Gardens unwrapped

I spent Saturday in Oxford touring the city's Botanic Garden. I was there to meet metron curators Diane Jones-Parry and Annabel Ralphs about the latest in their series of artist-led projects centred on books.

I'm one of a group of artists working with them on the Oxford Botanic Garden's archive of annual Gardening Chronicles. Senior Curator at the Garden, Alison Foster, drew articles from the Chronicles, which date back to 1851, and randomly allocated them to the participating artists as source material.

My articles are on the crocus and on budding and my task is to make work that can be sited in the gardens, glasshouses or other areas of the site. The exhibition is due to take place in 2014 so there's plenty of time to dig deep into the research and to ponder the very horticultural direction my new work seems to be taking.

http://unwrappingbooks.info/#/oxford-botanic-gardens/4560059824

Mystery upon mystery

I was intrigued by artist Louise K Wilson’s additions to the 1975 movie Picnic at Hanging Rock. Her new work Missing Scenes: An Evening at Hanging Rock was commissioned by Spacex as part of Topophobia and presented at Exeter Phoenix as a one-off event on 5th July. 

Louise K Wilson showed Peter Weir’s (shorter) director’s cut in its entirety, along with various audio and visual interventions, the most prominent of which were snippets of recorded interviews with Devon locals Val Bogan, Joe Loxton and Michael Calver. They talked informally about their impressions of the book by Joan Lindsay, on which the film is based. Wilson also gave a tantalising hint of the contents of the final (missing) chapter, which offers a solution to the mystery at the heart of the story.

I enjoyed seeing this excellent film again, and hearing different views of the novel as we went along (though, as my companion pointed out, it was bit like watching TV when someone else has control of the remote and keeps hitting pause). However, I confess to feeling slightly puzzled about what Louise K Wilson intended by taking on this iconic film for a rework. The event felt like an exploration of mystery and uncertainty, the activities of speculation and explanation, the inevitable blurring of fact and fiction and the multi-layered meanings of texts...

Perhaps it's only right that I really can't be sure.

Topophobia is at Spacex  for one more day only. It closes 7th July.  

Nothing Ever Happens

"Nothing much ever happened at West Coker" in Somerset, according to the village annals. "No relic of saint nor monument of art nor scene of natural beauty ever attracted visitors to it."  So it's hardly the sort of place you'd expect to find a contemporary art gallery.  But the Old School Room, run by Simon Lee Dicker and Chantelle Henocq looks set to challenge that. 

Curated by Nia Metcalfe, their latest show Nothing Ever Happens looks at our attraction to and dislocation from the natural world. This tension is typified by Michael Day's contemplative video pieces, in which picturesque landscapes are interrupted or overlaid with the technological and the mundane.

Dafydd Fortt has constructed a compelling two-dimensional work at one end of the space. Mind the Shake Holes, Tyle Haidd to Cwar Yr Ystrad is derived from photographs taken during several walks between two quarries in the artist's Welsh homeland. Cut-out images - divorced from context - are systematically repeated to create a kind of psychedelic wallpaper.

The dream-like atmosphere is completed by Ellie Doney's sculptural forms which seem poised between  liquid and solid, beautiful and grotesque. Consisting of poured glass matched with clouds of foam filler, they seem at home in their own materiality and yet convey an uncanny sense of instability.

Nothing Ever Happens, featuring the work of Michael Day, Dafydd Fortt and Ellie Doney, runs Thursdays to Sundays, 15 June 2012 - 8 July 2012 at OSR Projects, Old School Room, Church Street, West Coker, Somerset BA22 9BD

More live than I meant to be

Attended my first Live Art Meet at Exeter Phoenix on Tuesday.  I was curious to know more about these new events, but didn't really expect to be part of the entertainment. However, interaction was required - even by unwitting drinkers in the Cafe Bar as, under the guidance of our host Claire Burke, we meandered our way through parts of the Fluxus Workbook.

I'm interested in performance but not performing. Nevertheless I will be brave and go back as it was friendly and fun. Events happen the last Tuesday of every month and are announced here:
http://www.exeterphoenix.org.uk/art/galleries-opportunities/art-meets.html

Blow up art

Jeremy Deller's Sacrilege (aka bouncy Stonehenge) visited Belmont Park, Exeter today and, after it had had a quick mop down, we all got on and leaped about. It is truly is the year of inflatable public art, though I think Sacrilege rather outshines Kurt Perschke's RedBall, which was here a few days ago.

Turning thoughts digital

Test piece in Meshlab

Working on my Digital Art Commission and getting a headache. The biggest problem is not coming up with ideas, but getting those ideas into a form that a 3D printer can work with. Anything you want to make has to be digitised and it has to have dimensions in three axes.

If you can imagine it, you can probably print it, but first you have to master a 3D design program. There are many sophisticated tools such as AutoCAD (used by architects and engineers) but, as beginners, we were introduced to Google Sketchup.  It's free and it's clever, but ultimately it's clunky.  If we had six months to do this, I'd work my way through it, but I have to produce a design by 10th August.

Can you re-model objects from the real world? Yes. There's a fantastic piece of free software that goes with cheap kit for home 3D scanning http://www.david-laserscanner.com/, but those scans still have to be stitched and cleaned using a clever but rather daunting piece of free software - MeshLab.

Can you import raw data and visualise it? Yes. That's what I'm trying to do, again using MeshLab. But turning numbers into objects can't be done at the touch of a button. I've needed a lot of help from a programmer friend, and we're not there yet. It's alien territory for artists as there are no test prints, no maquettes - nothing to touch. You work on a digital file and the next thing you see is your finished object. I guess that's why it's known as rapid prototyping.

I'm one of 30 artists participating in the Exeter Phoenix Digital Art Commission 2012, in partnership with the Centre for Additive Layer Manufacturing (CALM) at Exeter University.

Making the virtual real

Gyroid by Bathsheba (made using additive layer manufacturing)

Amazing insights yesterday into a technology that looks set to revolutionise our relationship with manufactured objects. It all happened as part of my participation in the Exeter Phoenix Digital Art Commission, in partnership with the Centre for Additive Layer Manufacturing (CALM) at Exeter University.

Additive layer manufacturing allows you to take highly complex digital designs (for example, filigree/lace, chains, gears, hinges, bone implants, origami, mathematical models) and construct them in a single process, layer by layer, as if you were printing them from your computer. No need for tool-making, machining, moulds or assembly. No need to worry about undercuts or hollows. You can make models in plastic, metal, plaster, resin, paper, wax...and soon (we're promised) in chocolate or ice. Artists and designers are already doing amazing things as you can see here. 

I'm still digesting the possibilities for my practice, but also the huge learning curve required to master the technology that will allow me to submit a design for printing later this summer.  I know that I'll be revisiting my work with flight, but I have a lot of technical issues to iron out.

In the meantime, I'm inspired by Markus Kayser's Solar Sinter Project. Venturing into the Sahara with portable technology, he replaced the lasers used in the high-tech sintering process with the energy of the sun to fuse ordinary sand into glass sculptures.