Making an Artists Book

As part of my creative exploration I joined an artist book-making one-day course with Carolyn Trant at the weekend. Carolyn has her hand-printed artists' books in private and university collections worldwide and in public collections in the UK at the National Library (V&A) and the British Library. A couple of examples are shown here of her skill and versatility in this exciting medium. A collaboration with poet, Judith Kazantzis called Garden of Earthly Delights which is in a current exhibition in Maine, USA and my favourite Beauty and the Beast which incorporates little drawers and shelves with a covering made of old leather biking jackets -bringing to life our idea of what a 'book' can be. As an avid reader of fiction I find this art form quite fascinating.

There was a strong temptation to ooh and arrgh over Carolyn's work knowing it was impossible to emulate but thereby avoiding getting down to some creative work oneself. However, she gently encouraged us to get stuck in and try something. Folding, scoring, cutting, refolding varying qualities and thicknesses of paper. Thinking through concepts in design and shape of covers including ideas for book covers, (I loved a book in which Carolyn had chopped up bits of her old garden fence and used it as the cover of a handprinted poem), wool, paper, leather. We worked through a few ideas and ended up with many more inspired by books with examples from book artists like Nina Judin. I can't wait to go on the next on-day course to explore some more ideas. For source material to make your own books visit Falkiners in Southampton Row, London and on their blog is great little video about making a simple notebook.This blog doesn't seem to be getting updated but the video is still on there. For inspiration for book art projects the next Artist's Book Fair will be BABE held at the Arnolfini  in Bristol and taking place 30th April and 1st May 2011 - looks like a great day to send the bank holiday weekend.

 

Starlings in Brighton

As many of you may know this is the time of year that starlings gather in huge numbers and make calligraphic patterns in the sky over Northern Europe. They gather together forming murmurations all over the UK and I was lucky enough to see them on Saturday evening on Brighton pier. You can tell we are in Brighton because in the background you can hear a Dad say to his kid “Which are the Starling Mods and which are the Starling Rockers?!”

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For a film taken by a rather better operator of the video camera than myself here is a link to murmurating starlings in Derby at the beginning of 2010 on the BBC website. There are also spectacular images of the swarming in Rome where millions of starlings congregate annually. A pan -European science team have discovered that they fly in groups of 7 birds rather than having 1 dominant leader. Although the swarming mechanism wards off predators as in the starlings case,  the peregrine falcon, it appears this is not always the reason for the gatherings to take place.

These films give us a wonderful insight into the inspiration for Eberhard Ross' starling swarm paintings and illustrates the breadth and variety in how these small birds are depicted in his work.

Book Reading Retreat in Sussex

Beautiful mist rolled over the downs this morning on our way to Tilton House, Sussex where a fascinating ‘Reading Weekend’ is set to take place 18^th- 20^th February with Damian Barr as salonierre and author Geoff Dyer as special guest.

After cups of tea and chatting with Polly and Shaun we hung a selection of works by Ellen Bell, Eberhard Ross and Marco Crivello to be admired and to inspire visitors arriving for the weekend, many of whom are from abroad. Round the corner from Charleston, Tilton House is steeped in history and was once the home of John Maynard Keynes and his wife, the Russian ballerina, Lydia Lopokova. Thought to be one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century Keynes had an incredible portfolio career as director of the Bank of England, a patron of the arts and instrumental in setting up the Arts Council and as part of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.

For Creative Writing and Reading Weekends this wonderful Georgian House is the perfect spot for quiet contemplation.For details of forthcoming workshops visit this page

 

 

 

Acts of Love

There has been abundant coverage on love-related themes in the media this week which has prompted me to put my oar in. There is no doubt that all the artists I represent 'love' the work that they do. Since it is such a difficult way of making a living this is the reason why most of them continue. Each work created could be argued to be an Act of Love. The artist I wanted to highlight in this post, Ellen Bell, has created a series of works over the past year entitled Acts of Love. Templates of famous paintings were the starting point for this series of work juxtaposed with an imagined narrative incorporating words and sentences from contemporary works of fiction. 

One example, Acts of Love (7), the template taken from Thomas Gainsborough's, Mr & Mrs William Hallett (The Morning Walk),1785 and currently hanging in The National Portrait Gallery. Painted at a time when women's only hope of recognition was through the status of marriage. Ellen cleverly gives the characters a new life by inserting text from Samuel Beckett's 'Play'. Published in 1962 at the rise of the women's liberation movement, she invites questions about intimacy and relationship within marriage. Similarly, Acts of Love (8), inspired by R. Singer Sargent's, Mr & Mrs I.N Phelps Stokes,1987 incorporates text from Willy Russell's Shirley Valentine published in 1986. Taking the form of a monologue the play focuses on a middle-aged housewife and her transforming experiences when she takes life into her own hands. Echoing the position of the couple in the original painting the text fills the female image whilst the male has no dialogue at all. Much of the power of Ellen Bell's work is in the mastery she has over the choice of words, the delicacy with which individual words are placed, the visual associations we have with the original work and her immense love and knowledge of literature.

