“walk and talk”in “craft in the bay” in Cardiff, 2nd oct. 2015
#freakin-laser
Herbei, herbei was Rot sei.
(Come, come all you reds.)
It has been a week since I returned from Erfurt, a time spent being inquisitive and playing. Before leaving I decided to allow myself time to experiment, not to rush towards creating a finished artifact, but to explore. And it was RED I wanted; subtle, beautiful, glowing. Whether the large panels will or can be red, I don’t know yet.
It was a great time in Erfurt; exchanging thoughts with Elizabeth’s original group, Gudrun Wiesmann, Annemarie Timmer, Eva Kucerova and Martin Schulze. Agnieszka Lipp joined us later.
I also met the lovely Fritz Meierhofer and his wife Margit Hart. Fritz currently has an exhibition in Ruthin (http://ruthincraftcentre.org.uk/whats-on/gallery-1-2/) It looks a wonderful exhibition. Both shared so very openly and happily about their work and ideas.
Smallish pieces are always my starting points, testing out surfaces and cutting structures, before embarking on the larger panels. At the moment I am hyper critical with myself; is this actually reflecting what I am trying to say? Always more drawing I can hear myself say, but at some point it is necessary to just go for it.
So, here are a few images from my time in Erfurt, my ‘table’, some test pieces and good conversations with Gudrun Wiesmann.
Play Think
I enjoyed having two very informal and relaxed sessions collaborating with Lindy Richardson, Head of textiles and a colleague at Edinburgh College of Art.
Lindy is also an embroiderer and she was interested in weaving and making stencils to learn to enamel through, I in turn was interested in having bespoke screen created and experimenting with wet enamel to screen print with and to dry sift through.
We decided to have these workshop days after a ‘blind’ workshop where staff revealed their research interests through tools, objects and materials quite anonymously.
We have kept our first two sessions very loose and are now considering refining some of these areas for individual projects- I am not sure if anything will make it into Heat Exchange II, will have to see….
Out with the old
Quite a while back I finished working on the objects that I enamelled in Erfurt (earlier posts here and here), the Jewel for a Wall piece. The name reflects that the parts assemble into a single object suitable for display on a wall, while many of the individual components are human-wearable as well as wall-adornable.
Not long after their completion I realised that these would not be what I will exhibit in Heat Exchange 2. These works were conceived quickly to illustrate the potential of using a base shape that when aggregated could become a tessellated pattern or alternately, used singly or in small groupings as a stand-alone piece. And to illustrate that idea they worked perfectly. However, the evolution of the themes that I’m working with in the rest of my practice has reached a point where the investigations happening in my hand-cut works are becoming bigger, involving objects that take days to cut by hand. I’m at a point where it makes sense to use the laser cutter to do that work for me. So I’m designing a piece that will be cut quickly and enamelled slowly, and be in alignment with the research I have been doing on weapons for those works.
Jewel for a Wall has been instructive, and, like the necklace pieces that I put up here in my last post (which were a trial for what went on to be 3/4’s of a piece with Sean Macmillan called Quatrefoil Quartet), it demonstrates the strategies and processes that the new works will build on.
I’ve vague ideas for what I’m making, and as yet no plan drawing to show you what it will look like, but Jewel for a Wall and the complete Quatrefoil Quartet are the best indicators I have to give you a feel of what my research is pointing towards, and what that might look like.
Meeting in Munich
New Images
I hope that Cath and Griff’s studio is nearing completion, I find myself without a studio at the moment too. Making in materials has all but stopped. My workshop is being rebuilt and extended, which is very exciting and will be a great improvement, but it also means not having a space to work. So I am trying to be productive by reading, gathering visual inspiration and drawing experiments.
As I said in an earlier post, my interest in spaces, which are situated neither on the inside nor the outside, is continuing and my fascination with the ‘fabric of gaps’ is on-going. I have just returned from a trip to Northern Italy – Milan, Bologna, Padua and Venice, with so much wonderful inspiration. Below is a small selection; the most special is the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele II in Milan.
A Late Start
This year I am collaborating with my partner, Griff (Andrew Griffiths) for Heat Exchange, and like Stephen, we are starting a new body of work following an exhausting winter during which we moved house and as yet have no studio.
During the summer we were inspired by World War II pill boxes around the coast of South West Wales, ruins that are both familiar and intriguing, concrete husks that mark a destination or turning point on a Sunday walk.
The bunkers are quietly disappearing, immersed by brambles and crumbling from the effects of westerly rainstorms. The architecture is modernist and brutal, ugly in aggressive symbolism but softened through time like fortified castles. They also represent security and protection and bare witness to history though never used as intended and therefore dysfunctional: spaces constructed within a few weeks that are now forgotten scars in the landscape.
These empty places are now spaces for our imagination and focal point for a challenging shared project…!
Heat Exchange 2- following a thread
It’s taken some time to renew my posts after Heat Exchange 1.
Posting on-line isn’t a normal or everyday activity for me- but it has been increasingly on my mind to upload some recent thoughts and ideas for the possible direction for this new body of work and also some images from the Summer when I visited Elizabeth (Turrell) in Bristol to help with the ‘Shock and Awe’ exhibition’ (see last post).
In the studio, Elizabeth and Stephen ,Summer 2014 in Bristol
My work, (the Masters students’ show had), and family commitments in Edinburgh had, prevented me making it to Erfurt to enamel with everyone- which was sorely disappointing. It would have been super to meet up with old and new friends and colleagues and share studio time and ideas. So I was so pleased to be able to visit Elizabeth, Roger and Jessica in Bristol and have time to experiment and play in Elizabeth’s inspiring studio and home.
Evening train journey to Bristol from London
Back In Edinburgh, Corstorphine Hill. View from Corstorphine Hill Tower, a memorial to Sir Walter Scott.
‘Black and White Traces’ , brooch, 2014. Enamel, Rubber, Steel
‘Black Trace’, brooch, 2014. Enamel, Rubber, Steel
Now as Winter begins to move towards Spring there are some new shoots emerging after a long, dark and to be honest, quite difficult Winter.
My ideas turn around the samples I made in Bristol and some pieces that were part of an exhibition in Montreal “ÉMAUX AT THIS MOMENT” at the end of last year at Galerie Noel Guyomarch
Now I am looking forward to some of my own studio time again to take words and ideas forward.
Themes I am continuing to explore include:
“threads – hints- touches – marks – grids – pathways – lines – light – dark – shadows – boundaries –demarcation- delineation- discrimination- segregation- isolation”
More on how these progress next….