penultimate berlin drawing

drawing variants of medium

not very impressed with this one, but underneath it, or inside of it, seems to be a recurring/returning cuboid fascination. stemming from a quote by goethe, regarding the vertical and horizontal drives of growth, my drawings occasionally render that concept as cubes. in this pattern there is also an alternating vertical and horizontal mark making going on.

this has sculptural potential as a form of drawing apparatus. i'm thinking that maybe the hanging branch on the bottom could have the lower, pointed end burnt into charcoal, so that it marks the paper on the ground. the wind or vibration from the upper branch could generate the motion and create the drawing. this could form just one part of the work, the next step could be to then add my own drawing overlaid onto the charcoal markings. perhaps something more graphic, using ink and refined lines, or curves, as a counterbalance to the organic markings of the branch.

bikes have been a recurring motif lately too. surely as a result of the bicycle culture in europe. this drawing is supposed to be from a bird's eye view, looking down on two tree stumps that would still be in the ground (so the bike would actually be horizontal to the ground). might look good as a photograph.

tethered networks

there's definitely something going on with the suppressed growth of plants in my drawings. a lot of controlled or inhibited growth seems to be implied by holding down branches. bringing the upward trajectory of the growth drive down toward the earth or back toward the origin of the expansion. what that means for the intrinsic concept of the work, is yet to be fully articulated. but the notion of combative forces at play is clearly driving some of these drawings.

some networked nodes have also been appearing in the drawings. networks form a common body of work in my output. the mapping of the centres of the nodes has something of interest for me here, especially the way in which the geometry couples with the organic elements. something worth exploring more. the pulsating nature of the nodes reminds me of growth rings or rippled water. waves, oscillations, binary.

moon butts shrooms bikes

another sequences of photo-phrases for the collection.

'let's have an exhibition at my house', curated by renee cosgrave

exhibited my drawings as part of a group show in kreuzberg, berlin, curated by melbourne artist renee cosgrave.

other artists on show included renee herself, lucy james, carly fischer, and devon atkins. it was a very spontaneous show, with random people coming in off the street to look and some ex-pat friends too.

one of the random loclas who popped in for a look

more info here at anecdote

posterisation

so i was thinking i might collate the drawings i have been doing here in berlin and make myself a nice little poster. maybe a limited edition of 5 or 10, just a nice memento of the work i've done here and something pretty to shove on a wall at home or the studio.

here's a very very rough mock-up i threw together just as a reminder to myself really. i'll obviously need to scan the drawings in, probably change it all to greyscale and include far more drawings. i'll have close to 100 to pick from, so i might use as many as i can to make the poster look good.

it's still my intention to pick out the drawings that worked best and reproduce them on a larger scale, probably in different series. some of them will end up as preparatory sketches for sculptures, photos and video works.

twig geysers and more

these are throwbacks to some of my earliest drawings at the start of my postgrad. the earlier drawings usually had these branch/twig geyser things piercing through chairs mostly. here they are erupting from the ground and either swallowing up spheres or possibly projecting them out. for some reason i see the spheres as those exercise balls.

on the latter image, i can actually see the forms making some pretty fun outdoor lamps, with glowing spheres of colour.

this time the geysers are sort of interacting with trees. this makes me think about how my work sometimes shows nature or natural symbols that mutate and come alive to act/interact. there's something philosophical inside that concept, i'm sure of it.

another invented plant / speculative flora.

this is a random pattern arrangement of cumulative mark making. this sort of arrangement comes out quite regularly in my work. it's almost always just a build up of massed shapes, intuitively composed, to evoke the structure or pattern of chaos. or something. 

this one takes the leaf patterns i have been using lately as the units of form. i'm thinking that, rather than intuitive composition, i could use a mapping configuration, where each circular mass denotes a particular tree, perhaps from a park, from a walk that i take or some other territory.

more tethering, this time a sort of inward constriction of self control.

compulsive drawing

a few of these structures made their way into the sketchbook lately. i'm imagining that the hanging log is pierced by a copper rod. for what purpose, or for what potential meaning, i'm not sure yet. but i do like the idea of building a few of these in parks and just leaving them there.

with this one i'm thinking about the performance of pulling against trees. i can see it being just people, like some sort of tug-of-war. otherwise cars could be interesting too, with mud flicked up and smoke and a generally failed attempt at moving the tree.

just a random, proposition for a sculptural form. i think i was considering the idea of a circulated growth or cycle of movement.

so, this started off as an unplanned random pattern that turned into a kinda ugly web. i kept pushing it and it slowly evolved into a kinda ugly flower.

system animals

interesting little point made about the interrelation between the human animal and the systems we build, with an image of the chris cunningham video for bjork that, coincidentally, i used to show in my tutorials:

from nextnature, click here

title adaptation

small note: minor title change.

considering hermes just wasn't doing it for me any more. i've swung back toward the initial driving idea of my work which is related to amalgamation/integration/hybridisation of the natural and the cultural spheres.

still drawing out, literally, my major thematic premise through sketching. it's all there. in the stippling. in the flora. in the ropes. but the final articulation of that into a form suitably proscribed by words, phrases and sentences is a matter of continued coagulation.

drawings as plans

this last image is an extension on an idea that has been floating around for a while, nothing extremely fancy, just the desire to draw on branches or logs. this one has been scooped out (well, the drawing implies perhaps a plan to do so) and a pattern either drawn on, marquetry inserted or pattern carved in. it could even be something to consider doing to a living tree, not unlike lovers markings/graffiti/scar trees.

another idea for sculpture that has been floating around my sketchbooks for a while - often with bicycles in groups, as this seems to add a little more 'energy', but other options include caravans, trailers or carts.

