gold syrup

starting point
codeine linctus in bottle
sweet dreams
warm glow
the drugs do work

research: Artist Emma McNally- carbon dreamscapes

Emma McNally’s drawing, Carbon Cleaving, brings different ways of describing space together: cartographies, technological spaces, telecommunications, flight paths, tracks and transmissions. The materials used to create these spaces of transformation include paper, graphite, chalk, tissue and holes and metal pins that impregnate the soft paper surface. She writes: ‘I like graphite’s materiality: its mess and dirt as well as its capacity to leave the cleanest, sharpest percussive marks and lines. I feel like I’m forging land formations when I use it, or scattering particles, or spiralling vortices of smoke and water’

Emma McNally Carbon Cleaving 2010

emma mcnally's flickr account

artist: Doris Salcedo- melancholy and memory

The artist’s work is an ongoing exploration of how to address and articulate violence and loss. The objects she makes are works of intimate remembrance. Travelling through Colombia with humanitarian groups, Salcedo gains inspiration from the testimonies of people who are struggling to rebuild their lives after suffering the loss of a family member. She acts as a witness, meditating on the loss of freedom and human life in a country enduring a culture of collective fear—the result of years of civil war, drug-related crime, state-sanctioned torture and executions.

The materials she works with: simple furniture like wardrobes, tables and chairs, clothing, thread and animal skin, speak of the sanctity and familiarity of everyday domestic life. Through her molding or reshaping of these pieces - embedding a chair within a doorframe, grafting two tables into an unstable hybrid - she creates a traumatized, dysfunctional, object.

Research: works of Tim Knowles

Nightwalk - Valley of Rocks #1

i love the ambiguity and dramatic lighting of this shot

http://www.timknowles.co.uk/

Artists statement about the tree works

I use apparatuses, mechanisms, or systems beyond my control to introduce chance into the production of my art. The pieces here are from a series produced by trees, most of which are located in the Borrowdale and Buttermere areas of England’s Lake District. I attach artists’ sketching pens to their branches and then place sheets of paper in such a way that the trees’ natural motions—as well as their moments of stillness—are recorded. Like signatures, each drawing reveals something about the different qualities and characteristics of the various trees as they sway in the breeze: the relaxed, fluid line of an oak; the delicate, tentative touch of a larch; a hawthorn’s stiff, slightly neurotic scratches. Process is key to my work, so each Tree Drawing is accompanied by a photograph or video documenting the location and manner of its creation.

full moon series: reflections of full moon on water

2013

Single channel 12 hour HD videoA slowly shifting film made up of 9004 digital pinhole photographs taken consecutively during a walk across Mungo National Park, from its Western border to its Eastern border. The film [the sequence of images constantly cross dissolving one into the next] gives a Turneresque impression of the journey through Mungo's varied landscape of grasslands, dried up lake bed, dunes, Mallee forest, etc.

The landscape in this Australian based video is familiar in it's colours and wildness. I like the camera shake, the dream-like quality.

My response to the work: I love the strong concept behind the work, the use of chance to create the images, but ultimately the artist is choosing which iamges to keep/discard/show. like the chance element to the work, capturing time with traces. THe artist has also started using montage of still photos to make video-work which I'm interested in. Following of from a video project combining stills and short sharp bursts of abstract video footage, I would like to pursue this as a way of combining a number of abstract images to create mood.

http://www.timknowles.co.uk/Info/Press/tabid/301/Default.aspx

ideas: japanese designer Naoya Matsumoto- working with light and paper

Local studio Naoya Matsumoto Design created the small Yorunoma bar behind a typical glass shopfront in the Abeno-Ku ward of Osaka.

The crinkly surfaces were formed from lengths of rumpled tracing paper, sculpted by the designer and local residents to achieve a textured, rock-like appearance across the angular walls and ceiling.

http://www.naoyamatsumoto.com/


article from : http://www.dezeen.com/2014/12/18/naoya-matsumoto-design-crumpled-paper-grotto-bar-osaka-japan/

Paperwork inspiration: SIMON SCHUBERT

http://www.dezeen.com/2012/05/28/paper-works-by-simon-schubert/

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The artist Simon Schubert (born 1976) graduated from the academy of Fine Arts Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany (sculpture master class of Professor Irmin Kamp).

Simon Schubert, who mentions authors Samuel Beckett and Edgar Allan Poe as his biggest influences, raises the most existential and fundamental questions. Loneliness, isolation, loss and disappearance are the reoccurring issues in his paper works and sculptures. The mysterious and unsettling atmosphere his works radiate confronts the viewer with his own subconscious fears and anxieties.

In his paper works Schubert folds and creases the sheets in an extraordinary technique, adding a plastic quality to the plain paper without any graphical aid. Staircases and hallways, insights of stately homes are shown, seemingly on the point of dissolution. The rooms are inhabited by hidden human figures whose ghost-like shadows seem to enter or leave the scene.

