http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Stating/Showing Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:46:10 +0000 a-n rss generator a-n The Artists Information Company and contributors edit@a-n.co.uk technical@a-n.co.uk http://www.a-n.co.uk/img/logo.gif http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 This idea comes from the stating/showing [http://www.rich-taylor.co.uk/systems2/stating_showing/systems_redwire_ci.htm] series in which I come up with an idea either in writing or in the form of a drawing or series of drawings.  This idea runs from the logistical problems of projection and how this can be utilised and/or actualised as to represent something about the phenomena of perception within space.  The work will have much to do with illusion.  The drawings that are to be presented will be small and almost archival in scale, and will be framed.  They will record the ongoing workings out of the installation process that in the end will result in the projection itself.  The drawings will be mathematical in style and therefore analytical and technical in outlook, however their appearance will have more to do with the notion of illusion and how such a style in drawing emanates truth or indeed does not so.  The drawings will be of my own workings-out as an artist, so therefore will be process driven and will most probably be wrong.The projection itself will be of a simple film that is made of the rolling out of electrical tape from a straight on angle.  In the actual film the tape will not reduce or enlarge in scale.  However, after the film is made its appearance will be altered in preparation for the projection to be shown at a given angle against a wall.  To deal with this angle and still present the tape as constant in scale there will be much adjustment mathematically to the actual film.  All the adjustments that are to be made will be inversely proportional to the affects of the reality of the situation or presentation.  Here I will be dealing with the problems and uses of perspective and how its illusions can be manipulated. In the past I have presented other, more simple works, using the stating/showing method  [http://redwireredwire.com/page42.htm].  I have exhibited an actual photocopied drawing using the proportioned properties of the A4 sketchbook and externalised the initial ideas that were presented within the pages.  This photocopy was framed as an actual existing artwork.  Also installed was an actual investigation into the space from the drawing [as instruction] whether it is wall based or ceiling or floor based.  What results is a relationship between the two.  Furthermore, such a relationship then becomes questionable, as the realisation that is the installation within the space is inevitably changeable and is dependent on the given architecture.  A question that comes from linguistic capabilities: what is stating and what is showing of the idea, and which comes first?... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 ?deifitcejbo semoceb neth egaugnal A new portion of the blogging system:  How to make language an object through typing certain things backwards?  To first of all define the word ‘Stating’ and then to show the word itself as a possible object in space by typing the definition backwards; this will then help explain the reasoning behind the work that is being made.  Defining the word stating is to perhaps distinguish its meaning, linguistically, from the word showing.  Then there is a certain process that deals with how the act of defining can also be an act of representing.  Therefore to represent something is to define it against something else; thus the duality of the pieces that are made.  The objects that are made are that of archival references to certain understandings of something, and this something is usually an in depth look at an everyday occurrence, illusion, or object.In this situation the everyday object is the electrical tape, the occurrence is it’s unwinding and application, and the illusion is its maintaining of size.  The illusion of size of course depends on an application of measurement, which necessitates a concept of proportion and perspective.Then there comes the complexities of recording occurrence.  As an occurrence is ephemeral there will be a need to film its happening.  Then there comes the problem of filming, as in the very actualities of making the film.  In this there are inherent problems to do with perspective and a maintaining of proportion and such inherences are then reflected of course in the very way in which the film is presented.   The way in which the film is to be presented is where the appearance of the work then becomes scrutinised: it is this scrutiny that I am interested in and how certain illusionistic capabilities can render the very simple contents of the film as non-changing in its presented environment.   ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 The presentation reflects the studio?The acquisition of a space to make the film [in mind of how this space is to be re-construction in presentation].Does the arena in which the film is made have to reflect the very arena that the film is then to be displayed?  Or does all of the changeability in perspective etc. happen within the digital editing of the film.  In other words does the camera [that which films] be inversely proportional in angle to which the projector is pointed?  Or, does the camera face the tape head on, and then does the digital editing account for the changing in perspective?[within the filming process there needs to be a delicate handling of the tape in order for there to be a smooth unwinding of the tape – this smooth unwinding will also be slowed down within the actual edit of the film as a whole]previous and simpler films have been made [see images].  Confronting different coloured backgrounds, a difference in background colour may be used in the film other than white…  In the previously made films there is an intervention of the hand [that of the artist/the maker/the doer]; however in the new film that is to be made, no hand will be present.  Another device will therefore have to be crafted in order to unwind the tape, to give the illusion that it is unwinding itself....... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Intimate/macro space and covered/trajectory space an exploratory installation that with projection will, through material bind the two.    An every day material such as electrical tape exists in its potential state as a sizeable object that can be experienced intimately, regardless of perspective.  Furthermore when the tape is then unwound it begins to cover the space, which then transplants it into the domain of perspective, and it is at this point where the medium of presentation comes to the fore in negotiating the trajectory space.  Two different coloured tapes will be used to begin this exploration.  One will unwind up to the other which begins unwound; the second then winds up after collision with the first.  The frame in which the film is projected (or the composition in which the content is edited) acts as a boundary for where to tape can extend to.  This boundary therefore prevents the second tape from overrunning the perceivable space and acts as a wall upon which the second tape bounces off and then begins to wind itself back into its original state, thus the cycle starts all over again as a reflection of itself.The amount of space covered depends on the space in which the projection exists.  However as the actual tape that is filmed will be present in the installation set up and it will be a prerequisite for the tape in the film to be proportionate to the tape that physically exists.  The tape that physically exists is to be presented upon, (thus highlighting) the apparatus/equipment that makes the installation possible: namely the DVD player and the Digital Projector. The film itself will be especially simple and will be played on loop as if the context is endless and the person viewing the work can enter at any point and exit at any point.  The speed of the film however will be notably slow as this is needed to make reference to something that is almost still but then is moving with a willingness of momentum.  This willingness of momentum I think is important as the covered space is then more strenuous.  The film can be made at a good speed but then will have to be slowed down during editing.   ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 The Film and how it Works.Film Works…    So the DVD player and the digital projector become sculptural objects, through their role as image producing machines.  Image making machines become objects and the objects become subjects thereof.  Certain artists seem to be making a feature of the workings of actual image production and presentation.  Certain artists seem to be making specific use of a cine-film projector, presenting its presence as an actual sculptural and animated entity.  This is what I am interested and prospectively engaged in.  I feel like I need to wrap televisions in order to signify them as sculptural, and in order to separate them as individual entities…  I like how televisions can be used as 3-dimensional objects that can then contain 2-dimensional information.  There is a certain dialogue that happens when they are presented as actual artworks.  This dialogue happens through the negotiation between illusion and physicality through presentation.  The subject of the televisions (other than that they are themselves) is the content that is shown upon them, and this content should always refer to other drawings and evidence apart.   However what happens when the very content is the subject of the object within which it is shown?  Is it therefore within or actually upon?  It is interesting how the projectable space, through its illusion in light, acts as an actual boundary within which something is confined.  It is this confined space that is then explore-able in its changeability in actual space:    Two different coloured tapes will be used to begin this exploration.  One will unwind up to the other which begins unwound; the second then winds up after collision with the first.  The frame in which the film is projected (or the composition in which the content is edited) acts as a boundary for where to tape can extend to.  This boundary therefore prevents the second tape from overrunning the perceivable space and acts as a wall upon which the second tape bounces off and then begins to wind itself back into its original state, thus the cycle starts all over again as a reflection of itself. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Here is an image taken from the film series... that i seem to have left behind for a while.the title of the work still seems rather obscure. i will ask anyone who is willing to answer, at what point does a title for a work happen? and does it stay the same?  i for one seem to re-invent the title almost every time the work is re-exhibited.   As the work is re-staged according to the new environment, or depending on new components added or old ones taken away, the title changes also.What also seems to be happening is that i make work, in digital format, and then come to saving the work on my computer or hard-drive.  At this point i have to come up with a name for the file, this name has to be   easy to remember for me... it is interesting how this file name can also become the name of the work just out of simplicity.  So the name that i use to understand the whereabouts of by work, then becomes the name that the audience reads in order to engage with the work.   This is an interesting transition...  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 I have just blogged on my other blog (OutofOffice) where I am blogging about an exhibition proposed for the beginning of next year (January 2010). It made me think about this blog and how I am neglecting it, I seem to be thinking this with the absence of much else to do - in other words I do not work as such at the minute I have just been spending some time updating my online presence.   I have recently re-located to Glasgow and have joined the Transmission Gallery as a member, for the price of a day of invigilation: I opted for this in order to hopefully meet some new people and get some more contacts. Take a look at my online profile with a picture of a mixed media piece I did earlier this year and also a little more information about my practice: and a biography! Richard Taylor on Transmission The best thing about this website is that you are searchable by tagged key words that relate the you practice: for instance if you go to the website and click on Drawing I will come up, if you click on Conceptual I will come up, if you click on Animation I will come up... etc.   I have also produced an online profile on LinkedIn:This seems like a good resource and a good way to network with people: you can upload information about current and past projects or employment. You also upload a picture of yourself, which is horrible but also I guess for the purposes of signification (I tried to upload a picture of my artwork but it would not let me). Another good thing about this is that it lets you link to other online applications like google presentations and slide shows of work, I am yet to get my head around this though.Google is a very useful toolTake a look at my LinkedIn profile here:Richard Taylor on LinkedIn... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 To engage with a practice that confronts problems can be problematic, but it also produces possibility: this comes from re-assessing understandings and concepts that come from the things I have learned and characteristics I have attained... things familial. Many projects to date have been self-funded by scraping the barrel: I see this as pertinent to how I work fitting with my work ethic. Being at the tail end of a now "better off" working class family, the word resourcefulness was driven in to me as was the not so healthy practice of holding on to one's thoughts, remaining proud but also quite unprepared. Thank goodness for resourcefulness and the ability to be experimental whilst unprepared. A family of hairdressers and business degree graduates in the end produced an artist wanting to pursue his 'career', but to that I have phone conversations asking, "When will you get a job that earns you money?" I see my father less than I would like, whilst greying he holds on to less of his thoughts than ever before. I often think about where I get my creativity, is it handed down along with the grey hair gene? Does the fact that my father says he was "always good at technical drawing" - something he let slip not long ago - mean I somehow attained a knack for putting pencil to paper? I also sometimes think, "Why don't I just become a hair dresser it'll earn me money" As earning money was always presented as something essential in producing consolidation I'm standing by that inherited resourcefulness: Finding my practice then, is a process that happens with the things I already have or things easily attained (things reminding me of my father's garage). I then utilise a process driven activity to re-configure such materials (re-organising the garage...) rendering a practice that is more about notions of discourse, the problems of language and understanding, using words and objects, their descriptions and states: it is relatively open ended and non-problematic. What is problematic is the nature of exhibition. My artistic concerns extend to the application of a work or series of works to visually communicable scenarios; they confront inherent problems and thus possibilities, using presentation as a medium. Working site-specifically is in some ways easier as I adapt myself to various spaces and intricacies. However what lies within this is the difficulty in having an overriding statement on what the work is about. What I do seems to be defined by the different projects I complete, by the certain places in which I intervene. I often think that in order to somehow consolidate the work that I produce I should do an MFA: in this I would hope that congregating with others in an institutional environment would make things clearer... or better placed. But first I guess comes money before any such consolidation: meanwhile I can rely on my knack for technical drawing, solve problems by cleaning out and exploring a garage or two...  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 A recent exhibition at Wakefield's Westgate Studios puts some of my work in context with the interior and exterior environment. The exhibition falls under the name Artomata and consults the notion of artists in multiple disciplines working under the process of the artist as a machine. This piece works with the idea of representation. the chess borad is painted, the painting is framed. the subject is the chess board, which is then presented as the the representation. where as the painting as it resides on the floor emenates elements of object, the things that is represented instead of the actual representation itself. the tools of communication and rules are the chess pieces, these are arranged and drawn into the space. the whole piece interacts with the sun coming through the window. the pattern of gridded fire escape and the radiator inside the sash window. all elements of visuality that interplay with notions of representation.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 These are some images from a project I am currently working on: culminating in a visual exhibition, the work has taken on elements of research and exploration into architectural space and function. The subject is a church, in which the exhibition itself will be held. I am exploring notions of representation as the building is seen as a functional arena, a timepiece, and an example of period interior design. Furthermore the idea of hidden / non-public space that is functional to the place as a timepiece (the bell tower) will be represented in the physically accessible alter flats.   The symbols are taken from the design on the alter flats, yet are painted systematically to engage with the page and lines in which they fit. The other imagery is made up from notational script / ideas / scribbles as well as plans and forecasts of what will eventually be a self emanating light installation.    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Here I wanted to play around with the notion of how something can be displayed, using visual language and concept in order to re-visualise something, work something out. Each of these nine drawings is taken either from a documentary photograph of a film being made, or is taken from a still of the film that has been made.   The film in questions makes a visual and physical link between the alter flats, the patterns in the design, the tools that were used to manufacture the temporary pendulum that the camera was swung from (several extension leads plugged into the mains above - in the attic). The film makes the connection, through function, between the attic and the publicly accessible floor in the church.   The drawings were separated and inserted into old slide frames. This makes a further reverence to how something is recorded / documented, how it is stored and then how it is displayed.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 in getting to think about how the drawings are displayed: I have thought about framing the three paintings / drawings in order to present them altogether as a tryptic. they make more sense together. the image attached to this post helps visualise this. in have also been working on how the light installation shall be installed:making drawings from the things that will make it function. this will be scanned in and uploaded shortly... This images was first uploaded onto the Transmission Gallery website under my profile.take a look here Transmission gallery: memebers profile... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493   Another element of research finds its beginnings in the make-up of Leeds' new city museum that opened in 2008. Upon making friends with an assistant who worked there I managed to locate and attain a number of wooden panels that had some sort of use or pre-function: some sort of history that is unknown to me. The strange thing is that they have perfect circular holes cut in them, the same point on each one.   I have begun to construct some sort of language with these boards: but they need a place to temporarily re-establish themselves.... Masking tape seems to be playing a part again, as some of them hang in my studio, left for days a then a little more is teased out of them I've had them since April 2009: I wonder where they will end up. Off hangs a tape measure: not so sure what this is for yet...  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Working site-specifically – working with solitude – working with architecture   I am currently working on a small project that needs the capacity to re-locate or translate itself.   The interior qualities and histories of St. Mungus Cathedral, Glasgow seem to have taken upon a preoccupation with drawing concerns. The geometric patterns on the floor of the room at the far back left of the ground floor, are developing in to a research project – and I need another space to re-construct this.   A site is needed re-represent the geometry. With each visit to the Cathedral floor, I learn more of its asymmetric probability: I plan to scale the actual floor itself, through drawing, not by entire observation, but by paying certain enclosed attentions to the different patterns that make up the design. In gaining knowledge of these patterns, I reach the actuality of the floor-space and go back to the ‘design’, which then re-forms itself in another space that is ripe for experimentation.   The materials that are to be used will be specific to the new site: such will be the interventions that they work aesthetically as they are temporarily installed. The marketing of the happening will also play a part, translating yet again the actuality of the research.   The research and the activity of measuring and making the drawings, are both intertwined as learning processes: this process will then transcend and apply itself into the negotiation of an exhibition space, as a blank arena, in which to ‘work out’ and plan, construct and re-conceive.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 And MEANwhile: another church project continues, and is soon to reach fruition. Holy Trinity Church, Leeds is to hold three pieces (possibly fore pieces) of work later this month and running into November, in time for the seasonal change and also the adjustment in time-keeping. The time will shift and so will the appearance of the interior. here is a research drawing i have been working on: a drwaing that will also be displayed alonsgide that, which it is actually depicting call it pitching the final display (which i am actually looking forward to, the finality of things will hopefully be more fuild than the path of researching the site)    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Getting to think about how a drawing can both be an instruction to the research in to something made, presented - animated-projected-displayed-laid out: this conference between note book, photocopied page, photograph and BLOG, is paramount to the working of an artwork. The drawings can be and are sometimes indeed developed through turning an original instruction / plan over, tracing through from the other side and beginning to think of things differently. Complicated plans then become simple visual integrations, on the page, how they fit on the page, how they transfer from one mind to another - one stage to another and from one thing to the other. A progression of a piece comes from the re-negotiation of a church floor plan, how the installed work will eventuate in the time and place, in which it is installed - this is reflected in the paradigm of re-making a drawing, from a previous conversation between notes / doodles - this drawing, in anticipation of the project, then confronts another time and place. This is an image shown in its both sides. It's both instances. Its progression thus.