I am in love

I have been slack. But I am here now. My day started badly with that old tiredness-that-you-can't-shake feeling and an overactive brain that wouldn't stay focused on the task at hand. So I brokered a deal, "if you do these two boring things, the afternoon can be spent tumbling through the internet looking for inspiration". It conceded and away I went. And I fell back in love. He's a Norwegian artist that goes by the name of Rune Gineriussen. He creates installations in nature using foreign, man made objects. A lot of the time these objects create a relationship, for example - two chairs staring out to sea.

Or they mimic other living things like crabs as seen here below

 

I think my favourite thing about Rune, and why I am in love with him is the poetry in his art. The fact that he creates fantasy in real life. Takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. That's most evident in his work with lamps in the forest. 

Artworks like this give me the same feeling as beautiful images like the spiders that have coated the trees in Pakistan in wake of the flooding, pictured below.

at any rate, go check out more of Rune Guneriussen at his website http://www.runeguneriussen.no/index.html
The only thing I wish I could change about his work is that, much like Andy Goldsworthy, the work they create is so remote it is usually only seen through photography. I would love to wander through the forest of lamps at night and see the colours shine of the snow. Can you imagine walking through a forest at night and seeing a light from afar, going to investigate, and finding that? I think it would be the same kind of magic that reading Narnia gave you when you were a kid.

I have an obsession with abandoned buildings and post apocalyptic literature. Last night I was walking through West End and said to my friend "Gee the floods were awesome!" and then realised how insensitive that statement was. So many people lost loved ones, their homes, were displaced, lost sentimental possessions. I was fortunate. My propensity to live on hills served me well. I attempted to explain why I loved the flood. The flood to me, in a snapshot moment was tearing down ann street in the valley, on that hill as you head off the story bridge and towards the city. I'd had a couple beers and was tearing down a 5 lane road at midnight and it was dark - no lights and deserted, not a single car, not a single soul except for me and Alister. And I remember yelling out with pure adrenalin filled joy and thinking "remember this moment. This is a snapshot of youth." And I have held that moment with me. So every time I think of the flood I remember the view of my hands on the handle bars of my bike and this swelling feeling of excitement and adrenaline in my chest. This was as close to post apocalyptic literature as I could get. Well I COULD get a lot closer. However, this was nice, safe, strange adventure.

So ... I don't know why I felt a need to write this. I wanted to update this blog. I will now leave you with one of my favourite images of all time.

Paris flooded 1910, books spilled onto the streets

I don't like drafts

I don't like writing drafts. I have never liked writing drafts. Until I came to honours I got through everything in life by researching and researching and then writing it all in 3 hours and handing it in without a second glance.

The process of fixing words is just not my forte. I like writing them. I enjoy spewing them onto the page very much but the action of trawling back through? I find this excruciatingly frustrating. I find peeling labels off things more thrilling.

I don't know what it is about me. But I simply like the immediacy of the first act. If it's not right then that's okay. Disregard it. Write something new.

This is a failed system. One I have to ignore because it simply does not work in the world of research.

I am also a hopelessly restless human being. Always have been and always will. I find sitting still a challenge.

So, despite having a similar relationship to editing as most people do to the sound of fingernails on chalkboard - off I go again. Luckily I am built with an internal headmaster who screeches at me and tells me to get back to work.

Other wise I would never edit a thing.

Seizure - a crystal filled house in London

An artwork by Roger Hiorns set in an old apartment in London. Commissioned by Artangel, this artwork interupts an abandoned space, turning it into a site of crystalined beauty. Hiorns poured 75,000 litres of copper sulphate into an old apartment and let the artwork grow. The result drew hundreds of people a day on a pilgrimage across the city to visit this strange crystal wonderland. Hiorns is interested in sculpture that is self driven and grows in its own form. Seizure was inspired by the cathedrals he spent so much time in during his childhood as a choirboy. For him the structure of the crystal mirrors the architecture of the cathedrals.

 crystals

Aerial view of a bathtub

More details about the artwork and the work of arts commissioning body artangel can be found here



http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2008/seizure

thanks.

Good mood

Today I am in a ridiculously good mood. Despite stepping outside my house, walking up the street and being completely drenched by a bus driving past. Seems I am in an untouchable state of strange bliss today.