Sebastian Faulk's series, Faulks on Fiction, currently running on the BBC and available on BBC Iplayer looked at the subject of 'Love' on February 12th with a premise that much of our interpretation of what love means comes from our understanding of fiction. Citing Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice as his first reference and following on through with other novels in twentieth century English literature. Whether one agrees with him or not, in my experience words can be understood very differently depending on whether they are read or spoken and depending on our relationship or perception of the person, and what our state of mind and feeling is at the time. Creating an alternative framework in which text can appear as in Ellen Bell's work can allow us to engage with questions about themes in our life, like love, in a new way. Surely that is what art is meant to do.

 

Rivers and Tides

For anyone who has not seen the film by Thomas Reidelsheimer about Andy Goldsworthy, you are missing a real treat. Having spent time watching this again rather than some drivel on evening TV mid-week, I was reminded how many aspects of his work speak to us in a universal way. The relentlessness of Time marching on affects us all whether we like it or not and dominates all our lives wherever we live. The inevitability that natural forces will destroy his work in minutes, hours, days or months depending on the work, gives it an edge, a vibrancy, a life that is very real. Goldsworthy tells us and as we witness in the film that his work is often taken to ‘the edge of collapse’ and he feels that ‘too much control can be the death of a work.’ These are like mini-metaphors for what happens in life. Rivers and TIdes can be bought from Amazon for an amazing £4.99. For another amazing land artist, less well-known but producing no-less striking work is Chris Drury. Visit his website here

 

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Susan Hiller at Tate Britain 1st Feb - 15th May 2011

Continuing my mission to visit two art exhibitions a month that I am not directly involved in, I went to Tate Britain today to see the Susan Hiller retrospective. It was quite a struggle to overcome apathy and tear myself away from ever-increasing piles of paperwork and get on the train despite the fact that Hiller captivated my attention years ago with the installation, "From the Freud Museum (1991-1996)" which I saw in London. Once on the train, and on my journey, my apathy disappeared.  

Hiller was intrigued by the huge amount of ethnographic artefacts that filled the home of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and assembled her own alternative archive of cultural ephemera and personal mementoes displayed beautifully in cardboard boxes and annotated as if part of a scientific/anthropological study. There is a total of 13 rooms filled with her work at Tate Britain until mid-May, all conceptual works, in which she explores questions about what it is to be human. Finding something remarkable in the stuff of our everyday, I find inspirational. http://www.susanhiller.org/Info/artworks/artworks-FM.html

 

My favourite works were Dream Mapping 1974 which came out of a project in which 7 people recounted their dreams in individual notebooks a page from each is displayed here although the documenting of the collective dream maps did not appear to be on display - did I miss it?. Reading though the description of unknown individual's dreams I found moving as well as humorous, touching me on different levels. Visitors nearby seemed relieved that I felt able to laugh out loud at some of the dream narratives of impossible, absurd, unexpected nightly happenings. Being someone who dreams quite intensly I can really identify with these accounts. From what I can ascertain about the artist from the video interviews on her site, I am sure Hiller was touched too, her work has a sensitivity and an emotional quality of enquiry and is not just an intellectual excercise which one might imagine from the blurb written about her work by eminent critics.http://www.susanhiller.org/Info/artworks/artworks-dreammapping.html

Dedicated to the Unknown Artists 1972-6 began when Hiller picked up a postcard of a wave battering the pier in Brighton and then picked up a similar one in Weston-Super-Mare months later. This developed into a project in which she collated similar postcards from many British seaside towns from different eras. This work is also an amusing and touching piece illustrating the Brits fascination for bad weather described on the back of many of the postcards but also striking because by seeing these photographs en masse, taken over many years, in different locations, in black-and-white and colour, by different people on different cameras one can see visually a rhythm in the incessant movement of the sea and how it serves us as a reminder of the force that nature exerts on our lives. Hiller describes how she thinks of herself as both a curator of these 'cultural' materials but is also acting as a collaborator with the unknown artists who painted, photographed and hand-tinted the images. See images here http://www.susanhiller.org/Info/artworks/artworks-RoughSeas.html

Other striking works for me were: Witness, 2000, Monument 1980-1, Belshazzar's Feast, the Writing on the Wall 1983-4, Enquiries, Inquiries 1973-5. The Last Silent Movie I managed to miss unfortunately. The end of the exhibition on my tour was the J.Street Project 2002-5, in which Hiller documented all the street signs that incorporate Jude (Jew) in Germany. The resulting film showing daily life with a street sign visible in each frame ( like a note sounding in music) is very powerful, highlighting the undercurrents of past and present, absence and loss and transforming the street signs into mini memorials. See stills from the film here http://www.susanhiller.org/Info/artworks/artworks-JStreetVideo.html

I will fill my journal with more notes and thoughts, keep an eye out for interesting postcards and photographs, think more about making little videos and sound pieces and plan to write down my dreams for a week.