 

these guys i'm not too sure about. bundles of sticks? they need something else to become anything worthwhile i think.

so i let these geometric ensembles grow out into something more 'organic', if such a thing could be said of them. there's a certain limitation with the page size on my moleskine notbook, meaning they reach only a fairly small size. i would definitely like to expand them out further into larger scale drawings, perhaps upwards of 50-100cm to really test out how they feel. but there seems to be something in them worth pursuing.

i'm not very happy with this particular drawing, but in some odd way, it still has some sort of 'something' about it. i dunno. the cubes on the branches seem pretty wrong, the one on the right is actually incorrectly drawn anyway and really grates on me. the whole thing seems quite a bit clumsy. i'm still thinking of options for the planned 'giant plants that are over-running villages' large-scale drawings. i was thinking they should be fenced off and tethered, as if the inhabitants don't know what to do with them, other than make some effort at containment.

more tree bondage imagery. i'm not really interested in doing figurative work in this particular wave of output, but it's sneaking in a little bit. still, the figure is buried under a mountain of hair, possibly to mask individual identity, possibly to evoke the pre-historic, i dunno, these are post-analytical musings. it does lend itself to possible scuptural form, in a robert gober-esque fashion.

this is in a slightly new vein of thought. these little 'system' sculpture ideas come up quite a bit. they pretty much drove my output for my honours year in 2008 and proved to be a fertile area. the sculpture for my solo show at seventh (Plane of Composition, 2010) utilised this sort of model, and it comes to mind especially here because of the water fountain element.

skulls coffee weeds

 

spring is time, which brings out the plants and the polizei

luckily for me, the polizei were out and about, booking poor cyclists who rode on the footpath. i mean, really, surely there's more important legal issues in berlin than the inhabitants occasionally straying with their vintage and leisurely driven two-wheelers onto the footpath. if i was emporer of berlin, i'd have the polizei taking a closer look at the pram situation. those things are way more dangerous. the cycling has never been a problem for us, and we've been walking many kms every day. oh well, at least it gave me some fodder for my photo-phrases.

as for the pot plants, with the arrival of spring the locals have been transporting their heavy containers of soil out onto the footpath in front of their apartment buildings to add a bit of colour and life. it's a lovely idea.

the geometry strikes back

these are kinda simple really, and don't carry any conceptual weight at all. well, they do if they're amalgamated into some sort of speculative flower patterning on imaginary flora, but on their own, they're just attractive little patterns. i quite like them as such and could very easily conjure up a series of them. they're all very intuitive, as per my current drawing output and at the moment, they're all symmetrical. in the future i'll try a few that break up into more random patterns and see how they look. they are a little bit like the Honeysucker_series of drawings, but much more 'severe'.

another alternative for their development is marquetry, something i have a mild curiosity to learn one day. i could see them as various timbers inlaid into the centre of a lovely large piece of sassafras or redgum or tasmanian myrtle.

and then there's these architecturally influenced objects, like fractured planes or walls. not sure where they've come from but they seem very sculptural. they are almost always intersected by other planes bearing organic life or pierced by organic elements directly. maybe they are simply straight forward collisions of the geometric and the organic. i could imagine that the planes are made out of stone of some sort, basalt or granite, sitting heavily on the ground.

outpour

very productive evening of drawing, with more speculative flora forms and sculptural propositions.

control, control, there's so much control

another addition to my berlin photo-phrases series, this one is:  

clocks_polizei_pot plants

choosing the polizei as a subject was perhaps a little ambitious as there really isn't a great deal of them about the place. curiously though, they seem to be in different uniforms every time i see them.

now, as for the title, this was a comment from lucy when i told her my new set of images. time, confined nature and law enforcement - she has a point.

there's been a little introduction of the geometric lately, creeping its way into the predominantly organic nature of my drawing. there's always a tendency to pattern, repetition and order in the organic anyway, coupled with its intrinsic tendency toward entropy, decay and chaos. these paradoxical and yet completely intertwined forces pull the universe forward in an oscillating rhythm.

i've been thinking more about the description that one of my teacher's gave my work - triffid logic. it's been many years since i read john wyndham's classic novel but the idea that my work evokes a sense of nature evolved, of nature empowered, of nature working together in a 'logical' fashion, presumably driven by an urgent sense of reclamation, definitely rings true.

additionally, my wife has mentioned that my work suggests an almost quixotic relationship with nature. a desperate desire to connect to, understand and unpack nature that ultimately only ever leads to a failure to fully be with nature. climbing trees, running into trees, inventing new speculative forms of flora, trying to extract sound or information from plants... all these things demonstrate a clear effort toward bonding with nature but almost always end in a failure to clearly articulate a fully mutual relationship with it. i'm trying rather desperately to be at one with nature, and in so doing, just emphasise the impossibility of that objective.

so, these thoughts sit at the back of my mind as my pen concocts images of plants that never existed and plans for potential performances with trees that almost always involve physical exertion, discomfort and bondage. now what does that tell you!?