The paper works are made of plain paper. The papers are entirely folded and uncoloured.

The three dimensionality of the picture is a result of a special technique. The lines, angles and circles are raised several millimetres as the result of positive and negative folding. Those reliefs change in the interplay of shadow and light and move between two and three dimensionality.

In different lighting, like the changing of daylight, the pictures change from nearly vanishing into an illusion of space and three-dimensionality.

Simon Schubert lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

art bites

101 Women Artists Who Got Wikipedia Pages This Week | ARTnews

101 Women Artists Who Got Wikipedia Pages This Week | ARTnews

How did I miss this in june

Brilliant piece of cultural activism



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/ArtAndFeminism#Results

inspiration: female photographers- Lottie Davies

Lottie Davies:

contemporary female UK photographer

First saw her entry 'Quints' for the Taylor Wessing Photography Prize at the National Gallery in 2008. 

Love the rich colours, narrative and dream like quality of her work

Lottie davies website link

research:Susan Hiller

Susan Hiller

Inspiring

Memory, subconscious, rituals, subtlety, memory and memorial

Susan Hiller

What I like about Susan Hellers works is the impact of something geometric or reassuringly familiar ‘objects’ with an underlying meaning that is more intriguing.

The layers and thoughts that have gone into this.

The importance of memory, personal experience and unconscious thoughts/automatic writing to the creation of a work.

I like the blatant distance that the artist also puts between the viewer and her work. Burning works that no-one will see. The use of familiar (to me) scientific type storage jars, that now seem other-worldly and dated which adds a nostalgic/lost time dimension to the works.

I’m still not sure how much I wish to take into account a viewers subjective history when they see a work and how this will affect their interaction with a piece.

How much to manipulate an experience of a piece of art based on how much information you give away.

I think this is what steers me clear of mainly figurative pieces, playing with what I want to convey, or wrap up in layers of symbolism and meaning.

Bio

Susan Hiller was born in 1940 and grew up in and around Cleveland, Ohio until 1952 when her family moved to South Florida where she attended local schools and Coral Gables High School.  She was awarded a scholarship to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1961. After a year in New York studying film and photography at The Cooper Union and archaeology and linguistics at Hunter College, Hiller went on to do postgraduate work at Tulane University in New Orleans with a National Science Foundation fellowship in anthropology. She conducted fieldwork in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize but became uncomfortable with academic anthropology's claim to objectivity; she wrote that she did not wish her research to become part of anthropology's 'objectification of the contrariness of lived events'. During a lecture on African art, she made the decision to leave anthropology to become an artist.

Susan Hiller has been based mainly in London since the early 1960’s. After several exhibitions of her paintings and a series of collaborative ‘group investigations’, in the early 1980’s she began to make innovative use of audio and visual technology. Her groundbreaking installations, multi-screen videos and audio works have achieved international recognition and are widely acknowledged to be a major influence on younger British artists.

Each of Susan Hiller’s works is based on specific cultural artifacts from our society, which she uses as basic materials. Many of her works explore the liminality of certain phenomena including the practice of automatic writing (Sisters of Menon, 1972/79; Homage to Gertrude Stein, 2010), near death experiences (Channels, 2013), and collective experiences of unconscious, subconscious and paranormal activity (Dream Mapping, 1974; Belshazzar’s Feast, 1983-4; Dream Screens, 1996;Psi Girls, 1999; Witness, 2000). In describing this area of Hiller’s work, art historian Dr. Alexandra Kokoli draws attention to its palpable political subtext: “Hiller’s work unearths the repressed permeability ... of ... unstable yet prized constructs, such as rationality and consciousness, aesthetic value and artistic canons. Hiller refers to this precarious positioning of her oeuvre as 'paraconceptual,' just sideways of conceptualism and neighbouring the paranormal, a devalued site of culture where women and the feminine have been conversely privileged. Most interestingly, in the hybrid field of 'paraconceptualism,' neither conceptualism nor the paranormal are left intact ... as ... the prefix 'para' -symbolizes the force of contamination through a proximity so great that it threatens the soundness of all boundaries."

With a practice extending over 40 years, Susan Hiller is considered one of the most influential artists of her generation.  Her work is found internationally in both private and public collections and her career has been recognized by mid-career survey exhibitions at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (1986) and Tate Liverpool (1996), and, most recently by, a major retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain (2011).

Gallery representation:

Ingleby Gallery london

Source:

http://www.susanhiller.org/

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/susan-hiller-1286

http://www.inglebygallery.com/artist/

tagging and housekeeping stuff

updating flickr site

wisbones

kate mcguire's website

thinking ahead to installations/further 3-D work and objects I might be interested in using. Have been collecting wishbones from family meals for a while. Cleaned them using hydrogen peroxide which also bleaches them a stark plaster-like white

thinking about casting wishbones so looking at other artists using them

I loved seeing Kate McGuire's work in the RWA last year as part of a Coates and Scarry exhibit.