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 To consider how something is sampled and transferred. How spaces are animated through interaction and interference. These images are taken in the bell tower of the church in which an exhibition shall be realised: the arena here is situated below the clock tower and above the rest of the tower as it climbs. To introduce equipment requires introduction of light and electricity to navigate the tight winding stairs, yet once you are there, you have things set up it is like a studio in which to experiment, cross-reference and "draw" with your ideas and your tools. This is where the television has been stored, along with its white tablecloth - collecting dust, but still functional when someone returns. In the non-space that that provides height enough to make a spire visible within the cityscape, is where these activities happen, where samples from the public altar are brought from below and toiled over. Eventually the re-samples will be brought back downstairs for the exhibition: in time for public display. The former space is the rehearsal place, the "stage" is the exhibition itself where objects and formulaic display cross-reference and act out their animating conversation.      ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493   Creating a fiction and transposing the form of an idea   Recent goings on in the church spire, bell tower communications, television rooms, clock-services/maintenance and the FINAL DELIVERY: I expose the words final delivery as the television, wrapped in its cloth gets transited from the top of the tower to the altar flats, and this transition is the very subject of the installation - how did something get from one place to another, how did an idea change, and what hold this idea.   These photographs are documentation of a recorded act, a staging process in preparation as well as in subject making for the final display. The documents will also further the work, setting it beyond its physical appearance: the documents will be catalogued and this will be how the work exists from then on. This blog helps with such a process - I now deposit these as finished products.       Now the question is how do I negotiate the exteriority of the building, do I reference this or does this change the idea yet again. Perhaps a drawing from observation would be more appropriate and interpretive than a snap-happy photograph.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 INSTALLATION SHOTS FROM DAYLIGHT SAVINGIN THE FORM OF FORMATTED CATALOGUE PAGES -CATALOGUE ONGOING @ tinyurl.com/DAYLIGHTSAVING »   Now it is odd to consider the end of this, the installation seems to unsubstantial next to all of the research that has gone in to it. A few people have mentioned how well executed the work was, and I guess this is to do with how long I had considered the actual hanging of the work - it site-specificity seems to rule the roost as it were, rendering something that is inherent of the space and appreciation of it. It is also credited much to the other people involved.   What happens now: There shall be a short talk next Wedesday, 4th November (6.45) in time with the Artwalk in Leeds. From then on the work will exist in its online catalogue form.   What I have started to do is format the images and installation shots, as well as other content and texts into the same page-layout. This will then form the basis and consistency of the online presence, in which the exhibition eternalises itself. This allows something to be edited, retreating from the idea of setting something in stone after its consolidation, keeping it edit-able and updatable as we see fit.   This will also forward the working partnerships between the three artists that have been involved in the project: allowing for more contribution and mutual conversation between concepts and ideas. I for one am watching this space, as well as having a lot of fun with Illustrator!!!!  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 I have been consorting with the idea of how labels for a work can also be works in themselves: and how such works get to forward and re-locate an idea past its presented state - a visual definition is aided by a textual pre-disposition. What I am interested in doing is turning this on its head and playing within the paradigm of text as a visual area to express fictions from actuality. The labels go back to the source of how a work is made - but does the source have to be reflected in the title, or is the title in this respect the end result rather than a beginning?   Four films have been made from a direct resource: The Henry Moore Institute (HMI) acted as a resource and the architecture it inhabits lends itself to its very function as a research institute as well as a publicly-accessible space. I took to finding and bringing visual communicated, by-way-of recording spaces, pockets of the building that are essential for its academic as well as every-day running. These was an investigative process and the end result may indeed be the labels that I here present with this particular post in this particular blog. The text in the labels goes beyond - to make congruence between the environments through text and explanation.   The labels are then taken further as they are re-interpreted as physical grounds on which new drawings and trajectories are made. Upon one of the labels, which acts as a form of telling how the rendered films and other labels returned to the original site (74, LS1 3AH - which refers only to the address as a building, not an actual named institution - there is a certain anonymity about this).  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Another element of research finds its beginnings in the make-up of Leeds' new city museum that opened in 2008. Upon making friends with an assistant who worked there I managed to locate and attain a number of wooden panels that had some sort of use or pre-function: some sort of history that is unknown to me. The strange thing is that they have perfect circular holes cut in them, the same point on each one.   I have begun to construct some sort of language with these boards: but they need a place to temporarily re-establish themselves.... Masking tape seems to be playing a part again, as some of them hang in my studio, left for days a then a little more is teased out of them I've had them since April 2009: I wonder where they will end up.   The above text was written some time ago, and since I have returned to Leeds and the site (from its exterior). I began to make something of photographing elements of the architecture with the hope of correlating what I framed with my camera, with the found material that is the boards. What struck me were the signifying holes in the middle and how such signification can be translated and used as a way of relating the two types of imagery...   This will hopefully develop in to some kind of object-based installation.    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493   BELL TOWER COMMUNICATION (RE:VISITED) DOUBLE SIDED TAPE WORD LENGTH / LINE RULE PAPER WEIGHT IN SIEZE OF PAPER MUSEUM PROJECT (AIR VENT) SUPERIMPOSITION SCANNER PLANT PIANO PIECE (OBJECTS COLLECTION & RECORDING) ST. MUNGUS CATHERDRAL (LEARNED PATTERN) some titles to be thinking about in a space. and then some more text... added at 12.23 This at some point has to make sense PAPERWIRGHTANDWEIGHTOFPAPER COMMUNICATIONBELLTOWERDISPLAYMETHOD WOODCARVEDAIRVENTANDMOVEMENTMUSEUM INPOSITIONSOUNDWITHSUPER-IMPOSITION THEVENTSTHEVENTS&THEAIRVENTVENTS BACHE PIANO CONCERTO WITH HARMONIC LAMP:PLANT[how then this relates to object recording and repetition of scanned movement, the exercise of documenting object / next to re-staged performance of John-sound and movement. How this then converts to something else and something-other, in terms and intonations of display / environment / presentation. How can the notion of intonation translate to something physical and off the page? How can objects translate from words and their arrangements? How does this work? >>>>>    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Some old sketchbooks re-visited: scanned images from ideas past & numbers noted down and calculationory dimensions made too. Dancing around like visual plethora and infested with spelling mistakes and missed decimal points. This all amounts to how I see the next stage of work: as a collective whole that needs and covers the process of sketching ideas and making notes for all number and worded reasons. So I will have a room that will be all to myself and there will not altogether be coherence or progression through the pieces that are displayed: there will be different perspectives on things. Beginnings middles ends and appendices that look more like the beginnings of further things. The environment will be organised but the works may not be. Making use of the floor, the walls and the ceilings. Installed projections, sound pieces, drawing and other things. Intermedia connections: how do things connect through media and how do things connect through how they are recorded, documented and archived? How does art-work work as artwork? When it is conceptualised or when it is archived or when it is on display or when it is documented or when it is philosophised or when it is deconstructed and put back together again or when it is observed? I would propose this as a collection of works that are foreseen as well as others that are complete or reaching completion. The exhibition will see the end and the beginnings to works that have working-titles as well as other nuances as to their completed selves. Some pieces will be re-established from previous exhibitions and others will be formulated newly in the given space.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 APPARANTLY TO DO WITH AIR VENTS AND CIRCULATORY FLOWSO THEN, WHICH DIRECTION DOES THE WINDOW FACE?BY USING THE NOTEBOOK AS A BLANK, CONCEPTUAL ARENA FOR DISSEMINATING AND CONFERENCING IDEAS - THE PRESENTED WORKS/OBJECTS/SCENARIOS ARE TRANSITORY IN THE GALLERY SPACE THAT IS EQUALLY AS BLANK. AS THE NOTEBOOK IS FIRST EMPTY IT IS THEN REVELATORY OF TIME SPENT WITH IT/WITHIN IT: THE GALLERY THEN, IS TRANSFORMATIVE OF OBJECTS USED AND SCENARIOS SET, CORRESPONDATIVE WITH THE PAGE TO WHICH THE IDEA FIRSTLY OWES ITS BEGINNINGS. The work I produce is manifested within written pages of a notebook, the set paradigm that withholds notions of language, space and inauguration / organisation of ideas. The practice lies on the periphery of what can be and seems to be a studio, where ideas are then transformed into objects and subjects. Then comes the gallery-arena of ideas to be presented: I propose to use the gallery as a public-studio where the page can be three-dimensional and thoroughly explored. TO WHICH DIRECTION DOES THE WINDOW FACE, AND WHERE DOES THE SUN LIE? The works in the exhibition will correspond also to the exteriority of the building, and the objects used will be organic with the natural setting of S1 Artspace, which is particularly industrious. This industriousness will be welcomed in furthermore transforming the ideas as they construct themselves within the gallery.  The objects will be of everyday, just as the ideas were conceived within everyday happenings: their arrangement will demonstrate certain dichotomies, developing further inspections upon how an artwork or object is recorded and proven.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Blog post for the continuation of the Museum projectAPPARENTLY SOMETHEING TO DO WITH CIRCULATORY FLOW ((-according to a friend who used to work with circulatory flow-)) So I already have pictures that have been formatted in to squares with blank-black dots in the middle - the next step is to approach the interior of course (I thought). "What is the opposite of the outside (the inside of course - ok)" but then in terms of the aesthetic choice and the form that inspired the work in the first place: "Another element of research finds its beginnings in the make-up of Leeds' new city museum that opened in 2008. Upon making friends with an assistant who worked there I managed to locate and attain a number of wooden panels that had some sort of use or pre-function: some sort of history that is unknown to me. The strange thing is that they have perfect circular holes cut in them, the same point on each one..." THE NEXT STEP IS THE OPPOSITE OF THE FIRST OR THE NEGATIVE OR THE NEXT STEP IS THE POSITIVE OF THE FIRST - WHETHER THIS IS TO BE SEEN AS MINUS OR PLUS IS DEPENDENT ON HOW YOU VIEW THE INTERIOR OR EXTERIOR OF THE BUILDING.... Story:It happened when walking through the university (re-visiting another idea "an exhibition in the time it takes to empty / clean / re-fill the university pool" - there is another story to this: my friend went skinny dipping and had sex in the pool - but I am not sure how long an exhibition can last during sexual intercourse) - anyway, I then walked down past the hospital and towards millennium square and the Leeds City Museum. I began to think of the architecture as an explore-able object: how on the exterior there are four definite corners and so on the interior there are four findable corners that can be sourced and photographed. So I set too it: but was told not to use flash photography, and to avoid the MUMMY exhibit for copyright / insurance reasons - the most interesting findings were avenues to un-explore-able spaces: fire escapes and scaffolding and a huge arena-space that was closed for a private function. BUT THERE IS ALWAYS CIRCULATORY FLOW I SUPPOSE.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Two images from both the exterior and the interior put together - I guess that this is some sort of exercise in looking how things can be constructed and displayed in the end of things. Or the beginning of things. Or the middle of things. The display will be a series of screen images or framed printed images that then correspond to a construction of the found (or given objects) that will have been altered according to the amount of other images that are made (altered in paint - either black of white. Circulatory flow will then relate to the exterior mapping and the interior exploration of the building as a whole. (these images have also been posted on my Central Station image bank page / profile - take a look here)... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 photo·pia (fō tō′pē ə) The relationships with a found photographic composition and then re-compiling this as an image / object: meaning: the 'left over exhibition advert'. Lock and key prevented me from accessing the actuality of this object - but I took the picture anyway: and I do indeed become increasingly aware of how it can be used as the beginning / end of an art piece and the re-construction of an environment. I will not give away its location - but it exists in the interim stage and most probably was cast aside by a technician, ready for the rubbish heap. So I have photographically rescued it from the rubbish heap and kept its documented-sculptural form encased in archival existence. Here comes the actual notion of its embellishment through digital edit. It is a digital edition of its former found functioning. It had a function but now does not have a function except in how I might see the forwarding of its found potential...   ANYWAY - half of that is rambling tosh - it is a nice image and does generate a good composition, enough for you to question how it has come to be and what it may have been before: this could well be obvious and self-explanatory to the exposed eye. But I like the concept of it being transformative through its re-ignition in photopia. After light has affected found-vision, perspective after probability and potential.  It also adds a certain element for enforcing reflection within the composition: making this reflection unequal delineates reasons for black, reasons for white and reasons for colourisation (for instance how important is colour as far as the object goes - is it there merely for the objects identification. And how much of this work is in its actual form, not its identity?)  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 THIS IS A WORKING TEXT (a text that may still need work) OR A TEXT THAT CAN NOW WORK FOR ITSELF... SUPERIMPOSITION   Making and doing in at time of making-do.   The film and accompanying photographs were taken during a time of re-exposition whilst, mostly, looking at someone else's formation of exhibition. The Henry Moore Institute became an architectural device, in which to explore ideas through degrees of its compartmentalisation.   The directed compartments were the goods-lift, the disabled-lift, the archive-hold, and the book-store. All are continuing directions / movements in how the building functions in supporting the research institute and its ongoing stature, through catalogue, publication, visitor intake and exhibition delivery.   SUPERIMPOSITION brings these elements together, animating them through movement image so that they may attain a further language. Perhaps a building's inner workings, especially when its status goes through many changes / transformations, do actually converse: since there is no understanding of space when we are not there to experience it, the next best thing is to make do and use movement to humanise this and try to define it.   This is where the accompanying photography comes in. The images were taken and collected during times of particular inactivity. They focus on the empty space and its quality in transforming languages and ideas through 'empty' architecture, which in actuality is full of endless possibility.   In addition there are other works from previous exhibiting points of SUPERIMPOSTION. Labelling systems were designed in re-defining the work, what it can be and therefore is at any given moment. Therein a question protrudes: what is the title, the work itself or the label that attempts to explain its positioning and preservation.   Finally, there are a new series of site-photographs that explore a re-visiting to the explored site. The gallery is always at its best during the turbulence and endurance of the interim period, when the technicians, the front of house and office staff co-exist: the building and its workings were always more exposed. This time, the security lighting replaces the fitted lighting, creating compositional forms within in-between space, outside of the gallery looking in.   This is a re-exposition of work alongside a periphery of found photographic compositions. A 'taking-away' of SUPERIMPOSITION towards a re-location matches the designs of the Henry Moore Institute's self-exposition within the virtual domain. Thus, through this work, an ex-employee ties together his new location in Glasgow to his old one on Leeds.   ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 These notes cover the talks (I am writing this in my hotel room) I am to do at Stockport College and Sheffield Hallam University (my hotel room is about twenty metres from the sea, overlooking the waves and cutting out the road in between me and the water that leads to the horizon - through the bay window that I look, the central pain holds the sun as it ponders through the clouds and marks the water around half a mile off shore). So I am writing these notes and can be anywhere, just like the words that I write could be describing anywhere through fiction or through real life description (the central pane is slightly lifted so that I can hear the waves better). The sun is now reaching me as I see myself back up in Northern England (my hotel room is in Penzance), travelling to Stockport and to Sheffield to deliver the same sort of 'chat'. I felt it unfair to keep either of them out of the other's picture, after all there's only the Snake Pass in between them - the virtual sphere eludes this and 'can' make them be together through creative form. This account brings them together somewhat I think.   So for the Sheffield talk I have been told around 30 students out of 60 will attend. I assume that this is down to peoples' commitments with time, other responsibilities that conflict with university hours - or perhaps some of the students deem certain things irrelevant to their practice (The sun is now reaching me - no longer polarised upon the distant undulating waters - but acting out its warm attendance to my hands and my keyboard).   The fiction or the fact in a virtual sense does away with geographies - it exists in a language above a language that pursues nature but also does quite well with out it. People can talk across nations and make communities within points of view not just because of geographical locale. The students from Sheffield and the students from Stockport can exist in the same place. There is a platform for this.   text/finished-started-travel-direction/  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 A piece of text about something that describes the landscape as well as the journey and hopefully gets to the final result. The work is about the process someone once said. And one mostly avoids, or tries to avoid, the word 'space': instead the use of 'synonyms' makes the text more diverse. But when does the text become a partitioned language set aside from dialogue? When is it instructional and when is it directional, informative or discursive: when is it then descriptive as well as informative and critical? These definitions of what a language, an artist's 'linguistic-visual', come in to their own through visual diversity. This happens within dissemination and project-work that defines by way of and passed the result, then the aftermath, the publication, the exhibition before a catalogue; or the advert for the show.    Here comes along the notion of forming sites. Virtual sites with viaducts in cyberspace, or hyperlinks: something readily available and accessible to the public eye and arching with diversity in artistic language. At this point visual preoccupations become something of the discourse that goes in to them, archives them and documents them. It is self-generative. There is now a field of vision that comes from observing experience. There is now a verge of disturbance and a river, a viaduct again and then more trees whilst I converge towards something descriptive as well as explanatory.   I am explaining something that is an archive of events, objects, experiences, writings and other nuances. Or works. These are collated somewhere between the definition of Stating and Showing an idea, the instructional drawing of how to solve a puzzle - the photocopy of the original that forwards to the negotiation of space; a puzzlement in real space that eludes then to virtual dissemination.   Somewhere in Liverpool there are some stickers I used to make wall drawings so high up in to ceiling that no one dares get so far to take them down. These are recorded digitally, but also they form a selection of a permanent collection within the architecture. This is how they work in permanence even though the affect was supposedly ephemeral: wall drawings are not meant to last. But this one does. It's homage to what went before and deserved of publication through text, image and descriptive quality. It stated and now remains to show. Its shows something of a statement of what was once shown.   So what goes now is the negotiating of a space between Exposition and Exhibition. Somewhere along the line and endurance of knowing your studio-site and your exhibition-site: the language of objects and the conversations of recorded and re-presented imagery are superimposed, delivered, installed and re-recorded, then cropped and then uploaded, then downloaded - written about. I'm writing about something now I am sure of that. But how does this build around the hanger of my practice ready to sprout some projectile machine that has a general direction? Lets talk about general directions. What sort of direction does an artist's work go in and where is its resultant destination, the countryside of peace and mind? The industry of beginning? Or the edge of reason that has no reason but to be remote without social recognition? The South, the Mid-land, the North and the so far beyond north, that 'North' becomes more like South again? The border between England and Scotland is like a reflection of itself. So somewhere on the journey to and fro something happens where I become a reflection of myself. The only way I can keep track of this is to use terms that elude geographical problematics, instead they confront the notion of a 'site': a site with language, with form, and with accessible/updatable space.   The track then becomes the journey of an online sketchbook, which works as a generator for writings and ideas and the placement of images, titles and then further ideas.   Text can be collaborative. See the next post, which links to the next pylon or pillion. There is relativity in what I now write as my thoughts are on this screen that is blanched with sunlight through the window that, for me, never moves. Yet on the outside - as towns and stops and electrical lines pass by - they move with a force, a direction, a plane of organised vision. If only artistic directions could be so time tabled just as much as they are accommodating.