced which Rick and I filmed and I have edited. There are some imperfections and improvements technically that we want to make but in essence this has some of the visual ideas which we might develop further. Rick did some filming last week at Mucking Marshes in a grey and misty atmosphere and the footage looks wonderful. I hope he shares it with us when he gets time to look at it again.

Monday 29 October 2012

One Year On: The Wolverhampton Riots - Sally Payen

In August 2011 the streets of Wolverhampton erupted into violence and disorder. Sally Payen has been commissioned to respond to the events of last summer through paintings and drawings using CCTV, newspaper images and social media as source material. Her previous work has touched on the subject of anarchy and unrest and gives a fascinating insight into the way that people behave in crowds. I visited this exhibition to see Payen's work and was struck by such an intimate yet powerful body of work in the gallery spaces of the Wolverhampton Art Gallery. Here are my thoughts which I wrote at the gallery. Notes on Wolverhampton Riots: One Year On – Sally Payen Stepping in to the gallery was both intimate and powerful; within the space, fragments of the event unfolded, taking siege of the audience in a space.
Ring
I liked the way the figure (?) in the foreground melts under duress from the effect of being overpainted, imposed upon by a new figure. The scene has a translucency to it, a sense of a moment that has passed, a fracture of despair. It is a fable that is retold but in the retelling, changes mutate into something beyond the original actions. An enlightenment and a lens. Generally the colours in the paintings intrigued me because they have a muted, soft tone except for flashes of cerise or red. It reminded me of paintings from the genre of Romanticism. Tintoretto colours. It challenged the raw, gritty and violent scenes that were relayed via the media during the events. I like the ink drawings on vellum very much. I enjoyed the spatiality of them, the way the paper sucks up the liquid and wrinkles slightly, disturbing the surfaces which reflected the consequences of the physical nature of the events. My own perspective of the riots was seeing the events from a 360 degree vision from transmitted images, yet never being there or directly involved. I don’t know the back stories, the intricacies of lives that were battered or reduced to rubble, before, during or after the riots. The work
Riot
has a biblical connotation for me, like a scene of figures clustering around an apostle. One of my favourite pieces. Anna Falcini 2012

Sunday 21 October 2012

It Is Only I - A New Estuary Dialogue film from Rick

My new video: https://vimeo.com/51858106


While making this piece thought about many things. Is there a point to making a cinematic poem? How do people engage with this form? The accidental. Finding the landscape through video-making. The electronic huddle of pixels shaped by light through bulbous eye-like, hill-like lenses making shapes from your own sense making.

Masculine and feminine elements in art emerging subconsciously - the feminine pushing forward into an abstract masculine. Walking as a metaphor a la Richard Long and Gary Snyder. The joining of disparate moments that is editing.

Thought too about Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' with it's dizzying looping movements around a fixed space telling of (male) nostalgia and desire. How this is echoed in the film with Anna walking around that fixed space - somehow a hint that we can stay fixed in space like that without a way out, unless, unless.

And of course Tarkovsky ( damn still haven't read the Geoff Dyer book) with reference to 'Stalker' (with my favourite scene from his films, or rather the one that has haunted me more than any other and fed me through the years) and 'Mirror' ( my personal favourite of his films).

Enjoyed too the subtle energies of the continuous shot (which is edited in the film) where Anna's face and hair and fingers visually touch the water and how this came about in calm and spontaneous ways using focus and exposure and coming close with the camera to give on reflection a sense of immersion - again a statement about art itself to my mind. And the last shot deliberately echoing Caspar David Friedrich, although on a less monumental scale.

Here is the poem too that happens in the middle of the film - spoken with a male voice ( my own) but overlaid with the images of a woman's hands - it is a text about forgetting and the burying deep essential parts of ourselves and how this leads to a kind of warfare. It's central metaphor began as a small wood, a forest so this is why  I thought I would try juxtaposing it with the rest of the film:

It is only I

Restless leaves stroke away all clues,
They too it seems
Have something to hide.

I wonder if it is only I
Who perceives a single crime and
Only I who cannot see those who turn away.

Fearing my task is good impossible,
I take notes all of the time, but
These are removed at twilight - when the forest is noisier than any city.

