the city of ayr

the windiest place i have ever been! and i went with my friend ben!

peer work

the work done by my fellow classmates.
my 'wood work' is of the same exhibition.

sunshine

a warm day! a miracle! gsa and presumably all of scotland leapt outdoors on thursday, shedding clothes and taking it very very easy. i visited my friend helene who had brought her living room out onto her stoop. we drew and drank berry tea, talking to students as they walked by- lovely!

gardening!

a friend has begun a community garden project in which found places, vacant lots, spaces between rowhouses, anything, are taken and plotted. the desire is to enrich soil by returning it to a clean state and returning it to its original fruitful purpose while interesting those who live near by it. we hope that once we begin a plot, neighbors will claim and care for it, eating what it offers and being fulfilled by the progress.

these images are of the first step: the urban archeology that is plotting! we found several small walls and broken pottery, it was spectacular! next sunday we return to plant our wheat seeds and dig a neighboring spot for onions. beautiful.

the second show

this is organized as best as it could be: i feel like this installation's documentation needs to be fed to viewers in a particular way as it really is multiple pieces that are contingently particular with an obsessive categorization that absolutely have to live together. this way is still not the best way.

i have never made work like this, but it was so refreshing. here is how the process went: i looked at what i'd been doing naturally during the day, art-wise. i.e. drawing obsessively, graphite drawings of wood grain, blades of grass, watercolours of gardens, illustrative series of events- things i could not help but record. these were things that were not obviously connected to one another, which i felt was relevent and interesting. i believe in connections, and i know that i am not one to make things willy-nilly. so, to figure it all out, i sat down and did a hundred ink drawings, 2 minutes each, to meditate and pull out all the images i had. then, i picked my favorites. they were all material oriented. slowly they led to the objects seen here.

perhaps i should say here that i had a very interesting tutorial (one on one critique) with sean kayes, a professor at leeds college. while we talked about my mouse work, the printed shirt of last semester, and my dilegence to process, we together reestablished my determination to expose the instability of 'authority' and the tricks of 'truth'. real objects when combined with an approximation offer a dialogue that can propose questions of belief, or enhance the 'true existent qualities' of both items. thus my need to pair scenery of wood, drawings of wood, near real wood. trees are real, but each process we handle them makes them more and more false.

a tree -> a cross cut -> a plank -> a sheet of paper -> a record -> an idea
synthetic at many and nearly all stages.

the first thing i made for the space was the three watercolours of wood flooring at an angle. they were stretched on my bedroom floor, and were handpressed to pick up the exact texture of the wood. their arrangement and angle was something that was to come later.

there are three gold chains, the bottom one broken, inset into the wall. (really beautiful- i plastered them in at their edges so they really just appear out of the wall.) frivolous and vain, they are objects humanity can't help but want and want to make. such are all other objects included.

the ink drawing is an imagined pavementscape- it was the most labour intensive bit of the whole work. i wanted to think and 'build' concrete, pour over it in the same ways with the same attention it's inventors and technicians did. perhaps i was trying to care for it as much as they had. to make sympathy for those who are set to repair it. i was unsuccessful. it can be hated to easily, its purpose so often unfriendly and over the top. (do we really need this forever concrete decoration, stairs, fence, etc) no matter what the feelings towards it may be, it still exists and is seemingly self perpetuating. it will never be a relic, no matter how 'museum like' its presentation may be. thus the inclusion of the actual samples.

the bricks are one's i have dug from the earth myself, finding them in an abandoned lot while gardening. they are on cardboard shelves, roughly constructed to imply their future downfall.

repair remade

pair maid

kitchen pictures

lovely things to practice camera on.