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 www.rich-taylor.co.uk/archive/museumproject I propose to install MUSEUM::project  as a 'instance' of clarity to punctuate an ongoing project researching elements of circulatory flow and cyclicality in the making/documenting of an artwork. The piece has been developed throughout 2009 and in to 2010 by way of re-visiting the museum (Leeds' Civic Theatre) as a research-site and traversable studio where documentation is cohesive with temporary experience. The notion of a 'site' is an architectural reference point cited visually, textually and sculpturally. The next step is to house the material as a collective piece in a space alternative to the original context. The concept of 'exhibition as documentation' extends the work, attempting to re-define recorded visitation and the sculptural quality of public institution. The workload currently exists in archival storage and awaits the next step. It already has plenty written about it; this textual content seems exhaustive, it now needs space to breath and other works with which to communicate. So far the idea exists in digital form as well as through notes and collected materials. The proposed arrangement will take on the form of installation in response to re-located architectures. This will necessitate the 'artist as documenter' to visit the new exhibition-site via the work's research-site, cross-referencing more material. MATERIAL Documents compiled:Documented photography - series of 11Source material for drawings and sculptural arrangement - Materials/documents to be compiled:Representational drawing paths - series of 11Found materials in sculptural/sight specific arrangement - 19Text element [between description and fictional wanderings]   The collection of documents will include a series of drawings that absorb the process of envisaging a sculptural form. This sculptural form will exist through engaging with the wall and/or floor space: making use of the found materials and their affected state, the formation will then elude direct-documentation; instead defining itself in reference to the photo-documentation produced during visitation.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 ::DESCRIPTION}{FICTION:: www.rich-taylor.co.uk/collection/museumproject The new museum compositions and development of sculptural form: or a thought of housing a sculptural form, through arrangement within studio setting and site specific time of day. This is a dialogue with arrangement and anticipation of installation through cropped environment and sunlight and 'photographic composition'.     There is here a relationship unfolding. There is here a dialogue embellished. There is here a context for further composition and interaction through three dimensional and re-visited forms. Circularity is then sharp against what seem to be shadow I guess.     THERE IS ALSO TEXTUAL INTERVENTION - THROUGH DESCRIPTION AND HOW DESCRIPTION IS FICTION ::DESCRIPTION}{FICTION:: This documentation is integrated in to the work - it is ongoing and will be a part of the work as a project, an architectural experience unravelled and cited in multiple localities, through travel and in final destination and then onwards in publication too.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 This stem of blogging can also be read here - ArtEvict - hidden space and revealing performance   I was contacted on here from someone in an office on Buchanan Street - or somewhere close to thereabouts. In fact the whereabouts of this office are as equally as hidden to me as my whereabouts are possibly hidden to them. I was also contacted not too long ago by an old friend (a friend who likes to hitch hike and remain in a non-place, or live in a room made entirely of MDF). This friend he asked me to recall a performance piece we did together back in 2008 at the Carriageworks in Leeds - we called it "Bring your own Pencil" - we tied people up with electrical tabe and did a live interactive life drawing session with elements of forcibility.   ArtEvict. My friend Kimbal Bumstead has asked me to re-stage a performance we did together in 2008 - this time in a wearhouse in East London. In fact these ArtEvict guys, they seem to take on the semblance of organising a rave - the location always follows the notion of perfomance, it remains hidden until a mail out is sent - and there is never a singular location - every month it changes. The rave may be something to do with 'cultural' tenancies in wherehouses and other spaces - such tenancies that at times meet disagreement: ArtEvict follows along the same lines - it moves from one space to the next relying on the ephemeral approach that performance art installs in an artists work. (More information of ArtEvict - www.artevict.com/abou-us.php) There has been multiple projects between Kimbal and myself, notably a curated site-specific exhibition in an old church and bell tower near Leeds Central Station. This was as the clocks changed for Daylight Saving (the exhibition took this name as a timely device for conceptual applicability). We facilitated each other as the works were installed and thus we were inbuilt in to one another's work as much as the space itself. My hidden space came from the relationship between public display (the exhibiting of a work) and the work-done behind the scenes. I was commuting from Glasgow every month or two in the 7 months prior to the opening - each time I re-visited the site and re-allocated my installation. The ideas grew as I began to realise how the (hidden)space could be used as a studio. With a set of keys and a torch I explored the bell tower and set up shop in the top most compartment just below the time keeping device. I was hidden from view but from there I could look down upon the world (or the city centre of Leeds anyhow). (More information on DAYLIGHTSAVING - rich-taylor.co.uk/archive/daylight-saving) This Blog will follow the cohesive approach to facilitation and performance in the build up to a collaborative work between  Kimbal Quist Bumstead and myself (Richard Taylor) for the May 2010 installment of ArtEvict.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 “This month ArtEvict has moved around the corner from Tate Modern. Be there and experience what is really happening on the contemporary front. Explore the 5 floors of an abandoned Victorian Storage Factory and stumble across various durational, live interventions throughout the evening.”  AND YOUR LIPS ARE TRUE TOO AS MY STUDIO BECOMES THE SEAT ON A TRAIN – WONDERFUL ON THE EAST COAST. Once again I look forward to a week of travelling around the country – this travelling lark seemed to lark upon me as soon as I larked up to Glasgow last July – Glasgow is a far cry from many-a-place (13 hours train journey from Penzance for instance – that was a killer). Anyway the week after the next takes me to Bangor, Bristol, Aberystwyth, London and Brighton all in one week to deliver talks and present at events – to discuss the very genre of online platforms that Artists talking is – and their validity to a learning structure for art students and as professional tools for others. Thursday the 29th of April lands me at Slade School of art to talk to students from the London colleges – it was on this evening that I was initially invited to perform with Kimbal at April’s ‘issue’ of ArtEvict: then the date changed to the 24th and the ever illusiveness elongated itself. I got a mail out today from Kimbal – advertising this month’s event – this time you need a password to get access – something of a backstage pass to a building that is ‘just around the corner from the Tate Modern’. No more instructions I think you have to land a well-placed email in their inbox to find out more. Kiki is another of the ArtEvict gang – I got a separate email from her asking for a short description as to the performance ‘I’ am planning. Well – er – I’m not the performer, I am the facilitator and therefore I prefer to remain hidden and let my actions do the performing. This is a difficult one. But then I remember how I used to dress myself in multiples of A0 paper back at university – something of making my own drawing space that no one could see until I had finished and cut myself out at the end. I might tell her there is to be a lot of cutting and a lot of pasting – Kimbal can go off and perform somewhere ‘wow the crouds’ and I’ll just make a drawing act. Another thought I have had is to use the audience as drawing tools – enforcing them to pair up – be tied to the back of one another: one blind folded with charcoal, paper and easel to hand – the other to see the subject (but not the drawing) and to enact the movement of drawing. The contraption will suffice in transferring one’s vision to another’s movement on the page. A conference in process. Kimbal will be the subject as I take photographs by way of remote.  Hidden space - travelling, thoughts and communication-ist... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 There’s something attainable across the airwaves. "We have a secret hidden group on Facebook where we exchange ideas but its nothing compared to a good chat over the phone." Most of the time Kimbal seems to be away performing in various countries – forever simplifying his acts so he can travel lightly with a recording device (I can usually tell when he’s not in the UK – the dialling tone is different – sounds like he’s engaged most of the time or perhaps somewhere unattainable). I got to thinking how Kimbal’s work fits in to this strange beast that is ArtEvict. The nature of the spaces that are revealed each month bends towards an ephemeral approach – an ad-hoc deliberation in what is made and performed. Today’s telephone conversation came to a conclusion: Kimbal takes away, tidies up his ideas – he packs himself up to hitch hike to another land where he straps himself to a stranger. Then I come along and make a piece of installation art where I want props and sounds and flashing lights – basically making a mess. At some point we have to reach equilibrium and perhaps this will happen in the performance itself. Certainly my drawings seem to be acting as modes of communication – they seem to strike ideas within the nomadic man’s mind. So I also got to thinking of how even in Kimbal's stationary habitation – a warehouse/studio/flat/bed-living working area in north Hackney – is also a place of ever-changing racing activity. I want to install myself in this and build my ideas next to his self-made MDF bedroom. To this idea I thought of a tent made of paper to match his medium density box. This image is that which is drawn by another the person on shift before me. It looks like a tent or a pyramid. A hidden space within a hidden space is perhaps a make shift studio constructed upon arrival in London through collaborative exercise and conversational/visual exchange. It can also be a drawing tool or a habitable or moveable studio. Hidden space - tent as transitory studio... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Hidden space - photographic performance/stage/abode   HIDDEN SPACE - MADE EVIRONMENT - DRAWING ARENA - STAGE SET - CONVERSATION EXCHANGE     ALLUDING TOO KIMBAL QUIST BUMSTEAD     ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 THE HOUSE AND OTHER CUISINES I was given a time and a placeI was told to arrive at the time of seven thirty. When I did turn up no one was there - I meandered for a while and past the restaurant a few times. I then followed some people or perhaps I was more aware that they might have felt they were being followed - I was just looking to pass some time by walking in a general direction. I returned around three or four times, re-tracing my tracks or avoiding paths already taken. I hid round a corner with the flashing lights of Ti cuisine in sight, poised, ready to walk at a reasonable pace and 'arrive' again fashionably, expectantly and enthusiastically late. They were still not there. I took the choice of entering the restaurant. I entered in to a dialogue with the waitress. She asked which name I was under for the reservation - I realised I knew none of these people's names I recall someone called Chris who worked for an organisation in Penzance, he was the one who bestowed upon me the 'invitation' and showed me the restaurant around the corner from the networking event where we had just met - he had made me coffee - and we exchanged cards/email addresses. [ -- Before returning to the restaurant for the first time I had taken a walk back to the hotel where I was staying to contemplate the invitation - I phoned my friend Jade to ask her opinion on whether my attending was a good idea or not. Whilst at the hotel I had two conversations with her, one outside next to the shore and one inside the hotel room. Jade was distracted by the wind channelling down the acoustics of the phone so conversation no.1 was cut short - I had put her on speaker phone so she could listen to the waves on the shore. Conversation no.2 took place in the bath where I made my own waves by copying with my body the landscape outside; it's inhabitants and the environment: "creativity here undulates and transposes across many-a-place disseminating a holistic hub athwart geographical/traversable locales: they make their own city - their own centrality." -- ] I stank of complementary travel soap and the waitress could smell it on me for sure. The restaurant remained empty - still I had no names for the people who were yet to arrive and they had no idea I was waiting for them. All the collected cards and email addresses were left stuffed in my bag. I was too busy having a bath and making conversation with Jade to remember them. The bath overran and I was late. But then I realised I can actually walk pretty fast and arrived ten minutes early. But the other 'people' were then half an hour late. So I was always set to be early anyway. One thing - the reason why they were late is the same reason why I thought I was to be late. Conversations. Conversations in bathtubs: conversations about the sea, next to the sea, and about the southern coast of Cornwall. About journeys made and people met. They then arrived and I had already chosen from the menu what I was to be eating and the waitress had memorised this, she was determined to keep my business.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Knowledge – Acquisition – Escapism I will work backwards - escape to acquire knowledge   Escapism – this is perhaps a visual thing and sometimes I find reading to be so terribly visual that I find it distracting and have to draw or just sit and think instead. I am terrible at finishing books and rarely read just one at a time from cover to cover – I prefer to dip my toes in to test the water: if the text is more than tepid and excitingly hot (which it often is) then I have to take my toes back out again and leave the heat to settle. I seem to be able to escape in a lot of ways and not just through reading alone – writing is just as useful a mode of escapism. Its like taking a walk in some respects – in the rain – the typing is like the tapping of rain drops atop my huge white, black, red and green golfing umbrella. Glasgow offers a lot of wind in the rain – I get to take off from time to time – this is fortuitous if I am bored of the pavement and prefer the direction of the sky: an anti-gravitational pull towards potential energy in thought, writing, thinking, reading, observing, documenting. Next time you open you’re umbrella think of me.   Acquisition – this depends upon funds and time and resources. Acquiring ideas comes from watching the world and the passing by of people: their interaction, their concentration, and pre-occupations. Acquisition is therefore the impact of my observing others – it's a regular but fast exchange that takes a few seconds that I can then stretch over time into a paragraph, a page or a few bits of paper with pen and pencil. With acquisition comes dialogue too. An internal or tangible dialogue that matches what you understand with the conceptual process of ideation – language is therefore an offering of acquisitioned process in this respect. Whether this is non-verbal, bodily, mentally or indeed translated through reading. Reading is perhaps the most historical of acquisitions. There is food for thought in this as text is often sustainable if stored properly – less oxygen and less outsider affect. Next time you read something read it as quickly as possible and then put it away again – do not expose it for too long.   Knowledge – the latest piece of knowledge came around about the same time I learnt that Western edges of most cities are better off than Eastern edges because of the direction of wind. Is knowledge affected by smoke? If so then people who lived in the east end of Glasgow or London during industrial revolution did not have as much of an education thanks to geographical and natural circumstances: the prevailing winds of the UK would have seen to that murky dusty fact. So the other fact came from a fire training exercise – health and safety and common sense. How much does common sense match with knowledge and does it restrict the mind’s capacity for more knowledge? Is the  circulation of knowledge convectional like the movement of smoke within a room – and does it influx into empty spaces according vacuum or pressure, once it has maximised one space and is ready to fill another? Is it safe therefore to gain knowledge in a lift? Next time you want to escape (fire hazard or no fire hazard) and you’re acquiring knowledge – try thinking about the process physically as you’re walking or panting from one room to the next. text by me - Richard Taylor In exchange with Sophie Frost - writer and thinker and potential art doer. http://plightofthebritishartspostgrad.blogspot.com...  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 "... it was a bank holiday so we decided to escape the city and soft-top convertible our way towards a new studio. As summer was beginning to find its place upon the banks of the loch we took a minor road and parked upon a verge. There we took a walk, we walked, we found fifty pounds and bought ourselves an expensive lunch and a shandy or two. Ten minutes down we entered in to character - there, aside a pond and upon the rocks we came across something other than ourselves..." (Passage from 'escapades', 1985) Homage 'too' characterisation too (self-versus-another) - see video With self-characterisation there is an element of performance through histories, balances, extraordinary linkages and staring with one side of you in to the other. This eludes to the creation of researched drawings, tight, singular graphite creations that come from a variety of interrogation and experiments... these come at the end so do NOT expect them now. They come at the end like the illustration of a dialogue. A necessary process is to play one thing forward and then to create a duplicate of this to, at the same time, play in reverse. Therein you will spot connections, discrepancies and ways forward. This is also explorative of measurement, how does one thing measure itself against another... This gives way to open space: what is open can be measured in more modes than that of simple scale/size, there are certain things immeasurable so you just have to make documentation in its stead and hope to gain something from there. To gain something from observation through 'documentation': the docuperformer. Documenting the documenter. There is something here - something explored through having two equal measured spaces next to each other. What do you then make homage too but your own histories and accounts of character that amount to you occupying this space...? What then is the definition of 'versus'? One team versus another, one person versus another: one artist versus the character that made him or the characters that this artist then makes. Where are these characters made and what is needed for them to exist and should they have any essence of cross-division. What does it mean to bring the outside in to the measurable inside... Racoon likes Chinese lanternsThis is one such character How should it then be described? And what should then be used to document it? And what exactly is 'it'? Perhaps a story would then suffice... a link please.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 The new studio and car in between The car was as yellow as several hundred spines of national geographics stacked together high upon a shelf; it was ready to take us to the places its pages would depict. We had to find the road first though it was a bank holiday so we decided to escape the city and soft-top convertible our way towards a new studio. As summer was beginning to find its place upon the banks of the loch we took a minor road and parked upon a verge, next to a ruin, a pylon with mountainous lands in the distance. There we took a walk. Ten minutes down we entered in to character - there, aside a pond and upon the rocks we came across something other than ourselves. Something of a reflection or two: one of each for us to find. Stream rock ready water dam then leach sunscreen tadpole. Tree, root rock again then bones with antlers for us to fish out of the pond. One of us wanted to build a boat like the one in the river next to the mountains, shaped like a rice bowl, simplified for finding small fry. We would use masking tape for this, we would explore documenting what we make and the appearance of these characters that habituate and ruin the micro-eco-system of this place: with straight lines in the midst of nature’s curves. And then ducks followed by their children dressed in spotted feathers float effortlessly across to the man made destruction. It was all her fault, the found-character and her eyes and ears and meddling feet that looked like hands and her straight Patti Smith hair We set up the equipment with tripods and lenses and remotes and props to prop our ideas up with. We then gave the landscape over to these characters. And they were away amongst the odd dip in to conversation like the fingering of cool water to take stock amongst the hot sun of work. Photograph next to film, object next to movement and the drowning of lanterns bought and brought from Chinese porn shops behind Leicester Square. We had exhausted our lens shots and it was getting hot. The found limbs and extenders, she had finished her stream as a straight hairline extension. We have pictures for that. She misses the month ago birthday when shit hit the fan but here she seemed at peace. We decided to pack up our shit and leave this place so that’s what he did. Stepping over pond, fish, antlers, bones, rock and root. Reversing over tree and passed the dam and across the stream we documented our departure to an envelope on the floor: we had fifty pounds to spend on refreshments atop the hill and next to a gray man guitar player. So that is what we did. He then wanted walls after lunch so they went in search of them. GO FORTH along the road against the traffic to another grassy verge. The ruin was about us and the dell was beyond to a fork in the river. We found something altogether different there or rather he found us outside his home in a field. The grass took the oncoming rain along with the wind and all colour dissipated to duotone. We have photographs for that too. You can have a look.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 She was used to confined spaces but when in open air could not help but walk in to walls and trip over herself and her capabilities. She spent a lot of time clotted in bruised corners making work in the middle of sleeping and humming and spying. "Consider the following case: She has been taught a use of the words "lighter" and "darker" (a practical use she, in the end, uses to decipher which stones belonged where...). She's been shown objects before of various colours and sizes and has been taught that one calls this a darker colour than that, trained to bring an object on being ordered "Bring something darker than this", and to describe the colour of an object by saying that it is darker or lighter than a certain sample, etc., etc. Now she is given the order to put down a series of objects, arranging them in the order of their darkness and size. She does this by laying out rows of books, writing down a series of names of animals, and by writing down five vowels in the order u, o, a, e, i. We ask her why she put down that latter series, she says, "Well, o is lighter than u, and e lighter than o". - We shall be astonished at this attitude, and at the same time admit that there is something in what she says. Perhaps we shall say: "But look, surely e isn't lighter than o in the way this book is lighter than the page we happen to be upon". But she may shrug her shoulders and say, "I don't know, but e is lighter than o, isn't it?"" "...in the path's of our of our garden one finds beautifully coloured smooth shaped pebbles, varying in size from two to eight centimetres. She cannot resist picking up these unusual stones, and little by little builds up quite a collection of them, which lies on the window-cill of my workroom. Unconsciously I begin to sort these out by size, obeying a lifelong fascination with the sizes of things, equivalent to the interest painters have in the weight of colour in its darkness and shades of light. By rejecting those pebbles whose difference in size was too small to be perceptible, she reduced my collection to a series of thirty-six whose size-difference amounted to 4% of the size of the stones (in the stream). It at once became apparent, however, that if the pebbles were spread out at random, they could be seen to belong to clearly different groups. One could start by picking out the largest ones, until a point came when none were left that belonged to that size. A smaller group, again of a same type of size, then revealed itself. In this way the pebbles sorted themselves out in to five groups, each of six or seven stones which one assessed to be the same sort of size." GO FORTH...... