but the call of the paint whispers on the wind of wispy sable hairs and for first time in about 3 years, i'm at my dining table willing an image to life with coloured liquids.
July 20, 2011
painting the old fashioned way
it's such a surprise to find myself with paintbrush in hand these days. years of chasing down some sort of cutting edge to etch my name into for the sake of proving myself to the ivory towers of academia and imagined collectives of sagely artists had led me out of the land of paint and treading rather gleefully amongst forests of circuit board trees and ethernet cable fern fields.
but the call of the paint whispers on the wind of wispy sable hairs and for first time in about 3 years, i'm at my dining table willing an image to life with coloured liquids.
but the call of the paint whispers on the wind of wispy sable hairs and for first time in about 3 years, i'm at my dining table willing an image to life with coloured liquids.
wheeling out the record
i've got a group show coming up at uni in a couple of weeks, curated by the inimitable doctor michael vale. he's the sort of teacher you always remember coz he loves what he is teaching and he loves to see you enjoying the thing he is so passionate about. makes you wanna get better at what you do.
anyway, it's called beautiful volcanoes and it's gonna be at monash uni in the faculty gallery. there's a killer lineup and i'm pretty stoked to be included.
here's the first rough sketch of the sculpture i'm putting in.
it's a reworking of my series called Off The Record which has a few various iterations to it now. the series centres around the idea of nature as archive, with a central thematic totem of a log made into a turntable.
i've been in my studio tonight sketching up the mathematical logistics of all the component parts, trying to recycling materials i already have at hand, as i'm rather broke, a perennial artist situation really. nonetheless, after several pages of calculations and adjustments, i've got the plans all set and now have just under 2 weeks to build the whole thing. this is the daunting part, where there's the possibility you misjudge your segments by 2mm or you break a saw blade at the wrong time. but, all the while you're loving the joy of constructing something completely new from what was once a vague idea floating around in the catacombs of your mind. and then, of course, there's the fear that you'll fuck it up and look like a total arse in front of your friends and the professorial contingent of academic brainiacs you're trying desperately to win tacit approval from. but it beats about a million other things i could be doing so i'll crank up some crunchy beats and get the drill out.
yee-ha!
anyway, it's called beautiful volcanoes and it's gonna be at monash uni in the faculty gallery. there's a killer lineup and i'm pretty stoked to be included.
here's the first rough sketch of the sculpture i'm putting in.
it's a reworking of my series called Off The Record which has a few various iterations to it now. the series centres around the idea of nature as archive, with a central thematic totem of a log made into a turntable.
i've been in my studio tonight sketching up the mathematical logistics of all the component parts, trying to recycling materials i already have at hand, as i'm rather broke, a perennial artist situation really. nonetheless, after several pages of calculations and adjustments, i've got the plans all set and now have just under 2 weeks to build the whole thing. this is the daunting part, where there's the possibility you misjudge your segments by 2mm or you break a saw blade at the wrong time. but, all the while you're loving the joy of constructing something completely new from what was once a vague idea floating around in the catacombs of your mind. and then, of course, there's the fear that you'll fuck it up and look like a total arse in front of your friends and the professorial contingent of academic brainiacs you're trying desperately to win tacit approval from. but it beats about a million other things i could be doing so i'll crank up some crunchy beats and get the drill out.
yee-ha!
July 7, 2011
temporal overlap leads to painting
i started two concurrent series of drawings:
1) Calendar_series is a set of 12 abstract geometric drawings, each created on the first day of every calendar month, starting from the winter solstice 2011 and finishing at the winter solstice in 2012,
2) FullMoon_series is a set of 12 abstract organic drawings, each one created on every full moon, starting from the winter solstice 2011 and finishing at the winter solstice in 2012.
these series form part of a project called system overlap_time that i will be exhibiting at a commercial gallery late in 2012. very exciting stuff - more details will follow.
part of the project will include two large scale colour paintings based on each of the two drawing series. i just painted up a scale 1/3 scale study of the Calendar_totem image to see how it might look and i think it came out pretty well...
1) Calendar_series is a set of 12 abstract geometric drawings, each created on the first day of every calendar month, starting from the winter solstice 2011 and finishing at the winter solstice in 2012,
2) FullMoon_series is a set of 12 abstract organic drawings, each one created on every full moon, starting from the winter solstice 2011 and finishing at the winter solstice in 2012.
these series form part of a project called system overlap_time that i will be exhibiting at a commercial gallery late in 2012. very exciting stuff - more details will follow.
part of the project will include two large scale colour paintings based on each of the two drawing series. i just painted up a scale 1/3 scale study of the Calendar_totem image to see how it might look and i think it came out pretty well...
great doco
a series of documentaries about the application of systems thinking in society, called 'all watched over by machines of loving grace'
the second in the series, called 'use and abuse of vegetational concepts', touches on much of my thesis territory.
watch it here
the second in the series, called 'use and abuse of vegetational concepts', touches on much of my thesis territory.
