January - Bernard Tschumi and Ian Kiaer

Looking back at the month - the snow interrupted normal progress for almost three weeks, but it had its benefits. Life slowed down, I learnt to walk everywhere, and it was good to do less better.

I am focussing on the coming year and on the kind of work I would like to make. It is not predictable, but I like to feel anyway that my work is informed by ideas and by the experience of other artists. I am looking again at the writings and drawings of Bernard Tschumi, the Swiss architect, made for his theoretical projects in the 1980s. He was exploring the idea that, rather than being a static entity, architectural space is enlivened and given meaning by human events and movements, and he includes these notations in his drawings. Later he built according to these principles.

Bernard Tschumi Drawing for Manhattan Transcripts 4 (detail)

I have spent some time reading about the art of Ian Kiaer. I have admired his work ever since I first saw it at the Venice Biennale of 2003. Amongst all the large pieces by famous contemporary artists (for example, Matthew Barney), there lurked tiny evocative installations made of waste and common materials.

Kiaer's show at the Bloomberg was in a huge white space with a few similarly fragmentary objects placed within it. These are usually everyday materials - chunks of polystyrene, tiny long life milk containers, scraps of cloth. On one wall was a battered sheet of reflective aluminium, on another Kiaer's faded and elusive canvases. The objects have a strong feeling of being unfinished and potential and of being alive.

A small (imagined) reconstruction

With apologies to Ian Kiaer

According to Melissa Gronlund, who wrote the text "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" that accompanies this exhibition, Kiaer is redefining the traditional contrast between the"creative" and haphazard process of the studio and the "closure" of the gallery. He does this by bringing the fragments and detritus of the studio (packing materials for example) into the gallery, and allowing these to represent not only themselves and the associations made by the viewer, but also a deep theoretical investiagtion, so that "the enormity and complexity of the object's references are almost inversely proportional to the modesty of their language" (Gronlund).

Kiaer's complex references are drawn from philosophy, history, film, architecture, theatre, poetry and literature and undoubtedly give power and energy to the work. But this power also comes unconsciously from the everyday nature of the fragmented pieces. Unregarded scraps can evoke memories and associations of what is absent, of moments when we are "off-duty" and unguarded in our minds and emotions.

http://se8.org.uk/exhibitions/past/past/ for article by Nicholas de Oliviera and Nichola Oxley

Samuel Pepys and the beginnings of a thaw

Today weather is warmer and pavements and roads are clear, praise be to God. I went to the Apple centre in Glasgow because I wanted to learn better how to use my new iPod. Which I did. I was sorry to see the wonderful Borders bookstore in Buchanan Street now closed. Victim of the credit crunch. I have so much enjoyed visiting that huge opulent shop with its fabulous magazine collection and great range of books and music.


I am reading The Diary of Samuel Pepys. It is his private diary, originally written in shorthand during the 1660s in London, but is as fresh as if written yesterday, and particularly poignant to those who are familiar with London. Imagine nightingales in Woolwich and wild carnations in Vauxhall. But the cut-throat politics of Whitehall remain the same as ever, as we have witnessed this week. The Diary is also fascinating seen as a model blog, though I would be wary of being quite so honest in what is essentially a public document.


Yesterday I sent off my application to a printmaking exhibition in May.

New prints on paper by Diana

"Field map" Screenprint on paper 31 x 24 cm Dec 2009















"Winter 2010" Screenprint on paper 31 x 24 cm Dec 2009

New prints by myself - these may look very simple but they express something deep for me, perhaps a particular mood, and, not least, the random, even throwaway, method of making them and the simple materials used.
Because of the method used, and because each print is different, they are more like drawings than prints.

January freeze

It is SOOO cold here tonight. I walked to nearby town this afternoon, and underfoot was solid ice often a few centimetres thick. I am wearing several layers of thermal clothing indoors and am only just warm enough. I feed the wild birds two or three times a day and make sure they have fresh water. Thank goodness we have a wood-burning stove and plenty of fuel!

New Year 2010 and Venice Biennale

Thomas Nozkowski at Venice Biennale 2007

I was away before Christmas - in London again and visiting relatives. While I was away there was a big snowfall here in Scotland. I have now been back almost a week and have so far been unable to get my car from the driveway.

Lots of walking through ice and snow to get necessary shopping. But it is also a chance to catch up with research and studio work. I enjoy this time of year because of the quiet atmosphere. Most people are off work and it feels more acceptable just to be at home and relax.