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Unfinished acts, live shaving and completed avocado stones to polish and keep as our own OR using a tool to make a fool I asked for a 'long stand'   Using a tool. Function: to mark out and measure to stop flow and keep straight. I would then to mask off his face, write off his vision to focus his view. Focus to draw. Focus to write a sentence or two. Discover other ways to behave and to keep straight, to keep straight; to mark out and to measure. I would then seek my own form of balance: re-setting the foreground or performing and re-writing the stage. Re-set, edit, copy, paste (paste, copy, edit re-set - start again). Re-set edit copy paste. Perform acts that should precede performance - but 'acts' in their own write non-the-less written. Act: hanging up lanterns for soft light to play its resolute twirl of affection. Reason: the home is the object the studio and these objects do transfer and travel. Act: revealing projections (a projection or two) of shared studio antics. Reason: to reveal process and to show character-intrigue. Projected on to board from laptops (one mine and one his) two different versions in the same resolution, in the same mode of focus, with the same time lapse and loop functions. Laptops seemed to be our lifelines and this is how we began, next to the plant and the tree and the chair the cushion the tea. And these were our portraits self-instructed through type, text exercises in description. Result: self-instructed portraits bringing studio endeavours - findings-out - in to the live act: in text in time in film in words. We would share the shoulders first and then the heads as we stood opposite each other as equals - each of our characters resistant yet to be revealed through the other. Act: turn on the stage light to make the mould of dramatic effect - to focus again with light upon something soon to be a live act. Spot the chair, the line, and the 'tool' the stool prop for the fool: the drawn line 'drawn' out for full-spot centricity. Reason: to make shadows of meeting points (the barbers shop next door to Tesco near South Tottenham station, across the road from avocado superstore). We had it then, a masking of photographic-us - a performing power.   It is now that as I sit down in full light from three sources, after three acts and three reasons for doing so - the bringing of lantern light from home, the shared studio light and duality of projectors, and the stage light 'the reasoning of live act'. It is now that as I sit the masked-collaborator steps out from behind the curtain and follows masking tape along the floor towards me. Fellow creator and opposite, frame-setter, picture maker and 'record' button red presser. He crawls his way towards me down the steps, taking a sharp right and down to all fours, from the background and in to the set. "...I sit unfinished... still. He reaches me and takes away my sight with a blind-fold hidden in the left breast pocket of his black shirt. I can no longer see the audience or their reaction, how are you meant to perform without feeding off their disinterest or avid-eyes? ...his sleeves rolled up he then pulls a pair of battery-powered clippers from his right breast pocket, takes them to my head shaped as an avocado. He shaves. Its like being sat back in Surrey Street in Sheffield, not being able to see my own reflection and too young to decide the direction of the blade. He makes a fucking hash of it. But then again we're all for a bit of flesh left over when peeling an avocado - its what we do with the stone afterwards. That's interesting. That's when we're more ...complete."... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 At restaurant dissonance   I waited for half an hour after passing the friend I was supposed to meet on time in the street (we didn't see each other the first time). She had with her another extended friend in the burgeoning summer hazy heat. I had sweaty feet. We finally did meet half an hour later. We then walked to their Thai restaurant; we had not booked a table. They gave us a table for four for the three of us to sit at. But they gave us a time scale there to decipher order wait drink eat pay and leave. We had around an hour - so we were quick to it. We also had an hour to fit in all of the chat we had in us and to talk of things happening and things to happen... but how do you do this whilst munching away on over priced precious parcels of food depository? I ordered a soup with things swimming in it. We were especially vermicelli and delicious and I couldn't use shops sticks for shit, so had to use the tips of my tired fingers to pluck noodles out of the broth. These noodles were then transferred to my mouth - these movements, these eating habits reflected my mind field of thoughts: thoughts that were digested in to words helped out by the accentuating veins managing the movement of my twiddling thumbs. The other two, they were used to their chops-tick action and had mastered the talking and eating effortlessly at the same time sort of thing.   I sat observant of this and ready to learn.   Chop/then/stick/then/MOUTH/and hand and 'cover' [...]whilst chewing whilst speaking - a dichotomy of acts well placed to put an idea here and there across the table using the side plate and ceramic spoon for transport. This all happened at once with wonderful red lanterns glistening in eyeball soups alongside dishes and salads and cucumber shavings. Next came the carrots and the bean sprouts and chillies - all tangled together to save from cacophony, wrapped in a suitcase for safe depositing in destination mouth.   It then became an interview whilst I copied their melodious napkin movements, an interview in table etiquette with good healthy side plated conversational interludes. An orchestra of vegetables, the odd bit of meat... who eats what and why and when and how - and how - how do words work alongside one other rather public function of the mouth?     "Chop then stick then mouth and hand and 'cover'..." That's how.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Here there's something, a foot When something is afoot it is also a foot that itches and keeps you awake at night. The window of my bedroom faces east so I get the sun in the morning before touching upon the cold light of the Kitchen where I watch the sunset every evening before bed. There I make myself a coffee with my extra super duper coffee machine and rush back in to my room to type. Then I remember my itchy foot something is afoot. For the first time in a long time I was awoken by the first light of dawn through my curtains too thin, I could see through half awake eyes the silhouette of my camera perched high upon the extended legs of my tripod. The evening before after watching the last of the sun (I am sure we get longer evenings up here, more so than down there where the seasons very much mould in to one) I did indeed retreat to my room to find myself in "a room of one's own" - I was then reminded of conversations I had in and around feminism and what it means today, histories and how they make structures of contemporary meaning. Someone, another queer like me, mentioned 'equality' and how feminism should be called something other than the word that relates to women alone... History museums and shapes and buildings and architectures of time and place: something is here afoot and takes a couple of feet and steps to get there and realise what the fuck is happening. Then you find a stuffed animal alluding to the jungle before civilisation, a grim object display next to an equally grim steward stood to the side of a cabinet of turning twisting designer plates in the gift shop next to the café . Next to where you can see and browse and buy posters: posters of things and events and artists and works that mean nothing but to have them on your wall where they mean nothing. This is something here there everywhere afoot. I attained these two A1 pieces a few years ago in a building not so far from the museum that I now speak of. They relate to art, architecture, sculptural form, blocks of wood, doors corners beams and other related 'building' features. The work is particularly site specific to Halifax. The beam of light is like the morning sun. The focus is my eye's not being able to sleep as their lids are too much to do with the soles of my feet - here there's much ado about an itch or two.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493   Theorems, disappearances-(appearances) and ways of winning The start of Euclidean geometries for me is like taking something away, and then replacing it with something else - developing an axiom for change. You know, making use of something instead of just letting it sit, thinking of how it can be something other than itself. By any sort of means possible - a way of remaining ignorant of your disuse in the world I suppose. I recall this. My dad received a parcel in the post when I was around eight years old, it was a Saturday - my mother was working, he was washing the car, my brother burying his new plastic toy in the green house. I was looking in the parcel hidden behind the kitchen blind. The parcel contained six wooden blocks that would make a puzzle if you knew how. I decided no one would ever know how so stole one of the pieces and burnt it. By this point my dad had left the hosepipe unattended on the front lawn and was readying himself to wax the car. I felt I had to do something to replace the act of taking away, I wanted to connect the happening some how, make something a little more complete so sneaked out the house to the top of the drive way, the car at the bottom my dad finding leather cloths in the garage. I took my chance in his position of ignorance ran to the end of the hose, turned the tap on, then ran to the other end. My dad was still busying himself over the cloths. The next moment I had inserted the end of the hosepipe in to the exhaust of the car to flood the engine with water. My task was complete. But my dad and his fury were one step ahead. The tap was turned off where he stood... from then on it was a race. "They puzzled me - that's what I liked about them. They were my task towards absolution. They were a means for a race against someone who had gone before and my step ahead. I was leant against this fire exit, preventing any means of escape. It was then I saw them, at first I saw them as fuel, but quickly refrained and took them for other uses instead." Right now there's a simple spire standing across from the window. It gets looked at from time to time through the rain and the shine. And on occasion gets spied at, by me, through a slight gap in the curtain during the day. It remains stationary in its architectural grandeur - but I am sure if it knew it was being so observed, it would move. Before such concrete roving however I would like to climb it, scale it get to the bottom of its measure and decipher an accurate trajectory, from which to then reveal myself when ready. Of course - I would dress up as someone else for this. When ready I would open the curtain at the right moment, at night, with the light on. It would see me and then disappear for good. From then on my purpose would be obsolete but to replace the spire with something of less interest - a flat or two alluding to the age of the plastic number - in the form of a Japanese bathhouse. There's an axoim for this - the best things happen when you've reached a state of in-between-function - a status of chance, a chance for completion and definition. I came across four shelves upon a time when I was looking for 'something else' in form of fulfilment - they were discarded in a piss smelling side alley ridden with broken glass and moans from the gallery on the other side of the fire exit...... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 We found ourselves on the top of a hill, in a town surrounded by ancient walls. There, after all elements of self-clarification we lost sight of everything. "If you get as far as Rome you can go a little further in to the mountains." Head inland and northeast towards L'Aquila and Parco Nazionale del Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga. The road holds its magnificence in height, viaducts upon viaducts and tunnel after tunnel forever heading for peaks dressed in white. When you get so far you'll come across rows upon rows of tents on the outskirts of a departed city full of cranes - cranes that would look at home in any other landscape but they were out of place in this one. It's a sore history of dust and disaster, centuries of harmony with the land only to be crushed by landfall and the quaking earth beneath. More noticeable then is the engineering feat that is the road you drive on - slowly circulating the city of crushed rubble beneath, surrounded by green hills high in the Italian sun.   Roseto degli Abruzzi is a land where olive groves lay upon steepened hills hiding pizzerias, and gems of disguised gardens to sit and view the coastline below. Its a place for vineyards and secret courtyards, with blossoming sweet trees, a place where the dust of the road gets caught in the western sun as it sets hazy and red through evergreen trees passed towns and cities towering above. To the east is the dawn, and the Adriatic that covers outstretched horizons with deep green waters and blockades of rock and stone. In the day we headed for mountain top towns, markets, fresh pastries, bell-towers and the clarification of coffee. We fought against dead animals festering in the sun, broken water fountains and closed wooden archways armed with cats basking their totality.   But on one particular day we managed to find the rain and then clarity. After following many a road west, higher and higher still we reached a valley of tall grass. We settled there for a while against the verge; I had time to take in the sincerity of the air that was in dept to the downpour yet to come. As the clouds loomed, the grass before me grew darker and darker still. We looked north towards the towering hills climbing higher to frame the town in front of us; a wall of stone set in the landscape centuries before. The heavens then opened and we were wet within the seconds it took to take shelter. There were two dogs roaming, finding water and shelter in the corner of the courtyard to the left. To the right four nuns disappeared up a winding stair of stone, hands holding their hats and an umbrella shared between the two that smiled back at us. By the time we had all set foot on their side of the archway, they'd gone with a flash of black shoes upon their heels, around the corner, out of sight. I had foot wear ill fit for the climb and insufficient for the rainfall - by this point my feet were sodden. We decided to follow the dogs as their city was otherwise deserted. Finding a path to follow we entered in to the stone plateau heading for the rooftops above and eventually - the castle. But we had walls to attend to, stairs to climb and paths to find. The rain got worse with more height, and upon reaching the clouds our vision betrayed us...  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 “After making this up in your mind, you get there and see that perspective has tricked you. Your body has no affect. Your bones would snap if there were to be but one slip, all you have are your toes for grip. With bare feet underneath you and crashing waters beyond there’s nothing but the idea of building your way back out again...”     If you take your time when passing the cooling towers of south Yorkshire you can also spot the storage yard that’s filled with bright red scaffolding poles capable of cranes. There, you can build a city arbitrary to reason as to previous architectural histories. With different extensions of different sizes you can amount to one third of the first history and then another third of that again – three fold. You can see it in terms of plinths, I suppose, and what you might use these for, to build ideas and built on top of them, again, concepts for construction: one is larger and flatter than the other, the other being more cuboidial in appearance, the third and final version is of the same area but decidedly more stretched like a post or pole. From here you can build absolutely anything imaginable to support your ideas.   If it gets too much you can find a bit of nature, but you’ll have to follow the right sort of path through over and out of industrial magnificence. Here’s how you do it.   Instruction one: Get yourself to the outskirts of the city, inner-city parks will not do, you need green belt, the corrugated iron of tramp houses, ivy and lost soles in farm land, paddocks with angry horses and sheep with dangling backsides. You need to smell the shit of manure and reclaim your ability to climb trees to acquire better vantage points. From here you can call upon a dog to sniff out the stream. Instruction two: Follow the stream upwards as you need more height. Find or make yourself a hill to scale. Then on top of this spread some woodland to poke your head out of. Come across a river, a dale, and a meadow: a structure of lime stone, a valley, a crag a rock-upon-rock to muster and define and conquer. Instruction three: now you need mountains – not just hills. You need more height than the low rolling overturns of Derbyshire, something steeper than the North York Moors: more variety or difference in repeated roads, minor roads bee roads moth roads dusty roads the great western road through Argyll and Bute. Boats across waters to secluded bird sanctuaries and havens of lost stone. Then you see snow and have thoughts that are cold to the bone and altogether different from anything you have ever needed or seen or had before. Instruction four: “Settle for a rope swing” and swing back through the text. By retreating in instructions – from four to one – you’ll regress back into my childhood. Back to the swings of Chatsworth River: a deer or two staring you in the face, as you’re too chicken shit to take the plunge.   Now you’re older you should not be so chicken shit. But you’re heavier, longer, hairier and more cumbersome – more aware of the affect your body has and the strength you go without. Rope swings don’t really work. They just make your feet wet in the stream below. You laugh it off though and decide that the waterfall above is now manageable – the rain means nothing now and your oversized umbrella has this great balancing affect as you climb with bare feet. You get to the top steaming with sweat, drenched in bracken-flavoured dew, and ready to take the plunge...    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 BELGIUM AVENUE AND ATOMIUM "At this age one can tell that neon signs have another side to them: another meaning in three-dimensionality. More than signs, objects in fact, that die in time. So, you now have the choice of two images..." One image has the blurred movement of a child driving a toy car around a track in Brussels. The other image is entirely different but also the same. But not exactly the same: there's enough difference there to tell the two apart - but this is where your eyes are tricked, and in trickles the illusion alluding to one image alone, with foreground and with background in Technicolor-terrific vision. To the right of my picture now is a green bridge covered in cars and scaffolding. Below there's a river dark and fast flowing, hiding the activities of earthy stick and stone. Along walks a man dressed in high top hat and trainers; there's a fresh scar across his face running red and white and pink and blue down from his right ear through his top lip and ending against his chin. Between him and me is a pane of glass - he looks at me in frustration and moves his mouth whilst giving me a sign with his fingers. Then there's bright candyfloss before the sugar revolution. Hats made of edible cacophony spun and shone and done and gone across stage plateau and influx of helicopter visitor: more Technicolor fuller this time with whites and pinks and blues. Men are dressed high in tops, off white against the red adorned seats and suits: a procession or fashion parade. So what is this object of sculpture and sound and cart winding up to the top? You have a choice of just two colours, either canary yellow or blood-orange: you're then given a number "62" or 94 to take you along the river hovering your sites above the water along cables and wires. The underbelly is clarification and realisation, a definition of believability. Then there's this climbing structure resonant of cultural adoration - something that's new in its design, shiny in its affect - forward looking - and altogether celebratory of 1950's health and wealth. Now there's scaffold upon scaffold, to understand urban renewal you have to understand the language of scaffold - it's a new form of public sculpture.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Upon your departure yellowing the search   For one moment in time, as the colour of each awning matches a different part of another knight's crest, two definitions coincide.   "Our awning never did fit properly. It was toilsome in construction and collected water to the point of me being assigned with a stick, after every heavy downfall, to gently lift the puddle from underneath and rid the canvas roof from the water's weight." If you're camping you are generally in a field as green as the next that contains cows, and as yellow as the underbelly of a dragon that buries itself deep under the canvas where you sit. In these fields and amongst these colours, caravans find a double meaning. First off they're a tin place to sleep and develop a love for the sound of precipitation: a place to collect water in your stationary state, to drink from and wash in. When still they're a home delivery of pots and pans with jacks in land. Each has its own size in relation to familial growth. With solar panels attached to oversized extensions: awnings that look more and more like conservatories with each spring, summer and early autumn. 'CARAVAN' takes on another form in movement: a caravan of people in displacement, from one place to the next, through histories past in to futures yet to arrive. So whilst you're sat enjoying that rain in that field so green you hear the sound of ungulata hoof upon hoof - and each dog strapped to the front of each tow bar barks as another horse passes by. Then to you, your dog barks too and another caravan comes your way. I walked out of the awning into the afternoon sun. The grass was as green as it had ever been drinking from the precipitous rain that rolls every morning off the hills to the west of Rosely: it was then that two points in time travelled in to one. A precession of brightly coloured knights on horses weaved their way through our encampment - dirt and track upon their boots and blood upon their brows. They were to climb again to the east, away from the hills and the rain - backs to the sun and facing the shadows before them.