Less & less:
The fallen white berries like full-stops, the tall building
In front of the old school-house,
yesterday's dream of immediate water.

My mind shrugs
And moves to a different bough, scored
With dark rain and heiroglyphs.

There are numerous crimes,
Fragments of bones and weapons
Half-buried.

I wait, and barely note I have stopped wanting not to,
This barbaric radiance
Is a mother to me now.

Instead, I ponder if their investigations led them
Elsewhere, or if they got scared
Of what I can only guess.

by Rick Goldsmith

Tuesday 9 October 2012

Misplaced - Test Bed

This is a link to a clip from a test film which Rick and I have been developing in anticipation of our real moving image piece on the Thames Estuary. This is my rendering of the footage we shot. It was filmed at a local site called Bodenham Lake which used to be a working gravel pit until the mid 80's and it is now a nature reserve. There are still remnants of the site such as concrete aprons and slabs and rows of uniform trees, planted to block out the chaos of industry and destruction on this once precious meadow. The River Lugg which runs alongside the land, left handy deposits of gravel in the land and it was originally excavated by hand until it became worked by machinery.It has a kind of faded beauty to it and an oddness. The manmade lake is now like a Karl Stockhausen electronic performance piece with the multiple bird sounds which rise and fall, echoing around the flat spatiality of carved land. I think Rick summed up very well what our intentions with this particular test film were in the previous entry (26/06/12 - Bodenham Marshes). It was never intended that we come with a tight script, narrative or bunch of ideas that would be self explanatory. We are aiming to approach the final ED film on the Thames Estuary with a sensitivity to the space, trying to work in a more responsive manner, absorbing the nuances and letting the delicate details of the landscape emerge. At the moment it feels like there is an urgency to complete this sooner than rather than later, with the disastrous idea of the area being threatened for the development of an airport. Of course we inevitably bring our own back stories into play, our individual perceptions. It is almost impossible to remove such stains. I think of it rather like the Stan Brakhage films with those translucent marks painted onto the film strip by hand. It's hard to erase such marks. I'm still thinking of ropes by the way. And drawings.... Link for Stan Brakhage - Dog Man Star http://youtu.be/mTGdGgQtZic

Tuesday 11 September 2012

Journeys & Reflections - Jo Roberts and Stephen Turner

I've recently been sent a link to an exciting project in the Medway and Swale areas of North Kent by Urban Fringe which includes the work of Jo Roberts & Stephen Turner. I've long been an admirer of Stephen's work and followed his interactions with the landscape and area around the Medway over a number of years. This is the first time I have encountered Jo's work and I love the idea of hers to explore the perceptions of boundaries through the local community which she has then mapped. It is interesting to note that Jo studied Geography before developing her creative practice. Stephen has been amongst other things, distilling plants and created an essence; Eau du Bordure. I love the twist in exploring what some may consider wasteland, spaces which render little value and then extracting out of it, something of wonder. Well i haven't sampled the essence yet but I bet it is delightful. http://urbanfringes.wordpress.com/exhibition-events/ http://urbanfringes.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/stephen-jo-at-milton-creek-lr.jpg Stephen Turner and Jo Roberts present Journeys and Reflections around the edges of Medway and Swale; a multi media exhibition of drawing, maps, photography, video and pressed flowers, as well as distilled plants oils and papers made from local flora. The exhibition will include an Urban Fringe Library, contained in a small leather suitcase.

Tuesday 26 June 2012

Bodenham Marshes Film - beginning a moving image aesthetic conversation'


Anna and I decided to visit Bodenham Marshes last Saturday. We had planned to try a few ideas for the ED film. Before going down to the site I spent some time looking at my own poetics and texts that I feel are linked to the work. Much of this is site specific or landscape-based.

In terms of my normal film-making practice this 'shoot' was very differently approached in terms of pre-planning. There was no storyboard or script. No treatment. I had only have a very abstract sense of what we were going to do on the day - which was exciting. I was thinking of certain structural modes of working e.g. using fixed lengths of camera movements in different directions, and also ways of mapping a space visually, but beyond that i was keen to let alot of the thinking work to be done by my 'back-brain' unconsciousness.

