Leeds University

Making A Giant Birds Nest

New project. I have been having this vision for a month now. a desires to make a giant birds nest. So i am. I did. And this is what is going on….

This are stage one. These images will be made into photogravure plates, to be reproduced into a hand made book. Maybe even larger coloured prints, or large photogravure plates. Its all in the planning stage. Black and White are for the Plates, colour are originals.

Figure 1. First you will need to collect twigs and sticks. With Mouth Optional

Figure 2. Hands preferable.

Figure 3. Feet not advisable.

Figure 4. Try not to collect sticks that are too big for you.

Figure 5. If you do get tried, remember to find a close bird box for a nap

More to come.

Duality duality, I think you are my friend.

Recounting fragments of knowledge and then letting my instincts do the rest. Going with ideas even if I am not sure why, as in life there is nothing you can ever be sure of. It is all buried in a jumble pile of facts and fictions.

‘We know that there exists two types of sleep, which are scarcely less different from each other than they are from the waking state. The first type, which occurs in periods of roughly ninety minutes, is characterized by rapid eye movements; experiments have established that in this the eyes follow the movements of objects hallucinated in the dream…. dreaming is confined to this types of sleep which is called ‘paradoxical’ …the second type of sleep, called ‘orthodox’, has physiologically entirely different characteristics, and the thought activity associated with it is much closer to waking thoughts. In this phase, problems of the previous day can be dealt with logically, though the path leading to their solution cannot be remembered after waking.’[1]

Lots of fragments of information all on different layers, some hidden by mistake, and others hidden on purpose. We as humans only use ten percent of our brain; we have a great imagination and a history of lost baggage. We dream, and we dream and we dream; though we do not seem to make life easy for ourselves from the word go. Life seems to be taken too seriously, we are playing a game with many parts missing. Being lost and confused is to be taken very seriously. Searching my soul for philosophical and scientific explanations for the answers of how I make what I make. Weaving together narrative and ideas into a space of fact and adding in a lot of fiction. Does it matter what is true or false, as long as there is belief and a smile? Since when has works of fiction been taken so seriously? ‘If people didn’t do stupid things nothing intelligent would ever get done.’[2] John Baldessari quotes from the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. I believe this is correct. Though I worry about playing the role of the idiot, believing if I am serious I will be taken seriously, I am starting to understand this is not a fact but a fiction.

‘If you approach work with sense of humor. People immediately assume you’re not to be taken seriously, but I think the truths about society and human existence can be approached in different ways. You don’t always have to be deadly serious. Sarcasm and humor can help you see things in a lighter vein,’[3] explains Eurwin Wurm, a further artist who uses humor to great avail in his work.

I am the creator in this world, this surface of an image. I have power to make and create its life, their own memories, their own vibrations that will live far past my own morality. Stuck in a present moment in the past, always moving forward, always heading into the future. I take these memories that have been molded, and physically try to react to them using my dreams and imagination, feeling all the vibrations around me. Relying on my five senses to guide me, and my six sense; my intuition to writes in the rest.

As with all creators, there will be a point where I die, my own existent being my damning. A serious god of a world of my own, believing I have control on the outcomes but finding no answers, no truth and a world and a body that will turn against me. I will always believe in my own in mortality.

That is just one side, the creator, the god. There also lays in these pictures the child, the idiot, the joker. This part of me is in the physical planes, I am the source of the vibrations of my work and its target. Acting out silly tasks and roles, make them laugh the silly things you do, but also make them praise.

[1] Freud, p.78

[2] John Baldessari, Baldessari: While something is happening here, something else is happening there; works 1988-1999/ Texte von Meg Cranston, Diedrich Diederichsen und Thomas Weski (Köln: W. König, 1999), p. 17.

[3] Erwin Wurm, Pretty Cool People Interviews <http://prettycoolpeopleinterviews.submarinechannel.nl/interviews/item/25> [Accessed 25^th May 2010]

Dream.

I had this dream: I was the proud owner of a really big foot. People would come from all over to see this really big foot. My life was okay.

None Dream.

Bee was a German Sheppard. She was my Dad’s; he kept bees. Do you see the name connection? Good. I used to pretend she was a pony. She was really strong. I had a real pony but Bee was better. The dog called Bee that was a pony. We had fun. I do miss that fun. I miss something so wonderfully kind and that sense of safety she brought me. I do not think I have ever felt that feeling since she left me alone. She had puppies but most of them came out dead. That day I was told animals do not have souls. So I went to bury them down the garden and I wondered how I could help them, as they did not even see the world they died within. Why did they not have souls? That day I lost my soul. As I shared mine out and gave each lifeless body a fragment to help them on their way.

Soon to be dream.

I hope tonight I dream about my big foot, I have some questions to ask it.

I am inside myself. I am inside the world. I am above and around everything my senses allow me to understand. I am waking-walk-waking-walking. Vibration of a conscious mind. Of my own creating. Of my own forming of this physical world. ‘Multiply faceted ambivalence. The presence of mutually conflicting thoughts and feeling after all…to embrace duality and contradiction’[1] but when it all boils down to it what are facts? Are these facts what I am seeking to achieve? Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. This was once a fact, like the earth was once a flat. Disproven over time. What else could we believe in that could be proven wrong? I worry about my memories.

There is this place I want to be in, or on, or maybe just hanging down and looking at the view. Quantum physic scientists call this place ‘The Field’. Albert Einstein would have insisted this place was the fastest speed that exists. Einstein was wrong, maybe the quantum physicians are wrong too. But I am not dealing in pure facts, but the facts and fictions. The Field is my ideal holiday destination. The place that is a boundary between the physical plane, which is everything our five senses can feel. The facts that we can touch, like the chair I sit on and the smell of the flower that sits on my desk. Then we have what is above The Field, which is the metaphysical plane; everything we are able to sense in our dreams, the spiritual world and our emotions. These ideas have been around for hundreds of years before the quantum physicians started looking into it; from the poetic language of mysticism from the scholars of Kabbalah and the Sanskrit pundits. Fictions that are proven to be facts, or maybe they still lie in fictions.

If we start in the physical, the slow vibration of life, what is fixed or slowly moving? The vibrations move faster up toward the field (the speed of light) and up faster and faster over the field and into the metaphysical; the emotional plane or the astral plane, which it is also known as. If you raise the vibration fast enough you will get to the source, to that which started the vibrations. This place has interested me for sometime, as a place where moments form within. A physical act that vibrates upwards into moments, into the subconscious and out of my reach. I feel that I can be a tourist in this field by standing between both my physical self and the self to which ascends up past the point of my senses. In there, if I catch these moments and mold them onto the surface of an image, I will find something that has always been there, which I have never seen before; I need to see them differently. I want to be a tourist in the field and somehow to take my camera and find these moments and picture them, and be pictured in them, as ‘essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality and eventually in ones own’.[2] Photography plays with our memories, turning them into not only facts, but fictions transformed into an object.

[1] Liz Rideal, Mirror, mirror: self-portraits by women artists/ Liz Rideal ; with essays by Whitney Chadwick and Frances Borzello (London : National Portrait Gallery, 2001), p.157

[2] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 57.