See post below for details of the fair, (and others I am doing in May) and updates on talks and images...
my divided life doing my own work and writing/speaking about others is hotting up currently!
I am learning so much more about work from the past from doing my new project...
Science
now shows that relating to certain imagery can enter our genes and be passed on
through generations.
Menmosyne:
Memory Palace: images should be revisited and remembered to keep them
revitalised... new connections are made on the peripheries….
Above are some more images from my Orbis Pictus; Entre Chien et Loup which I will be showing as part of work in progress ... …it’s
a work in progress for however long it takes, using a scrapbook format so that
it is perfectly fluid until I decide to make it fixed, perhaps in a variety of
forms. Victorian themed scrapbooks, often on political themes, show us a way
perhaps to deal with our fractious, fast-moving, elastic times… and provide I
hope a space to reflect and grieve.
Mirroring
our times I have no idea what turns the project will take, I am moved by
intuition, fate and serendipitous encounters.
Encouraged
by discovering Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne: Atlas project, and Walter
Benjamin’s desire to make a book made up entirely of quotations (realised
partially in his Arcades thesis on consumerism - which I referenced in
my last cartonera – Bonfire of Vanities) gives me reassurance I
am on a valid path.
I
am making woodcuts (historic medium of political and popular commentary) of
seminal works of art through the ages as ‘engramms’, used and manipulated as a
vocabulary or alphabet of images, bouncing off each other to develop a ‘text’.
“History
breaks down into images, not stories”
…says Walter Benjamin.
“Artists
should today craft a mythos as a time capsule warning to our descendants not to
repeat our mistakes….like the proposed cautionary folklore and imagery to deter
future people from meddling with toxic waste….” Gareth Rees writes in Sunken
Lands
This
is an experiment in imagery, but not about deciphering meanings … …“Pictures
which are interpretable and which contain meaning are bad pictures…” says Gerhard Richter
Jeremy Eichler writes in Time’s Echo –“….we
have internet access to so much stuff/info about the past now – can take
virtual tours, retrieve old photos , and writing and yet at the same time we
have lost the ability to really feel close to and empathy for the past – we now
have research confirming that information retrieved/received digitally is not
imprinted or retained in our brain in the same way as that from a printed page
or further handwritten notes, we can’t practice active remembrance or
commemoration so well now….”
TS Eliot
“where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, where is the knowledge
we have lost in imagination?”
Tim Hyman …”And let us not forget we must
hope to find our eventual audience not among our artist contemporaries but in
the much less narrowly bounded cultural realms of the future…”
The way I am using newspapers is ecological and the fact that the original
print layer could eventually show through with extreme age I find really
exciting – the palimpsest becomes an even more interesting document as I
usually choose images or articles to print over which are relevant to the
subject matter of my images… as I have done before with my cartoneras
where more was left unpainted deliberately.
Do
we really believe in a future?
“Hope is not a prognostication, it is an
orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart…..”
Vaclav Havel Beauty is in the Times-Eye of the beholder.
On the talks front-
since suggesting my Oxford talk title I have read the new Parenthesis ( journal of FPBA )...and a Peter Koch article discussing what makes a book a work of art or an Artists Book, which is very serendipitous as it happens - in my talk I am trying to bridge the gap between the sort books the PBFA members sell on their stands and the Artists Books being made today, and looking at books ( by women) that I think could be considered Artists Books before the term became current and developed its own categorisation. I am not keen on categories generally so come along and see what you make of it....12 midday on the Sunday 4th May....
And please visit my stand too... old favourites as well as work in progress....
