install

today was all about getting all the materials into place, testing all the wires, the microphones and the amps, the lights and all the amount of powerboards and extension cables needed.

setting up the first speaker-lamp;

connecting the contact mic, the power, and the speaker to the amp

setting the component elements into place

one of the necessary environmental conditions to consider is the lighting. often something easily overlooked. most times, galleries are very well lit, sometimes with track lighting or spots. for this installation i wanted the lighting to be a bit dramatic, a bit like a fractured infrastructure, as if the lights have either not yet been put into their place, or had been taking away from where they were meant to be.

 sitting the bluestone cobblestone on fluoro lights

placing the lights on the speaker-lamps 

seemed to elicit the best effect in the space

butterflies are thoughts

all the bits and pieces of the artwork, like the component elements of a mini-system, are all constructed, soldered, drilled, tied and taped.

all four speaker-lamps built:

starting to look a lot like a system now

once constructed i needed to tested out how the lamps are going to look when i set them out as an apparent grouping of behaving objects.

first i set one up and just looked at it, to get a sense of its feeling, or effect/affect.

of course, there's a particularly anthropomorphic element, 
not least thanks to a particular digital animation

but then once they are grouped, another dynamic comes into play. a structural, systematic, amplification of the repeated behaviour, however that 'behaviour' may be implied to any given viewer.

   

 starting with 2 speaker-lamps 

(the log here will actually be a large bluestone cobblestone)

 

a third speaker-lamp, increasing the sense of implied power and implied network

introducing the slightly different speaker-lamp,

the one directed at the cobblestone protruding from the wall of the gallery

all four speaker-lamps, 
all mounted on structural pine (another infrastructural material reference)

the last image is taken from down lower to try and describe the feeling of intimidation that i feel like i'm getting from these objects that seem somehow to be with some sort of agency. the brick in the middle has replaced the log so i could get a better feel for the materiality of a rock.

here's hoping that there is a decent sound coming from the contact microphones on the pipes. even if not, i think the sculptural form of the work still carries some of the desired feeling i had hoped to evoke.

happy with this layout prototype i'm now all ready to take the whole lot of pieces into the gallery space and set them up to suit the dynamics of the architecture with which it will exist. tomorrow is install day.

  
this is everything all sorted out so i can pack it all up and take it into the city on the train

studio drawings

here's a couple of drawings on my studio walls at the moment:

i've got about 30-40 speaker cones i've collected from hard rubbish over the years and am thinking about building a giant, geometric wave that is embedded with them all. this is an early plan for that idea.

the scale of the enterprise is a little daunting, but summer might be the perfect time to bring this to fruition.

 

this is a few little sculptural ideas, i really would like to re-visit some kinetic elements in my work. i made a working fountain in a large sculpture for a show at seventh gallery in feb2010, and quite liked the feel of it. so these are some thoughts about fountain based works.

this is a large ink drawing, about 1m by 1m, that took many hours to make. 

i'd like to make a series of these, probably with more cuboid elements to them, so this sits on my wall to remind me to get back to it at some point. the series would be similar to the HoneySucker_series i recently made for a show at shifted gallery, and have almost sold out of now (8 out of 12 have been sold). those will be on display at the sofitel hotel in melbourne in 2011. ideally, another series of these cuboids would be completed by middle of 2011, and i think probably about 6 would suffice.

  
these ones are based on an idea expressed by goethe, that plants grow with two dominant and equal forces - vertical drive and horizontal drive. so they are an abstracted representation of those forces, and in some way remind me of mondrian's paintings of trees, with his vertical and horizontal abstractions of the branches. the patterning on the cuboids is an abstracted representation of grass.