Friday, 28 May 2010
TRAVELLING LIGHT
So, After I went and came back from Broomhill, after enjoying all that marvellous hospitality (and food) from Anieta and Rinus and the gorgeous Broomhill Art Hotel gardens, I am still working on the bags!
At the moment I am working on two installations (Broomhill and the Harold Martin Botanical Gardens), in fact it is a quite stressful time, but I could not resist the temptation (if not just to unwind, keep my mind off things and at times change working mode) to edit the footage that I've filmed documenting the making of first ten elements that I have set out at Broomhill two weeks ago. Ten more elements are to come and will be hopefully added next week.
As you can see the 3 parts video turned out to be something completely different than just the documentation of the making process that I had initially intended to make, somehow the footage took its own course and life!
The Idea behind was to document the sound of the preparation of the 3000 plastic bags (part one) then, while piling them up and moving them around the room to make space for the new ones and for myself I saw other things happening ( part two).
Part three is about the packing up of the installation and the traveling with my bags.
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
The Tip
While piling away and stacking more and more bags in the small sublet, working to get ready for the Broomhill art show, I couldn't help but noticing stuff happening, so i decided to film it!
The initial stages of my art-making are factory or better mass production-like: very methodical and often monotonous although blissfully meditative! They usually consist of endless repetitive disciplined repetitions of the same movements to prepare a few thousand plastic bags, to shape them and mold them before they get all assembled into a final piece.
In a trance-like action I blindly follow a vision that keeps me at it for hours and days. Those long tedious hours I love! They enable me to explore my mind and my medium in more depth and each time in different ways. The process is what dictates the work. For me it is never really about a final piece of work, I feel I am always in a constant transitional phase of work in progress, one shape flows into the next one from one installation to the other in an unstoppable stream of thoughts and ideas. The journey of the process might be in-fact "the final piece". Sometimes the changes are just very subtle: I work with a very limited selection of materials. I like to keep things simple and try to milk the most out of what I have.
Sunday, 2 May 2010
The other thing i have been doing this week is to organize my next group show at the Harold Martin Botanical Garden at University of Leicester in Leicester. The bags I will be using for this show are the same ones that were at the "Climate Change" Show at the Rhyl library Museum and Art Centre in Rhyl.
The title of that piece is: "It always rains on wet"
These 2000 bags will be boxed up and mailed to Leicester and together with another another couple of thousand bags that I will pick up from my London Storage will form the next art work.
For this exhibition I will be flying out of Italy into Birmingham and then take the train to Leicester and spend few nights there in a cheap hotel until the work is set up. During that time frame I will be also make a trip by the train to Aberyswyth in Wales to meet the organizers and visit my next summer residency place at the University of Aberyswith where i will be living and make art for a 3 months period
When I am not making art or applying for new opportunities I am always planning. Planning is one of my main activities that absorbs a big chunk of my liquid time. It constitutes a very important part of my art-making and life where I have to work out all the logistics in order to make art happen. The 2 main tyrants-dictators are time and budget!
It all becomes much easier when to be part of a show I just have to send in a DVD. This is the case of “After the End” group show at the Elysium Gallery in Swansea that i will be part of in May.
The video I will be showing there is titled: "Like a Fish out of Water". It is a performance piece that I staged last year in Italy and was filmed and edited by photographer and video artist Donna Lee Corboy.
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