free-not-free

Its been a week or more since I wrote last. Either I have been so involved in making that I haven’t had the time, or I suddenly lost my tongue and got reticent.

Tonight I embark on ‘having a go’ at making an animation. The method looks quite straightforward, but I’m not sure I have started out on the right foot as the wooden blocks with the cut birds that I plan to use as the centerpiece are inky and stained from printing. No beautiful clear cuts to be seen. I’ve been cleaning them with white spirit but the wood has sucked in all the ink. Ok, first lesson learnt.

There’s no noise of the local football at St James Park tonight, just sea gulls, and the next door neighbours’ children bouncing. Mine are long sleeping since they were up in the night and up early in the morning.

I did some intense printing this afternoon, its tiring you know. All that rolling, wiping, thinking, concentrating, checking for inky fingers, wiping, cleaning, and cleaning again. I have created a building shaped wood cut filled with a backdrop of trees (from Haldon Forest, nr Exeter) and four windows. The windows are for the birds.

My current work is exploring the concept of refuge, and with it, personal peace.

In this piece ‘All the Houses in the Street’ I aim to infer some of the complexities around refuge and in particular, the search for personal peace and the fine line between refuge as peaceful security and captive discord.

Terraced housing: all the houses in the street may look the same, but the outside belies their individual characters. Are they places of refuge or containers of discontent to the inhabitants who live there?

The woods are my own place where I am drawn to for refuge. They are a place to be hidden; clear sight deflected through trees and dappled light. In the woods you are surrounded by nature’s cycle of new growth, living, dying and death. It is natural and unthreatening, raw and knowable. And, in the stream that runs through the forest, there is life’s energy manifested, which balances with the dryness and earth of the forest.

The moon: at nighttime the subconscious mind takes over as we ‘stream into the loving nowhere’. In our sleep and dreams we seek refuge from the day’s ‘conscious decisions and personal memories’. The typed verse at the base of the work is a poem by Rumi.

Knowing that conscious decision and personal memory are much too small a place to live, every human being streams at night into the loving nowhere, or during the day, in some absorbing work. (from Milk of Millennia).

Repeated mantra-like it aims to underpin the atmosphere of the work.

This piece of work is currently in the Open Print exhibition in RWA, Bristol.

http://www.rwa.org.uk/currexh.htm

For a review on this exhibition see:

http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/art71083

its been pointed out to me that the photo of the view through the 6-paned window of the incubator matches the wooden blocks of the bird woodcuts. Of course I meant that on purpose…

Today I’ve sorted a table top and trestles for the incubator and also a dustbin (piles of wood shavings, scrunched up masking tape. and paper cuttings).

The Incubator space in the basement of Exeter Phoenix. The desk faces a window that looks out onto car park spaces. Its a great place to see people walking past, all at a good foreshortened perspective too.

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While I’m talking about general stuff, it makes sense to talk alittle about the process of blogging.

I feel like I’m in a room with a bunch of people I haven’t met before. They don’t know me and I don’t know them. There is the mumur of conversations around me. I feel self conscious and shy to talk much. These posts of mine are short, excluding much, rather than saying the wrong thing.

Writing a blog (I don’t like the word blog, what’s a better name?) is much like making art. Putting your thoughts and ideas out there; making yourself open to critic; not wanting to be heard (seen) and wanting to be heard (seen) all at the same time.

Time for more vulnerability; I’m off to the dentist.

I’ve borrowed some of my kids building blocks, to create a ‘moving’ woodcut print. The idea being to cut it and animate the blocks moving themselves into different images.

On each side is a close up of a dove (ring-necked/ turtle dove). They’ll shift and morph into each other through the animation.

Doves enclosed. A symbol of waiting for peace/ for freedom. I started looking at this for an installation piece exhibited in Gallery 333 last August. http://www.exeterphoenix.org.uk/gallery_archive.php