Once In a Universe

Where to start? Probably best to forget about the gap between then and now and just begin with today.

There are these things I made last year.

They looked a bit like boulders… but like bad scenery boulders. They were made for a particular setting but as a spin off from another project: Improbable Experiments With Growing Stones, where I was, improbably, trying to grow some stones, like this:

and this

and then these ones I made, which looked like this at Newhaven Fort

But when it was time to bring the “boulders” back from Newhaven Fort, I felt a bit differently about them. They seemed to have taken on a life of their own. I herded them out of the Fort and into a van to bring them home.

Five of them overwintered in  my garden, hibernating, huddled in a corner against the wall with the snails and the fox who sleeps nearby.

Two of them stayed indoors, quietly evolving into something new in my mind…

They awoke in my studio this week

along with no-ocytes and clustermorphs

and other things

that have been biding their time until the right moment.

It’s getting pretty crowded in there.

I’m back in the studio this week after two months of domestic distractions, travel and other work, so going back to my August blog is a great way to re-ground myself and pick up the threads from where I was then:

“… next week will be different again as I will be spending six days in the Open Studios which are part of Towner Gallery’s Art School programme…”

That week in August at Towner turned out to be hugely significant – a break-through week, because it was the start of a process through which I began transforming the Blood Music cluster-based work into something completely new. The challenges I set myself to re-use and re-purpose materials, plus the basic practicalities of what to do with the huge Blood Music clusters filling my studio, prompted some radical thinking. This combined with the week long period working in public at Towner provided the impetus and continuity to try something new and persevere with it. I began the physically challenging process of crushing and compacting the clusters, thinking about the processes involved in geological transformation, binding them tightly with tape, and eventually wrestling them into submission as much smaller, solid objects.

So now, back in the studio, I’m trying to refine this process with the remaining clusters, but most importantly trying to work out how to record this process of transformation as this seems as important (if not more so) than the objects themselves.

From this…

to this…

It’s not every week that you get to travel with a bunch of great, friendly, broad-thinking artists to see some fantastic international contemporary art in an extraordinary city, but that’s what happened to me last week when I visited the Istanbul Biennial with a-n’s Artists Council.

Earlier this year I was really honoured to be selected as one of the members of Artists Council, an advisory group tasked with feeding in to a-n’s policy and strategy making and ensuring that artists are kept at the absolute heart of everything a-n does. The Artists Council is made up of a group of artists of all ages and backgrounds from across the UK  reflecting the diversity of a-n’s membership. Generally speaking they’re a pretty dynamic bunch, so it was especially exciting to spend five days in their very good company and get to know them a bit better.

We also met up with a delegation from East Street Arts in Leeds and some really useful conversations were had and links made as we bumped in to each other throughout the week in galleries, restaurants and on the Biennial boat.

Monster Chetwynd’s Hybrid Creatures installed on the island of Büyükada

Over the course of four days we were treated to a  packed programme of visits to galleries and museums to see some outstanding artworks from familiar and less familiar names including Monster Chetwynd and Charles Avery, Phoebe Cummings and Ernst Haeckel, and artists new to me such as Eva Kot’atkova, Pia Arke and Haegue Yang.

Above: detail from Simon Fujiwara’s installation, It’s A Small World

Art highlights for me and many others were Simon Fujiwara‘s fantastically memorable installation, It’s A Small World, and Mika Rottenberg‘s film, Spaghetti Blockchain,  both of which managed to draw me in with their quirky humour and superficially seductive aesthetics to hold me in thrall while the dark undertones of the work unsettled my mind.

Above: Still from Mika Rottenberg’s Spaghetti Blockchain.

The great value of the trip though really lay in the relationships which were cemented, the conversations about art, artists and arts practice, and the shared feeling that as artists we can all work together to support each other and maybe help to make the world a better place.

It was great to finally get the boulders installed at Holding The Fort*, but even though I had prepared myself that the work which had seemed so big in my studio would appear much smaller in its new context, it was slightly disappointing to see that happen in reality. However, never one to turn down a challenge, I’m ready to start to think about how to up the scale again in the autumn when current projects end.

A highlight of Holding The Fort for me though has been the opportunity to make another piece of new work in situ – a site-specific drawing which took place over two days. The idea arose from the fact that Newhaven Fort is made from approximately six million bricks. I find it hard to imagine what six million bricks look like, so I decided to try to count the bricks in one room in the Eastern Magazine. Although I haven’t managed to add up the final tally yet the work has taken on a life of its own in the cell-like space and the smudgy markings on the bricks are reminders of the passing of time.

One of the things I love about my job is the sheer variety of it all, and this couldn’t have been better demonstrated than over the past few weeks when I traveled seamlessly from the dirty, messy and physically challenging work of this drawing and the boulder-making, to the necessarily clean-hands/clean-worktops environment needed for framing. It was exciting to frame nearly twenty new drawings ready for the next thing – an Open House ** which is part of Artwave Festival in East Sussex which opened today. And next week will be different again as I will be spending six days in the Open Studios which are part of Towner Gallery’s Art School programme. Watch this space!

*Holding The Fort is at Newhaven Fort until 26 August

**Fairways Collective Open House is at 5 Fairways Road, Seaford, BN25 4EJ, 11:30am to 5pm, on the 18th and 31st August and 1st September.

Well we all know the weather has had a big impact this week with yesterday being the second hottest day on record and super-high humidity contributing to storms and downpours. Well to be honest, I know in the overall scheme of things this is only a small thing, but I am actually really suffering from this weather disruption at the moment. For the past four weeks the weather has been firmly on my side, allowing me to spread out of the studio and into the garden while making my boulders. Fantastic! The warm sun has been my friend, making many litres of glue and paint dry quickly and speeding me towards the impending installation deadline. But now, with the exhibition rapidly approaching this weekend, the weather has turned against me!

Yesterday I failed my self-imposed deadline for finishing the work when soaring temperatures slowed me down and evening storms put paid to late work. And now under dark skies and with final coats to apply, here I am blogging, while waiting for paint to dry. (The note on the tin said “Do not apply in more than 85% humidty”…)

Oh well.

On a more positive note, in a brief interlude from boulder-making, I spent a brilliant morning with artist Vicki Painting a couple of weeks ago. Vicki is a photographer and we worked together to realise an idea I’d had in my head for a while since developing my cluster work at the Milton Street and Martyr’s residencies earlier this year. Here is the result:

Photo by Vicki Painting from a collaboration with Judith Alder.

The finished boulders will be at Holding The Fort from this Sunday 28 July to 26 August come hell or high water.

More of Vicki’s Cluster portraits can be seen at the Open House we’re both participating in as part of Artwave Festival next month.