So I just wanted to share some images with you that inspire me / make me happy.

 an incredible house melting into the ground

 This

 Jill Orr. Live Artist. She makes very visually striking work. Beautiful.

 Romeo Castelluci. I have a thing for burning pianos

 This is one of my favourite images of all time.

 I have a collection of images of houses under/in water. When they were doing the snowy mountains hydro scheme they had to move the town of Jindabyne up the hill so they could make a dam. They left some of the houses there and flooded the area. When the water is low you can still see some old stone steps near the island in the middle of lake Jindabyne. I find the thought of a submerged town eerie and incredibly beautiful.

 hehe

Graffiti for a special someone and everyone simultaneously 

 Mr. Alister

mmmmmmm

 Beautiful composition. Very pleasing

 Alison Mosshart is a babe

Bill Henson. He is incredible. I think subconsciously he is what inspires me to work with so much darkness in shows. Be specific with colour and focus. 

Early morning starts with my cat. This is her mid yawn.

Abandoned buildings. Grandeur slowly turning to dust.  

Miss Tess Mallett. Remember this. 

"Tattoos on your body like a road map of everywhere you'd been" Ani Difranco.

Longplayer - a 1000 year long musical composition

I was tumbling through the interwebs looking for information on Artangel, an arts commissioning body in the UK and found this artwork. It's called Longplayer. A composition that started on 31st December 1999 and will play through until the last moment of 2999. Then it will begin again from the start. What struck me most about this artwork is the hope, for want of a better word, that is imbued within it. To think that the world will still exist in 2999 to keep playing this composition.

For me this conjures visions of a post-apocalyptic world, human life long since gone and across a vast desert you hear this machine tick into the last bar of it's song at the final moment of 2999. There is a moment of eerie silence. And then it resumes. Tracking back and playing music that was heard in 1999 by people that once inhabited the earth.

Strange.

So this artwork is eerie, hopeful and beautiful all at the same time.

Here is the link to it.

http://longplayer.org/what/overview.php

thanks.

Inspiration

I'm currently in the throws of my confirmation write up. A 100 page document of pure joy. It is due on the 29th of April. I do not see as much as a breath until it is in. Then I present on May 12th, the onto developing my Scratch work for La Boite. In the meantime I've been keeping my creative bones sane by looking at this amazing website called 'the fox is black' and I found this amazing artist called Myeongbeom Kim. He is an South Korean / American artist that creates beautiful works.

Check these out:

The fox is black site can be found here: http://thefoxisblack.com

And more info on this amazing artist can be found on his website http://www.myeongbeomkim.com/index.html   He also does amazing things like sculpt chairs into / out of trees and fill school corridors with leaves. All the artworks are visually striking and have this gorgeous friction of man made and natural.

Practice

These are some photos from my PhD practice that I ran last Saturday. It was a experiential piece that asked a person to take off their shoes, don a key around their neck and walk into the space with no other guidance than the clues placed around. I was interested in how I could cue and spark memories and recall in the audient and the emotions that were conjured through this performance form. The results were very interesting. I am currently in the process of transcribing participant feedback. Thank you to all who were involved. 

 

Would you share this with me?

I found this on someones tumblr that I follow:

 6 things that you miss
1. Having loving parents in my life
2. All my friends, who don’t live in Manchester
3. The sea
4. A cat in the house
5. Humanity and common sense in some people
6. 8 hours sleep per night

And I loved it. I am currently attempting to come up with 1000 ways to say that you miss someone. This is being concocted with the lovely lucas stibbard.

In the meantime?

6 things that I miss
1. Waking up to birds, sky, dirt, grass and the smell of the bush every morning.
2. Having enough time in my life to totally indulge in the people I love.
3. The ocean.
4. Having a garden to meander in.
5. Riding my horse. Feeling that complete sense of freedom as you gallop through the bush.
6. The Never Never river, the Promised Lands - The place where I grew up. 

What 6 things do you miss?

the woman in the supermarket

I had a beautiful exchange with the woman working at a supermarket check out today.