So I am looking through papers, and found records of a trip to Venice Biennale in November 2007. This is the chance to go through my photos and notes and recollect what I saw there . This will take some time, as I keep stopping to check out the artists on the internet! There is so much information on you tube and through interviews. Thomas Nozkowski, whose work I remember very well from the Biennale, commented in an interview that he always deliberately works small in order that his paintings fit into domestic interiors rather than in large institutions.. I have never heard an artist explicitly saying that before.

Today I have also packed up some work for an exhibition in Yorkshire which starts mid-January. On Monday I can walk down to the post office! This walking, often 1 or 2 miles a day, is relaxing and is getting me fit.

Kapoor and Auerbach in London

Anish Kapoor at Royal Academy












Anish Kapoor, As if to Celebrate I Discovered a Mountain Blooming with Red Flowers, 1981 (Royal Academy, 2009)

I went to to see the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy last week. I was not as impressed as I had hoped. The reviews had been ecstatic, but the reality was a very crowded exhibition, more spectacle than anything.



The high point for visitors was the cannon that fired red waxy substance at the gallery wall. It made a very loud noise! Two galleries were used for a kind of train coated in red wax that imperceptibly moved through on a base.

Other rooms contained Kapoor's characteristic distorted mirror pieces and large wall-based trompe d'oeil work.
Another room was completely full of cement excrescences of all kinds, mostly like massive piles of grey turds. I thought I was going to like this but it was overwhelming.

Anish Kapoor, Shooting into the Corner, Royal Academy, 2008/9 (above top)
Anish Kapoor, Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked (detail), Royal Academy, 2008/9 (above)

However, the first room was the best for me. Simple spiky and sculptural shapes in bright primary coloured pigments. Fabulous.


I saw the movie, Bright Star, about the poet John Keats and his relationship with Fanny Brawne. I found it a beautiful gentle film which evoked the slow pace of life 200 years ago.


Frank Auerbach at Courtauld Institute
London Building Sites 1952-62



FRANK AUERBACH Study for Shell Building Site: from the Festival Hall, 1958-60 pencil on paper

FRANK AUERBACH Shell Building Site: from the Thames, 1959, oil on board











These paintings meant a great deal to me. I can just remember post-war London. In the words of Auerbach, "London after the war was a marvellous landscape with precipices and mountains and crags.. ful of drama .... it was pitted with bomb sites and the bomb sites gradually turned into building sites .. there was a sense of survivors scurrying among a ruined city".

I am also fascinated, like Auerbach, by building sites, and by the "contrast between apparent chaos of excavated earth and piles of rubble and the beginning of architectural order at its most dramatic".

In an interview with John Tusa http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/auerbach_transcript.shtml
Auerbach talks about the early influence of David Bomberg, who taught students to look for the "spirit in the mass" and to constantly experiment until they found the essence of the subject. Auerbach works and reworks his paintings, working slowly and scraping back the paint constantly to reveal the image until he is satisfied. His work is characterized by very thick paint. He says this is incidental to his search for the deepest meaning of the subject.

"Taking Time" exhibition in Birmingham

Taking Time:Craft and the Slow Revolution (Waterhall, Birmingham, then touring) is an interesting project. The curation and planning is very transparent, as described on website http://www.takingtime.org/ and blog http://www.makingslowrevolution.wordpress.com/

















Neil Brownsword, "Salvage Series"(detail), 2005
Ceramic and industrial archaeology (Crafts March/April 2008).

For me this exhibition is about makers exploring everyday objects and their place in our psyche. Neil Broadsword casts remnants of the lost Stoke pottery culture in porcelain, Amy Houghton explores our relationship with historical textiles and other objects and David Gates how everyday furniture shapes our space and assumptions, to give a few examples.














Amy Houghton, "One centimetre is a little less than half-an-inch." Stop frame animation of Dovecote Tapestry weaving records. (Photo by Amy Houghton). (Exhibition catalogue)


Associated with this is the idea of "place". Ken Eastman and Dawn Youll investigate how a place is created, quoting this passage:

"When a place is found it is found somewhere on the frontier between nature and art. It is like a hollow in the sand within which the frontier has been wiped out. The place of the painting begins in this hollow. Begins with a practice, withsomething being done by the hands, and the hands then seeking the approval of the eye, until the whole body is involved in the hollow. Then there's a chance of it becoming a place. A slim chance." John Berger, (2001), The Shape of a Pocket, Bloomsbury, p. 29.