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links for 2007-03-30

• Towards the Hidden Fortress
  (tags: art sketch drawing Virgil Hidden Fortress)
• Turndust and experiment
  (tags: turndust art artists book experiment)
• The Past Inside the Present
  (tags: hidden fortress BookArt art sketch sketchbook drawing studio journal)
• Rotten rotten
  (tags: artists books Turndust)

Rotten rotten

I went to print the cover for Turndust today to find that the print centre is closed for easter and my screen is locked away.-X-
I asked around for a key. -X-
I looked for a porter to ask for another key. -X-

I decided not to bother.

So I brought my prints home to work on them with rubber stamps instead. Let's see if I can make a virtue out of necessity.


Technorati Tags: artists books, Turndust

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The Past Inside the Present

This is what I mean.

"The past inside the present."
a quotation from Boards of Canada: Music is Math

Some more cogitation on Whistling Copse as being at the centre of a number of different possibilities. The hidden fortress is not merely a stronghold but also a doorway. I'm thinking of Mythago wood again, I think. I haven't made work about it since I was a teenager, but it seems to be interesting me again. Let's describe it a different way. It's a special context wherein our thoughts and unconscious imaginings take on physical form. It shouldn't be too difficult to see the original fantasy setting recast from that into something a bit closer to the more widely-acceptable context of the social construction. Something entirely imaginary which impinges on the real because we, collectively, believe in it. (This encompasses our major social bonds and beliefs like money and marriage. They are real because we believe they are, and they and constructions like them exist at the pinnacle of causal force for us and our societies).

What Mythago Wood can do is allow these beliefs to take on form for the individual: the individual, in this context, takes the responsibility/unconscious responsibility, for generating the materials he or she encounters. It conjures up those moments where we are 'running offline' from the rest of society: we still carry those social structures in our heads, but it is up to us how we administer them when we are alone, in a dark wood. And perhaps, the wood is right there in the room with us.





Technorati Tags: hidden fortress, BookArt, art, sketch, sketchbook, drawing, studio journal

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Turndust and experiment

Turndust is finished.

It will be on sale at the Bristol Artists Book Event on 21st April for around £40.00 in a limited edition.

Of course, these are just lo-res versions of the images themselves, which I'm currently printing and binding. I'm pretty happy with the general feel of it. The various transitions it's been through, from  a made-for-print set of drawings, becoming the basis of a digitally-oriented design, and the final transfer to the paper print of that design has been a opportunity to watch my own deliberations about the developing form of the book. It's also a chance to watch my work habits more closely. This was a sporadically-worked piece, but intensely-worked nonetheless. I think it's to its benefit that I had to come back to it more than once to make it work. I'll be showing the finished printed version at the Bristol Artists' Book event in April. So much for the process involved. There was also a process of evolving content which was intrinsically linked to the choices of physical production, but which has its own story to tell of the book's development of its metaphor and iconography. It felt like I was finding out what it was about by working with it. There was a certain  sense of discovery. But also a definite sense that I had to activate the enquiry with an initial text, and a clear pathway that I could follow into the work. There was this initial guide, perhaps equating to a preunderstanding applied to the work. But not quite. I didn't really know the shape I was discovering; I was making it up. Nonetheless, as I went through it, certain directions seemed to be 'right' or 'wrong'. The sense of discovery is really one of a sense of creation. The thing which was discovered was actually invented. One activates enquiry with a hypothesis. Could the original draft materials that formulate the initial structure of a project equate to an hypothesis of the work's eventual structure? Hidden Fortress isn't at that state yet. There are few candidate hypotheses around, in the shape of a rough storyboard that features some but not enough of the component parts, and a notion that I will employ said component parts. But they do not yet have a formulation that will form a template for my interaction. That will, in a sense, be a hypothesis for the work. Note to self: a mindmap on materials, hypotheses and experiment and how they transliterate to art materials,  the intention/structure that initiates the work, and the work as praxis and reflection (as experiment that moves the understanding of the material on) Technorati Tags: Turndust, BookArt, experiment

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Towards the Hidden Fortress

Thinking more about the "Hidden Fortress" notion. I started out exploring a few things to try to make contact with it. started out with some 'castle' doodles. Crennelations, castle shapes, woodlands. Then keys, for some reason: an access to another 'room'? Then maps, literalising the relationship between places into an iconography, finally a sleepwalker, and a hooded figure: Virgil. A guide, psychopomp. Where is this going? What can I know about Whistling Copse from such a guide?

Technorati Tags: art, sketch, drawing, Virgil, Hidden Fortress

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links for 2007-03-29

• Hidden Fortress
  (tags: art artists books hidden fortress)
• Nestor Chimbonda and the Ensorcelled Mattress
  (tags: chimbonda)
• cognition and reporting
  (tags: BookArt art cognition report mindmap)
• Both a Picture and a Thousand Words: Keynote Speech
  from 'How I entered there I cannot truly say'
  (tags: BookArt talk MP3)

cognition and reporting

Some thoughts, inspired by the film I refer to in my 'languages' post, below, on a (personally relevant) theory of engagement with the world (or the art materials in this specific instance) the feedback of reflection and the difficulty of working out strategies to form either:

• linguistic reports or
• an approach to the art/action as documentation/expression in its own right.

This is ongoing. The mindmap below should update.

Technorati Tags: art, cognition, report, mindmap

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Nestor Chimbonda and the Ensorcelled Mattress

In which our hero, in the midst of the pursuit of a gang of art forgers is led a night time chase across the Italian countryside. Benighted in a tiny village, Chimbonda seeks rest in a hayloft where he finds a mattress stuffed with papers from the fascist era. Discovered by a farmhand in the morning, Chimbonda has a stark choice: defend the mattress or pursue the painterly ruffians?

grabber & Grabber, 2/6


Technorati Tags: chimbonda

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Hidden Fortress

I had a dream about the phrase 'Hidden Fortress' last night, where some kindly person was sightly annoyed with me for using the phrase because it had militaristic overtones. I think it's also a Kurosawa movie.

Anyway it strikes me as a resonant phrase, and I'm thinking of it in contact with the material I've been storyboarding for a return to Whistling Copse. The material I've been working out on paper will use photography of the woods but also use it as a springboard for other things- kind of using the woods as a map to other places. When I have the sketches handy  I'll scan them in.

I like the thought of a hidden stronghold. The idea of one world inside another is what intrigues me. I'm dimly imagining the storyboard material morphing into some sort of more or less literal fortress imagery; though the point is not the literal imagery, but the leap from one world to another. One world within another.

I've now read a brief synopsis of the plot of the Kurosawa movie via the link I posted above. Since this would probably be the strongest reference for most people from the title phrase, I'll find a way to engage with some of the movie's themes.

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Technorati Tags: art, artists books, hidden fortress

languages

Angeliska introduces this video on her blog with these words:

This completely blew my mind.
It changed the way I think about many, many things-
and will change my actions as well.
It's the work and world and words
of this woman-
I believe that she is going to change the world.

I share her reaction absolutely, though I have my own reasons for being affected by the video (read on for those).