Reflection on My Journal - alternative title - No-one Has to Read This

I think I need to go over my journal that was started at the beginning of this course in order to get going properly so here goes ..............

Images of the work of American photographer Taryn Simon whose exhibition at Tate Modern was entitled A Living Man Declared dead and Other Chapters.  This work is concerned with looking at bloodlines 'mapping the relationship among chance, blood and other components of fate'.  It  comprises series of portraits of ascendents and descendents of a single individual and presents a narrative and details in text and imagery.  Apart from the main subject matter, of interest to me was the clean, archival method of presentation.  In later research on the internet it was interesting to discover that the same exhibition was also being staged in Berlin at the same time, the gallery spaces being totally different.  The Tate space being white, clean and clinical with the images placed around the rooms almost sanitising the unpalatable truths. In direct contrast the Berlin staging presents a dark succession of frames around each story almost like a series of Chapters reflecting the title, the darkness evoking the darkness of the material.  It would have been extremely interesting to have visited both exhibitions one after the other.

Also visited the gallery containing work by Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas who spent time in Western Scotland making art from the environment he found himself in.  The works reference the autoconstruccion or 'self build' of Mexican migrants to the cities where they self build their houses using materials that 'come to hand' as had his own family and also looks back to the Arte Povera of the 60's and 70's.  Both these exhibitions I found quite moving in their references to family and pasts as well as the materials used and display methods.  Methods of display are important and for me are crucial to meaning of work.  I think I am probably quite harsh in my criticism of display and exhibition. 

In one piece of untitled work  Cruzvillegas has used plaster in little used boxes.  This slots into my own interest in plaster. It seems to be popping up.  Finding a piece of plastered plumbers bandage that I made years ago,  the gift of lots of plaster moulds for ceramics, the birthday present of a Paolozzi plaster maquette,  my love of frescoe  and the Braque plaster pieces at the Maeght exhibition at the Royal Academy a few years ago and my, to be expanded collection, of plaster madonnas.     The sunflower seeds by AL Wei Wei  although not plaster but porcelain now in a mound. 

Images of these things are together along with Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery, Pieter Breughel the Elder from the Courtauld, one of the most beautiful paintings ever for me and currently my thing of beauty to wake up to,  and the Giotto grisaille frescoes from the Scrovegni Chapel.  These two images feed into my interest in drapery, the depiction of soft, seductive folds in hard materials in painting and sculpture.

A collection of words and images : collections, bones & skeletons, x-rays, grisaille painting, plaster, tudor costume structure, armature, musculature, religious paraphernalia: crucifixes, madonnas,  tiny saints, glass slides, Maxine Bristow, paint sample cards , Brian Clarke window motifs. Images of crucifixes.  Found some in amongst a bag of costume jewelery given to me, and old magic lantern slides.

A Bridget Riley card from the Kettles Yard exhibition this year.  Harsh and unyielding.  Her colours are discordant and aggressive  and the juxtaposition with the supreme tranquility and beauty of Kettles Yard jarred.  The collections in the house and the positioning and display of artefacts is somewhat staged but redolent of the 60's and the Ede's aesthetic values. Riley's early works are of course from that period and so perhaps validates the exhibition but it managed to underline my dislike of her work.

More collections.  An image of a collection piece of Gabriel Orozco next to a collections of paper cut outs by Caroline when she was little, it is very sweet and beautiful, little folded creatures coloured in with felt tip.  Alongside some more words: voyages, journeys, pattern, reliquary and some more Clarke window motifs.  Some images of madonnas and Kris Martin's Festum from the White Cube.  Christ figures hanging in a paperchain.  

And above the 'Falling Up - the Gravity of Art' catalogue from the Courtauld this summer.  

An image on the front cover of Cornelia Parker's Neither From Nor Towards, 1992.  An eery conjuring of a wall falling upwards made of a collection of eroded bricks collected from a shoreline (an irresistible way of collecting)  hung on wires and beautifully lit in the centre of the gallery space.  It was perhaps the most literal interpretation of the exhibition title but another piece that arrested was Wolfgang Tillman's Dan, 2008.  An extraordinary photograph of a man.  The exhibition was curated by students from the Courtauld MA Programme: Curating the Art Museum.

A collection of Hands - I love hands and I have a friend who has such beautiful hands that when in her company it is hard to look anywhere else.  She wears lovely rings and is an artist and maker too which makes them even more fascinating.  When asked to join in an exhibition set in a museum and about the museum the thought of her hands that prompted my response.  The hand in the museum that finds, makes and cares for the collections. Hands from the past, hands now and the baby hands that will one day take care of the collections.  There are spare pages for more imagery of the hand as it is collected.

Another collection, a drawing of my collection of shirt collars used to make tudor clothing earlier in the year.  Making things and drawing them is part of my methodology and in this instance the only way as there is very little clothing in existence.  Some photocopies of one or two of my glass slides.  The copies make the image ghost like, almost x-ray like.

Now Tracey Emin whose exhibition I enjoyed enormously.  From a critical point of view I don't really understand why.  Perhaps it's because she uses the medium of textile thereby endorsing its validity.  Perhaps it's because she lays her life bare and there is something of her in all of us - a sort of everywoman.  Maybe it is because she is a collector and a darer.  

Found an image of Le Defi, 1991 in the Louise Bourgeois book I was reading that is a blue cart full of glass bottles and was juxtaposed with an essay touching on the collections of Freud. 

