Christmas cards

This year I decided to make a limited edition lino-cut. Having not done any print making for a very long time, it was a steep learning curve. First I had to track down some block inks – ultramarine was relatively easy to locate, but silver proved more illusive. Cornellisen's came up trumps finally, whilst the paper came from Atlantis.

I bought two thicknesses of Khadi Cotten Rag and wanted to use the thicker 320gms, but that involved an expensive afternoon at Thames Barrier Print Studios, hiring the use of their almost clapped out old press – with mixed results, and unfortunately there wasn't time to put on a second colour.

The edition was ultimately produced in my studio with a hand roller on the thinner paper. A test showed the ultramarine needed some black in the mix to create a stronger colour.

The mis-registering was deliberate – the white show-through on the silver layer meant to convey snow sitting on the 'fruit'.

Silhouettes and Kara Walker

The Willow Pattern, viewed by candle-light (the usual night-time illumination at the end of the 18th century), appears like a silhouette. A vogue for making silhouettes and the art of shadow portraiture swept across western Europe in the last decades of the 18th century. This may have been influenced by Chinese fretwork, and the lattice work of furniture maker Thomas Chippendale. Silhouette art became a popular pastime, requiring only scissors, a candle and black paper; the art was taught in fashionable schools, and a major treatise was written in 1792 by a Dutch artist August Edouart (who had previously been a painter on Delft pottery).

The art of the silhouette was already popular in the East. The Chinese enjoyed shadow plays, and at the end of the 17th century were making iron 'pictures', designed to be mounted in windows or in lanterns, or hung on walls. A noted iron artist in the early 18th century was T'ang P'eng, who often featured the willow tree. Similar depictions found their way into the English drawing room in friezes.

Kara Walker is a major American artist whose signature works are silhouettes – paper-cut installations, using black paper and scissors. I first saw her work at Tate Modern in 2007. Kara uses the 'genteel' art of 'the oppressor' to create stories that would never have been told at the time.

The historical setting for much of Kara Walker’s work is the American pre—Civil War antebellum South. While this is the backdrop for many of her scenes, Walker does not represent a necessarily truthful depiction of history. Fact, fiction, and fantasy are intertwined; exaggerated truths and fictionalized events parade as history lessons that viewers must unpack, sort out, and ultimately decide which elements are true. Through this scrambling of “truth,” The artist is also commenting on the way that official history, particularly that of African Americans, is just as constructed as her stories.

Kara Walker describes her work as both visual and literary. Literature such as southern romance novels, historical fiction, slave narratives, and contemporary novels influence the artist's practice of storytelling, while some texts are directly referenced in her pieces. Like a novelist, Walker employs characters, setting and action to convey a story. These narratives are not always linear, however, and don’t necessarily include a clear plot line. In the artist’s words, “There is always a beginning and there’s never a conclusion.” Walker is interested in the stories we tell about ourselves, and specifically, a desire for a narrative about “African America” that engages the past, present, and future.

Text and image © of Walker Art Center (all artworks and quotations by Kara Walker © the artist, courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York).

© Installation view of My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo: Sheldan C. Collins.

whitney.org/Exhibitions/KaraWalker

About an academic dissertation...

Another academic request recently received...

I am a PhD student and working on my dissertation about "Use of Readymade & Found Ceramics Tableware & Porcelain figurines in Contemporary Arts". I have prepared the questions in the below link to be answered by ceramics artists and related professionals from all over the world. Could you please fill out this questionnaire. That would be a great contribution to my doctoral dissertation. Thank you in advance for your valuable time.

Aygun Dincer Kirca
aygundincerkirca.blogspot.com/

The Fragments Conference

Beatrice Bazell runs an academic reading group called 'Fragments' at Birbeck College London, which she says, 'studies the incomplete, broken, partial or refracted'. She wrote to me to ask if it was OK to use an image of my work she'd spotted on this blog (see the 2008 post) to help advertise an event she's holding for her PhD students in early December.

Of course I said yes. In the event description, Beatrice credits the work: "the image is from thewillowpatternproject.blogspot.co.uk which showcases the stunning (and very pertinent) work of the artist Sue Lawes, reproduced by kind permission."

