Thursday, 19 May 2022

Woven Gridshell and Wayfaring : Visual Environs/Emergent Landscapes/Lines

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach
The OLD WAYS, a JOURNEY ON FOOT, Robert Macfarlane
“ Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings:
 Edward Thomas not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.”


“To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led out-wards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inward to the self. These traverses- between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal-occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. He imagined himself in topographical terms.”

DSC_0205 Archipelagic/Light Drawing
'Ma' The space,expanse and distance between objects/events and time that can create 'boundararies for nothingness/energy'
Covehithe

Walberswick : Woven Paths/Digital Pinhole. 2016

Gridshell Building, Singleton, West Sussex
Weald and Downland Open Air Museum
Making ; Tim Ingold
Anthropology, Archaeology , Art and Architecture.
Knowing is 'understanding in practice' made from lines of active engagement with the material world.

Wayfaring : Emergent Landscapes 

 


















Wednesday, 18 May 2022

In and Out of Material : On the experiential level of life, Tony Cragg.


Tony Cragg
IN AND OUT OF MATERIAL


Demonstration

Tony Cragg : I basically mean the effectiveness of the object, of the material. But because the metaphysical and physical association are already occupied, I'm interested in somehow establishing some relationship with the materials and the things around me without using any preconceived notions of an already occupied language. It is a bit like taking away a Christian name and depersonalising something. What I mean is that it's an attempt on my side to restart the relationship with the material, which I think sculptors have to do anyway.






Jon Wood : Thinking of the increased awareness that this side of your work tries to capture and harness in the viewer, can you say a bit about the kind of sensitivities that you would like to be heightened? What would you see your work as demonstrations of and for? Your sculptures are triggers for what kind of thinking?

Tony Cragg : Well there is an attitude to looking at things and to looking at objects and materials which is based on a meditative tradition of contemplation : the universe in a grain of sand idea, or maybe even religious ideas where you actually get in contact on some level with the material world, on a deeper level than the one you obviously are capable of reaching in an everyday situation, so on an extraordinary level, outside of your own experiences.
I am not saying that that's not interesting or important. But I also think that this leaves the battleground for the everyday life to be governed by non-contemplative thought and non-meditative thought. And this may sound like a mixture of terms, but I think that there is a job to be done even on an everyday, “second for second” level of life—on the experiential level of life. I think there is a job to be done here improving the quality of contemplation about an awareness of the material world—the material world seen as an immediate extension of the communal social effort, the cultural effort that you are part of.

Jon Wood : How does it move from being an individual contemplative experience to being one that has a communal relevance?

Tony Cragg : In the main part it only has communal relevance. All you can do for yourself is formulate your sentences, cook yourself a meal that suits you, get dressed in a fashion that suits you, and everything else you have to put up with as having been made by other people for you. But obviously, even if they didn't ask your permission, there's something consensual about that, isn't there? Even though you don't like it, it doesn't look like you're making an effort to change it. And maybe there's some active thing there. My idea is that even if I don't like it, I wouldn't be able to change a great deal of it, but I could sow the seed for some change in the direction that I would feel would be important. It's a measure of how much responsibility one takes for the change. Looking for more in the visual world around me and looking for more language, in a sense, is one way of heightening sensibilities and expanding a vocabulary and then expanding the responses to a vocabulary is a way of heightening sensibilities. I'm not a politician, but I think we still live in a world that is greatly dominated by mesmerism and mystical models, which are very distracting because they actually stop us from really trying to face reality.







Monday, 16 May 2022

Postmodern : Contested Landscapes for Melancholy



Postmodern : Ever Changing, Fleeting, Positive, Nihilistic,

"There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them.
It therefore has a combination [chiffre]. It is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity
is conceptual...
Not only do Descartes, Hegel, and Feuerbach not begin
with the same concept,
they do not have the same concept of beginning...
Every concept has an irregular
contour defined by the sum of its components,
which is why,
from Plato to Bergson,
we find
the idea of the concept being a
matter of articulation,
of cutting and
cross-cutting.
The concept is a whole because it totalizes
its components, but it is
a fragmentary whole.
Only on this condition can it escape the
mental chaos
constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it."

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 15-16.

Melancholy And The Landscape
Locating Sadness, Memory And Reflection In The Landscape
Jacky Bowrin

Path : Analogue Film Process
St Catherine's Hill, Winchester

Anthrocene : Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Skeleton Tree.
Walberswick :  Beach Slides/Digital Pinhole

Covehithe : Walking/Thinking/Physical Entanglements in the Landscape
Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach
The OLD WAYS, a JOURNEY ON FOOT, Robert Macfarlane

“ Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings:
 Edward Thomas not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.”

“To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led out-wards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inward to the self. These traverses- between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal-occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. He imagined himself in topographical terms.”

