The terror of neutrality

I am excited because I have finished my first piece of work since my sketchbook exercise.

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.

Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

The end of my sketchbook project

I have finished my sketchbook, I have drawn one drawing a day over the last 67 days, a way of compiling new imagery without being precious. I call these drawings starting points and now I will endeavour to make new work from these starting points. However first I want to read about two architectural theories ‘the fold’ and ‘other geometries’ I have been thinking of these since doing a workshop with Rupert Hartley last term, I have no idea what they really mean but I am intrigued. I am also thinking about the tyranny of the page.

What then is the problem of “other geometries”—- “geometry” in what sense and other to what? We can talk, for example, of the geometry of a novel or a character in a novel, or else of another person, someone in fear or in pain, with a toothache. Such are the geometries of living —- the geometry of a young Japanese woman walking down a Parisian street or a Dutchman made to feel clumsy, elephantine, in a traditional Japanese house or inn. Each of us has such geometries, composed of lines of different kinds, coming to us in different ways, which make up the arrangements or dispositions of space —- the “assemblages” —–in which we move and relate to one another. But how then do such geometries of living come together, intersecting and interfering with one another in the space of a city or a building?

John Rajchman, Constructions, 1997.

• 
• 

continued

EARTH: Art of a changing world (part 3)

Suzanne Moxhay’s work Halcyon is another epic large format photograph. Showing a beautiful misty landscape we read that her images are constructions of imagined worlds, she photographs 3D collages she has made from collected cut outs. her worlds appear haunting yet beautiful.

Yao Lu’s photograph Spring in the city, Is at a distance a typical chinese landscape painting, on a closer look one sees that he has photographed mounds of rubbish covered in protective green nets, he has then manipulated the photograph by adding in motifs of typical landscape painting. It is a beautiful and clever take on the changing landscape of China.

Mariele Neudecker is another favourite of mine. Her work is called 400 Thousand Generations, the works title is how long it took for photosensitive tissue to evolve into the human eye. Her work explores the sublime landscape little changed over time.

The last work that I also was impressed by was Emma Wieslander’s series of landscape photographs she had taken using a Claude glass, a small black convex mirror used widely by artists in the eighteenth century to frame a landscape by reducing it to an ordered view. She is interested in romantic notions of the celebration of landscape where nature can be appreciated for its pure beauty.

• 
• 
• 
• 

continued

EARTH: Art of a changing world (part 2)

The next piece of work that I really loved was both sublime and conceptual by Antii Laitinen called It’s My Island. The work consisted of three video screens and three large photographs. The video screens show him building an Island (over three months) out of sand bags. The photographs show the ideal beautiful Island scene with a tree set against spectacular skies. I feel this piece is dealing with our desire for our own paradise as well as the futility of our desires. Also with the futility of our small measures for stopping climate change.

The next piece I thought was really provoking is Thomas Saraceno’s work Endless Series. This is a series of Photographs taken in Bolivia at Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat. These photographs reminded me of casper David Friedrich’s

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_David_Friedric…

famous painting The Wanderer above the sea of Mist, where the man stairs out over nature, his smallness and inconsequence is emphasised against the vastness and grandness of the landscape. This series made me here made me feel humble in the face of nature and sad that we had desecrated something so pure.

A highlight of the show was Lemn Sissay’s poem What if? shown as a video of a studio session with a jazz accompliment cut with images of the world. It is a powerful poem but I think it would have been better without the extra imagry, just the remarkable studio performance & let us imagine the rest.

Lemn Sissay

What if?

A lost number in the equation

A simple understandable miscalculation

And what if, on the basis of that

The world as we know it changed the matter of fact

Let me get it right. What if we got it wrong?

What if we weakened ourselves getting strong

What if we found in the ground a vial of proof

What if the foundations missed a vital truth

What if the industrial dream sold us out from within

What if our impenetrable defence sealed us in

What if our wanting more was making less

What if all this wasn’t progress

Let me get it right. What if we got it wrong?

What if we weakened ourselves getting strong

What if our wanting more was making less

What if all this wasn’t progress

What if the disappearing rivers of Eritrea

The rising tides and encroaching fear

What if the tear inside the protective skin

Of earth was trying to tell us something

Let me get it right. What if we got it wrong?

What if we weakened ourselves getting strong

What if the message carried in the wind

Was saying something

From butterfly wings to the hurricane

It is the small things that make big change

What if the question towards the end of the lease is

No longer the origin but the end of species

Let me get it right. What if we got it wrong?

What if we weakened ourselves getting strong

What if the message carried in the wind

Was saying something

http://gps.southbankcentre.co.uk/poems/668/what_if…

• 
•