White Space, white walls

White Space. April 2011

Rust

Rust in the 'white space'

Stage/layer one of the board rust work, further images to follow.

White Space. April 2011

    Put a black square in a white cube.

Carol Hummel

“In my art practice, I’m interested in connections made and the trace I leave as I move through space, time and place.” 

My work is ontological in intention and traverses the socially constructed constraints of difference by exploring the ties that bind human beings to each other through culture, kinship, history, social interaction and friendship.

 Yarn

25' h x 15' diameter
     2011

"Best of Luck, Nuclear World" builds upon the Indian tradition of wrapping string around Banyan trees for good luck and to make wishes come true. Each day for 9 days, Carol Hummel wrapped this tree in the colors of the flags of the 9 countries that possess nuclear warheads. As the strings are wrapped, the colors weave together to form a colorful fabric, an analogy about the hope that by interweaving our cultures, we can create something of beauty instead of destruction. Country Number of Year Acquired Nuclear Warheads United States 9,600 1945 Russia 12,000 1949 United Kingdom (UK) 225 1952 France 300 1960 China 240 1964 India 80 1974 Israel 80 1979 Pakistan 90 1998 North Korea 10 2006

Global Arts Village Delhi

Knitted tree by the Global Arts Village Delhi, New Delhi, India,

Blossoming

Notebook

Here's my Notebook project as it stands. 

Since I'm an Art, Philosophy and Contemporary Practices student I have the Notebook module this semester, which allows me to push forward the thinking from my dissertation and connect it with my practice more than before. I have multiple A5 'notes on...' books that sit on top, each one focusses on its own topic, Heidegger's 'Origin of the Work of Art' or chapters about the museum institution taken from 'A Manual' etc. Below are A4 booklets with articles and images annotated and compiled to follow my own interests in art and curation. Still a bit more reading/writing to do and then make some paperweights but I am nearly at the point that it could be submitted!

Karla Black

I really wish I could see this Karla Black work. I think it's quite like a large pocket holding paint, soap, moisturising cream, nail varnish and even Cif! Although it's evident that the materials she uses are partially chosen for the cultural implications and intriguing references that they evoke in the viewer, another aspect of them is that they are everyday materials and materials that she may have at hand. Black's working process sounds quite intuitive and as though she unconsciously explores the materials, then allows her conscious mind to consider them from a different analytical view. Black says in her video that because her works are shown in a gallery and there is the cultural custom not to touch, her works which are very textural or tactile, mean that the viewer has to transform their desire to touch and instead touch with their mind. This makes me think about Merleau-Ponty's description of the flesh as our experience of this world through tangible, visible and experiential. I think I want to re-read 'The Intertwining, The Chiasm' and have another think about how it relates.
Kettles Yard, Karla Black

Just had a bit of a makeover...

...the blog that is.

Walls work

I've been thinking about a work that is about the gallery/degree show space walls - or the chipboard that gets put up in the uni spaces and becomes the wall once it's sanded and painted up all nice. The wall provides a backdrop for contemplation of works, it frames them as works to be contemplated, it lays claim on work as work.
I want to make a work that is made out of the same stuff that the wall is made from, and that rests on the wall physically. My work would lie on the wall, and the wall would claim it as its own.


There will probably be some knitting involved.

Rosemarie Trockel

This weekend the Uni organised a bus to Edinburgh and a group of us went up to Talbot Rice to see Rosemarie Trockel's drawing exhibition. It was the first time I'd seen any of her drawings out with books and the textures and layers within them really struck me. Trockel doesn't use precise lines or overly measured imagery so the work has a very hands on, tactile quality. She uses materials in interesting ways, plus I get excited by the occasional knitting reference! The exhibition spaces were interesting too - from a high ceilinged room to a small intimate room and then out into a corridor, then further works could be found downstairs in the highly decorative Georgian gallery space - Trockel's work was positioned neatly along the walls and certainly occupied the viewer's attention.

                  

In the gallery information Schreier is quoted and the significance of Trockel's choice of aesthetic and the imagery she focusses on is highlighted...

Trockel mistrusts the evidence of the pictorial, the clarity and lack of ambiguity of the absolutist approach, and prefers to populate her pictures with chimeras and grotesques that at times seem comical, at times inscrutable

Christoph Schreier

"Trockel’s ‘mistrust’ stems from the fact that she has continually encountered opposition within a male dominated art world; although the artist builds upon a strong German artistic context, which includes Joseph Beuys and Martin Kippenberger, she is critical of its implicit machismo. Against an Enlightenment tradition to treat the self as a rational, finite entity, the anthropomorphic figures in Trockel’s drawings blur the boundaries between representations of conscious and unconscious, human and animal states."

Rosemarie Trockel at Talbot Rice

Studio, April 2011

Recent experiments in pewter.

Collaboratively Collected Curation

"This double-sided cabinet houses the artefacts retrieved during the Tate Thames Dig. One side contains items found at Millbank, the other those from Bankside. The cabinet is in the style of nineteenth-century display furniture still found in many museums. However, Dion has not labelled any of the objects, allowing the visitor to form their own ideas about them."

Mark Dion's Tate Thames Dig, 1999

Dion's presentation allows a viewer to form their own meaningful dialogue through objects that required numerous people to collect and produce as the work. The project involved paid volunteers and other professionals and artists collaboratively finding, cleaning, sorting and presenting artifacts retrieved from the River Thames. This interesting creation/curation process questions authorship of art, interpretation of objects and the value given to art by attributing value to objects that were most recently forgotten on a riverbed. Funny to discover it now after having curated Collection(s) Part 1 where we aimed to provoke some similar approaches from the viewer.