A Scottish Buffalo?

                                                 Tomnaverie Stone Circle, Tarland

Now having returned from SSW to the Dear Green Place of Glasgow, I’m back in the studio getting reaquainted with everything - outside I hear the rumble of trains and motorways, but not Arnie the foundry propane torch or Eden’s Squennis commentary. The dung molds seem to have survived the epic mountain road crossing over the Cairngorms, having been carefully packed in wood shavings for the journey.

Here are a few more images of the work being installed, and of a sort of stand-off between man and dungmix. Here also is the latest odd set of objects to be installed in the Corolla:

I have now decided to show the work again as part of the Merchant City Festival at the Briggait in Glasgow (weekend of the 23/24 July). This will be shown alongside new work by Deniz, one of whose involves the collecting of dust from several locations around the Merchant City. We both seem to enjoy reinventing the waste products found around us!

A few images from the last four weeks:

                                              Eden and Katie, pre pour

                                                 The door of names

                                SSW space shuttle programme underway

                                             Gordon shows off his cast

...and in the spirit of continuation, following a conversation with a friend at GSS, I have managed to find a possible source of Buffalo dung in Scotland. As you will remember from Kate Hobby’s advice, this is the best dung for mold-making, but usually hard to come by in this part of the world. If I do succeed in acquiring some of this fabled excrement, I shall perhaps begin to re-create my SSW residency work once again!

Unearthed Ideas

The Friday night opening at Left Bank had a good turnout, there were several people inquisitive about my material and the final forms, and also the sun shone through the windows, casting giant spider-leg shadows beyond the tall stands. Based on the reaction to the work, I have found that people living in rural locations have a strong awareness of their surroundings, and have to network across greater distances than you would in a city. They are keen to understand something new, and place it in context with what is already known. The saying knowing the lay of the land springs to mind.

 From sawdust box to raised stand. the journey to Tarland was a careful one!

I’d like to thank Ross for all his help in setting up and documenting the work. I’ve included some images here, but more should spring up on the SSW site (and mine) in time. Also, thanks to Christine, for her continued help and advice on all things local and worth knowing about.

 

After the show we set off in search of a Ceilidh we had heard about down the road, which just finished as we arrived, so we made our way back to SSW for a rather large fire in the big steel bowl. Joining in with the singed eyebrows were Ross, Gayle and Katie, who is also finishing her two-week residency here with a run of bronze hand and arm-like forms.
 

I began to pack away my studio yesterday. Some things have been used to destruction, others never really got unpacked. Among these are my birdie lanterns, a wiper motor, choc bocks, cable, nuts and bolts, all in roughly the same place they were four weeks earlier. In fact, all kinetic or theatrical stuff didn’t get touched. I gave them considered thought as part of the work, but the process of collecting and working with natural materials, from Steve’s horse dung to Alan’s wood shavings, from endless kneading of the dungmix in the Ganghut, to keeping the old smoky kiln going for a total of 170 hours (or thereabouts) meant this wasn’t the place for clever mechanisms or dramatic lighting, but for slow, accumulative and primarily outdoors work that can be very rewarding.

I’ve just unearthed two exhibition catalogues and a journal that I had found in the library near the beginning of my residency. I felt like my work may have been influenced by these articles. The first was From Art to Archeology, a South Bank Centre book from 1991 containing work by Richard Long and Thomas Joshua Cooper. Referring to the crossover of art and archeology, and to sites of specific human interest: ‘We study the endless number of patterns they offer, at scales of magnitude that go from the miroscopic to the global, and hope to distinguish those few patterns that we find intelligable, as telling us something instructive about ancient human lives’ (a). I find this interpretation useful, but I also enjoy alternate realities that are in part fabricated, which can begin to seep in and inhabit the same space as those understood empirically. Book number two is called Lost, by the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2008), whose front cover depicts the Coney Island rollercoaster, now derelict and enveloped in weeds. ‘The disused rollercoaster at Coney Island has been reclaimed. It is a modern ruin. Coney Island, the world’s first theme park, was built to attack the problem of pleasure. This was a laboratory of experience offering a variety of multiple synthetic realities to act as antidote to the metropolis’ (b). Number three is the October 2010 issue of Sculpture magazine, on whose front cover the chaotic bamboo structure called Big Bambu, by Doug and Mike Starn. This free-forming natural structure was assembled by trained climbers, who sailed through the web of poles, slowly building pathways and tunnels to the sky, all atop the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Within the artical is the line: ‘Usually, sculpture is meant to be viewed from the outside; it’s not something you enter.’ (c) This work is obviously not like that sort of sculpture, as it can be entered and explored. All these three texts have been inhabiting my space during the evolution of the dung molds; following their evolution from fragile cardboard boxes to stacked and coated solid blocks, to fired and excavated, fragile and smoky, interior forms elevated on tall steel platforms. One of the molds didn’t even make it out of the fire before crumbling to dust. Here are some of its fragments:

(a: Christopher Chippindale, b: Tania Kovats, c: Christine Temin)

Tourist at Left Bank

Well, the day of exhibiting my work has come. After four weeks of horse-shit discovery and bakin’ molds, I had one last intense day in the metal shop yesterday heat-bending and welding the steel stands together, and now the molds are elevated and set for show at the Left Bank Gallery in Tarland. This is a neat little gallery situated in an old bank, run by Sera Irvine. The space is large enough for four of my elevated molds, with another mini one in the entrance area... or that’s what I’ve planned so far, as long as they make the half-hour journey intact. It’ll be a careful drive!

I’ve also marked out Left Bank Gallery’s footprint onto the floor of the Communities Room, and began to lay out the work in the space. What I began to realise was there are real contrasts between exposed and concealed spaces in the work. I had decided to make a stand for one of the fragments that had fallen away from the manhole cover mold (not a title, just for reference). This is to be placed a short distance from the main mold, and appears as if it were an exploded diagram. The view of its now exposed interior represents to me a kind of miniature amphitheatre or an underground conduit. This revealing contrasts with the darkened and secret interior of the heart mold, whose interior darkness and elevated height give little away.

 The piece that got its own stand!

Stepped interior of mold, seen through the gap left by the piece above.

I’ve begun to to reflect on the past four weeks, and have tried to ascertain what I have learnt. Some of these are things like: put more clay into the mix in future, as some molds have come out of the kiln fragile and crumbly (or maybe I had been making apple crumble all along?!); projects like this are great experiences in testing new territory with unfamiliar materials, so as not to become complacent with your own practice; Eden has probably over twenty different personalities (pool of technicians); all four seasons can be represented in one day in Lumsden; when walking in the countryside there’ll always be a dead animal when you least expect it.

So, soon I’ll be heading off back to sunny Glasgow, GSS, and a new project, this time helping to film Deniz’s new video work at a local windfarm, with a menagerie of props and willing assistants! I’m looking forward to it, but in the meantime, the show.

http://leftbankgallery.wordpress.com/