We knew we wanted to try out some techniques e.g. tracking and particular hand-held shots - but beyond that little else was decided. We did try some tracking with a dolly which a local film-making friend, Neil Oseman had lent me. But these didn't really work out - we wanted a very slow and very smooth movement that we couldn't really pull off to our satisfaction. We'll probably use some Hollywood Dolly tracks and dolly from a B'ham based company.

I did have one recurring approach that I wanted to try though - that of the camera hovering close to a figure as the figure explores an environment and bring it vividly to life. On the day this really became an interesting point of departure for both Anna and I. We tried this many times, using different Olympus prime lenses on my Panasonic AG-AF101 camera. It worked best when the camera hovered close to the figure - without revealing the face - it brought up alot of questions and interesting lines of enquiry, which I intend to investigate further.

I wanted to respond quite rawly to the place, and also leave an openness so that Anna and I could truly create an 'a moving image aesthetic conversation' at the site. Of course this could prove quite a dangerous thing to do, but this became a positive.

Later, looked at the footage from Saturday and really, really liked some of it - there were a few shots that I found very effecting - and I started to look forward to begin editing it. I have a poem which began speaking with the imagery, which was weird as I was hoping to record it on the day.

The early filming was very much spoilt by the tracks not doing what we wanted but it's helpful to look at the footage as it gave me some ideas of what we could achieve. A wide shot of the the landscape was particularly good. The main revelation was the footage of you walking through the landscape and then to the lake. Some of the shots really began suggesting some possibilities.

Anna and I both now intend to work on the footage from the day's filming seperately. 

Rick

Friday 8 June 2012

Incarcerated

I've been focusing on preparations for a funding bid for Estuary Dialogues recently so my drawings and other practical work have taken a bit of a back seat. Going back into my studio last week, I was playing around with some ideas when I picked up a box of these small clear bottles with stoppers, that I had ordered from a company who make containers for collecting insect specimens for my last project, Adventureland. There is something about the scale of these bottles that I liked so I thought about using them in the ED project. On a very thin strip of tracing paper I began to draw a reductive version of a prison hulk. These hulks were originally naval ships but were decommissioned and used to house prisoners offshore in the 1700's to late 1800's. Conditions onboard were grim according to records in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich and the Guildhall Museum in Rochester. Prisoners were poorly fed and clothed, had to do long days labouring shackled together and disease was rife. Often prisoners were sent to America and then Australia as convicts. I wanted to draw these hulks on a tiny scale, with fragility and attention to detail which was quite challenging. I then put them inside the bottles reminiscent of old ships in bottles. I like the fact that the drawings become incarcerated; both a nod to the historic version of events but also a reversal of events. Instead of being the prison, the hulks have now become the imprisoned.

Friday 18 May 2012

Momentary Presence/Absence (sooty shadows)

I photographed the lengths of rope on Wednesday in a studio setting. This was a much more orchestrated process compared to the scanning of the ropes, which I have been doing recently. Setting up the ropes was much more tricky than I thought mainly because I wanted to suspend them and be able to get the whole length of the rope in. I selected a grey backdrop which softened the coarse nylon orange rope. The rope lengths were surprisingly heavy, even small pieces. Initial experiments involving a line of fishing wire going across the studio where I tied the rope on, failed. The weight of the rope pulled the wire down and the rope was only partially suspended. I then noticed two metal eyes, in the ceiling and they were positioned in a good enough place where we could tie the rope. Brilliant! The ever patient Cai, who was the studio technician, threaded fishing wire through the eyes and then attached two pieces of rope. Cai then helped me set up the right lighting and finally I could begin photographing the ropes. Once the ropes were suspended they looked magical, as though they were on a stage for a performance. I mused on their life, thinking about where they had been before I picked them up from the shoreline in Kent. It was interesting to think that they had been discarded, lying flaccid on the shore. Suspended they appeared majestic. I selected two very different lengths of rope, one long piece that was tight and neat at one end with a small bristle of fibres at the other. The other was less tightly bound and each end had unwound into unruly sections. As they were suspended their forms unfolded. I began photographing them and fixed on the rope to begin with. I worked from distance then close up. I moved the light source around. As I did this I noticed the shadows from the ropes altered, either virtually disappearing or suddenly emerging soot black. The camera began documenting these momentary impressions which were like drawings of the softest charcoal on the grey paper. I found them mesmerising and seductive. Somehow the shadows dominated the stage and as quickly as they were created, with the touch of the lamp's off switch, they evaporated.

