
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
"you can't look at your-self in the ocean"...wall pieces...

Monday, November 29, 2010
" match-box songs & gypsy hymns"...'you can't look at your-self in the ocean'...pages..3-6
Saturday, November 27, 2010
"you can't look at your-self in the ocean"...page 1 & 2...
Thursday, November 25, 2010
"matchbox songs & gypsy hymns"...the ocean...
At times it is difficult to reflect upon what has been made...at least to the point of revealing something one can only ever really feel... then attempt to articulate...I'm not familiar with this work as yet...so it remains the same for me as it does for you...in the thought that the only clue to the meaning exists within its title...the unresolved, reflective searching it implies....it has everything and nothing to do with the ocean...the box is bookish in structure...a thin volume of six pages..a narrative of both presence and absence... of opposites...one page is simply a veil...dark but transparent...damaged...there is also a sense of something out of reach...all of it contained...portable...a black page with a white thread forming a cross or 'X'...suggesting a mapping or surveying of surface...preparation...construction...a mirror image scratched into the surface of another dark page...perhaps the only hint of a reflection...of looking and discovering of self image...a boxed figure above a forest of wooden and metal shapes...although I am now familiar with their intended use I recognise them as I first encountered them...strange...curious sculptured figures...natural...even human...the box figure has an absent presence...the last page is at times veiled... a cut-out
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
"you can't look at your-self in the ocean"
Monday, November 22, 2010
Thursday, November 18, 2010
"matchbox songs & gypsy hymns"...intermission..
coming soon...sp
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
"matchbox songs....last day of 'miscellaneous'...
As has been the case since the inception of this series of transitional shows I am uncertain as to what will be next...at present all that I have is a title..."you can't look at yourself in the ocean"...a line from the book of Lorca's poems that I read during my morning train journeys when I first arrived in Brisbane...it may be something...at times all one needs is a title and the rest falls into place...we shall see...perhaps they will continue to be 'hesitations'...which I do not mind...eventually, either singularly or collectively they will say something...I have been reading of Joseph Cornell this week...they say that you should never meet your heros...but I would not have wanted to meet him so much as to have followed him...his bike rides through Flushing and the sojourns through Manhattan...a mind that was truly a stream of consciousness...child like in every way...there was a wonderful story of how he would often buy a new record and take it to a friends place for them to keep for a time...then he would return in a number of days even weeks to collect it.. still unopened...a way of prolonging not only the experience but the sense of expectation of the moment...in small ways I do similar things..deliberately having books wrapped in brown paper and leaving them overnight before I open them...some times the same thing will befall a new CD...thank you again to those who have taken a moment to peer into my window...someone asking about the binding of things...I am not so sure that I have worked that one out myself ...I guess it is all of the associations that are implied with such an act..but I think the connection is between the act of binding and what is presented...the doing is no less significant then the result...the viewer is hopefully aware of both elements...and apart from my time in London where I had a job binding rope around bundles of newspapers before they went out to the news stands I can't really say much more..or won't..sp
Monday, November 15, 2010
"matchbox songs & gypsy hymns"...more hesitations..
Friday, November 12, 2010
"matchbox songs and gypsy hymns"....miscellaneous hesitations...
Thursday, November 11, 2010
"matchbox songs and gypsy hymns"...'miscellaneous details'
this may very well be one of the miscellaneous pieces that have a very short 'use by date'...but it is somewhat indicative of how i have been making things since my arrival in Brisbane...disparate objects finding each other on the studio walls...moments of self-contained reflection....the closest thing to a formula i care to find just now..their disparity is connected to living within the realms of an inner city...everything fits but nothing lasts.sp
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
"matchbox songs...'nebraska'...'sewing needles and poetry...'
