The weeks are passing very quickly. After a year of going to school every morning the change to going just twice a week is taking some getting used to – at the moment I find myself thinking that it is Monday when it is Tuesday (which is my first day at school each week) and that it is Friday on Thursday (which is the second day at school). My current inability to work out what day of the week it is perhaps contributes to the feeling that time is somewhat accelerated.
At an opening in gallery here last week I meet another artist who has knows Kjetil and Liz (artists I know in Norway and who know other artists also at Wip). It really can be a very small world.
My meeting with an advisor at the tax office was very useful and quite enjoyable. Not only did we talk about my situation regarding (lack of) income and (relatively modest) expenditure, but about how the internet – and in particular the relationship between ideas of physical and virtual locations – is creating so many complex theoretical questions about where things, such as web transactions and exchanges, can be considered to be ‘sited’. I really was not expecting to have such an abstract, interesting and stimulating conversation!
Meeting up with Alex, whom I took over the studio from, is always good. We had a great talk about art and education – she is training to be an art teacher, which is a specialist discipline here, and is investigating, amongst other things, how processes rather than products could be valued. It is something that I very much wanted to pursue when I was working on education projects but never really had the opportunity. That evening I was reading a text for the ‘Artistic Research’ course that I am about to start, and it too was promoting the idea that processes (as outcomes in and of themselves) will continue to become more and more significant in terms of knowledge theory.
Definitely a area that I want to explore ….
The winter here continues to amaze and fascinate me. Last weekend as I was about to head off for a run I spotted my first “snowbow”*. It was truly beautiful – an incredible thing to see. The picture does not really capture the ethereal wonder of it, nor the brilliance or clarity of the colours.
Later that day I noticed the coral like formations of snow crystals on the metal handrail on the bridge over a road. The temporariness of these crystal formations seems to poignant – a perfect reminder to appreciate the presentness of things.
* apparently it’s still called a rainbow even though it was not raining. It was a cold late morning (about -15°) and the low winter sun was shining through ice crystals in the air. I guess I should call it an “icebow” but the alliteration of snowbow is so much more appealing.