Thursday 10 May 2012

A grain of sand in the hem of Madame Bovary's winter gown *

* Sebald, W.G., The Rings of Saturn, 2002; Vintage (London). (P8) I have begun to read W.G. Sebald's book, The Rings of Saturn. It is a record of a coastal walk through East Anglia by Sebald that prompts reflections on past cultures and people. I really like the way it meanders down metaphorical pathways and places which seem on the periphery. It feels both lucid and eccentric in its subject matter. The quote which is the title of this post, just seemed so complete and beautiful to me. In the book it explains that Flaubert who wrote Madame Bovary, saw the whole of the Sahara in this grain of sand in her gown.'For him, every speck of dust weighed as heavy as the Atlas Mountains.'I love the significance and weight given to that one grain; how potent it becomes. It has made an interesting connection for me with the work I am doing with the ropes. I took them last week and began scanning them on a large scanner. The aim was to achieve a similar image as before but with a better quality finish. As the process was happening, I noticed how beautiful the motion of the light passing underneath was. There were reduced beams of light that momentarily flickered as the rope was scanned. It created a shadow on the white lid of the scanner; a ghostly imprint. I videoed this action with my iphone which has not come out brilliantly but it is like a sketch. Tomorrow, I can hopefully continue this process using a better camera and give it more time.

Friday 27 April 2012

Humbrol Enamel Paint

It's been a strange period in the project. The momentum from the drawings has dissipated and other elements have been crowding into my vision, such as the ropes or other responses to my site visit in February. Plus I have been weathering a virus on and off for some weeks so it has all really disrupted my flow which is frustrating. I do always try and stay philosophical though because sometimes these blips in progression are quite useful (in hindsight). It can allow one to re-focus, re-analyse the ideas and work. I do find myself getting rather desperate during these periods and despondency creeps in. Every action feels so exposed as you think 'is this it, am I on the right track now or going into cul-de-sac?'. No matter if I go through this cycle a thousand or more times, I panic, then I relax and its all ok until the next big wave. During this period of flux, I had an urge to go to a model shop in Hereford and buy some Humbrol Enamel paints. I've always liked these pots of paint especially the drab colours which they usually come in. My brother used to make airfix kits and there was always the painting of these models with the appropriate shade of Humbrol. It was an activity that I was definitely excluded from, being the in the 1970's. So I probably harboured ambitions to use Humbrol paints for sometime. It still feels like a very masculine environment in the model shop. I like the size of these Liliputian paint pots. Obviously Humbrol are making good money out of these but I love the fact that the paint is doled out in small amounts. I started to use the paint on blanking out areas of hand drawn maps on tracing paper that I was working on. I like the way the paint sits on the surface of the paper, all glossy and opaque. I then looked at the details and symbols on the OS maps which indicate things like caravan sites or youth hostels. I have been taking some of these symbols and hand drawing them onto graph paper in multiples. Using the Humbrol enamel paints, I have hand coloured these symbols, so i ended up with 168 camping sites or 224 beacons. I also looked at the details often drawn on coastal maps such as shingle or mudbanks and then translated these onto the graph paper. I enjoy the repetition of drawing these symbols yet they are never exactly the same and you can see each symbol has a different quality. Taking these drawings on graph paper, I began playing with light and shining a strong light source through the paper which makes the graphic qualities of the paper, luminous. Where the Humbrol paint sits, it remains opaque and solid, the symbols almost floating. I started to layer these drawings up so I had one with Beacons on in an orange colour behind another with grey campsites. I inevitably seem to come back to wanting to find the latent in my work. It's always the unexpected in my work which fascinates me.