Landscape : Entanglements of Affect

Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,
Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

Landscapes : entering/intruding/emerging
Pinhole Photography (Holga)

Landscape : Entanglements of Affect/Aesthetics

Nihilistic Aesthetic :  Bleached Cyanotype






































Saturday, 14 May 2022

The Drowned World, JG Ballard : Architecting the visionary present









The Sun has gone mad and stripped the earth of its ionosphere. For decades blasting radiation has poured upon earth, melting the polar caps and turning permafrost into streams, rivers, oceans. Huge deltas have been built, lakes formed, seas have risen.



The Drowned World, JG Ballard.



Wednesday, 11 May 2022

Elliptical Phenomena : Flux and Mutability

 David Sylvian & Holger Czukay: Plight & Premonition Flux & Mutability





Elliptical Phenomena

Ellipsis : Chantal Ackerman, Lili Dujourie, Francesca Woodman.

Lynne Cooke


Body, Personal Relations, and Spatial Values.

Composition, Concept, Object.


Space is an abstract term for a complex set of ideas.


The photogram is the immediate result of a constellation of light, three-dimensional object and photosensitive material.


Experimental Vision

FROM BEYOND VISION

Photograms

Flouris M. Neusus


Work in the light laboratory was a standard part of the curriculum.


The photogram became a functional element of a personal time curve, allowing the artist to continually endeavour to see or put phenomena into new relations. 


Moholy-Nagy and the Chicago Bauhaus

Thomas Barrow


THE COLOUR OF TIME

Garry Fabian Miller


The Majesty of Darkness

Adam Nicolson


The Unmade

The Pregnant

The Half Erotically Unmade


ADYNATA- Time's Colour, impossible Beauty

Marina Warner


TIME AND LIGHT

Nigel Warburton


TRACING LIGHT

David Alan Mellor

Garry Fabian Miller


Derrida

Blindness

Butades

Trace and Trait 


Karl Blossfeldt

WORKING COLLAGES


Experimental Vision : Research Collages/Ceramic Structures/Making Spaces













Tuesday, 3 May 2022

Brian Clarke : Lead Based Drawings

 Outpost 030522


Stained Glass

Painting

Appropriation

Collage


Using Lead As The Ground Of The Work








Don't Forget The Lamb, Brian Clarke. 2008


New Work : Lead Based Drawings


A lot of people are interested in skulls, but not nearly as much today as in the past. The skull is not only a memory of who we were but also an image of what we will be, I think it will probably engage artists as a subject for as long as art exists.


For me, as I've grow older, imagined truth is just as valid as factual accuracy.


But what really makes me feel isolated is that I don't know any artists today who truly understand what makes good architecture.


There are certain things you can say with stained glass that you cannot say with painting.


The black lead outline emphasize the colour. The minute you put a black line next to a colour the colour is intensified by a factor of three to four times.


You see stained glass by virtue of the passage of light through it, whereas you see a painting by the light reflected off it. So, in contrast to the static condition of a painting, a stained glass window is in a constant state of change as the day progresses, the clouds move, traffic or people pass by behind it.


The problem with works of stained glass is that they have too often been left in the hands of craftsmen who don't think like artists about how to enlarge the possibilities of the medium.


Up until the 60s and 70s lead was solely a structural element that held the pieces of glass together. It's formed as an H-section and because glass was so valuable a commodity, if a piece broke in putting the window together, that piece was then held together by tiny spider leads. This practical device intrigued me, I realized that lead had a potential outside its structural function. I've always drawn and realized that I could use the medium of lead without the line being hitched to its historical role.


There have been only two artists to whom I've felt really close. One was John Piper because he knew how to work with a building and the other is Johannes Schreiter, the German artist.



Study for Portrait of John Piper  2007  Oil on Canvas

Study for Portrait of Kenneth Clark  2008  Oil on Canvas

The Office for the Dead  2008  Lead and Stained Glass on Lead

Shopping List  2008  Lead and Gold on Lead

Don't Forget the Lamb  2008  Lead, Stained Glass and 'Oil on Canvas' on Lead

Lamina : Brian Clarke. 2005


I suppose I wanted to engage the same kind of disciplines that an architect has to deal with when he's building, because I feel what I do is so integrally married to architecture. In a way what I'm doing is coming as close as I can to creating my own architectural experience without the interference of an architect.

Monday, 2 May 2022

Astronomical archive : Entanglements of matter

Astronomical archive
Time based analogue photography

Entanglements of matter and meaning.







Karen Barad, Meeting The Universe Halfway, 2007.

Celestial Sphere/Scale/Intersection : Stars and Dust Particles. 

Astronomical archive

Hawking understood black holes because he could stare at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life. Hawking could see.
Martin Amis, Night Train, 1997.
 
For Baudrilland the actual photographs are beside the point. It is what precedes them that counts in his eyes- the mental event of taking a picture.
Sylvere Lotringer, The Piracy of Art, 2008.