Stretching a Line at Hastings Railway Station

New work, new EDGE exhibition

Really happy to be involved in this group who individually produce such interesting work and collectively help me to remember why I do this and the benefits of it.

 

The show has just gone up, there's an amazing diversity to the interpretation of the theme 'Line'.  It's in the two waiting rooms and on the bridge. 

The mystery of Existence

Today I found a book that might help me more completely determine my position, and that of my art.  Where it sits in relation to my thinking and belief compared with philosophical thought. 

What surprises me is how thin this book is, given the weight of its contents.

 

Thinking about making new work

Run

In considering a call for proposals around and celebrating the work of Fay Godwin, I discovered I was interested in Peter Stokes question “How many more Aveburys will be there, perfect under future moons”

Referring to Godwin's work 'Land' Stokes wrote that she is 'dealing with issues of exploitation and industrial damage;  albeit with the possibility of a suggestion, in the way in which the material is associated, that all things pass, and that the land will heal.'

I remember writing 'This too shall pass' on my wall at home in thick blue paint in utter frustration and in response to a particularly nasty relationship. We sometimes have a nasty relationship to the 'other'. Witness politics. Tara Brach calls 'the other' 'unreal other', it means that we can feel able and justified to hurt 'the other' partly because we are afraid of it/them and partly because they don't exist to us, so far removed from us do they seem. This can relate to animal, vegetable, human, mineral, the sea and the land. We choose. Our rubbish litters the land, the sea and the air making it difficult sometimes to see, to breathe or to move about safely regardless of the physiognomy.

As a vegetarian heading towards veganism I find it difficult travelling past sheep and frollicking lambs on the marshes soon to be travelling to the abbatoir. We used to see lorry loads of animals on their way to death. Now it's rare to see that. Is it that there are now abbatoirs in every town and village? Everything is being cleaned up in terms of what we are allowed to see, so we aren't so inconvenienced or distressed, despite wanting to buy 'meat' at rock-bottom prices which has to equate to rock-bottom humanitarianism. It might be better if instead of 'meat' we selected an animal with an identity at the supermarket. Let's face it, if you're going to eat animal why not have it's name and species branded on it, cheese and wine have to declare what they are. My sister-in-law once yelled out the train window at the sheep at the top of her voice 'RUN!' but then she had visited an abbatoir. I share her horror at what will become of them, a shank on a plate. The rot, in our country, is not just in our minds its in our bellies too, via our attachment to the hog roast. Godwin promoted the organic route not for nothing.

I'm interested in how, as Margaret Drabble wrote (Guardian... http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jan/08/margaret-drabble-fay-godwin ), Godwin's change of diet contributed to her recovery from “advanced cancer”. If our cancers are related to the desecration of the land and life, Godwin's concern over our sites of mystery, pilgrimage and contemplation becoming lucrative sideshows devoid of meaning and mostly untouchable identifies them as also troublesome. Mass conscious life that is out of touch with its centre, with little spirituality or deep meaning other than a monetary drive for survival, allows us to treat each other as unreal and develop deeply rooted psychological pain as a result.

Looking to the sky at night when the land and our destruction of it has disappeared into a shimmering blackness offers hope. The twinkling lights of distant stars, light years away, scribe their images onto my hand-held lens as I, who wobble while looking upwards (not being a tripod), am inconsequential beneath them. Is it my subconscious that has me wobbling an image that might be the equivalent of an ancient chalky white horse or a long man scribed into the side of a hill? 