The event details are here, and hopefully I can join them on the day.

Adriana Varejao

Just discovered the Brazilian artist Adriana Varejao. Her work "alludes to expansion and transformation of cultural identity, yet continues the use of her theme of understanding the past in order to understand the present."

From the Liverpool Biennial website:

"Adriana Varejão’s paintings are cultural and artistic excavations. In particular, they trace the historical conjunctions that have produced contemporary Brazilian art, including Portugal’s long history of cultural cross-fertilisation with China. This complexity is exemplified by Varejão’s incorporation of traces of the transplanted Chinese artistic tradition with the Baroque influences of colonial culture.

"Portuguese Catholicism has produced some startlingly violent imagery, with graphic representations of martyrdom and disrupted flesh that literally dismember the classical ideal of the human body. These images have been absorbed into the indigenous cultural traditions of Brazil, in turn influencing the style and content of local Christian iconography.

"Portuguese artists exploited the narrative potential of Chinese ceramic decoration, especially the cobalt blue that became so popular with Europeans. It is common in both Portugal and Brazil to find blue tile decoration on the outside of buildings. Inside churches, panels of these tiles often tell stories from the lives of the saints. These narratives invariably end badly, with bodily degradation, flaying, dismemberment and various forms of penetration. A very popular secular use of the same medium is found in butchers’ shops to promote their wares. It is common to find images of joints of meat, poultry or fish hanging on hooks in these situations. The parallels with religious iconography are hard to miss.

"Varejão recalls the curious sight of damaged ceramic panels that were restored at some time in the past without any apparent attempt to reconstruct the original design. As a result, the figures have been fragmented and the frame has appeared within the composition in a bizarre configuration. For a modern viewer this fragmentation and disruption of the frame has distinctly cubist (and indeed post-structuralist) overtones, but it is also a compelling metaphor for cultural bricolage. The artist has used this strange history of iconographic conjunctions as a starting point for her paintings, often referring back to the blue tiles."

Meanwhile, this piece by Adriana made in 1997, titled Tea and Tiles II, sold for £391,250 in June this year.

Top image: copyright Victoria Miro
Middle image: copyright Liverpool Biennial
Bottom image: copyright Christies 

Samuel Smiths Old Brewery Bitter

Adjourning to The Angel pub (St Giles Street near Tottenham Court Road) with my niece Kate, after the TUC march yesterday (A Future That Works), was delighted to discover it is a Samuel Smiths pub with special Samuel Smith pumps.

Unfortunately my camera battery was dead so I didn't take a pic. This photo is copyright of Beerlens.

Also a pleasant surprise was that some old friends from Deptford were in the pub. They had also been on the march. Moyni said they come here cos the beer's cheap, and I was reminded that recently a nerdy beer fanatic had told me that Samuel Smiths pubs only serve Samuel Smith's products. The price of the beer is set by the brewery at an affordable rate.

Their website says that no branded or media advertised products are stocked and their pubs have no music or TVs. It was a fitting place to end a day of protest against capitalism, and the beer was very good, but now I will have to find out why they have chosen the Willow Pattern to decorate their pumps!

Shadow players Tim Noble & Sue Webster + March Against Austerity

© Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Blain | Southern 

In Willow, David Richard Quinter observes, "Thanks to whaling, one of the greatest revolutions in human history occurred at the end of the 18th century...whale-derived spermaceti oil came into general use, providing candles which burned with a clear, steady flame – giving us still our measure of 'candle-power'. It was not until 1784 that the public was able to extend day into night even more efficiently with the marketing by Aime Argand of a lamp utilizing a burner, wick and a chimney...If the nature and duration of work thereby changed, so did recreation, the arts and their performance and completion – and with bright light sources emerged the opposite: substantial, if not natural, shadows. At that point the silhouette hobby and its practitioner arose in Europe..."

"Sitting on a dresser shelf and viewed by whale oil- or candle-light...a row of Willow Pattern plates would appear much like a row of silhouettes..."