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 "He lent me his jacket and we took to the outside air to collect light that would otherwise be lost if not for the refracting glass of snow. Snow is soon then ice and all angles of thought are different from before. He sings and slips ahead in to the night. I have his jacket still - I wear it with such memories as below..." A friend worthwhile for festivities: I was never allowed in his kitchen though for some reason - it was just this one room - one room that soon became two. The first time I visited his flat was on a darkened icy December evening ridden with more snowfall - his belongings littered the close; you followed them up the stairs to his front door that was usually ajar with paraphernalia. When inside you made your way through curtains draped across collected junk - books piled in corners and framed photographs and drawings from artist friends decadent upon the walls. There was no central heating; only warmth from a small electric heater burning the smell of his floor and drapery, from elegant damp, into the dry comforting crisp of sheep's rug ash wood and oak recline. There was one curtain in the room that covered just one of two magnificent single glazed windows - the other was simply left bare. After watching the snow fall outside your eyes would follow shelf upon shelf of sheet music making their way to a grand piano crushed in the corner behind the door, through which you walked in. Upon greeting you he disappeared into the kitchen. I took this absence for my collected observation. A low light dangles from the high ceiling above; reaching the coffee table in the middle of the room, save for a few hitches on the metric scale. The table is cluttered with half made Christmas decorations, glass spherical paperweights, broken ceramic pots and teacups accompanied by an ashtray containing change from the day's cigarettes. I was presented with wine complete with a mug decorated with lights and birds and trees. He played the piano as I gazed around the ornaments that danced with every note he delicately placed upon each string. Preceding the second visit, we met in a second hand bookshop that sold sheet music. A dusty old man who spend most of our visit on the phone to his younger lover - I was listening in - sold us a collection of Bach (1685 - 1750), some Czech composer, a neat bit of Debussy (1862 - 1918), and an almanac on Peruvian interior design.  We arrived back to his flat. Heater on, coffee table set he shuffled again to the piano. Heater pulled closer to my feet, coffee table redressed, I sat on the sofa again, busying myself fixing his broken ceramic objects. One ceramic container had the function of keeping the smaller - yet anything but negligible - pieces that would in the end complete each puzzle. The objects re-formed themselves by way of my fingers as his hands recited the sheet music in front of him. Several compositions later a teapot, a fish ornament, and a few cups and sauces lay in front of me.  I stood up, stretched, turned the low orange light on at the wire and swung it as a pendulum, then crossed to the other side of the coffee table to catch it. There I let the light go again, across the paperweights, dancing its way through each reflection, up in to the air to where I sat before. It was then I noticed a hint of another reflection. On the wall directly behind and above the sofa the light fashioned upon an inch of a mirror behind another large piece of material. Piano sounding in my ears, notes seemingly louder with each step, I approached. I pulled at the cloth that then fell to the floor. And before me was a great reflective surface unleashed, revealing the room of activity, twice the volume it was before: in the bottom corner towards the frame - to me his back remained - the pianist had stopped.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Len had my laughter Flash film lens camera axiom action location difference description words and conversation. An autobiographical fiction...  I remember then match sticks making a composition of a house and a lane and a tree in the background and then Len laughs at the revelation of his creation. In the Crux of Sheffield, there's a hill so steep that your bike would have to be pushed, not ridden, on the return home. Len held the can of my laughter. Len's brother was Jack. I wear Jack's jumper and laugh. And talk in to the camera with the affect of conversation. What happened? Sat in this place we face one another with teacups and sauces and crumpets in the middle, and a shiny Mongolian teapot reflecting our convex torsos noses knees and shoulders - knees and toes. We begin to write down every detail of the character in front of us, drawing out physicality on the surface using words that describe our knowledge of one another. At first a tip of the head the brow the cheekbone and mouth and ears connecting the odd smile. Then eyes come with a flash of further description. Then comes laughter how do you describe this in words without alluding to your history? The crux of this is the edited character that comes after, the muffled voice and the sound of exultation in between. There's a place called Crux too. This is important in terms of location, so take note... "After the written description I take it upon myself to speak directly in to the camera. Little do I know that this camera focuses on my mouth alone: whilst brandishing my characterisation in to the lens, Len's laughter escapes. A willowing dip in sensibility, a slight whine and then a realisation that gobbles up the sound and swallows only to let it go again - to exasperate - again: such an incantation this is! I let it go again, knowing it's exacting affect, its altitude in decibels - the intensity of two sources - a logarithm of gut throat and rhyme." A climbing hill ends with the next horizon revealing itself - it cackles at you and makes you more aware. So, when speaking in to the camera I will be aware of myself. I will laugh. But then what is the difference between giving you this laughter and describing it? What is fiction thereof and what is empirical evidence of something that has sound? To edit text you first have to edit film. So - edit the film, re-play the film and decipher the words spoken. Then use these words as a final draft. Then comes an installation. First a photograph that's relevantThen the full description written by the otherThen the film that is mixed between an edit and the full versionThen the edited text at the other endPerhaps unrelated sound... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 THE CUMBRIA ENERGY CENTRE "We're now exposed to the maintenance tracks. Such observations would be impossible if there were but a break in the clouds in the sky for the sun: now more houses, more settlements and more trees and common land in between are set behind us. And there's a constant black line that floats beside me on the other side of re-enforced glass - it's not that comforting though it keeps disappearing above the window frame." There's an age where both Ine and Pie go well together and a new form of energy is created. Right now I am around ten minutes from the border between Scotland and England, heading south east of Dumfries towards the next stop, which is Carlisle. My final destination, after meandering through the hills of Ayrshire down in to the valleys of the Lake District and through to the northern hills of Lancashire, is eventually Manchester. There was an age when this journey would have been altogether more troublesome and harder to navigate. As the window set to my right dost frame each scene as I occasionally look out, the landscape escaping before my eyes, there's a hill another hill a town a townhouse a church a paddock a river lake tree forest fence and field. All rolled in to one and relative to us as a travelling hanger of internal sound. We are not reserved - just quiet Before all these 'objects' of the landscape, the very fabric of a traveller's horizon would have been North South East and West by way of tree, hill, lake and track - all forayed before each step forward. And none of these tunnels or bridges would ever have existed. Right now I think of the short walk books my father keeps in his trunk at the top of the stairs, behind where the dog used to sleep. The page says jump (with a smile) It was on a walk through the Peak District that I lost one of these books. He blames me as he entrusted the book in my hands. I was the navigator following the instructions set before me with each turning page. "Walk three miles east of the pink tree set before you and come to a fence two metres in height. From this fence head down a track through a stile and over a dry stonewall. From here see the tip of a reservoir to your left. Follow its line around North West arriving at a dam. Scale the dam reaching midway between water and stone. Jump off in to the water and swim to the shore on the Eastern side. Once there head north to a second stile..." And so on. I do this with a smile of course, as I'd rather forget how I left the book, having survived its rigorous instructions, on the top of the car - we set off, the gravel underneath us crunching and expanding space beneath our tyres, the book flew off the roof caught by the Winter's afternoon sky. And we are now in England and the accent is altogether different. Carlisle is as grey as Glasgow's West End on a sunny day and from here the world seems to be not so much as awake as the humdrum of the engine I sit behind. I am facing north west now and there's not a stile in sight, just more bridges and tunnels that disguise our guise as a linear travelling collective machine.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 The sun is facing us so we must be heading west for a while. Cathie is her name and her surname is Fields. She lives just over the hill in to the sun. "There is a perfect hill of pine to my right, crafted by the landscape, which dances around in the pallet of green in the breaking evening sun before it's setting. And then a tunnel in to browns and greys and yellows and blues. The falsity of late summer that looks warm but hides rain around the corner and damp under your feet. And the train still hums on." The whole journey now sets itself in reverse and all the hilly hill hills look vaguely familiar as they roll in to one. Two, three green brown jade-of-purple heather and heath. The clouds too take on similar shapes, setting the horizon as something altogether inspirational, so to speak. So, to speak is to sit across from someone you're not sure about, you have a memory of them starting a business in Yoga and or in Palates but you have never been ever so sure of the difference, and of the difference in her. So you speak to her and you ask "how the Yolates business going?" - and she gives you a funny look whilst shoving yet more free paella in to her mouth and washing it down with bread. This was an art exercise. For us to arrive and climb the stairs, after each flight there was a taster of a menu built up from what the building had to offer - each doorway opening on to a free sample of publication and construction and printing press and chalkboard. We dined in the end at the very top. Two artists were in the guise of chefs cooking a rice dish. We sat on a long thin table. On this table the woman sat opposite me. And conversation eventually flowed after we disregarded the idea of us being placed in a social experiment. We were fooled by the food as it took us to somewhere exotic via the heavy vegan desert. Upon descending the stairs we took another door on to another street and it soon became evident who was the most prepared. I pulled out my umbrella to shelter from the rain. The woman, she stood as if naked for want of being dry against the sky. The sky, well, that was littered with disused buildings: once printing presses and publishers - brass signs disguising the real goings on and the real deal inside. We then went our separate ways and I won't see her again until I forget what it is she actually does. When we do meet it will merely be a repeated performance - a repeat journey.  We're now exposed to the maintenance tracks. Such observations would be impossible if there were but a break in the clouds in the sky for the sun: now more houses, more settlements and more trees and common land in between are set behind us. And there's a constant black line that floats beside me on the other side of re-enforced glass - it's not that comforting though it keeps disappearing above the window frame.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Man in green jacket lined with white fluffy material: "How would you feel if I gave you a piece of this artwork?" Mersey River rower: "What do you mean, it's a piece of video installation, how do I take a piece of it home with me..."         Ubiquitous is everywhere action and thanks to the small tight stairways leading to the first floor of Greenland street's foundation beginning with A my work remained anonymous - just like myself as a performer or artist in the presence of an audience on the opening night. Boots were bashed trousers were ruined and self-performance exuded across the widening floor as light and colour danced upon the walls - and the objects I brought with me, they made friends with the ghosts of each hallway stairwell and barricaded windowsill. Dust was all and Perspex sheet (scratched upon the surface) rendered heavy efforts beautifully reconciled. These moments were then given away - fragments of a whole film reel were offered to the audience. Value and spectator as embodiment of an artwork's worth were both explored through conversation: conversation with space, object, interaction and displacement of "a set piece ever changing".         Man in green jacket lined with white fluffy material: "Each film is a fragment of what you see before you. You have seen it and your presence gives it a title. Here's the title..." He takes from a rip in the right hand side of his jacket a silver shining disk embellished with an intricate drawing and hands it to the rower - this is a votive act - an offering of ritual and shared experience an opportunity and tangible object of touch...   ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 She sat on the red sofa in front of me eating a cup cake, head bent low over the table between us, and read the following text on a piece of parchment littered with scribbles and marginal errors: After a bare-footed mountainside climb he found himself half way across a river hanging from a rope swing. Whilst hovering just two inches above the water he recalled his initial excitement that was now debased by the present situation. He thought of the feeling as his tired feet left the ground and his weight and momentum were transferred to his hands clasped around the rope. But he never reached the other side and on his return failed to touch base. Now he hangs like a broken pendulum listening to the voice of the water and the story told by his partner who sits on the riverbank: Breaking from the text she crossed her legs, swallowed the last of her cake, brushed the crumbs off of her lap on to the floor and continued to read: In the town where I grew up a couple that live in a house with many rooms of many colours hold feasts celebrating the twelve days of Christmas. All the community are invited and for each woman and a cake is baked. In two of these cakes they hide a gold ring - one for a man to find, another for a woman. Whoever finds the rings takes to a throne for the remainder of the festivities: they demand an audience and decide upon the fate of the community. Decisions are made; the community acts and things change with each year. This is a memory but I do hold an experience close to my own: one year I took ill and found I could not eat my cake so decided to keep it - one of the rings was never found... She then took the parchment, folded it in front of us and turned her attention at last to me asking: "What made you decide to disown your work and give these moments of experience and this effort as an artist away? Does your work have no value to you?" To this I replied: "I wanted them to think of my work not as a commodity but as something they could own for their very participation. They experienced it so they have access to it as an experience: and through this it ceases to be ephemeral.""What are you getting at?""How an audience and their relationship to the artist can sometimes get stuck in the middle (the artist can also be stuck in the middle fully exposed). I wanted to elevate this relationship, pass over the ownership of my work""How did you meet them half way?""As the artist I took an anonymous role and entered in to the domain of the spectator. As the artist in disguise I approached people watching my film (that clearly featured me) and engaged them in polite conversation. Slowly I revealed who I was and released my anonymity.""How?""I gave them fragments of the film burnt DVDs I hid in my pocket.""Do you think this worked?""Yes it worked, I am no longer stuck in the middle, it gave me momentum to either return to the beginning away from my present position as the artist, or to continue ahead. But with each element given away their was less of a title for the work and less of me. Soon enough I disappeared entirely." She stopped at this with a sigh under her breath, unfolded the parchment and read the final paragraph out loud: "For him nothing was tight or durable enough. From his publisher we know that his proof reading habits were the despair of the typesetters. The galley proof always went back stuffed with marginal notes and not a single misprint had been corrected. All available space had been used for fresh ideas. Thus the laws of remembrance were operative even within the confines of the work. For an experienced event is finite and a remembered event is infinite as it is only a key to everything that happened before and what is to come after."... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 taʎːaˈtɛlːe and cut   Ah, what a jolly day that was I thank you both so much for ferrying too and fro: Anne for delicious pasta the other night and Francis for extreme courage in harmonious duty. Sups in October, coffee will be heavily caffeinated I promise. Love Jessie x (postcard from Whitley Bay on the North Sea).           One day, sooner or later, whether you find it by looking or having it looked for or whether it reaches you by mail in six years time - that is how long it has taken me to shake my vengeance - you will have this letter in your hands and you will finally know why and how I killed your daughter. X   Recipe for delicious pasta (disaster) "I always use fresh tomatoes and anchovies, no tomato paste. Always fry your onions in butter for the best of buttery results and meanwhile prepare your broccoli on the chopping board. Use vegetable stock and take stock at all other times, keep calm and collected. Fresh tagliatelle, tagliolini or tagliare is the best type of pasta for strangulation. Boil this separately until half cooked and add it to the stock, tomatoes and anchovies. Add the broccoli too at this point, don't cook it through leave it half raw - give her something to choke on." ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦In this lies anything but sinister edge but the relationship between two texts and the negotiation of a fiction brought together from the two. Jessie wrote her words on the back of a postcard that she left in an art gallery; I found the postcard that was addressed to Francis and Anne, in London. I copied the text and then posted the card. The text on vengeance came from a book I was leafing through at the time. The recipe comes from an artist friend of mine who works in publishing - she's very quick at giving good ideas and lying out recipes and structures for text on the page.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Drawing board ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦ ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦ ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦ ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦ ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦ ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Museum collection (related objects apparently to do with ciculatory flow) [built inpart with The Mutual's members show at The Glue Factory]     OBJECTS INCLUDE:   Fimo supports (varied colours)Plywood panels with black/white oil paint three small orange plates sourced from Istanbulapects of Dean Clough exhibition posterpostcard from Hayward Gallery 2005Glass jar with light3D slides from 1958's World Fair, BrusselsSlide coversBuilder's light (casting shadows)Shoe rackhand made ash tray from Gran Canaria street merchantGlass paperweightExtension leadWall mounted photographs of exterior and interior of Leeds City Museum SOURCED FROM:(all locations possible museums) Glass jar kept from BA in 2006Leeds City Museum basementIstanbul via Newington, EdinburghThe Henry Moore InstituteThe South Bank of ThamesCharity shop across from CCA, GlasgowCardboard box in garage, Dronfield, DerbyshireSame cardboard boxGlue factory, Glasgow!950's exhibition vanGran Canaria, via Newington, EdinburghLea road, Gainsburgh, Lincolnshire Wilkinsons, LeedsLeeds city museum  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Final question: What is the language of the mind? The other night I dreamt of licking my best friend's partner. We were in a building that resembled an assemblage of architecture - a mixture between Oxford's Christchurch grounds, Glasgow's University erection and Leeds' modernist definition. Running around as we used to it just happened and my tongue sort of slipped. I licked her. We used to count chevrons on the road driving from East Anglia to Bristol. "Chevron" resounded in the car every time one shoved itself under the nose of the bonnet: unison of intonation announcing our situation on the road. Chev-ron. We said it a lot. The journey felt longer but was better for it. In Bristol the two of them live apart but together in two separate houses around five minutes cycle ride from each other. There are no chevrons on that route. Just short cuts and back alleys to navigate with peddle and bike lights. At her partner's house we cook vegetables together that have been cut together in a pan together. We do everything together we light the stove with a cook's blowtorch together because the gas ignition does not work. I now display my affection for this girl on her Facebook page. I like everything on her wall with a "like" and shout chevron to myself at the back of mind with each indulgent click. Then at the top of her page I announce I have licked everything in her status. A strange difference there is between liking and licking - does one come with the other? Do you like someone because you lick him or her or do you lick someone because you like them? My French teacher used to say (with little affect other than this, as I have forgotten the French now), make sure you get your accents right, make sure you're using the correct sort of intonation. An example she used to use was: if you do not use this sort of accent correctly you could end up saying "I lick Cliff Richard" rather than - what I assume she meant us to say - "I like Cliff Richard". I ask myself the following questions: Why did I let my tongue slip? Do I like my best friends partner? Did my French teacher have a sexual fantasy about Cliff Richard? Did she dream of Cliff Richard? Why did I dream of licking my best friend's partner? Did I just get the intonation of the dream wrong? Do ideas like this have - or indeed any other ideas have "intonation"? How can a marking on a road become a chant? What is the point of me writing this? Answers: My tongue slipped as it often does, I'm not good a holding my tongue at the best of times I do like my best friends partner but not in a sexual fashion My French teacher would have liked to lick Cliff Richard at some point Everyone dreams of Cliff Richard I didn't really lick her I shouted lots at her - this made me hide behind the joke of licking her. Yes I did get the tone of the dream incorrect I think I think ideas do have intonation - ideas are visual and words that have meaning are also visual A chant is a repetition of a word - a marking on a road that repeats itself, if announced every time one is passed does then become a chant The point of me writing this is to make a point about the levels of intonation and meaning and the connection behind visual language, vocal language and the language of the mind.