I put my wallet on the counter and she complimented it. I said thank you and then explained where it came from. She then told me she used to do leather work. I got excited as I also work with leather. I then watched years drop away from her face and her eyes sparkled. She told me that when she was 15 she made a wallet for her grandmother. On it she stitched icons that represented her grandmother and her life. She then lashed the sides of the wallet. As she told me of this she illustrated the whole making process with her hands, smiling. Then she gave it to her grandmother. Her grandmother was cautious of banks and her pension payout so she took out an amount every week and placed it in this wallet and placed it in her drawer. When her Grandmother passed away she got the wallet back in absolute pristine condition. A much prized possession. She left enough money in the bank account for her own funeral.

I have a theory that I make people want to tell me things. I don't know what it is but a lot of the time within a couple minutes i'll know some strange facts about a stranger, have a memory of theirs or have discussed their views on life and whether they are happy where they are. This is one of the things I do enjoy about myself - I seem to encourage confidence.

I would not trade this for anything. 

i think it is

a) form - open, sensorial, a similar openness to music in that there are no 'fixed associations' (Langer, Form and Feeling)

--> this form opens up associations and an emotive engagement

--> which gives the audience a certain experience and this experience differs according to memories and emotions activated in the audient.

So according to this theory, changing the form changes the engagement. But i guess that is always the case.

Hmmm.

essentially I am interested in the 'best' form to illicit memories and feelings aligned with similar notions of feeling and music and langer purports.

Ahhhh research. How mad your drive me with your quicksilver nature and your shape shifting appearance.

And all the sitting still is getting to me.

A musing

not as in funny. "how amusing!"

Like this picture below

but a musing on theatre - like this picture

I was thinking, as you do, about the differences between theatre and music. The way bands happen and the way independent theatre happens. I am recently (in the last year) part of a band. And we get together, write songs and have band practice. You build up a repertoire, a set list, a collection of minute ideas and feelings collected into time brackets, say roughly 3 - 4 mins and you call them songs. And you practice these songs, over and over and then you present them, with your band, at gigs. You discover new parts of the songs - maybe a new drum fill, maybe a better holding chord and they evolve over time - but you and your bunch of rag-tag band mates stick together - write the songs, practice them, present them and then rinse and repeat.

In independent theatre though - we tend to go from show to show to show. And you collaborate with so many artists (I guess if you form a company than that is an exception) The emphasis tends to be on creating the new, rather than presenting the old. In theatre - it seems that if you practice and repeat too much you tend to be 'flogging a dead horse' unlike music in which repetition gives pleasure. Maybe its the time frame thing. 4 mins rather than an hour. So it's just an interesting experience seeing two different worlds of rehearsal. I had a colleague say that they didn't like new versions of old shows - as in the artists revisiting the work and changing it, shifting, extending, condensing. And I thought isn't that strange. The difference between a song and a theatre work - one is much more likely to be open to evolution than the other.

I don't know what these thoughts are - but they are there. Just an interesting relationship between two different ways of creating art that is dependent on the live experience (obviously theatre more so).

And now back to my contextual review. I am going to attempt to define 1. form. 2. feeling. 3. Experience.

and then talk about cognitive function and memory and its relationship to feeling and reading art.

Sarah out.

A memory - if you will

Hello everyone - today I would love for you to make a contribution to this thread by commenting and sharing with me a single memory. It could be of anything. Your favourite memory, a moment you would rather forget, your first memory or just something small that has always stuck with you.

I will go first.

I remember being about 5 years old and my dad would have jams in the loungeroom in the late evening with his band. I remember the smell of one of the guys smoking. They used to record on an old cassette tape recorder that was black, square and had huge clunky buttons that you really had to push down, like the old walkmans. A similar feeling. This particular memory is of a winter's evening. It was cold so I was tucked up in bed, with my thick blanket, lying awake, knowing I'm meant to be sleeping but loving hearing the music of distorted bluesy guitar licks and ambient chatter oozing through the walls, muffled. I lay there for hours listening. I remember one of the guys was called tyrone but i could only ever remember him as toblerone. I often wondered as a kid why his parents had decided to name him after a chocolate bar.

So that is my memory. Yours may simply be a sentence. But I would love for you to gift me with one of yours.

Thanks.

xx

the bitter taste of defeat

Today I finally folded and bought a go card. The last straw was when I hopped on the bus this morning and asked for a daily and was refused. They no longer sell them. So I swallowed my pride. I looked a little something like this when he handed it to me.