Yesterday, I caught Tim Noble & Sue Webster's show Nihilistic Optimistic at Blain | Southern in Hanover Square, on the way back from the TUC march. This is their first major solo show in London since 2006.

"Featuring six large-scale works, the show builds upon the artists' sustained investigation into self-portraiture, further deconstructing the relationship between materiality and form, which has been so intrinsic to their practice.

"The exhibition's dualistic title, Nihilistic Optimistic, responds to the oppositional forces present within these works, and indeed within the artists themselves; the show is at once constructive and destructive, hopeful and despairing. Light and shadow, form and absence, figuration and abstraction all inform one another and exist in a constant state of tension."

“There was a kind of deliberate choice not to use such recognisable objects any more, and to start fracturing things up - splintering things. So the mind has to wander in a different way, like you’re giving and taking, and it’s as much about the gaps and holes in between.” Tim Noble

www.blainsouthern.com/exhibitions/2012/tim-noble-and-sue-webster-nihilistic-optimistic

Meanwhile, here are some pictures from the March Against Austerity...

 

This is Independent journalist and commentator, Owen Jones, new star of the left. 

This yellow RMT SAYS NO! banner was adapted (with permission) from artwork I did for a local campaign against Academy Schools (DEPTFORD SAYS NO!), which was in turn borrowed from Shepard Fairey's SAY YES, who took that from Alexander Rodchennko's Everything old is new again.

Pierre Sauvageot: Harmonic Fields

On our first day in Weymouth, we went to the amazing sound installation in an old Portland quarry, Harmonic Fields. This was part of Inside Out Dorset and the piece itself was part of the London 2012 Festival (the 2012 cultural olympiad).

Harmonic Fields is an ensemble of 500 instruments, played by the wind. Harnessing this natural energy, life is breathed into the orchestra, creating a symphonic soundscape, unique to each visitor.

Pierre Sauvageot, creator of Harmonic Fields explains. “We’re constantly bombarded with new noises, which amplify, until we no longer listen. Sounds from Harmonic Fields are quiet and come at their own pace, like waves on the seashore. It is music in its simplest, most primal form.”

It was an overcast and windy day – the rest of the week was sunny and calm, and apparently there was less wind to play the instruments. In fact there was so little wind later in the week that the last day of the Paralympic sailing was cancelled.

Here's a video I found on YouTube...

My videos....




There was a lot of art on in Weymouth when I was there, although I'd missed much of the work in the B-Side Multimedia Festival as it was in its last week. Managed to see Stig Evans' Portland Colour Library of Portland and Beijing artist Lu Zheng's Waiting For Godot, both on Chisel Beach at Portland, but unfortunately missed a live gig by Bristol improv duo Eyebrow at Sandsfoot Castle since it was our last night.

Richard Harris: Jurassic Stones

Have just spent a week in Weymouth. Saw some art, but didn't see this...

 
Richard Harris's Jurassic Stones. See www.richardharrissculpture.co.uk/jurassic.html

The BBC covered the unveiling of the sculpture in February 2012: "A collection of 16 Jurassic stones mounted on steel plinths have been unveiled in Dorset to mark the 2012 Olympic games. The sculpture is near the Jurassic roundabout in Littlemoor, Weymouth, and is close to the venue for the Olympic and Paralympic sailing events.

The project is funded by Arts Council England, Dorset County Council and Weymouth and Portland Borough Council. It cost £335,000 and is part of a three-year project costing £725,000.

Each boulder weighs between two and nine tonnes. They were formed between 160 and 65 million years ago in an area of the county that would have been a tropical lagoon.

The sculpture was designed by Devon-born artist Richard Harris. Mr Harris said: "I was inspired to work with the large Bencliff Grit stones when they were revealed by the road excavations on Southdown Ridge, to preserve them and to give them a new life after millions of years under ground."

Karen Ryan

My neighbour John sent me this link...www.flickr.com/photos/bykarenryan/

Karen Ryan is a contemporary British designer. "Necessity, fate, autobiography and subversion are the key influences upon my practice. I generally use what others discard. Every discarded object is imbued with its own living history. This everyday provenance is used as narrative in the objects I design and make."