MORTAL

I have just returned from installing and de-installing The A Game from my first "proper show". (The Organiser of the show was very pleased when I told him it was a 'proper show'; the project apparently started small and moderate and then grew...) This is a picture from the MORTAL website www.mortal.org.uk. Unfortunately all the picture Liz K and I took are very blurry, whether from the dark or the drink. As you can see, my giant piece (I recently found out that it weighs some 80 kilos) has pride of place in the middle of the huge red carpet. I can honestly say when I made the piece, having in mind the vast concrete floor at Paintworks, I never expected to install it on a red carpet. I was very pleased with the result.

Flexible Territory

This was made using latex and transfer type and is approximately a meter square. It is a "print" taken with liquid latex from a folded metal sheet stained with earth and ash, on which a fire had been set that burned through the center of the metal. The dried latex was then carefully and laboriously peeled from the sheet. Adding the rhumb lines was tricky as latex doesn't take ink particularly well, but I was pleased at how well the transfer type adhered. At this size, it is quite difficult to spot (look for a small number of scattered white letters).

I have been meaning for some time to make a flexible piece that was both map and territory. Ragged coastlines and damaged documents share a certain quality of torn, fractal edge, that sense of the 'giantiny' I mentioned in the Found Paintings post.

Carving Nature at the Joints

This letter is carved from the medial epicondyle of a lamb's humerus and is approximately 2.5 x 3 x 2 cm. It was carved using a grinding disk and drill. The varied colouring and texture results from the transition between compacted outer bone and the spongy inner bone found inside the epiphysis. The piece was partly inspired by my recent visit to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Some of the most fascinating and terrifying exhibits was an example of the severely "anaklosed" skeleton of a 30 year old man who suffered from an extremely rare genetic disorder now called fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva. This disease causes muscles, tendons and ligaments to be gradually replaced with bone, imprisoning the sufferer within their own ossifying body. The bowed skeleton was like nothing I have ever seen, a cage of bone interlaced with baroque excrescences, the back an almost solid mass of arching bone. The body, like so many medical curiosities, was almost certainly taken from its grave and sold without the permission of the former owner or his relatives. What a profession, to search for the country for tales of people with rare conditions. Tracking down the bodies of rare mistakes to sell to interested gentlemen bent on acquiring the rarest specimens, pitting their prized collections against one another in the spirit of friendly scientific rivalry. The pieces, the collectors and their culture, all written in the same flawed shifting alphabet.

undemonstrata

This is a small prototype for a series of drawings I intend to make about text, cartography and the city. The creased landscape of paper is covered with fragmented prose about the reading of a landscape. More Sinclair inspired, Situationist, psychogeographical, Joycean mumblings.

This Foundation Stone

I'm reading Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory, on loan from AHB. He writes in soundbites, shorthand. Writes of the scurf of abandoned tags and slogans, lateral moraines deposited in sidestreets by the glacial movements of the capital's polity, each graffito a letter in the great unending unreadable name of London, written in its native tongue. The city's language a hydra of tongues, a mouthful of tongues and limestone teeth, a great mute body skinned with a sea of such mouths, silently scrawling over the brickwork with their felt-tipped tongues. A freewheeling fragmentary prose, a pandemic infectious cant cultured in London's feral book trade...

This photo, however, was taken in Bristol.

Carnivale

This is a 'digital painting' that I completed today. Adding left/right symmetry to random phenomena always, for me, brings out faces. This form of assisted pareidolia (seeing patterns where there are none) always makes me wonder about the baroque facial recognition algorithms hard-wired into the human brain; at certain times - when rationality is weakened - even furniture can gain an expression. The world is so quickly turned in to the Beast's Castle (in the 1991 Disney movie) where every stick of furniture has a personality. And what is more, when we share our observations we often find that people will agree that, say, a certain jug looks pleased with itself, and another jug looks glum. (Indeed, it is not only in English that objects such as ceramic vessels share our anatomies; lips and feet, necks and bellies). Whether we learn all of it from experience, or have some basic physiognomy hardwired, we all infer character from appearance, and our inferences often agree.

The Trees of Whiteladies