The Path is well-lit

Ok, as I regularly say- this is the first day of the rest of my life.... desperate cliché but I'm all out of imaginative rejoinders at present.
It is the last day of the Easter break and from tomorrow there are five weeks till end of year assessment. The Third Year Project is finished  - in draft anyway -and to be seen by the tutor: fingers crossed for not too may amendments.

Because of this I was able to return to a book project I had been working on; here are some pictures and I will explain as they come up:

 

This shows the case(cover) almost finished but in front is the birch bark backed with Heatn'bond  to make it usable.

 

 

The book block with its binding tapes

 

 

 

Front and back of the book - 15 x 11cm

 

 

Endpapers and headband

 

 The book is blank at present but I have a programme for it that should be finished in time for assessment.

 

Last Wednesday a terrific exhibition opened in the Church Gallery in LSAD  - The Plane Invasion  - to honour a past student of the college -Orlaith Spain -  and this was put together by those who knew her. In passing it is worth noting that her work is also in one of the four shows now running at LCGA. But to return to The Plane Invasion - this consist of over sixty pieces by many artists who are still teaching in LSAD and some students also. I am not sure how long more it is on for but everyone should see it.

Equally, anyone with the remotest interest in art should go to LCGA  - work from the National Drawing Collection  - two print shows (one curated by Susannah O'Reilly : Plan A + Plan B)  and a travelling installation - Waste Land - all of which are excellent.

 

I was in Dublin before Easter and visited Copper House Gallery -or Fire as it is now known: they specialise in digital printing and my whole view of this has change completely and I was very interested as I am making a lot more of these  - and if I can get this business of the PSD and Tiff files sorted I can show some I have made.

 

Another visit I made over the break was to IMMA where among other things I saw this wonderful vdeo piec using three screens side by side to show a study of the skeleton of the house used in the film 'Giant'(1956) - This was built on a wide open prairie and the video dramatises the arrangements and concentrates on the recording of the ambient sounds - it really is tremendous and makes me think again about he possibilities inherent in video.

 

 

This was a still from the video and here is some info about the artists

 

 

Worth following up.

 

Some of my studio work has been influenced by the much lamented Helen Chadwick and I will come back to this later but I was surprised to see this small piece by her at IMMA:

 

   Helen Chadwick (1953-1996) Untitled 06

from Other Men's Flowers, letterpress
1994, on wove paper

 

Here are some images also from IMMA:

 

STILL FALLING I Cast iron and air 317 x 276 x 148 cm Collection of Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland

This is by Antony Gormeley and I have already shown it here about a year and a half ago, but in its entirety -this time I am far more interested in the surface texture and how this might be related to skin, in that all surfaces are essentially skins and this has all the hallmarks of crust - skin & landscape ---- you'll be hearing more about this.

 

My final visit was to the shore - sea and land - Sandymount and Blackrock - to record the edge where one skin meets another. Just a few shots because there is  a lot more work to be done on these:

 

 

You can see that the last one particularly has the look of old skin ...... I will persuade you.

 

 

I started with books so I will end thus

 

 

 

.... and the edition:

 

 

and from the sublime(!!??!) to the utterly ridiculous:

 

 

This one started from my hatred of waste and an enormous strip of perforated brown paper that came as packing in two parcels from Amazon; I just couldn't bear to throw it out and I wanted to try out this open binding with tapes that you see in the first and last images - great fun and it will require something unusual as content.

 

I will erturn with images of etching from the workshop.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Path Through the Fog

.......physical and metaphorical.....but even as I write, the physical is clearing and the sun is breaking through.
Dear me its very early in the morning for such slush, but its one of the small trains and it is too unsteady to attempt to showimages work of the sort I have been doing. Here's one:

 

This, believe it or not was a piece of wood I found in the bog and I am working it in to the skin surface to show the parallels there are between ageing landscape and ageing skin -hence body

(unfortunately I don't seem to be able to upload PSD or TIFF files so

you are missing out on the better ones.

Here is something else I have been doing:

 

I am just going to explain that this post was set up as a draft about three and a half weeks ago when travelling in by train from Limerick Junction to Limerick - and never published  - for the sake of historical completeness I am just going to put this up  -also as public penance for my laxity .........

The Path of Surprise and Urgency

I have other things I should be writing this morning but while having breakfast I was reading yesterday's Guardian Review which featured a piece about an artist I have always been attracted to - even though he is not well-known over here. The RA in London are having a big exhibition from March to June  of Richard Diebenkorn(1922 -1993):

The main article

The newsprint reproduction here favours  the artist's work which generally uses pale faded colours echoing the Los Angeles light.

But here is one of the pieces I really like - a 'landscape'

 

Ocean Park 79 - oil on canvas, 1979, 236.2 x205.7 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

 

However all of the above is really preamble because while reading the article I came across this sentence:

 

Years later, he said: "One thing I know has influenced me a lot is looking at landscape from the air...Of course, the earth's skin itself had 'presence' - I mean it was all like a flat design - and everything was usually in the form of an irregular grid." 

 

This really hit because only last night I wrote here of the ' skin of the earth' and how often  when flying in by plane I have marvelled at the skin -thinness of the land where it meets the sea and forms the inevitable Edge.

So the skin is the locus  of my thought - how thin it is, though.

 

One other thing I forgot to do last night was to thank Noelle for pointing me to this amazing book:

 

 

I was lucky enough to be paid for a couple of prints at the time and regarding this as fate (which of course I do not believe in) I put the money to the book. I can just say for anyone remotely interested in photography and art this is a must - here is an image from it:

 

 

Laila Muraywid (b. 1965. Damascus) - In the garden of dreams - hand painted gelatin silver print (no date ) 41 x 43 cm -

This together with the previously mentioned  Photography Book are very valuable.