Curled works of feathers in sculpted forms, still and serpent-like in wooden glass cabinets, giving them an otherworldly appearance and interesting context.

ongoing installation project

12.12.14 installation work

trying to push on from initial dust projection prints.

Working towards idea of light/projection installation using old-school projector and slides.

The concept is about the familiarity (for old farts like me) with the regular sound of projector, the hum, the visible dust haze in the beam, and the doziness and heat and associations that come from being in a room watching slides.

This is a scanned dust slide using just sellotape and sampling dust from the largest oldest room in the art school.

I'm interested in referencing traces of the past. The art school in Bristol has been here since 1853. Like any home, parts of it are unchanged, others bits left untouched. There are obvious associations with dust and history. 

I like this particular image as the dust collected unexpectedly looks like an eye gazing back.

I'm trying to avoid coming back to deliberately framing my images which seems to be a recurring familiar almost comfort blanket.

However in this case it works better with a black outline.

working with resin

artist working with glow in the dark resin

http://blog.shinium.eu/

Uta BARTH

  

11th december

researching other artists interested in light/the viewer who use similar imagery familiar to me

use of windows/curtains/light

Uta Barth

video research

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwGLdhuD1lQ

Bill Viola

Watched a video of the artist talking about his inspiration on Tate shorts

Liked the fact that he didn’t for ages realize he was referencing a childhood experience and that this impact on him, a near death experience, flavours his work with a spiritual element which adds more depth to an already beautiful an eery approach to his work.

I particularly liked

Bill Viola - Tristan's Ascension – 2005

The theatrical lighting gives this a sense of immediacy or a live performance, which is then blurred and confused as the viewer struggles to understand what is happening and how the video is filmed,

It shows a body prone, covered in white, suggesting a death shroud, water in larger and larger quantities seems to travel upwards from the figure giving the film a sense of movement and ascension of the body, as the water density increases, so does the light intensity, albeit obliterating the previously visible body, adding to the sense of ‘ascension’.

Unsettling, dramatic and impactful.

installation pieces

4.12.14 installation

Casting the walls: PVA and tissue paper

In my studio space there's a patch of wall that's white and been visibly painted over time and time again, the brush strokes timeless in contrast to a patch of dated woodchip wallpaper that reminded me of home and inumerable bloody magnolia coloured rooms I've lived and stayed in over the years.
Again it's about the white. I still have no idea why. It doesn't matter



This piece is cut from that cast, it has pieces of paint and has poorly picked up the texture so I decided to use as a frame (again..).
The window shape is a recurring image that preoccupies me.
Years ago daydreaming out of a similar looking one when I should have been revising. Dreaming of writing scripts and film school, not the future I ended up following. Fast forward 20 years, and I'm now back in an art school with the same windows. This time the day dreaming's encouraged. It's different to the one I stare out of a work that's been tinted to save on aircon and is as modern as you like.

I went round sampling dust with sellotape from hard to reach nooks and crannies. Projecting these on acetate created a blurred nothingness that seemed to indistinct. The above image, is the cast scanned with the dust taped bits in between. Makes me think of christmas cake icing and cinnamon.

Anna Franceschini - Laws of Attraction

video artist
impressions:
random, liked the use of light, tension, little sound to distract-muted low growl-like bass notes that may or may not have been the sound slowed down.
Slightly haunting location for a film anyway, the ghost ride, haunted house, all forced fear, jumpy laughs and old-school nostalgia.
Something hypnotic and nauseating about watching the images of the big dipper and rides.
Eery sense of being left there at night, abandoned as there are no other visible people.
Jarring more lengthy shots of a pair of legs in manicles shaking in a fitting fashion as if on an electric chair.
How we are appalled by murders and gruesome images in the news, but crime dramas and getting thrills on rides remain an unchanging pasttime however civilised we like to think we're becoming.....
Liked the use of hanging screens with noisy old school projection and shuddering images on a loop. Again,making the viewer feel unsettled and wondering if you're the hunter or hunted.
Sensual piece of video showing hands moving under material with holes of light.

Antoni Tàpies: Catalan abstract artist

Antoni Tàpies 
Catalan Abstract artist.

I've never seen any of this artist's works in real life.
I love the importance to him of big themes in his work.
He has recurring symbolic motifs and is interested in eastern philosophy and buddhism.
Growing up and witnessing the repressive Franco regime during the Spanish Civil war, frequently bed bound with illness, has had a lasting impression on his life view and need for artistic impression.
Influenced by Dubuffetm, Klee and Miro.