For two reviews of this exhibition Brian Sewell in The Evening Standard,  http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23920219-away-with-the-fairies-with-susan-hiller.do and Adrian Searle in The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jan/31/susan-hiller-tate-britain

 

A Way With Words

I am in the process of resuming a blog which will feature news and inside information about the wonderful artists we represent and well as comments and thoughts about exhibitions, events, artists, articles that may be of interest to our followers.

My initial posting is about Ellen Bell as we are preparing for her solo exhibition Camera Obscura & Other Stories to be held in London at the end of May. Ellen's work seeks to look at the way in which we communicate within our intimate relationships by using books, plays, texts and paper ephemera to create exquisite drawings, installations and small sculptural works.

Visit to an Artist's Studio- Alinah Azadeh

I visited Iranian-born artist and friend Alinah Azadeh in her studio today. Freezing cold, as there was no heating and standing in our coats clutching warm cups of tea we discussed her work and our showing it at a forthcoming show. Having visited her wonderful installation at the National Portrait Gallery on 8th Jan, Chasing Mirrors:Portraits of the Unseen where she worked with young Muslim asylum seekers to create a non-figurative work of hanging objects wrapped in brightly coloured cloths and text from the younsters thoughts and reflections about their culture and homeland. A collaborative portrait. There is plenty of information still available about this project if you want to explore it and also here is a link to the project blog Alinah wrote on Artist's Newsletter.

We have been in discussion a few times because I am fascinated at Alinah's ability to create collaborative art with the general public but also having a deep affinity for textiles I often wonder how I can find work using textiles that suits an "art" environment. Alinah has always been involved in public art and to create work for a smaller domestic scale has been an interesting challenge. However, her new works are delightful, eye-catching and quite unique. Inspired by the thirteenth century Sufi Poet, Rumi a ribbon of poetry wraps each of the individual objects chosen and relates to what lies underneath. The juxtaposition of everyday objects with the ancient poetry is insightful and the use of natural materials to wrap man-made objects is also thought-proving. They are beautiful, tactile creations.

 

Birling Gap Art Project

I am not what I call a "creative" person. I have loads of ideas and try different approaches and take risks in my business but fundamentally I feel more comfortable sticking to a script, a recipe, a pattern rather than improvising. The early signs of creativity which involved making little compositions on the piano and syncopating exisiting rhythms around the age of 4  was soon drummed out of me when I began to get formal piano lessons from a very well-meaning, but traditional piano teacher. This continued for the next 14 years through all the grades. I now have a highly developed aural sense but looking back now I wonder what might have been nourished if there had been more of a balance between reading and playing piano music by the great composers and creating my own albeit very basic compositions. I currently spend most of my time working with artists on projects and exhibitions and making sales for artists. I am fed by the experience of working closely with people who have a highly developed visual and aesthetic sense but there seems little time for me to develop my own interest in making my own "art". I am sure this is how many people feel.

On a very cold sunny day last week I felt the need to look at the sea rather than the four walls of my office and armed with a suggestion from my artist husband, Marco Crivello, and a mission to use my new IPhone, I set off with a plan to really look and find things to collect, or "capture" from my trip - a kind of psychogeography...

I first encountered a bit of old rubber with a beautiful delicate pattern of mould or fungus which I brought home and now sits on a plinth on our windowsill. There followed a short sound recording of the scrunch of the stones as I walked and the sound of the sea (I am attaching the sound recordings here but I have no idea whether they can be opened via a blog), an image of the sunlight on the water; what were meant to be a horizantal line of circles embedded in the cliffs -nesting holes for birds - the holes are almost invisible in the photograph but the blue sky looks good; a group of weathered rectangular red bricks against the varying greys of the circular stones on the beach; an image of some neatly written names of previous visitors in chalk - I liked the evidence of people having had a good time and the style of script and finally the bright green glass of the windows of the newly refurbished National Trust café - the vivid green in the sunshine is not captured to great effect in the photograph but I've included it anyway.

  
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