watch it here
July 4, 2011
wiffle waffle
so there's a little under 8 months to go in my phd and i have to really start bringing everything together. so here's a quick little rundown of where i'm at and where i think i'm heading:
exhibition:
the idea is to create an indoor garden of terrariums and pot plants, all hooked up to a variety of sensors. at the end of each day, the information collected from the sensors will be processed, and the results will trigger automated software to buy/sell shares in selected commodities on the australian stock exchange (probably industrial stocks for companies that mine rare earth minerals).
i need to consult experts in sensors and experts in trading software, which i'm in the very early stages of doing.
thesis:
revisiting systems theory, and its application to both art making processes and art criticism/analysis.
systems theory was of interest to artists around the late 1960s and early 1970s during the growth and development of conceptual art practices. it fell out of favour about as quickly as it was first taken up but i think there's still untapped potential in some of its approaches. the main theorist who brought systems thinking to art was jack burnham, who began to write less and less interestingly on the topic before abandoning it completely and disappearing into esotericism. much of what he echoed about systems thinking was translated across from natural sciences and has been consistently evolving in that area - into complexity, emergence, chaos theory and network theory - whilst still being pretty much left along by the fine arts.
much of the ambivalence in the art context to systems theory, stems from its associations with militarism and corporatism and its apparent implication of logical processes - all things anathema to any considerations of the creative avant garde. however, the internet has its foundation in the military and yet has gone on to be considered the most democratising development since the printing press, so abandoning or ignoring systems theory on these grounds is limiting. additionally, i think the variety of names applied to this way of thinking - systems, networks, analysis etc - raises concerns about its application in the fine arts, where freedom of intuition, randomness, non-heirarchical concerns are the touchstones of practice.
ironically, aspects of systems thinking goes straight to the core of these very 'art-centric' issues.
in some ways i am looking to work backward from the most recent developments of actor network theory (ANT), and most recently 'compositionism' as developed by the founder of ANT - Bruno Latour, to the origins of systems theory and touching on the art-focused ideas raised by Jack Burnham. this takes a path through mostly scientific-style theories, with foundations in anthropology, sociology, metaphysics and economics, and their potential application to the practice and analysis of art making.
exhibition:
the idea is to create an indoor garden of terrariums and pot plants, all hooked up to a variety of sensors. at the end of each day, the information collected from the sensors will be processed, and the results will trigger automated software to buy/sell shares in selected commodities on the australian stock exchange (probably industrial stocks for companies that mine rare earth minerals).
i need to consult experts in sensors and experts in trading software, which i'm in the very early stages of doing.
thesis:
revisiting systems theory, and its application to both art making processes and art criticism/analysis.
systems theory was of interest to artists around the late 1960s and early 1970s during the growth and development of conceptual art practices. it fell out of favour about as quickly as it was first taken up but i think there's still untapped potential in some of its approaches. the main theorist who brought systems thinking to art was jack burnham, who began to write less and less interestingly on the topic before abandoning it completely and disappearing into esotericism. much of what he echoed about systems thinking was translated across from natural sciences and has been consistently evolving in that area - into complexity, emergence, chaos theory and network theory - whilst still being pretty much left along by the fine arts.
much of the ambivalence in the art context to systems theory, stems from its associations with militarism and corporatism and its apparent implication of logical processes - all things anathema to any considerations of the creative avant garde. however, the internet has its foundation in the military and yet has gone on to be considered the most democratising development since the printing press, so abandoning or ignoring systems theory on these grounds is limiting. additionally, i think the variety of names applied to this way of thinking - systems, networks, analysis etc - raises concerns about its application in the fine arts, where freedom of intuition, randomness, non-heirarchical concerns are the touchstones of practice.
ironically, aspects of systems thinking goes straight to the core of these very 'art-centric' issues.
in some ways i am looking to work backward from the most recent developments of actor network theory (ANT), and most recently 'compositionism' as developed by the founder of ANT - Bruno Latour, to the origins of systems theory and touching on the art-focused ideas raised by Jack Burnham. this takes a path through mostly scientific-style theories, with foundations in anthropology, sociology, metaphysics and economics, and their potential application to the practice and analysis of art making.
critiquing colonial romanticism
occasionally i write reviews, normally about emerging art shows, but there's a big exhibition on at the ngv about eugene von guerard and given that my thesis deals with our culture's relationship with its environment, i thought i'd go along and analyse it into words...
swarm of activity
having settled down into place at daylesford, i've been able to get back into some serious art making. i just completed a new series of works based on the cumulative effects of swarming behaviours - think bees working together, flocks of birds flying in the sky, shoals of fish etc. the drawings are abstracted interpretations of this, ink on paper, 30 x 40cm.
the series is titled Swarm_circle and there are 6 in the series.
i got one framed up, in tasmanian oak, so i could have one for our growing art collection on the walls. i've also had some preliminary interest in them so i'm offering the remaining 5 for sale too, or for an art swap.
the series is titled Swarm_circle and there are 6 in the series.
i got one framed up, in tasmanian oak, so i could have one for our growing art collection on the walls. i've also had some preliminary interest in them so i'm offering the remaining 5 for sale too, or for an art swap.
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