NEW STUDIO Week Seven

Spent Monday preparing the plinths. I decided that I wanted to keep them very basic as it’s all work in progress so I only painted a section at the top. Installed some of them on Wednesday…

Shop April 3rd

Shop April 3rd

Shop April 3rd

Shop April 3rd

here are the three from the Wheatley Hall Road studio and the two maquettes for the screens that will be built from the shelves here. The new one at the back, or the mostly new one, is called ‘snow line’ based on Dream Song 28 which is one of the saddest things I’ve ever read.

The piece is being built around the armature I built at the last studio and is clad in the flooring the last tenant ripped out of the first floor of this studio.

Snow Line

Snow Line

On Friday I took the forty one Garden Collage drawings from the Ptolemy’s Garden series to the shop.

Shop April 5th

Shop April 5th

The idea is to display as many as possible alongside the sculptures I’m building in the space. I think I can get 30 of them around the room and up the stairs without too much fuss. Everything takes longer than you think it will. I’d originally decided to use a steel wire along the wall and hang the drawings from it using bulldog clips. I want to keep the ‘in progress’ aesthetic, implying a constant state of flux. That’s why I’m building in the space as well.

Shop April 5th

Shop April 5th

You can some work on ‘snow line’ at the back but a better view is provided on the video

I also revisited an old film piece and ripped the sound to add to a track for the installation. The film now runs through the interlaced Burnt Norton/Tithonus poem, into a piece called stations which uses some overheard comments and a few half memories to suggest something of a reverie and then into the short poem paraphrasing the first piece. I will post sections when I’ve edited it to be small enough to upload.

NEW STUDIO Week Six

Monday 25th March.

Started the day by filming the installation with a tripod and adjusting the lighting in the camera. It’s not an expensive camera so the quality doesn’t improve much but it gives a better idea of the space. The videos are very big so I’ve put them on Vimeo.

Vimeo MVI_3310 https://vimeo.com/326652463  6 minutes – Eliot/Tennyson

Vimeo MVI_3311 https://vimeo.com/326652287 3 minutes – summary poem.

rudimentary plinths for shop space

rudimentary plinths for shop space

Subsequently spent time downstairs checking out the lights, the sockets are are working fine but I need a couple of dozen new bulbs, and making some simple plinths to stand the five sculptures I’ve got there so far. Two are put together so far but need painting. The aim is to be able to open the big window shutter by next Friday.

This Wednesday was spent out of the studio doing a spot of teaching. I also spent a full day on an ACE application – got to keep trying – and planning for a potential commission.

NEW STUDIO Week Five (with a break!)

After my last studio post I went to the Future Now conference – posted here  – and then for a walking holiday in Derbyshire. So this is officially week 5, and week 6 if we’re counting days.

My first day back was a bit of a farce, I put the installation back together and then decided to put a door on the shop wall so that I could close the whole back of the space off. I then got an email telling me that the agent was bringing a prospective purchaser around so I had to take the installation apart again. When they had gone and I had finished the door I put the installation back together again.

Shop Floor 21/03/19

Shop Floor 21/03/19

The door is the lighter hardboard on the left of this picture. The main consideration was that it closes off the painted section of the wall so that it looks better.

I have been working on the sound and been diverted into text, based on the TS Eliot – Burnt Norton stanzas I used on the walls, I looked to emphasise the nostalgic aspects of the verse by combining it with Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ . I decided to interleave lines of the verses, playing around with them a little, to break up the meaning of the poems.

The video has a section of this recording overlaid onto birdsong. The recording is not as good as I want, because of my nasal midlands accent that I can only hear on recordings and the quality of sound on my camera. The lighting is also not correct, I had to brighten the video after recording so the quality suffers.

I also worked on a distillation of the texts into something shorter and more individual. My idea is to create something of my own that I can use instead of the ‘found’ text.

The same caveats apply to the recording.

I have also begun to work on new sculptures and rescued the ripped up flooring of the first floor studio to make some new work with.