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Brief description I knew this person in Leeds when living in Montpelier, a Victorian gated community of flats with a lawn at the front. It used to be an orphanage. These may still be the days where you fit everything you own in to one room because one room is all that you own and have to yourself - her room in Leeds was full of herself. I used to sit on her bed and draw for hours whilst she inspected insects collected throughout the day at her desk at the foot of the bed. To the left of the bed on the wall an original piece of artwork hung framed on the wall. The work was by her father a successful rock climber in the world of rock climbing and a notable artist too. Here in Bristol her room looks pretty much the same. Its full of all the same objects and houses the same person - there is however but one addition to this - a strange object rather like a medal draw or a draw to keep different beads of varied shapes and sizes. Turned on its side and propped on top of the same desk against a different wall it has many compartments for her many micro-objects to be shelved. They collect dust but hang pretty: each of them holding an aspect of her personality - when she is out of the room I quickly lick one of them clean... a different one each time, replacing it before her return. Back in her old flat in Leeds (I know someone else who lives there now) upon the wall in the living room, hangs another of the compartmentalised draws used as a shelving unit - it too holds many objects that are apparently unrelated. One day I'd like to stand them both side by side and cross-reference them looking for any difference or indifference in repetition...... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 ROUND OBJECTS TO THROW THROUGH hollowed HOOPS [the basis of circulatory flow] "When thinking of museums I think of paths to museums and paths back again after the experience, our minds often flooded with the objects we take in our heads. These places need hollow halls at the top and open platforms to the sky..."   Across the causeway towards the rock that sits in the middle of the sea we walk. I turn to my friend and say that if the tide was in our heads would be submerged in water - to this she replied we would need weights attached to our ankles to walk still on the path. This is true. Once at the rock she collected round objects and arranged them on the beach. To what affect I am not so sure, perhaps to make an order of things. At the top of the rock we climbed there stood a house built on top of another house to rest from the wind - it was no lighthouse simply a watchtower with winding stairs and hollow halls. It was very ordered in its architecture and at the top a platform jetted out into the stream of open sky. There we stood and watched the disappearance of the path aforementioned. The tide had swallowed its rock pools, swelled back to the shore, and we were fully surrounded by the waters below. The sun was loosing itself over the hills in the distance and we had naught to burn for warmth or for light. The halls were hollow.       If the tide was in our heads it would most likely be in our bellies and in our lungs. We'd be flooded with the tide. If the tide was in our heads would like to be above the brim of the water's edge so as not to freeze: so as not to have the tide in our bellies and in our lungs. We would avoid being flooded with the tide. We risk having the tide in our heads and use the round collected objects on the rock's beach, put them in our socks and weight ourselves down. We then walk the path together holding our breath until the shore.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 The Russian Sauna Exchange I sit across from the same two men, fully clothed in the office back in North London. They're both Russian, I am English but come from Welsh decent. The company we all work for necessitates our occasional journey too and from Mars. The sauna on Mars is nothing like I would have imagined - and you get there by car after landing by shuttle. It involves buckets full of hot water that soak twigs and branches and leaves bound together with twine. You sit in just your towel fully prepared for you office colleague to ask you to remove it, approach the bench in front of him and lay flat on your back - suddenly you are faced by this man, who you usually communicate professionally with in a suit, completely bereft of clothing brandishing a collection of twigs, branches and twine in his hand. He then proceeds to whack you with them moving from your face down over your nether regions passed your knees ending with your toes. You're left sore but surprisingly acclimatised for the galactic air that waits. But... why the ritualistic act? Is it really necessary on the evening of landing on another planet? My brother and his partner received a present this Christmas from his partner's mother and step father to visit a local all day spa in the middle of Nottingham Forest. They said they had to pre-book their treatments before arriving to save disappointment and began to list to me, much to my annoyance, the different 'procedures' they would subject themselves too. I asked the name of the sauna, they said it was called the torture rooms - I then asked them if Russian Sauna Exchange was available - to this they replied with blank faces. It's a Russian exclamation for exfoliation and acclimatisation I said... you should try it, they do it on Mars mostly but someone might know what it means in the middle of Nottingham Forrest... it involves using twigs leaves and branches drenched in boiled water: there's plenty of that in Nottingham Forrest.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 THE SEA (THE ARTIST) THE WRITER (THE SEA). I have this art writer friend who lives in London, she's originally from Surrey and likes Iris Murdoch novels. We once took a walk through the park opposite the ICA together talking about literary references to art. It was invigorating and summery. For a while now, well since she wrote an accompanying text to my first exhibition in Leeds back in 2008, she has said she would like to make the transition from being a writer in to being an artist - I contacted her a few months ago via email to say that my practice as an artist is taking hold of a writing practice also. Its as if we were engendered to meet in the middle. One way that writing meets visual practice is through interview. So I proposed to my friend that we both interview each other at the same time via email. That way an artist is writing and asking questions of a writer and the writer is writing and asking questions of the artist: As an artist, what is your attitude to the idea of 'permanence'? I want to begin with an artist statement: "My practice feeds off the placement of idea-based conversation, site-specificity, documentation, research and their relationship to drawing and writing. These then engage with the definition and presentation of art making using curation, photography, projection, performance and object association. A foremost concern is to deal with the connection between artist and audience and the underlying task of conservation embedded in art practice. In this, drawing and writing are used as forms of initiating, collating and recording ideas." When I think of permanence I think of how often they way I write about my work changes. And how the work I produce is defined perhaps by the short concise piece of language and grammar squeezed in to a paragraph. Permanent is not something an artist should be nor aspire to be as far as their practice goes - but I suppose another way of looking at things is how artists exist permanently through self-conservation - archives - documentation etc. And my work does deal with documentation quite a lot... I suppose there are two edges to the sword then... Do you think this interview via email is organic? Are we talking at each other rather than to each other? Is that important? I do not think that we are talking to one another or at each other. We are leaving notes for each other - we're playing chess with words and awaiting replies together. That's how I see it. I do a lot of interviewing other artists via email and I think it does seem to work as often, visual people do need time to consider their response if their writing it down. So in this sense, I suppose it is less organic and more engineered... One thing I will say though is that with my blogging and the writing I often post along side images - is more so organic and also automatic. I type, edit slightly, post, publish and then erase the actual text off my computer - it exists in the organism of the Internet instead, which I also see as an archive.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 (Design magazine page) Geometry race (Su's secret Santa paper) and Bell Tower Communication painting     I had left the bright red Chinese lanterns next to the canal in South Tottenham, but they seem to have floated back to the shore again. One is broken and has lost its steel axis, the other two (one with its dragon dressing) are intact - they're currently drying out on the radiator. Meanwhile I discard of the broken one in the large commercial waste bin next to the Italian restaurant at the bottom of the road. I do this in the cover of darkness and use the fairy lights hanging down across the restaurant's front window as my screen. I have stopped using lanterns as before they were over used. The two that are still intact are now dry, deflated and stored in the dark olive green bag I was given by the Chinese shop assistant when I first bought them in London. I remember that day - it was hot and the capital smog attached itself to my limbs. The gift shop I went in to was respite from the sun, I saw tits and vaginas splayed across magazine covers as my eyes stroked lanterns hanging from the ceiling in all manner of shapes and sizes.     Now I sit in my flat in Glasgow, its cold, windy and stormy and I have just packed the last of my DVDs in to a box. I am laid on the granny bed futon in the kitchen drinking luke-warm coffee and I notice a drawing framed last year, by myself, depicting two runners with hats in the Scottish countryside racing across a stream. In their hands they hold long branches snapped from near by trees - at the extremities of these branches three Chinese lanterns wave with exulted momentum: their design is novel for the scene that is otherwise set by browns and purples lucid with dampening rain. Set beneath the drawing in the frame, acting as its mount, is a yellow page I used in an installation piece (again last year). It sets out a number of names, of people unknown to me, the page was ripped from a design magazine - ripped out of context purely for its formal characteristics. It depicts encompassing circular forms like a chart: a periodic image of who may have won which race at which time perhaps. Another frame I keep to hold an older and dustier piece of work: a small idea-based painting of scarlet red shapes upon a lined light affect non-acid-free paper. It is lined as if an obsolete address card. With the paint marks - copied from the altar tile-design situated where an installation once completed the painting's reasoning - sit pencil strokes and notes for further ideas. It is a sketch foremost but sits, non-the-less, lightly and comfortably in the frame. Set beneath the painting in the frame, acting as a mount, is a piece of wrapping paper that once wrapped my boss's secret Santa gift. She discarded the wrapping paper after carefully retrieving the present inside - it is of floral design and displays subdued colours that compliment the dishevelled tone of the light affected address card.   From the broken lantern I kept hold of one thing. This thing is a yellow tassel that once hung down from the bottom of the lantern with yellow and red string, the weight of the tassel is a small green globe of plastic. This tassel rests now on top of the aforementioned frame...   ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 FROM CONSTANCE AND FROM VIOLET I am currently in the process of moving flats from Glasgow to Edinburgh. I came across two old USB sticks I kept files on during my studies at Leeds University. Here is an image and a piece of text, possibly related probably not... 04/05/2007 Ha - the non-performance of the half hour drawings, by wearing some kind of dress!   Ok so I didn't measure the dimensions of the drawing in relation to my body - it is evident in the photographs how large the overall garment was.  However this is somewhat irrelevant as they were to be worn what ever the circumstance - and at least I got a photograph.  In fact the situation of the photo-documentation is interesting here as I had to direct someone who had never used an SLR before to take the photograph (this statement may be slightly hypocritical in relation to some of the photographs I have taken), so the realisation of the idea could only have happened with someone else present.  It is relatable also to how the artist parades his ideas and art works in front of an audience and I think this 'performance' highlights this.  The paradox of me coming up with the idea then building the suit by myself with the fact that I needed someone's assistance in order to put the suit on and then to record the fact that it was on - highlights the importance of an audience in such forms of art.  Performance has always been something that has been available to me aesthetically in order to dabble in, but only as an extension of some form of documentation, and it is interesting that in order to document such perspectives another person always has to be involved.  This subtle form of interaction with another person in such situations is interesting in an indirect sense, such a sense that always gives way to the notion of someone else being there outside the frame of documentation, as either of us is documented in some kind of task - such a task that is essentially directed by the artist.  The notion of control becomes evident here, as the artist remains the director in such situations.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Dummies and divine sense (or following the same paths and learning the same way)   "On occasion I am dressed accordingly and on these occasions I get to lie about who I am. When wearing clothes I get to wander through the gardens surrounding the institute, passed the bamboo, over each and every stream circumnavigating the amphitheatre - where on other occasions we are instructed to perform - and then back through to the institute... and usually back in to storage."     The divine sense of dummies - when I think of this I think of Ghost in the shell and an apparent consciousness or sentience in man made objects that are produced to resemble human existence. Cyborgian is the term. This term is perhaps now a little dated. If one part is human then the non-human part is the opposite of human. The divine sense of dummies - I would like to extract the zombie-essence from these artefacts and question (tap in to) how qualified their reasoning is. Why do they exist and when they are stored out of sight what is their reason for being there? The divine sense of dummies - is to be found in the basement then, at the bottom of the city museum. Here, in this room, a found-photographic composition is located. A lens is placed and the remote on the shutter is pressed gathering the correct exposure to render an image of these objects tied together like limbs. There is little stability yet something holds them upright and gives them a lingering sense of balance.     "I made up my mind and then changed it, I changed my mind, my mind changed... and all of a sudden I was naked like a doll exposed for a life-like drawing exercise. When I walk my legs wobble and my head remains still staring straight ahead. I do not have the ability to see rather I know the direction I am walking because of my prior function and my installed intuition. My reason for being here instructs me to walk this way and that, and eventually to climb the plinth in front of the spectators, to be observed out with obscurity and to be drawn from and sometimes upon."... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 The dog that hangs around (and jellyfish that have minds) An idea that may or may not involve hanging a dog from the ceiling, which ceiling I am not so sure. Not this ceiling it is too high. Not just any ceiling though. If I recall the landscape has no proximity to primary colours. Instead it is full of muted dampened washes reminiscent of my bad watercolour days and lazy brush strokes. Want I want to instil are reds and bright whites that are alien to the landscape just as I am alien to this city. An action or happening for story Using a spherical lamp shade - as an object out of context and therefore rendered entirely in its own right with its own defining properties - carefully stuffed with helium filled balloons (enough gas for it to float in the sky). This will be a dramatic act that goes beyond the confines of the "room" (thanks Virginia Wolf) that is or would be a studio - restricted by the city - beyond in to empty and explorative space that matches that of the mind. Why photographs and not film It is important when performing for yourself and your camera to extract the live element and leave it within the real time experience. Film and its motion picture quality, even in a digital sense, tells a lie. It pretends to be live and manufactures a bad quality dummy experience. Still photographs taken in quick succession is more appropriate. In this the actuality of film is dealt with and the animated quality becomes a work in its own right made up of fractions and snippets from the real time event. This is more explorative when it comes to editing too.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 "I would like to give you this but I would not recommend it Today I changed someone's gender. A male walked in to work through the glass doors. Using this pen, keeping a tally of the footfall we, I marked him down under 'F' instead of 'M'. He is now a Today someone recommended me a pen. It was the same pen they held in their hand - a pen which I assumed to be theirs. Later they took the pen and placed it in their coat pocket. Later still they left their coat over the edge of their chair and went to the bar. Whilst they were at the bar I stood up, reached for the coat, put it on and left. Later still I got home, took off the coat and hung it over the back of the door in the kitchen. I put my hand in the pocket and stole the pen too. These words are written with this pen. These words are a confirmation of this very theft. It is enough to write this story on this page rip the page from the note book and place it, folded, in to the coat pocket replacing the pen. I shall return the coat but not the pen and say thank you for the recommendation. Female. This pen is transcendental of gender but only has affect as far as its ink can stretch, therefore upon back to the other side of the glass door his sex changed back again in time. Much like an upside down nature fountain (a waterfall) and an upside down modernist waterfall (a fountain) things change depending on how you name them. Things change depending on the name they are given."     I came across this text whilst studying the catalogue for 2011's Glasgow Film Festival. Someone had left the catalogue on the floor in the foyer of the Glasgow Film Theatre. I picked it up and out slipped a page with these very words on it. Here I have copied them word for word entirely but what I find strange is that this pen, whether it's the same pen in each side of the story, happens to take on a certain character with a certain agenda. It has the ability to change things. Maybe at one point this was written with a pen in a hand, but now the text exists in print out with the raw element withheld in hand writing. I'm not entirely sure what I think about it.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 To dally on the walkway and marry at the door           I seem to have acquired myself a mentor. A mentor that is impeccably fast at replying to emails - almost too fast, and definitely faster than I am at producing the work in the first place.   The mentor is currently working through this text for me. The text is then edited at a faster pace than it takes for the mentor to get back to me, this being a response to her well-practiced speed in reading, thinking, responding and making things constructive.      Keep writing (making) making writing she says.   ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Having moved   I thought it was time that I tackled the view from my flat. It adds layers to the city. The flat itself is on the top of a hill and the back faces southwest in to the hills. In the far distance there is a ski slope that is lit up at night. The weather of each day affects the view: some days (like today) you can see the hills as they dress the sky line and on others all that remains to be seen is the bare trees at the foot of the window across the garden. It is a different kind of view from that which I became used too. Glasgow offered the reflection of your flat within the windows of others. Leeds was much the same - quite on show that you were. This view reminds me of the hills of home, North East Derbyshire encroaching on the seven peaks of Sheffield and the Peak District itself. You could see the water tower next to my uncle's house in Norton, south Sheffield from the landing window. Perhaps this is it. Landmarks are a given in this place. The other evening my friend needed the toilet so we entered in to the foyer of an arts centre around 6.30 pm for him to find suitable facilities. Before long we were asked by a young woman, who's accent disguised her past, if we wanted a Peroni. We of course said yes and then three Peroni's later we had learned she worked for a bank and was posted all over the UK to help promote one of its clients (you can guess which one). The promotion this times was in the guise of a photography exhibition, rare prints taken from Italian or Italian inspired films, in which Italian costume designers played a huge part. One particular print took my fancy. It depicted a 70s bar with one woman wearing a 70s style dress and three men with moustaches and matching suits. We decided to get to know the Peroni girl a little better - another bottle later we learned that she was from North East Derbyshire (Clown in Chesterfield to be exact), the town next to the one where I grew up. First off though she said she was from Sheffield too as I had said that is where I was from (well I was born there, in Jessops hospital, the hospital where my Grandmother on my father's side had worked as a nurse). We were then a lot more exacting and confessed at having grown up just south of the Yorkshire border instead. I could see Sheffield and the water tower from my house on the hill though so I was sort of half lying. She did not sound as though she was from just north of the midlands. And neither do I except when talking to Scottish people, as I want to accentuate my roots during my time living here. The landscape is the same but the accent is different I think.   ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 A Plan of just down the road from George Square (the leaf it tagged as me)Mary Cooles's perfection - alter-image - I entered in to her domain and the painting remained as my disguise. "I am talking to you today about alter image." This alternative image is changed during intervals in the installation process. You see before I made considerably large movements, God knows I had room for it then, now I make smaller perfections. There is something about the house plants that litter my window seat in the living room. They have entered in to my drawing process as my drawings take place in that room, they have entered and are a part of - or perhaps already were a part of - my experience. The other day, in envious delight, I visited the studios of two other artists who think a lot. In envious delight their studios exist on a mezzanine surrounding the gallery of the studio complex below. One of the artists has a cactus on his shelf, the other a picture of a cheese plant on her desk next to an open book or two. I now have a picture of another cheese plant's leaf next to an empty espresso cup on my wall above my writing desk, tagged with bent over masking tape. In the picture, according to the photographer, the leaf is also tagged as me.There must be a connection here. There are fucking house plants everywhere and this studio complex I entered in to uses house plants to make you feel at home, or to make the studio holders feel at home. In this studio-cum-gallery in Glasgow, I will use a houseplant or two to make a projection in shadow on the wall, I will move one leaf one by one, tacked with masking tape to the floor.Back to the window seat, where each pain, as you lie underneath the sill on the white sofa, frames another gull in the sky and another flag whistling in the wind: there on this sill I cannot sit, there are too many plants, and instead I place an oil painting on the window seat to dry in the sun. This painting is build on systematic geometry that is deliberately altered, a very conscious choice to go wrong. In the middle of this painting there is a whole, or a window, through which you can focus in again on the framed image: a gull seems closer for some reason, and the flags more resonant whipped in the sea air. I will bring this painting with me please and I will use this painting please as it is a painting and it belongs in a gallery not on a window sill.