I collect bus tickets on my loved ones birthdays. I am sad that this is an end of an era.

I felt like no matter how hard I resisted, I finally had to comply. Like Facebook with the new profile layout. Like itunes with their updates. Resistance is futile. But it is also fun while it lasts.

I talked to a young man sitting in the back of his van in a carpark the other morning. He was overlooking the ocean, watching the waves roll in to the beach with pen and paper in hand. I asked him if he was drawing. He said no - he was studying. Oh! What are you studying I asked. He said a finance and commerce double degree. I said Oh cool! And he said Not really. But I do draw. Here. He handed me a book, saying that he wrote his dreams in there and then drew pictures to accompany them. He had the most beautiful handwriting I had ever seen. I told him so. He said thank you. I looked through his drawings, flipped through a book that contained the chronicles of his dreams. He asked if i drew. I said not really anymore. But I study theatre and play music. He said he had a guitar and a violin in the front seat. He played both. I said to him I hope you don't mind me asking - but why are you not studying art. He looked at his notes in his hand - powerpoint slides of graphs and figures with his beautiful handwriting scrawled on the side. He said he didn't really know. He said his sisters asked him that a lot.

I couldn't get the picasso quote 'every child is an artist, the problem is how to remain an artist once [they] grow up' out of my brain. It elbowed at my conciousness and asked me to say it out loud. But i swallowed it. Smiled. And said. Well if it pays for you to do what you love than I guess it is worth it.

I never found out this mans name. I never will. But i will remember him.

Art that inspires me

Building on the ideas of Dewey from yesterday - I started thinking about art that gets me in a guttural way first - something that sucks a little something out of you when you see it, and you willingly give it because this is art that makes the world seem governed by poetics and magic once more. For me it is art that astounds, and touches me emotionally. This is one of those works

http://24flinching.com/word/featured/drowning-beautiful/?ref=nf

It is created by an artist called Jason de Caires Taylor who creates amazing underwater sculptures that are left in the sea to grow. Here are some images - but check the link out above.

I

You can access his site at http://www.underwatersculpture.com/pages/artist/about.htm

I will write more about him tomorrow - and the role of art as experience as I mentioned regarding John Dewey yesterday (the one that's my sworn enemy)

Sarah out

First day jitters

As said - this blog is a day to day account of working through my PhD. To procrastinate the procrastination as my art teacher once told me. To log in thoughts, readings and musings. To encourage a mellifluous process. I will post dry boring things, pieces of inspirational art, complaints about bus fare prices and the fact that I don't want to buy a Go Card. I will post it all. It will track me through my PhD - it will be an interesting and all encompassing journey. Welcome to my mind.


Today I started reading Art as Experience by John Dewey. This caught me:


"In order to understand the meaning of artistic products, we have to forget them from time to time, to turn aside from them and have recourse to the ordinary forces and conditions of experience that we do not usually regard as esthetic. We must arrive at the theory of art by means of a detour. For theory is concerned with understanding, insight, not without exclamations of admiration and stimulation of that emotional outburst often called appreciation." pg 4 (REFERENCE THIS).


To me this means that you have to forget about thinking too much about what the art means to really get art. To, for a moment, disengage the intellectual brain that we are taught to view things with and just go with the feeling. That is where true understanding and appreciation for art lie. Dewey also discusses the idea of the cult status of art - the idea that once something is considered a masterpiece - let's take the Mona Lisa for example, then one stops appreciating it for the sudden emotional outburst of appreciation from a feeling sense, and instead engages with it in a cultural "oh! It's the real Mona Lisa!" And hence the appreciation is then not in the true feeling and emotional response to the ACTUAL art, but rather the discourse that surrounds it. That is my reading anyway. I just want to preface that (well i guess post - face that as it is after) with the note that I haven't even finished reading the intro. I may be totally wrong about this man's ideas on art. 


He did invent the Dewey decimal system. Anything is possible. I am actually his sworn enemy. I hate the system of codification of library books. It is like a secret society for librarians. Many late nights on too much coffee trying to find books in a library with not enough sleep and a looming deadline. 


And now for something completely different - art that inspires me