Trip to London at the weekend hoping to meet up with someone from The Showroom to discuss their Communal Knowledge project which sounds great and not dissimilar to some of the work we do at the Biennial- arranged to meet at 1pm – train didn’t get in until 1pm and so at 11am whilst on the train, the meeting had to be cancelled, really disappointed but we are going to get in touch in the New Year hopefully.
Did however get to see Anish Kapoor exhibition, really amazing and the Roger Hiorn Installation which is so stunning – he’d have my vote for the Turner Prize on that alone.
Did some mapping doodles on the way down, as an experiment for a project I might do next year, really enjoyed the freedom of having to draw so quickly as the train sped by.
Have had migraine after migraine all week though and am praying it stays away for the awards dinner tomorrow night.
Very busy week, exciting in work as The Forestry Commission have just agreed to re-instate Raumlabor’s Jantar Mantar for one day only in Southport, so I’m busy helping organise that. Photo here if you want to see it.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/liverpoolbiennial/393…
I have just booked my hotel in Bristol for the Ixia One Day Sculpture seminar in December, so it’ll be good to get some feedback on the Jantar there.
I was accepted into the finals of a local eco art competition, doing very badly in the vote though – a very lovely light design is winning but I’m also being beaten by a sock monster (a cute sock monster but a sock monster nonetheless) which feels a bit bizarre.
I get to go to an annual dinner party with the other finalists so I’m hoping that I can ‘network’ whilst spreading the ‘environmental art’ word.
The shortlist is here http://bit.ly/XLK5C for you to see and if you want to, please vote for your fave (hopefuly me) here: http://bit.ly/3p2XkX
I am researching madly for my MA and have just suggested that for my main project I concentrate on Wirral (where I live) as I am researching 4 separate parts of Wirral for a Biennial project any way and it’s seems sensible to take advantage of that and work with it.
My boss at The Biennial is really keen and thinks it’s great that I can benefit them and my own practice at the same time. Interesting times ahead.
Manchester Book Fair today – hmmm – an odd day. I was asked to put some work onto a table shared with all the Wirral Met students, I spent a lot of time producing book work and had loads but there was only a really small table and for everyone to get work on display – it was 1 or 2 pieces each. So rather a waste of all the time and effort put in with all the other work.
Well attended though and some amazing work there and I met Emily Speed at last (hello Emily), good to meet a fellow a-n blogger.
I would do an artists book fair again for sure but with a table of my own, I had enough with me to fill one, had to leave loads in the car.
My friend Julie felt the same so we may look into more fairs and go together, share a table and costs to start with – see how we get on.
Mini presented my chosen place/reasons for site art at Preston, went well I think. Also met up with Jeni who was year ahead of me in Wirral and now again on the MA, she had some Preston books/info for me which are really useful. Good to talk with her and her friends too, I got a better gist of what’s to come on the course over the next 2 years and feel better about it all now.
We have to present an image from our research trips to talk briefly about this week.
I bought this very old, damp and battered book of Shakespearian poems at the Portico Library.
Opening upon a random page, I chose a word (with a pin) that happened to be ‘PERIL’
I decided to create an artwork from the book, using Peril as my starting point.
The beginning of the book now blanks out most of the words except a few relaying a sentence about Shakespeare’s dark works.
Then I have cut rectangles through page after page, gradually decreasing in size until you can view the one word ‘Peril’.
I also google imaged the words I have left on view and then quickly sketched the first image that came up onto the peril page to show how modern technologies and research methods can illustrate old works and words.
Is it desecration to write,draw in and cut up old books?
Maybe – but all the same it can make people look at these unloved, unused and neglected books in a whole new way – surely that’s a good thing?
Wandering around Manchester getting a feel for site and archive was far more interesting than I had thought. Not that I didn’t think it would be interesting but it was altogether different from my imaganings.
We looked at site, place, space, architecture, some public art and visited 4 libraries – all beautiful.
Manchester Central Library, The Portico (private members) libraty, The Chetham School of Music Library (Harry Potter eat your heart out) and then the amazing John Rylands Library, well worth a visit for any book lover. I could live in there!!
Popped into see the New Comtemporaries exhibition at the Cornerhouse whilst there, some fantastic work this year.
it has set me up to want to produce more art again, I have been busy in work and busy with portrait and caricature commissions(have to pay the bills somehow) but need to do some work I actually like too.
So I have started some artist books (of a kind) as I’m sharing a table with some students from Wirral Met at the Manchester Artist book fair in November. It’ll be very interesting to see other books again, I always get inspired at these fairs. Also good to share a space as I know I wont have time to produce anywhere near the amount of books you would need to fill a whole table.