Another collection of words: Freud Museum, myth/relic, watercolour and grey, chicken bones, Giotto bowl above a postcard from the British Museum of the Parthnenon Sculpture - room 18 displayed beautifully.  The stunning shapes that remind me of the Seven Deadly Sins series of Marc Quinn.  The torso of Emin on the cover of the catalogue is also there in the sculptures.

Record of the Treasures of Heaven exhibition at the British Museum, staged beneath the dome of the old reading room.  The experience was almost transcendental with the chant in the background.  Full of sublimely beautiful artefacts including reliquaries made like little buildings, hand reliquaries, portable altars and wrapped relics.  And then immediatly on to the beginning of concrete investigation.  I had always thought of concrete as harsh and modern but watching What the Romans did For Us with Adam Hart Davies (a while ago) disabused me, it is a very old building material so this for me gives it more weight.  The discovery of concrete canvas  opens out all sorts of possibilities and it will be something to investigate in relation to drapery. Blow up, add water and you have a building - magic!  Fabulous image of knitted concrete!

A marathon day in the life of me comes next.  Four exhibitions.  The first one recommended by Vanda - Caroline Broadhead and her daughter Maisie at the Marsden Woo Gallery. In a nutshell Maisie has played with paintings  such as Hogarth's Tete a Tete from the Marriage a La Mode series and inserted her own family members, the chairs in the paintings have then been recreated by Caroline.  A delightful exhibition and well displayed.  Am I going to add chairs to my list, we are continually being given chairs - I wonder why?

The next was a Greek artist, Kalliopi Lemos at the Crypt Gallery.  Very spooky, was there on my own, and quite opaque in its subject matter although it obviously had its own narrative.  I didn't understand it at all.  It was well done and enjoyable on a superficial level.  Would have liked some explanation to go with it but maybe the viewer was to make up their own story.  It was a series of boats (real) so perhaps to do with voyage and journey.  (Resonated for me with my long journey and a spooky night spent under a boat, alone on a Greek beach.)

Number three exhibition was the Grayson Perry at the British Museum.  Hugely enjoyable and fun and of course concerned with collections and was one great big reliquary of treasure.  Loved the boat. It seemed an appropriate follow on from the Treasure of Heaven which had been above it whilst being prepared. I like that connection. 

Number 4 was the work of the American Judith Scott who died in 2005.  There is an extremely emotive  backstory to this artist's work.  She was born a twin but deaf, mute and with Down's Syndrome.  Considered ineducable she was put in a home but taken out years later by her twin and attended the Creative Growth Art Center in California.  It was here that she developed her sculptural  fibre art.  She would 'acquire ' all sorts of objects and bits and peices and wrap them using fabric and thread to form extraordinary large shapes which were hanging from the ceiling of the gutted Selfridges Hotel, itself an extraordinary venue but which suited the work fantastically well.  There was a meditative and ethereal quality to the whole.

This was staged under the auspices of the Museum of Everything and suited the work absolutely.

Each of these four exhibitions were staged in totally different settings but each appropriate to the content.  The commercial gallery, the use of an otherwise never visited space - the church crypt, the famous museum and a temporarily empty and eviscerated hotel space.

Images of the sculpture of Cy Twombly chosen from the book I was reading at the time, some of them I remember from the Tate exhibition a few years ago.  They have some sort of resonance for me in their seeming simplicity and the need to use vision and imagination.  They are almost childlike and plasterish.  Also found quite by chance on youtube the Lepanto series of paintings full of exquisite little boats.

New for my word collection : boats (I seem to have mentioned the a few times)

When researching tudor clothing I was looking at tomb effigies so a printed image with added water to soften the printedness and of course the drapery.  A pair of my own made African figures jumped into view so plastered them - wow.  A bit Twomblyesque but also how I think I had envisaged them in the first place.  The action felt as if I had done it before.

Kate Green's exhibition in Ely - full of colour, narrative, fun and her life - full of marvelous bits and pieces and lively embroidery all just like her -  she is very clever and lovely.

Nine has been at the back of my mind for some time.  I am not a mathematician but I like the circularity of nine.  The way it multiplies and the cuboid aspect - must keep it in mind.  Its use for display always balances well. I realise I have just described it as both circular and cuboid!

Back to concrete and the stereo system by Ron Arad, 1983 was the best thing in the Postmodern exhibition at the V & A.  I found parts of the exhibition to be full of things not of interest.  It all seemed very pretentious somehow, I'm obviously not ready for Postmoderism. 

Images of crucifixes by Maria Militsi.  A Leonardo image but don' think I will manage to see the exhibition and some work by textile art Sarah Cawkwell.  Drawing of a mattress and a collection of thumbnail photos of a beach day. I like the way they are ordered.and they remind me of the Gerhard Richter Atlases.  I like that way of recording.  

Some artist's were recommended during the work in progress seminar so have added images as an aide memoir, must add in images from the Iranaian artist I came across recently as well. Paul Noble, Ghada Amer and Cathy de Monchaux.

I started some experimenting with plaster on stretched fabric and have images here.  I love spending time watching videos on Tate Channel.  Saw one about Callum Inne's  watercolours and grey so made some experiments using his technique myself and put a couple of them in here. Grey paintings: Richter, Twombly, Rothko etc. 

Vanda showed me a book by Chistophe Zelwegger, a jeweler, which has lots of bone like imagery.  Always interesting finding relevant imagery in all sorts of different places.  The antennae need to up at all times.

Some images from the Richter Atlas book out from LRC.   I like the ordering and his imagery.  Suddenly imagery reminded me of Alison Watt's huge paintings of fabric and put some examples alongside some watered inkjet copies of a high fashion image that resembles a classical statue.  The water makes a huge difference.  


I have now arrived at now so that's it for this entry!