Friday 16 March 2012

Return to ropes




On my previous visit to Kent last month, I collected a whole bundle of ropes from the shoreline. They were odds and ends, pieces of rope that had been cut or discarded or lost. There were different types and lengths to choose from; orange, blue, soft yellow, thick, thin, unwound, huge coils or tufts. I decided to select orange rope mostly with one piece of yellow thrown in. For practical reasons I picked up just a few lengths. As I alluded to in my previous blog entry I love the material quality of ropes and find them fascinating. I was recently given a copy of the film 'Ropemakers; Memories of Chatham Dockyard" by Prue Waller. It explores the previously bustling Naval dockyard in Chatham through different memories and scenes but perhaps the most beautiful & mesmeric part for me is the rope making shed. Waller shows the processing of raw hemp into twines of rope in this antiquated building with original machinery that twists the hemp into long strands of rope. From a soft unprepossessing fibre, there is a magical transformation into strong coarse rope that will tether and secure the shipping world.
This pile of old rope (money for..?) has been sitting in my studio patiently waiting for me to give it attention, on the floor in a cluster of orange tangle. Even as it sits in a still life it has energy and intrigue. I have kept observing it whilst I try to wrestle with new drawings of power stations and large container ships. At the end of my last day in the studio (wednesday) I could no longer resist it. I swept it up off of the floor and took it to my scanner, placed it down on the glass bed and waited to see what the scanner would produce. The results are dream like, with the orange rope being absorbed into tones of grey. I kept moving the ropes to re-choreograph the image and new arrangements came to light. Progressively as I made the first scans, fibres were left on the scanning bed and obscured the subsequent images.

I began the process of scanning again.

With the assistance of my Dyson vacuum cleaner after each scan, I made some new images. There are still some loose rope fibres which can be detected but they are less invasive in the images than before.
After each scan of the ropes, I then scanned these loose fibres that had been left on the bed. Like a ghost or shadow of the presence of the ropes before hoovering the 'fibre drawing' up.

My next move may be to progress these rope scans onto a bigger scanner as I am working on an A3 size. I will have to take my Dyson with me though!

Yesterday I went to an exhibition called Made in the Middle which is a showcase of contemporary craft from across the Midlands. Much of the work was very exciting and in particular there was one artist called Imogen Aust who "makes one off objects that comment upon craft itself'. She worked in ceramics in strong colours but one of her pieces included rope threaded into a ceramic wall mounted disc. My rope antennae must be in full use because I came back with the images of her work in my mind and then woke up at 4am with my imagination buzzing. I began to develop rope ideas in my head until 6am.

http://www.madeinthemiddle.org/





Friday 9 March 2012

Hello Kent


A visit to the site again was a welcome return to the place. I went down on Friday 23rd February. After a very positive meeting with a creative company Francis Knight in the morning I made my way to the estuary. It was an unseasonally mild February day and as I drove down the dusty potholed track to the site, it was a glorious feeling of relief to be back. The light was soft and picked up the textures and myriad of colours of the marsh grass. A herd of cows grazing with their calves looked like a scene from an American plain.

Driving down the track was time consuming trying to avoid all of the huge potholes and rough ground but then it made me re-evaluate time; refocus. I've been caught up in the constant overload of information and activity that seems to be required for life now. As I parked the car at the end of the track and opened the door all I could hear was birdsong and the wind. I just sat there for ages listening, not needing to move or do anything.

Using the car as a base I began drawing. I became obsessed by this tangle of bramble that grew obstinately in a field in front of my viewpoint. I was fascinated by the way it clung onto the patch of ground, its mass of deep purple thorned stems, turning in on itself, creating a clutch of growth. I just drew it obssesively for about 2 hours. In between I was photographing all of these cargo ships that I could see drifting along the sea wall. They became like modern day prison hulks, except they were moving more objects into to Tilbury and taking waste out. A constant exchange of nonsensical activity while I made primal marks on paper and looked at a bush.




Sunday 22 January 2012

A Glossary of Stitches (tethering and wrapping)










My temporary studio in the dining room. My main studio is too damp and cold at the moment.

These drawings I have made in the last two weeks, mainly in the temporary studio. I had a dip in my work after Christmas and found it really hard to reconnect with the work but this last week has been more fruitful thanks in part to a visit to my friends in Brecon who made some pertinent comments about my drawings which helped me find a way forward. This all coincided with the devastating news that the Conservative Government are revisiting the idea of a new airport on land very close to where Estuary Dialogues is partly situated. (please see earlier blog for more details about this).