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Out (mirror image) and (painting as prop) with (house plant)"I ended up having a late lunch with Geoff in his office, smelly cheese and crackers handed to me one by one. I said to him, it is foremost about documentation - I am not a film maker, I am a someone who messes with props and builds installations. Therefore I am not making a film directly, instead I am investigating the concept of a film by building frames one by one, by way of stop frame animation."Day out with out with simulacra is a film project using ornaments of everyday and objects of a gallery context to explore the cross-division of front room play and exhibition performance and display. I have been using 'out with' a lot in my writing recently, it means something different to outside of, it also conjures a play on words that is, if anything, satisfying: "A day out with simulacra", could mean a day out on the beach say with mirrors and plants and friends and your camera, or it could mean a day without simulacra, thereby being a day without any representative image of anything else: a day that is outside of normative exploration.The 'act' then, in the end, was immersive and experimental - a whole day was spent (with dried fruit and ginger beer for sustenance) making imagery with the objects I brought with me and in the end making movement image. These films were then built on and finally rendered in to twenty different versions: each version untitled was then posted to a different audience member who consents, if they will, to take the DVD with the film on it home with them.Thus the film never touches the gallery as an actual film, it exists erstwhile as another object hidden within the politics of space that is a gallery-cum-assembly or resource.Images here are:A 'painting' on the wall of a 'gallery'A day out on the beach in East LothianA film still, or photograph that in the end made the film, "Day out with simulacra"A plastic plant found outside the gallery in the corridor... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Spelling herbs: Basel is Blackford hill and beyondWell, what sits on the window cil matches the mood green outside. At the top of the hill on the top floor the coffee machine whistles away and so does the wind outside, you wouldn't think we were about to break in to summer, or is what used to be mid Lothian (now Edinburgh) always like this? Perhaps its just written in the script. The clouded sky does bring out different levels of green though, which I quite like. The same greens that are Basel, Coriander, Parsley, more Basel, Thyme, more Coriander, and some Lettuce - all fighting for their own light.It begins to rain again slightly, one or two drops fastened against the window. This matches the sound of the fridge next to me as it extracts the warm air from inside leaving a fairly cold temperature. This method of extraction is also like leaving the flat and confronting the rain. Its probably colder inside than out. There is a red leafed tree sat just beyond the green line of trees just below the window. This colour matches a plant I once had in my possession, bought from Homebase on 15% off day. A wonderful purple-y red and leaves like velvet. I used this as a prop in a film piece I made starring myself. That was in Glasgow and I remember holding the plant, still wrapped in its plastic, and clambering on the train with my other props at Haymarket station. This was around a month ago now. The gallery where these props were filmed alongside myself is just off George Square in the centre of Glasgow. Its a tricky one way system to get to the correct street and luckily my friend has a nippy 70s soft top to manoeuvre there. I enlisted her help in exchange for an apple juice to help me pick up the props after the exhibition: she kindly agreed and we drove back to her place afterwards lifting the plant - now out of its wrappings flourishing with its colours - from the car and taking it in to her ground floor bedsit. The plant now lives in the bedsit and this little bit of colour that resides in Edinburgh, just outside of my window enclosed within the tree, now lives in Glasgow's west end near the Kelvingrove museum.My friend is from South Queensferry and detests Edinburgh as the city she had to return to from London after study. Since I moved East she has not been too visit me. But yesterday, like a character from an Iris Murdoch novel, she crept back in to my life. She knocked on my flat door I let her in and she sat at my kitchen table, in the seat where I now sit writing this. It felt displaced, she said "its just like your old flat in Glasgow, but in Edinburgh". With her usual expectant hunger I fed her. I begin to think of partnerships now. I have realised quite recently that my drawings and perhaps my films and performances - under the guise of 'collaboration' - are in fact an exploration of partnerships. Soon we will return north in the same 70s soft top. But its raining pretty heavy now and the slick black leather roof would leak... ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Enclosure The first studio I had was a room without windows that had two strip lights, which resonated with a communicative buzz. I used it as a room of reflection and an enclosure to let loose my wide collection of bouncy balls:   If I happen to be incommunicado it is not my fault. I am in writing jail - a self-set constraint where I retreat in to four walls, feed off their flatness and project ideas back on to the key board resting on my desk. Ideas are bouncing around all over the place; I find it hard to stop for breath or for water of for Spanish meats. A friend of mine is off on a week's meditation retreat in the bowels of Western Scotland. I am jealous of her power to jump on an bus sharing the destination of others, arrive and then be absolute in the solidarity of her own mind and the connections therein. Sometimes I make up the practice of meditating. The last time I visited home my mother was preparing to move out: I was laying across her bed watching her pack - I picked up a supplementary magazine from the weekend paper flicked through its pages and found a relaxation technique spelled out in a sidelined column referencing 'ways to deal with stress', it said: "... breath in for four seconds through your nose, then breath out through your mouth for another seven seconds". This is well practiced within these four walls, I count in and out envisioning waves on a beach swelling in 1 2 3 4 and... swelling out... 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. I imagine the words associated with migraine and anxiety washing away to drown in the sea. One: I hit the desk with the heels of my hands just above the wrists, my fingers flayed like antenna projecting out towards the walls around me. Two: I am a bat loosening my thoughts and waiting for the return of measured displacement with my eyes closed. I am in the dark until their return. Three: I feel the crochet under my feet and liken it to crotal lichen. I am otherwise here as well as there. I am beyond the walls as well as within them, using their divide as a platform to frame and otherwise throw ideas at, bouncing too and fro. Four: I slowly clench my toes and my fingers tightening the hole of my mouth waiting for immanent exhale. It works and my back is aligned with my neck as the rear of my head arches to allow the tip of my nose to face the ceiling. One: I realise the ceiling is not there, instead there is sky, my process of meditative state seems to have worked. Two: through my mouth I begin to blow a balloon filling it with helium that is reverent to my elevated state. Three: this balloon begins to lift me, still attached to my throat, and my body tears away from its seat. My wrists leave the desk; my feet leave the patterned floor. Four: I get so far and something stays my flow as I begin to run out of breath. But I push on anyway hoping for more. The balloon's size increases but exponentially, soon its volume will reach its plateau matching the capacity of my lungs. Five: the peak is reached. The ceiling manifests and returns to hold me within. I bounce gently against it and then settle as if the room has been turned upside down, filled with water and I have gently floated to the bottom. Six: my potential weight takes over and I start to reduce in height - I prepare myself for landing, I retrace my steps making note of each second in the elapsed time. I will repeat the process and perhaps the ceiling will remain gone. Seven: my last second and I feel the magnetic pull of the desk, my seat, the floor and its crafted edging, pink, purple, blue, red, yellow, green with intersecting faded white squares. I don't open my eyes - I return to my exacting and grounded formation. And I repeat the process again.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Is this the place for duplication?Image directories. One image holds the centre of the next image, this image gives away its centre as it knows its own centre will have space on the image that comes after. This is another form of collaboration. I do believe:An old sculpture trail"This is a triangulated object that helps us focus. Existing in time, in and around the changing colour of leaves, it changes with each perspective that is happened upon it - it is no sociological structure just an object for precise contemplation…"What of this object then? How can it act as a point in direct collaboration and why? And why would anyone care as half the time it is just covered in leaves? This photograph is very orange - you need to change the white-balance on it - it looks old… too old. "It will work as a point of collaboration as it is a formal pyramid with four sides. Each side a reflection of the respective other - a geometric representation of the actuality that happens during collaboration. A propensity object. Each side is the same, but as you turn slowly around the concrete pyramid you notice imperfections that spell out differences. There are indeed many differences that this photograph does not depict - in many ways this is a romanticised representation of the object and its specific location. For one thing the object is framed yet again by the camera's eye - a direct response to the perspective of the viewer…"How do you mean it is a romanticised version?"Well, what you do not see in this image is the two people dressed in patterned dialogue. One holding a stick, the other precariously wearing high heels muddied by the turf. These two people have the collaborative ability to de-familiarise the object… so take a long hard stare. At the photograph that is not the object in front of you. Take your stare and keep it - the next time the object is framed and shot it will be entirely different."How will it be different?"Lets just say it will be something like standing on your head…"... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Changing timesI am about to get on a bus to Glasgow, final destination is the Centre For Contemporary art. At 1pm I will be giving a tour of the galleries and an introduction to the artists involved in BAS7. During this I will think of flying, singing, bin diving and food. I will weave like an otter from art work to art work using the notes I have just made and gestures of so called significance with my hands to extract any form of concentration the audience may have wished to have paid to the words that I speak. In reality I will tell them the following and I will play the magician. After the tour I will then eat:Triangulated airplane music"When I worked on the airlines, we used to play our own selection of music: the office would receive letters and phone calls after the flights I crewed, from people asking what the music was. They wanted to hear more. So we played more from my own selection. Before long though the royalties did begin to seep in: now we play spin off pop songs sang by second-rate artists who always hit a note too high when we're decending lower and lower. And as we touch the ground the plastic taste of the airplane food is concretised by the electronic drastic resonance of a cheap keyboard preset for "Triangle"."Fake restaurant review"If you walk in to the restaurant around six thirty in the evening you will most likely bump in to the waiter serving Poission at a reduced rate. Poission is a form of chicken served in small numbers and even smaller sizes - and they taste phenomenal. The atmosphere is somewhat drab though, and could do with a bit of updating in terms of its royalties and the music it plays, it needs a bit of charitable input, so to speak…"DelectablesWho else collects food - the way of the artist is to hit a posh enough supermarket at the right sort of time. There are two times that are best, one just after dusk (depending on the time of year) after the out of date food is thrown out. Another time is usually early evening when someone is paid to scour the shelves for produce that will otherwise be thrown out that day, to take their labeller and ticket each item accordingly - thus making your food expenses lesser and lesser still.Bin DiveI have a friend, she lives in Bristol now and works as a carpenter, who used to know the way in to our local supermarket's bin yard that was barred by iron gates. She would, with her nose to the ground, slither underneath the gates (I was usually on watch at this point, ready to give signal if anyone turned round the corner) and appear on the other side. Like some kind of otter she would mount each bin one by one and dive in. A few minutes later she would surface with healthy-balance yogurt drinks, tinned fruit, cakes and bread. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 brand new arrangement studiesI think the correct term to use here is studies. These are by no means finished works, just arrangements for possible installations, possible props for movement and alternative contexts for widening and exploring the content of existing drawings. I suppose I start off with the drawings in mind at least and then work from there. Work formally, seeing what fits and what photographs well (so it is remaining instilled within documentation too) and also what colours go where with other collected objects and materials. I can see some of them developing specifically in to film works, closely recorded and then build in to larger performance pieces when I have the space to do so. It is important however that the performances - using my camera as collaborator - are worked on site-specifically, dealing with an outside context as it were. Not the context of the studio specifically.For now these works exist in a tangible yet changeable state. Each time they are returned too they are indeed re-visited (just as the site may be too) and things are added or taken away. I see this as being connected directly to the drawing process adding and taking away erasing and making more marks - in the end it is compositional.I would also like to return to photopia here. These are images that are taken / photographed on walks, days out, days where I do not want to concentrate entirely on art but want to get away with taking snippets of ideas using my camera phone or my SLR if I have it with me. These are indeed snapshots that are then edited digitally and formally too. They are then stored in one place allowing direct reference at a later date. Some images may appear in more than one place.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 "Image directories. One image holds the centre of the next image. This image gives away its centre as it knows its own centre will have space on the image that comes after..."To opt-in and opt-out: on image conference and directoriesQuestion: How many times can you cut and how many times can you paste? And which tools do you use to defy the appropriation of an image, bypass its content and connotations - how much does it become about 'cut' and then 'paste'.I think we cut and paste from conversations we have. Mild chats to full blown heightened infused arguments - afterwards and during reflection, we tend to cut and paste elements. Try a conversation you have with your camera. You have a direct dictation of the image's content in terms of the still-life in front of you, and your conversation is to have this still-life recorded using the correct lighting, the right sort of angle - I suppose this can be widened to a conversation (or a conference) between the camera and the tripod and then you, the eye's and the fingers that press the shutter release. The conversation is then exposed. And there is a direct, then, cutting and pasting that happens in your mind as you say, "I will photograph this with a 5:7 ratio, but I will edit it square not rectangular… so I can cut this bit out, and this bit and the next bit using this next bit as the centre of the image. The centre of the conversation… the centre of the conference."You then stand up right, hands placed carefully on hips, and you stare back at the still-life in front of you questioning its content: you decide to take another two or three shots, one or two maybe with flash, using the camera as your conversing tool. But what then of the post-production process. What then of 'non-wet' photography and its apparent freedom and its actuality in ratios and measurability? A quick change from one size to another, attributing printing quality and deriving web capability. One colour mode to the next colour mode and then back.So you finally have two images that you are both happy with, both the camera and yourself that is. But in terms of the installed composition - you want to excerpt more of a collaged framing. So… you take one tool and place it in one hand… and you take another tool (something with a straight edge) and place it in the other hand: the camera sits there and watches, just as always, documenting your approach and your changing and shifting of an image. You take one tool to the image: cut.You take the next tool to the image: cut again. You take the other image, which matches the prior-image in size and ratio exactly, and on this image you paste from the other.You then do the same to second image, opting-in to a mirrored affect. Following the same movements You take on tool to the image: cut. You take the next tool to the image: cut again.You then end up with two image that speak to one another. Or two images that have the affect of you, and your camera, staring in to a mirror… asking a question of the reflected inspection.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Fourteen days later dually image [a nod to handstand technique]     I am heading backwards in to the south again, for the second time in a week. Soon I will hit England with the North Sea on my right hand side and the track towards Cumbria on my left. As the breadth of the country matures pasts its bottleneck the coast will slowly disappear as the train heads inland. The clouds, according to the weather report, will close in on the train to the eventual point in time where relativity excludes itself from our spearheaded location. If the earth stopped moving the atmosphere would maintain its viscosity across the surface of land and sea: high winds would rip us from the earth at speeds beyond macro-recognition and the skies would blur between you and the next solid object. Instant death would hit you in a matter of milliseconds.    ------------------------- In editing these two trains of thought I would have to extract one from the other and place them side-by-side. This editing would efface any tautological misreading allowing the reader to cross-reference one narrative with the other. But on a whole one stream of access to the idea is relative to the other.  ---------------------------   If I had your speed and you borrowed mine for a second or two we could work out what displacement lay between us: as your window seat catches up with mine we get to enjoy an expanded lapse in time where visual contact is exposed and slowed. Your face flickers gently with recognition. Mine probably makes the same involuntary contortion as always, and for a brief calculation we stare in to one another's eyes with exacting measure. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 The adventures of Kim-bob and me [part 1]   I slid open my phone to access saved contacts; under favourites I find Kimbal’s number and press dial. The phone nears on connection and then fails – I lift the phone away from my ear and press re-dial, this time it connects, but alas to a foreign dial-tone: he is on his travels again but still he answers:   Hi Richard how are you, I am currently in a queue for a bus in Athens having being scolded by the police for attempting to hitch a ride to the shore, I’m not island hopping I am undergoing a performative exercise that will result in an exhibition in Manchester at the end of June. It’ll be more like the end of July at this rate. Hi Kim, is this costing me a bom? No it is me though, I have to pay to accept calls – oh and that reminds me, I have little credit: but how are you? I’m good – I just wanted to touch base on the project we discussed last month forwarding the residency we underwent last year. Oh okay. Well, can we speak when I am back in the UK? Okay. Will call you beginning July. Good luck.   It is now July and I get around to calling again just before my journey to London from Edinburgh with East Coast, after tracking Kim’s location on Facebook I map his current capacity on the road back to London from Manchester. Whether he is on a bus or as passenger in someone’s car I’m not so sure, but I slide open my phone to access saved contacts; under recent conversations I find Kim’s number and press dial – I anticipate a foreign dial tone but it never comes, instead it connects to UK fluidity: it dials, and dials some more. I get to the point of counting the dials as if I am counting the turns in the road as I chase Kim on his bike around South Tottenham. I say to myself only two more rings and then I am done – I don’t like leaving voice messages so instead I draft a text message in my head: a sort of haiku in place of prolonged conversation:   My hotel is nearGreenwich is that too far forYou to come meet me?   Kim answers a few seconds in to the first draft. Hi how are you I am currently on a bus back to London the exhibition went well. Not so bad thanks the weather is shit here in Scotland. I heard the storms will meet me in London on my arrival. Are you hitching? Yes. Okay, can you speak? Erm, not for long don’t have too much battery can you email me instead? Okay.   Email to Kimbal:   Hi Kim, I am about to walk down to the train station for the 3.30pm East Coast train to London Kings Cross, I arrive I think around 8pm. Are you around this evening to catch up? We could do with talking about this in person and get our ideas together. I have to find my hotel first, which is in Greenwich – is that near where you are in terms of transport? If it is lets meet up for a beer and get this ball rolling. Also, I think we should build a schedule to get drawings and written texts sent to one another – start building up a dialogue and a library of one another’s ideas. How about once every two weeks on the Friday we post something to each other. I will take your address down later... I will be at my emails on the train as I have editorial work to do, so will catch anything you send back. Cheers Richard... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 It has been a while since I last posted on here. This is because I have moved to a larger and grander living arrangement where one half of a open plan space exists alongside another, one side being my studio, the other my living space:                Bounce and haul-ass            ----   Sitting on the bright orange plush sofa in my open plan loft apartment I relax, having just listened to a rendition of some other song or other on Jazz FM. I turn my head to the corner of the room looking passed the spiral staircase in front of me. There, in this corner, I see my desk. I stand up from the sofa and step back on to its cushioned surface - giving my vision more panoramic height I survey the rest of my apartment and its contents. To the left of the desk and heading back in to the centre of the space there are several pieces of cut wood ordained with oil paint and beeswax varnish. At the foot of these 'props' sit several counted objects of similar colours, shapes and sizes.   