 

In Search of The Real: Spikes

Really pleased to have had my Spikes film selected for the curated film event,  Altered States, as part of Coastal Currents 2015

Altered States / Electro Studios Project Space / 29th-30th August 2015 View this email in your browser

Altered States / Electro Studios Project Space / 29th-30th August 2015 Altered States is an immersive multi-screen show of the latest experimental film and video work curated by the Hastings-based filmmakers Toby Tatum and Mark French. Altered States features moving image by over seventy of the most fascinating international moving image practitioners working today, much of it unseen in the UK. This exhibition includes the fruits of a worldwide search for works that articulate film’s power to initiate heightened states of consciousness, transporting us across the threshold into a mind-expanding visionary state. The programme features a selection of cutting edge films that imaginatively reshape the base materials of the everyday world into something rich and strange. Featured artists: Michael Woods, Sandra Crisp, Atoosa Pour Hosseini, Diego Barrera, Ellen Wetmore, Maximilian Le Cain, Rouzbeh Rashidi, Dean Kavanagh, Ema Čulík, Duncan Reekie, Helga Fannon, Alex Carmichael, Helena G M, Leslie Supnet, Juliette Liautaud, Patrick Rowan, Theo Tagholm, Sandra Bouguerch, Philip Sanderson, Guli Silberstein, Lucinda Wells, Shaun Blezard, Sirin Bahar Demirel, Maria Niro, Grant Petrey, Mike Stolz, Alex Dickson & Greg Adsley, Eden Mitsenmacher, Tessa Garland, Joseph Curran, Anita Spooner, David Ian Bickley, Laura Focarazzo, David Asher Brook, Jeannette Louie, Laurel Beckman, Josh Weissbach, Stephen Broomer, Dalia Huerta Cano, Andrew Littlejohn, Joel Cahen, Peter Rose, Helen Flanagan, Juan David Gonzalez Monroy, Enrique Piñuel, Stuart Pound, John Davis, Alex Hovet, Disinformation, Ben Barton, Michael Fleming, Margarida Sardinha, Richard Ashrowan, Brice Bowman, Demian Skogr, Zachary Finkelstein, Asha Tamirisa, Nicholas Bunch, Gabriel Rud, Hans Lucas, Alisa Berger, Mirjam Bromundt, Pako Quijada, Josh Yates, Harold Charre, Evguenia Men, Michael Betancourt, Jason Bernagozzi, Mark Street, Chiara Ambrosia, Rui Hu, Kera MacKenzie & Andrew Mausert-Mooney, Caryn Cline, ana b. & nuno m. pereira, Callum Costello. Electro Studios, Seaside Road, West St Leonards, TN38 0AL Sat 29 August from 6pm – 10pm Sun 30 August from 2pm – 6pm Altered States continues at Butlers Gap, George Street, Old Town, TN34 3EE on Sat 5 September from 8pm Altered States forms part of the 2015 Coastal Currents Arts Festival film programme. For more information visit: http://coastalcurrents.org.uk/altered-states/

Copyright © 2015 Coastal Currents Arts Festival, All rights reserved.

Languishing

I'm languishing, making work, being a bit more organised.  Teaching.  Meditating.  Developing myself.  Enjoying the new work that is appearing.

How to follow anything?

Really, it's a tricky question.  For example, how do I follow a post that has a title like 'The Greatest Thing Ever Known'?  Is it possible?  The other day I was reading about Entanglement, it's a particular interest, along with the Observer Effect.  So it's possible that while I am struggling to imagine what kind of post could follow the previous one, it might already exist and be resonating or lighting up elsewhere which saves me the bother.

In order for you to read it, you'll have to look for it, notice it and then look at it but don't for goodness sake interfere with it because that will set off a whole new chain of events.

The Greatest Thing Ever Known

Hmmm, it's been a while I know.  Remember my post about warm Italian air?  Today I found a book that looked really promising (imagine something so promising yet only costing £2, which is very nearly the bus fare one way into town) but, being wrapped in its original sealed film, is tantalisingly inaccessible.

Googling tells me that it was originally published in 1898 and that this copy was probably published nearly a hundred years later, that's longevity for you.

I can't bring myself to unwrap it on account of the potential to be disappointed.  Does that point to a poor attitude?  Possibly.  But to discover that The Greatest Thing Ever Known wasn't would be a bit like finding out that I didn't like Limoncello after all.

Meanwhile new work is emerging from the depths of my consciousness around the idea of air.