I have begun to add some embroidered sections to the drawings as a new layer of surface and texture. In preparation for this I looked at a book on embroidery with a glossary of stitches. I chose a very simple cross stitch in the shape of an 'x'. I have always loved this symbol, since I first discovered the work of Tapies. I did not want to get too fixated on it though so I have also tried to do abstract marks by piercing holes randomly in the paper and letting the thread move about these piercings without any preconceived ideas.

Since beginning these new stitched marks, I have been thinking about using rope in some way to make a drawing on a large scale. Living on a boat for eight years, I became fascinated with old canvases, sail cloths and ropes. I am attracted to the tactile nature of these materials and their investment in the functional nature of their purpose. Ropes are so integral to boats, to tethering and wrapping, that I find them to be almost sacred objects.
A recent visit to Tate Britain to see a retrospective of the work of Barry Flanagan began a reintroduction to this humble material.
To quote from the accompanying leaflet on Barry Flanagan; Early Works 1965 -82

Flanagan continued to challenge traditional ideas about sculpture, employing unexpected materials such as hessian and rope. ...... He explored his own response to materials, which he considered the fundamental constituent of sculpture. A length of rope marking space within or between rooms could also be understood as a drawn line.

Airport proposal is devastating






My heart sank when I heard of the proposal for a new airport to serve London in North Kent which Boris Johnson the Mayor of London has persuaded the Conservative Government to consider. The airport would be built on the Isle of Grain which used to house a power station (now decommissioned), runways extending into the estuary.
About two years ago I spent the most magical day in Grain, on that very land which could, if not saved, be forever sunk under swathes of concrete. I took the road from Strood out of the bustling Medway towns that sit one on top of each other with no apparent seams separating them, to the relative isolation of Grain. The further I travelled, the more desolate the landscape became and the more fascinating. Life existed in small pockets of habitiation, a small convenience store, the lifeblood of an otherwise deserted place. Perfect for exploration. I parked the car next to the estuary beaches, unloaded my cameras and tripod and walked along the shore line. The sun was shining and the light was crystal clear. I looked across the estuary and clearly distinguishable was the pier of Southend in Essex. The mud was a physical barrier between Kent and Essex, a dinner table for the numerous species of wetland birds.
I made my way around the coastline, in the direction of the power station and I found archaeological treasures like the second world war pill box with bricks saturated in graffiti. A strange tableaux occurred when I looked through a wire fence obscured with inhospitable hedgerow plants to see a buffalo grazing in front of the power station. I crossed a concrete inlet, an old water pumping station for the power station. Its deep twin troughs sucked in the tidal waters with a sign strictly forbidding any person to swim in these potential watery graves. My footsteps followed the curved shore around to face the Isle of Sheppey. I loved the fact that as I sat there, I was on the edge of the land. Before me sat an island in which nestled the mouth of the Medway. As I looked across to Sheppey, in the centre of the estuary lay an old fort, still intact. I wanted to swim out there, to see its latent treasures. I imagined meeting the artist, Stephen Turner out there and chewing the cud as the tide swept out to sea, swirling around the base of the fort. Over tea, we would discuss his Shivering sands project (Seafort) and our mutual interest in this strange but mesmeric landscape.
I walked on and encountered the site of a redundant car park which had long forsaken its purpose as a place for the employees of the power station to park their vehicles: a very JG Balladian kind of place. The car park had no entrance or exit, a grassy bank provided a barrier of inconvenience for any car left. In the corner a skeleton of a car remained, burnt out, its carcass existing like a swatch of fine venetian lace. Individual components had been carefully lifted out and arranged on the ground like critical samples containing the genetic code for Dagenham. In this patch of rough hard standing lay the hope of nature reclaiming this place. Native plants were emerging through the cracks with bright yellow flowers on architectural stems seemingly thriving where once the repetitive choreographed routines of car tyres had resisted them.
I tracked my way back, past the pill box which had become the HQ of the 'Grain Crew', boldly emblazoned on the damp brick work with reluctance that once I entered my car and drove back to civilisation, this day of vivid experience would fade like a scene from Brigadoon.

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