BOOKS
This week I’ve set aside a few days to make some small zig-zag books using images which I ‘ve accumulated over the course of the 5 years or so that I’ve been working around the theme of Wanderings. Some of the earliest images taken in 2006 still have a strong resonance for me and it would be great to actually put them together in a way which can be shown to some effect. The trouble is that amongst the accumulated mass of photographs spread across 2 pcs, 1 external hard drive, numerous “backup” cds and 2 laptops I can’t find the originals! All I have are these photgraphs of some mock up books I made from them. They must be here somewhere. This is my quest for the day – find the missing pics!
(Note to self: another job to add to the list of “Things to do when everything else is done” (haha) – “Re-organise digital filing system.”
TWO WEEKS AND COUNTING
Just two weeks left until I leave for the Isle of Wight where I’ll have four days in which to install my show. I’m still finishing off new work – in fact I’m only just starting some of it. Today I started making one of the three simple concertina books which I want to make. However, hopes of making a new sculptural sand piece are fading fast – I think I’m just going to run out of time. I’m not too worried though, I’m sure I have plenty of work, and in the four days that I’m there I’m hoping to make a new site-specific piece too.
The concertina books are going to be based on some of the many photographs I’ve taken on my various trips to the island and will reflect my interest in the constant and ongoing battle to defend the island from attack from or by the sea.
PARALLEL WORLD
I’ve been getting some more prints ready for framing today. At the same time, and for a different purpose, I’ve been reading with interest the publication The Urpflanze which is accompanying the exhibition of the same name at The Drawing Room in London at the moment. The publication is by Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie and I must say I have found it really interesting and informative. The particular passage which had a resonance for me, linking in some ways with some of the work I’ve been making, talks about photographs, “bits of the world seen through glass”, as suggesting a parallel world to ours.
PROGRESS
Everything is moving on and making progress. Two more paintings are ready for collection from the framer. I call them paintings in the loosest sense of the word. They are actually Letraset “drawings” on painted board. As with the blackboards I’m working on at the moment, the boards all have an integral history. They started off life as ten 4 feet square workboards which I used during the Watch This Space residency at Phoenix Arts in Brighton 5 years ago – at the very beginning of my Wanderings work. I used them to form a huge 3 dimensional mindmap in the gallery space where I worked for 6 weeks. All of my research and development work was posted on the boards and linked together with tracks and trails of stickers, dots and lines of sticky tape. You can still see them here – http://bluemonkeystudio.co.uk/judith/watchthisspac…
At the end of the residency, the boards returned to my studio with me and over the years have gradually evolved. They’ve been cut down, painted over, and have eventually become works in their own right. The layers of paint have built up. Markers from the residency have been covered over, scraped off or built upon, forming a sort of historic landscape which has become the basis for my current drawings.
Had a bit of a hiccup this week when, having got 3 big prints done & ready to take to the framers, I managed to leave them on the train. Luckily they turned up in Hastings so I had to make a trip over there on the train the next day to pick them up!
I’ve been working on some blackboard drawings for the show. They’ve come in out of the studio into the house now so that I can live with them a bit & decide whether or not they might be finished.