Two movements come to mind as I stand on my sofa in place of sitting still. One is to bounce, just once, as if a trampoline exists beneath my feet. The other is to haul-ass to the other side of the room passed the staircase to join in with the objects.   I make the first move and bounce once on the sofa. The sofa implodes beneath me and I end up on the floor of the living area behind staring at the underside of the coffee table. I then stand and begin to move awkwardly towards the stair in the centre of the room. I turn and look back at the orange sofa - it's more like a deliberated sculpture now. Bright and ornamenting it reminds me of an office-cum-staff room I used to take breaks in, which housed a similar couch for lounging on next to the curator's personal assistant. With her insistent typing she declined every hot cup of tea you offered her, instead you laid back and watched her send email after email and answer the phone with a flash of an arm movement - her face was painted with the colour of the monitor screen she stared at whilst speaking.   I make the second move now. I haul the sofa and my ass from one side of the apartment to the other - there it is to become a colour-way for a new set of paintings or props in the 'studio' area of my open plan habitation. To do this I have to take a half moon trajectory around the central staircase - reaching a quarter of the way I stop pulling, take a peek down the steel steps, half moon around the orange mess itself, and push for the rest of the journey. One half moon tipped with a tangent of another, slightly smaller half moon. After hauling my ass, the sofa transforms and reaches another possibility in its existence.   I bounce, and then I haul ass. I break and then I drag the breakage from one context in to another, as if moving from one continent to next with the flick of a switch.                                             ----  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Vault Art Fair and the brand of Glasgow (here I am stating - there I am showing).Under one guise and then another - and then another. I journeyed West yesterday over to Glasgow to meet a friend, first of all, for coffee and then we took a walk through Kelvingrove park, over the hill passed Park Circus in the sunshine - the chime of Glasgow University tower donning against the odd cloud hanging in the sky. My friend then left and I journeyed with another old pal down to King St. - venturing in to Transmission Gallery I caught up with the resource room in the basement, got to grips with its goings on. I then took a step out of the glass door and headed further south towards the river Clyde. I arrived early at my final destination - the Briggait and found myself cut off from the vault inside. I stood waiting at the door for tickets that I needed to get in - but then a member of the filming crew passed by (he was head camera man, and happened to be friends with the other person I was with at the time). He soon returned to the door where we stood and gave us both a film crew pass.Inside there was stall upon stall of art for sale or art for commissioned value or art for oysters. Commercial standing stood next to not-for-profit artist groups - and together they stood pretty well.All in all I am happy with the submission I made to The Mutual - a story-cum-interview with fellow artist and writer Sophie Frost, attached to the back of an A3 page - folded to perfection in to a 'pamphlet for sale'. Together with the pamphlet and the backing design we were asked to put together a flag: this flag then performed as a title for the work enclosed in the pamphlet and was also screen printed to bespoke canvas bags, scarfs and bunting - all of which are too for sale in an increment of prices. For the speeches, I was asked to make the most of my film crew pass - for this I climbed the stairs to the surrounding mezzanine and 'spied' on the goings on from above! Then back to the train, back east again and now rain - yet more rain. Its as if I had dragged the representative weather with me and now I sit underneath the cloud.   footnote"She would always, without fail, wear a scarf - but on my arrival her neck was bare. At the back of the stall there was a neatly folded yellow screen printed scarf, left for someone to wear - why she did not have it wrapped around her neck I did not give any time to know: I said she had to put it on - and from that point onwards she became to me who she always was. It all felt complete and its as if I had never left!"... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493        Whistle blower your table shine is mine   In my mind's eye I saw from below the coffee table again, its underside constructed for ultimate-fold and transportability. Atop this table, opposite from where I hid, stood a woman wrapped in a scarf and covered from breast to toe in a black jump suit. She whistled a tune that, by way of my open-plan apartment's acoustics, rang true through the room. The women held her arms aloft balancing core-weight against one table leg that appeared shorter than the others - she swayed from one foot to the other on the balls of her feet, and the table followed suit in time with her song.    I was sat amongst my objects on the half of the open plan space that housed my studio endeavors - ever since I invited the women in I had begun to construct a hide out for myself amongst paintings: by now she was so coveted by her song her eyes were blind against her senses, and I could move unseen and unheard gradually gaining on her - closer and closer still and then upon her.   I needed the coffee table, I had inspected its underbelly and had planned a painting using its alterior surface as a ground for decided incisions, cuttings, and pastings - I had the oils mixed and ready, emulsified with turpentine and bees wax.   I would only get so close before interrupting her flow. I had to carefully plan my moves, one after the other, to increment this sound and build upon her display. She had to fall in the opposite direction towards the window for the table, pushed by her dexterous mishap, to carefully roll on to my side of the space. One foot wrong on my part and she would fall the wrong way.         I got as far as the staircase in the middle of the room and had to stop. She stared right in to my eyes as her whistle reached a higher tone, as if to pierce right through me...   ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 FOUR F E A T H E R SAN   OPEN  WINDOW Of late I have been collecting the feathers that float through the window at the Eastern end of my open plan living space. The feathers seem to be from pigeons that habituate their movements in flight by dipping under the bridge across from my window frame and landing reversely within the suspensions and metal constructions that hold it together. Its as it the pigeons sacrifice one part of their wing span in order to be given permission to ‘land’ or to ‘rest’. I often watch from the interior side of the window as the birds, encased in silhouette against a background of light, grace the last inches of sky and then join the black mass of the bridge and its hinges - then, slowly but surely, a feather falls and gains drifting momentum towards the vacuum that is my open plan flat. The feathers enter and fall lightly to the floor - from there I pick them up and take them to the stair case. The stair case, as I am sure you will know by now, makes up the centre and dividing space of my studio-cum-living arrangement. Apart from the occasional obvious spell of a line between where I work and where I sleep, the flat is currently in disarray - and the feathers add nothing to what should be a goal in clarity for me to define what is work and what is not. My old sofa now exists on the studio side as a sculpture, a broken function that folds in orange display with wooden feet jutting out from the top rather than the bottom. The coffee table also now exists on the brink of my studio space, on its side. It just needs one last push over on to its back and it will be ready for painterly affect. I have four feathers in my hand and as I approach the stair case I trip over the cable for a light fitting, a four meter line of black wire affixed to the ceiling. The fitting comes loose as a result of my momentum, and the energy from my forward steps transfers like a pendulum making my body top heavy. As I fall head first to the ground my hands involuntarily follow my arms and spread out in a wing-like fashion, the four feathers again reach the air. My nose hits the ground with a  tremendous force. The feathers float with a slight sweat taken from my hand, which affects their gravitational balance. The interior conditioning of dust momentarily contorts their time in the middle of the room directly above the stair case. I turn over on to my back and watch them above - they create a perfect circle in slow motion, a perfect mobile with no attachments and no armatures. A new art work by mistake? There is a gust of wind and its as if the vacuum of my interior habitation flicks a switch, the pressure in the room reverses and in one fell swoop the air is sucked out of the window - the feathers follow this gulf stream and rush for the outside. I lose them in one blink on an eye.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Navigating Bempton Cliffs: "plan this step and each new move as you would equate one word upon the next."Both Ross Hamilton Frew and myself are drawing in the same place - as we draw the rain hits the tin roof of the studio and the wind shakes the corrugated shelter above our heads. For me these sounds re-surface the memory of joint, even familial, activity - caravan holidays and towed activity routed in walks along the East Coast of Yorkshire. Activities jammed between the sea and the North York Moors.  I then get to thinking about the language of this coast line. I should, by anyone's reckoning of a taught or learnt process of acquiring a language, be fluent with these edges of the land by now - yet it is so long since I was there. Whenever we were there as a family our path's were clouded by the sea-mists and we never saw but a puffin in the sky. If only this treaded language, this colloquialism of navigating the land, was the same as getting your ass round a gallery and understanding the walls and the floors and the ceilings. With written or spoken language you learn that one word means the following word should make sense - as should one step lead perfectly to the next along the path in front of you. Landmass has no grammatical structure, yet if the steps you made all those years ago on those caravan holidays amongst the mist are copied and pasted in to a white-cube, is the language then translatable?Back to the collective drawing exercise and the conversation in the studio under the rain. I finish one line like I finish a sentence and start another line with another word as I walk from one end of the room to the other.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 The sun is shining and I hope it holds for tomorrow before all the leaves fall of the trees that back my top floor tenement. I haven't sat here for a while, just as I have not really blogged properly for a while. I thought this point, on the kitchen table next to the herbs that match the leaves on the other side of the window, was a good point to list some of the projects I have been working on and other current projects. Perhaps these explain the absence of direct commentary on my work in the past months.A bulletin of sortsFirst up is a two-person show called IPSO FACTO with fellow artist Ross Hamilton Frew at SUPERCLUB in Edinburgh, this opens on the 28th of October. Ross and myself have been working on the project loosely headed as "this is meditative" since around January 2011. IPSO FACTO is the culmination of new works in a space using drawing as a model for collaborative exchange: each work in some way will support the work of the other in a matter of fact (or indirect) manner. We have been keeping a separate Project blog for this on Artists talking called Drawing as a forum for collaborative exchange…Running up to the IPSO FACTO show Ross and myself also have an image that it exemplary of our curatorial approach printed in Drawing Paper 4, a drawing/exhibition/newspaper produced in Liverpool and distributed nationally - http://www.issuu.com/mikecarney/docs/drawingpaper4... 'Abandoned house' is also a result of 'this is meditative', the collection of work by Ross and myself in one room in a derelict house near Lumsden in Aberdeenshire (I posted two separate works up to Ross there) comments on the dialogue we explore in the blog and also sets curatorial makers for IPSO FACTO - http://www.rich-taylor.co.uk/archive/abandoned-hou... On a more Individual level I am to get two pieces of my creative writing published in two art journals. The text 'One moving but still the other still but moving', is to be published in Gnommero: Exactitude, the third publication in a series produced by Sarah Tripp and Eona McCallum that respond to Italo Calvino's 'Six Memos for a New Millennium'. This publication will be launched at an event at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow that maps the art journal activity in Glasgow today (other journals will include 2HNB and Victor & Hester).Another text '-Repeated act, Concentricity-' is to be published in Critical Writing Collective's upcoming journal COPY // Unfold - http://www.rich-taylor.co.uk/textworks/repeatactA recently concluded project with writer (and now PHD student at University of Aberdeen) Sophie Frost records the wandering conversations and stories that are 'The Sea (the artist) the writer (The Sea'. This text and artwork were printed with the support of The Mutual Glasgow and Vault Art Glasgow - http://www.rich-taylor.co.uk/textworks/seaartistwr...A fast approaching collaborative work will surface come mid-November 2011. Artist Kimbal Bumstead and myself have been working collaboratively for the past four years now and our recent project 'two men one room' reaches Edinburgh with a week long residency that maps alternative space within the city and then culminates with a series of events and exhibition at The Old Ambulance Depot off Leith Walk in the north of the City (November 26th - 28th).Another working project is with fellow artist and friend Jennifer Picken. Proposed title: "embargoed" Read Jennifer's blog... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 "I plan to re-visit the work made during these excursions - make them in to episodes the commemorate their existence. We have plenty of footage between us. What do you say?"The failed system?Last year has past and this year has, almost, gone through the same trajectory - as we reach Winter it is cold enough to remember the approach of new year. Back to last year, 2010. A culmination of mustering thoughts on moving away from Glasgow  joined with a fellow artist and friend buying her soft top yellow car. We both worked together in another capacity, drank together with too much capacity and ate together with lack of capacity on her behalf. This, strangely, developed in to a mutual understanding of creative isolation - both a longing for it geographically and a feeling of it within a wider city and a consolidated art scene. To deal with this notion of isolation we crafted an idea from within fictional desire. After watching the enough science-fiction and talking about it enough we jumped in to her car and headed northwards toward Loch Lomond and its surrounding areas. We went in search of that which Glasgow did not give us: space. Space in the sense of a designated area for us to make work comfortably and head-space beyond and above the city.On the north-western tip of the loch we came across a mire - a pebbled and wooden enclosed stretch of water that acted as an over flow for a river that ran its course eventually hitting the loch itself. From the mire, in the distance and set in to the hills was a waterfall. In one place we had immediate privacy and time to experiment and record happenings, we also had perspective, as the waterfall in the distance - connected by the flow and idea of water - gave us a destination. We made three visits in all. One to re-arrange the water's path and to make film works next to the mire under the beating sun.The next to talk to the deer and its family under the pylon, beyond the fence in the field next to the mire.And the last to climb barefoot through the bracken in the rain, to hit the mist of the waterfall itself and whiteness its scale and its affect upon usIn all these visits and our talking about them became something of a method for working through and on to ideas. The system of working became fictional in our ability to re-visit it in our heads. We named the system 'Dagobah', after the swamp moon of Jedi teachings featured in George Lucas's Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 A current project is 'Parallèlement à l'intérieur (au-dessus de)’, an explorative run-through of work with another artist, Jennie Picken, that will culminate in a show in Glasgow in 2012, along with a partnering show in Amsterdam.The plan of action was to post physical elements of work to one another, myself being in Edinburgh and Jennie being in Amsterdam. However - as much as the project is about notions of communication and distribution to muster an overall idea of what the final shows will be (and to define the content of them) - snail mail has failed us: an original drawing and set of photographs have now been lost somewhere between Scotland and The Netherlands via Airmail.Perhaps I wrote the wrong address down - or perhaps Jennie's mail box is not big enough for a square package to fit through: but the result is we are now looking at alternative methods of sharing these ideas via email. And we are looking at the material of email and the possibilities of this in order to develop a language that progresses the project without giving too much away.So we now progress with the project using Skype to catch up with one another and to discuss developments. We are also waiting for certain 'terms and conditions' to not be 'embargoed' - so we can distribute ourselves freely. For now, our project and its whereabouts - somewhere in between here and there above the sea - remains deliberately embargoed too...... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Story of tracker Dusty chalky dancing travels"How can you make art about our dance?" Moving to Glasgow involved a train journey north in the summer of 2009, and then a final a climb up to the west end of the city, following my nose, to Kelvinbridge on the Great Western Road, which takes you to Loch Lomond and beyond: one bag under one arm, another over the adjacent shoulder. 

Later I arrived at the third and top most floor of the tenement where I would reside for one and a half years: using my new set of keys, I entered the flat. Waiting for me was my landlord on the eve of her departure for a month-long trip to the south of England and my new lodger, an odd little drifting number in a summer dress who was well balanced on the balls of her feet. She greeted me with a smile.

A few days later the lodger invited one or two friends round for a meeting - I was keen to stick my nose in.
 First two girls and then a third and finally, after I had been introduced to them all so far, a fourth came in through the front door, through the hall and in to the kitchen where we sat. I shook her hand in greeting, she smiled a wry sort of smile, and I took my leave of the table and left the room. A week and a few more meetings later their plans were set amidst. But they needed help. And they would get it and get at it.

My time with The Group, you could say, started at this point in time. Now 2012, almost three years later, I have taken many a task and gone on one or two dusty chalky dancing travels with them. 

They push on and they give more, and they get more in return. They live in Glasgow still and many of their meetings, although not in the same flat, still happen in the kitchen... or the living room or the bedroom or the dining room.

The same lodger who hosted the first few meetings visits me from time to time in my new studio apartment in the centre of Edinburgh above the rail station. There, we battle and toil for words and for domestic objects to polish and shine in to art-forms. She prefers to stand upon them, ride them and holler or whistle from them. I prefer to steal them, much like I steal words, and drag them in to my studio and embellish them with meaning. Whistle blower your table shine is mine. THE BARREL THE ICE THE SNOWRemember our outstretch to the gallery opening in the twilight months of 2009, chalk was on the walls as well as art and we whirled the room practicing and outlaying our movements in time with each other and apart from everything else. And before this, atop the shattered tower at the back of Trongate - we sketched out our footwear and step tip toes. Then, in the summer of 2010, together we built on our display in an empty warehouse scattered with sculpture. And then the same warehouse a month or two on shovelled under the snow, the ice and the barrel.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 I am finding some time to blognot touched this for a while and not even so sure why… truth be told, I am currently rendering a film for a project that is to be screened during an emerging artist symposium at Tramway this weekend - so I decided to whip out TextEdit and get typing...The film aforementioned is about male pattern balding and has gone through several phases using different creative practitioners at different points. First point of call - the artist Oliver Braid, who is leading the project, spied me out on Facebook, stalked my pictures and decided I was "physiologically apt" - i.e. going bald! He then contacted me to ask if I would be interested in producing a film using a writer's monologue, which crafts a certain nervous character, who has dealt with the balding process. I said yes. I received the monologue via email and enlisted two actors to play out the script to camera - I got some interesting results and hopefully the film will end up having my mark on it as well as the actor's and the writer's.… truth be told, I am currently rendering this film. I have not made a film like this before and feel oddly under script and within brief. Not sure I like briefs. Hopefully the result will be something aesthetically interesting as well as narratively engaging.I will get used to it Oliver and so will you…Another project that is well underway is a collaboration with The Mutual Charter for GI 2012 and artist Jennifer Picken: we have made it to manifesto three and then four five and (six) will result in a show for the festival in April/May and a residency in  Amsterdam that develops the project in to a considered exhibition Netherlands style. See here for more information - http://cargocollective.com/audessusdeI was reading through an old guide to Amsterdam round at my partner's flat the other day. The way they described the gay scene was something of archaic - perhaps it remains the same…I have heard that if you pick the correct time before noon (approximately 30 seconds prior to the chimes) and wait at one end of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam - and then ride your bicycle with constant speed underneath the museum, you will hear each clock hit '12' as you enter in to one side of the tunnel, cruise through the underside, and then reach the other end.Reach the other end, tunnel and back again with soundfile_name.mov... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493 Certain bits and certain bobsI do remember a time when hours were passed in great halls of sculpture, my friend hailed from Wrexham or thereabouts, she now resides in Korea - but for a time we inhabited the same imaginary open plan living space. There we read everything backwards, each word was taken, read, and then the word before was to follow instead of lead. A strange performed language exuded from a need to translate your speech for others to understand: hand movements and head nods were needed to emphasise certain bits and certain bobs. To Align or to DerailBelow is a film, which is being developed through modes of translation for an upcoming exhibition in Glasgow (mentioned in last post).[Computer.m4v "A film developed from original 'snap shot' footage documenting travels made and repeated, underlaid with sound from buskers and singers in a tunnel in Belem (a suburb of Lisbon, Portugal). This film aims to translate the idea of communicating with other artists and groups by presenting a layering of image and text to configure or dis-configure - to align or derail."]... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493