Macmuff

Minor Celebrity Pool Party: Installation

A collection of objects and drawings from the last three weeks. For me this has been a new way of working, bringing together all ideas rather than just those that "are relevant to the project", as everything is connected. Objects from drawings, drawings from objects. Things I hear, see, find and remember.

I plan to turn this collection into some sort of exhibition catalogue in both book form and online.

Iceland

2 years later and I finally got these photos sorted

The Vogelkop Bowerbird

My new favourite.

Link: The Vogelkop Bowerbird

I love how he collects things, and how they each have different colour preferences and ideas about what is beautiful. These seem like such human characteristics.

Moral of the story: he who has the prettiest house wins the lady, and don't decorate your house with poo.

"Thursday Morning" : The Worlds Cheapest Ice Rink

At college, each Monday and Thursday morning time is set aside for two people in the class to display work in the "seminar space" (ie. a small room/gallery space in the college). On Monday Caroline and Saskia has built this huge installation/shrine in the space, hundreds of flowers, toys, bones, colours surrounding a red bicycle with a bisons skull which. Being inside the installation was really claustrophobic as you had to crawl through the space between the objects and the ceiling was lowered with shawls etc. The whole experience was quite overwhelming and it was really well done.

So It was Laura and I's turn on Thursday to do something with the space and how were we supposed to follow that?? We couldn't compete with it so we decided to have nothing in the space, to make it completely empty. The floor of the space was filthy with dust and dirt and the remnants of previous installations so we decided to clean it. Really clean it. And cleaning away the top layer of black watered down paint and dirt revealed 100 years of marks and paint splodges.

We also polished the floor to make it slippery thereby changing the way you experienced and moved about the space. It became, as Faith put it, the worlds cheapest ice rink.

Katie Paterson

Katie Paterson graduated from Intermedia at ECA a few years ago, this is what she is doing now. Pretty amazing.

Speaking of Intermedia graduates, a couple of my favorites from this years degree show:

Rachel Adams

Tom Nolan

Drawings

Toucan

Thinking about birds...

Alfred Hitchcock: Original trailer for "The Birds"

Pixar: For the Birds

The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing + Monika Grzymala talk

On Saturday evening I went to see artist Monika Grzymala "in conversation with" Brian Dillon at the Fruitmarket Gallery.

I found a lot of what she was saying was really interesting. For example, she trained in stone carving and restoration and in her early work she was making very labour intensive stone sculptures depicting scenes from her childhood etc. which would take weeks and weeks to make. She would display them in galleries, two or three of these sculptures in a room, but the work was really about the connection and the tension between the pieces. So her tutor asked her one day, do you really need the figures? And she realised that she didn't. So she stopped making stone carvings and focused on this "nothing" in between them, and this is what she has be working with ever since.

I also liked that when she takes her work down from an exhibition, she keeps the "clumps" of tape in her studio as works themselves, or she gives them away to friends.

Garrett Phelan: Roving Roding Woodcock on Reconnaissance

As for the rest of the exhibition, The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing, I was slightly disappointed. Some of it I really loved , eg. Garat Phelan's "Battle for Birds" installation, and Monika Grzymala's tape piece that spanned both floors of the gallery.

But for a "contemporary drawing" exhibition, there not a lot else very exciting going on. There were quite a number of photorealistic drawings from a few of the artists, and I'm just not into that. I mean, once you have got over the "wow it looks so realistic, it must have taken ages" then I just don't find them that interesting. Just show us the photo you drew it from, it's less tiring to look at. If you have a photo, why do we need the drawing if you're just going to copy it? Plus it's way to easy for photorealistic drawings and paintings just to look plain cheesy.

So anyway, I will most likely go see this exhibition again at some point and maybe I'll change my mind. I just think for an exhibition about "Attitudes in Drawing" the majority of the drawings just weren't all that ground breaking or varied.

Karla Black: Sculptures

"All pastel colours and not really of anything"

...apparently thats the kind of art I like. So it's not surprise I really enjoyed this exhibition.

"All the materials are used out of a pure physical desire for them" - Karla Black

(image above are from previous Karla Black exhibitions, not the one at Inverleith House.)

http://www.marymarygallery.co.uk/index.php/artists/karla_black/

Drawings

Too much STUFF

Last week I was stuck at a bit of a dead end with this project.... sitting at my desk in my studio with all this STUFF around. So I cleared it all away, and started again with nothing around, just ideas. I realised that I should just do all the silly little ideas and drawings that come into my head, and not worry if they are "relevant to the project" any more, and that all ideas are connected.

So here goes. Gathering thoughts and images, visiting exhibitions, finishing the books I've started, wandering the streets, no more desks, refilling my space with stuff.... and let ideas happen naturally rather than worrying about whether they are "good" or not.

Extraordinary Object

For this project I was recording time through making objects, looking at:

• the time frame of one hour
• repetition and endurance
• the idea of non objects (like the origami triangular dipyramids, which hold no particular meaning.)
• the importance of colour