 

There is one other book worth mentioning which is a good deal more theoretical but deeply fascinating:

Micael Fried - Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, 2008 New Haven, CONN:Yale University Press

 

Thgis one is in the library in LSAD.

 

 

Her is a large photo  - lamdaprint, I think, from Abigail O'Brien's exhibition - Bread - at LCGA:

 

Abigail O'Brien - Paula Rego

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Relaying the path

That title now that I look at it again, is a bit open to interpretations - but no - I am not running relay races - a bit past that ; but on the other hand it does sound rather pretentious. Anyway keeping it simple  -I am just trying to get the communications onto a more regular footing....... footing, path.. ??! geddit  - oh leave it alone.

I haven't mentioned much recently about my own work and that may have had something to do with some of the uncertainty I had been feeling, but now there is a degree of enthusiasm present that was missing.

You may remember my earlier comment on caustic soda and some of the experiments I tried t see if I could damage the Box  .... I failed with the box due to the vinyl covering but this,....    appeared  on some card:

 

There are larger versions of this which  I have put in for the progress review to indicate whence certain images had been derived. I discovered later that the solution had leaked onto some earlier zinc plates producing a surprising efflorescence.

In short it was suggested that I might print from these  and here are some of the results:

 

 

This was over the existing image

 

...and this was on the back of the other plate

These by the way are the prints.

 

Then I decided to pour caustic over more plates and these were some of the prints that resulted. There are a lot more possibilities  here because these have used with different colours and then overprinted onto the Back:

 

 

there is an immediate feeling of landscape here and as I have said elsewhere this is the skin of the earth and when these images are put together with some of the skin pictures there should be some good result:

 

 

 

This is the image of the  Back that was  sugarlifted (by silkscreen) onto a znc  aquatinted  plate and  printed  - later I will show pictures of these results.

Just in the last week we have been having workshops on Photoetching from Susannah O'Reilly and I have been particularly interested in this because in puts together two techniques in which  I am deeply interested.

 

 

This is a close- up of my thumb with cracked skin ; this was taken with a little macro lens attached to my iPhone

 

Here is a very similar photo processed through threshold in P/S:

 

 

then put onto acetate:

 

 

and then photoetched  onto a coated zinc (or aluminium) plate:

 

 

 

Later I will post the results - the process needs some more work as the print wasn't as black as I would like it to have been; but because this plate is zinc I will treat it to the metal and then acid etch it and see if I can get a better printed result.

 

However the main benefit over the past while is in the  aesthetic. The study of skin - particularly ageing skin as a site where culturally much of the 'west' is in denial(indeed one might say even denial of death) and when this skin is compared and blended with the skin of the earth(landscape, seascape) -  provides a contrast worth thinking about.

 

To finish,  another shot of an old favourite 

 

Ground Art Rides Again!

 

 

 

 

 

 

the path of shame

note the lack of capitals - I am not really sure why my attendance to my faithful readers has been so sporadic but I can only claim lack of time - the old excuse.... but this time there is some substance to it . There has been a lot of outside activity in my life over the past six months and that won't change for the rest of this year(academic) so I can only plod forward.

I will give one piece of good news to begin and that is that my creative thinking and consequent work in the studio and workshop is in the best state it has been for the whole of this year so far. After a lot of thrashing around (metaphorically and physically) I have found something that I wish to pursue deeply,widely and perhaps contradictorily, narrowly, and that is - skin.
I will later talk a little more about how I intend to investigate this but first I will do a quick recap over the past few weeks.
Revive (Y3 Print Show) opened and ran very successfully for a week at the Sailors Home and all the work can be seen on Third Year Print Buddies Facebook page - photos beautifully taken by Dervla Mulcahy - and now some of the prints from the show can be seen in the corridor outside Y4 PCP studio (on the way to the canteen - LSAD)
One of the surprising results of the show for me was the main work I put up; when I came here first I would have been quite dismissive of digital print work but all that has changed because I have found out how much effort may be needed to produce the pieces involved.

Edge 1           digital print           50 x 157 cm

 

Edge 4         digital print       40 x 57 cm

The other thing I got from the show has been a very positive boost in both the creative and the theoretical areas of work with skin becoming the topic of my Third Year Project:

 

This photo of my heel has produced a wide variety of images already and apart from the obvious, aquatints are appearing and there will be photo etches  - if not of this part of my body then some other:

 

 

 

 

 

thee will lead into and be combined with landscapes seascapes and sand patterns because after all the land and the sea is the skin of the earth and sand -the seashore is the edge that joins the two sections of skin together.

 

 

So like the surface of my skin

 

 

But there is an artist to whom I must draw attention here as was my attention drawn to her by my indefatigable tutors - in this case Noelle:

 

 

Vija Celmins (b.1938, Riga) Ocean - lithograph

 

This artists' work appeals so much because of its apparent simplicity but also because of its endlessness ands not least because of that feeling of its being a portrait of the skin of the ocean which conceals so much more that it reveals .... one of he great qualities of skin.

Celmins' work reminds also of another artist whose work inspires me  -Norman Ackroyd (already mentioned above): the subject matter of both artists deals with the edge and the endlessness of the sea where it takes over from the fussiness of the land.

 

 

This is Achill Head (pictured from a boat in 2013)and it would be  the sort of land/seascape favoured by Ackroyd

 

 

 

....and these are the landscapes that make up my skin  -    you will see more of these