...nebraska...sewing needles, coloured thread, poetry and diary entries...of all the miscellaneous items this remains the most curious...out-of- the-way oddity...perhaps due to its self-contained completeness...the cover is from the original album I bought in 1983-4... I'm not certain how bleak, first-person ballads of a mid-west state in the USA are able to resonate with a twenty something year old living in North Queensland...but they did... not just in the intimate voice of Springsteen accompanied on little more than an acoustic guitar..it was something geographical...the same sparse, desperate, poetic associations of the nebraskan landscape unfold in a similar fashion in the north...the North Queensland highway has stretches of bleakness that mirror the same narratives expressed in 'nebraska'...it has an embedded history of murders,shootings, abandonment, runaways, and lost relationships..you think of a lot of things when you drive the north's highway...and so before I even make a mark there is already in place associations of meaning and identity...so where is the phenomenology?...its most deliberate association exists within the realms of the relationship between presence and absence in all that we experience...but in the end it is something you either get or you don't..
.(to be continued)sp.
Friday, November 5, 2010
"matchbox songs & gypsy hymns"...'miscellaneous'
The miscellaneous can often provide a certain immediacy to ones response to experience... that for the artist or poet reality simply requires description and not re-constructed...descriptions that belong to the sensory world..accounts that evoke varying degrees of historical circumstance...the incidental and ready-made permeate the historical...narratives... suggestive of a particular awareness..descriptions of silent disclosures...the miscellaneous anticipates...wild thought.. immersed within the senses...remaining incomplete...this incompleteness exists within the realms of the relationship between presence and absence...but more deliberately it implies merleau-ponty's idea of "flesh"...la chair...something so close to the essence of experience that it dissolves the distance between self and object...that possible moment of dissolution, if it exists at all, belongs within the process of making...the studio provides that moment...what proportion of that 'flesh' moment is gathered or retained within the work is difficult to gauge...but it remains inarticulate...beautifully silent like a child not wanting to be found...it simply can not be explained away... the "durable flesh of the world" (m-p) contained within the miscellaneous...sp
"matchbox songs & gypsy hymns"...'miscellaneous'
'miscellaneous'...a lacing of collage + assemblage + objects...reflective moments from the studio walls...a short 'use by date' for many of them...some will last longer than others...threads of entwined narratives...short stories...poetry...phrases...single words...nebraska...needles of coloured thread...the moment...transparent envelopes... memory...embedded horse...mythology...clothes-peg bird...transition...bindings...the silence between language and image.sp
Thursday, November 4, 2010
"matchbox songs & gypsy hymns"....piano key portraits last day
Several conversations this week about the piano key assemblages...the layering of surface and image somewhat excessive for some...too many surfaces...image and texture over worked for such a confined surface...someone else recognising only death...bleakness and melancholy...nostalgia for one...are the piano keys a metaphor?...someone liked them because they played the piano...another not recognising that the 'wooden sticks' were piano keys... do the numbers represent collecting and cataloguing?... repetitious...a single narrative re-told...is it like a single note repeated? are the photographs of anonymous male figures a metaphor for identity or the transitory nature of things?..are they self-portraits?...are they meant to be held like an old fashioned slide-viewer?..are they meant to represent a collection of curious instruments?...was your father a butcher?...and to all of these I answered 'yes'...sp
Monday, November 1, 2010
"matchbox narratives"...
On my train journey this morning i suddenly realised why these works remain quite unfamiliar to me..no sooner had they been assembled before they were put in a box and sent to Townsville for the "Alter" exhibition...even in Townsville i had little chance to spend time with them... they have remained in a box until last week...i feel rather vain standing before my own studio window...but i have done that especially with these works...i'm not certain they belong to me..if they ever did....in a sense they don't...they exist in a space somewhere between myself and the notion of 'other'...it makes them sound like an offering...if the other is capable of providing the source of a meaningful sense to experience then each of these pieces are hand mirrors...but hopefully not just for me...anyone can make use of them...perhaps there is more light in them than i first thought...maybe i didn't have the angle right at first..or just a change in the weather...sp
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