My visit to the Venice Biennale was marked by my receiving news that I had a place at the Royal College of Art for the Autumn. A great start to a very inspiring few days.
It does feel a bit like I am going to be launched into space. Exciting and an amazing opportunity but also not knowing what to expect with anxieties that I will be lost or unable to cope.
Bedwyr Williams ‘The Starry Messenger’ and Sarah Sze’s Triple Point both explore feelings of place within the universe. Very apt for my frame of mind.
Wales in Venice
‘The Starry Messenger’ explores the relationships between stargazing and the individual, the cosmos, and the role of the amateur in a professional world.
Inside the former church and convent in a darkened room there is a small observatory with a door ajar through which we can see the starry cosmos. There is the sound of a man weeping, just like Kevin does when he thinks about the vastness of space and his own insignificance. Moving through the installation you walk under glass with household objects placed on its surface above your head which I took as a possible reference to Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawing ‘A cloudburst of material possessions’. Maybe it is space debris.
Bedwyr Williams The Starry Messenger
There is a film with a Mighty Boosh style protagonist who represents a character trapped within a mosaic mural.
Bedwyr Williams The Starry Messenger
From the geological formation of stone out of oozing mud through its journey and subsequent use in a mural to the demolition of the building and its return to the earth. From looking out at the stars through a telescope to ‘staring into space’ the outer and inner worlds collide in a wonderfully amusing narrative encompassing the life the universe and everything dialogue.
Bedwyr Williams The Starry Messenger
Sarah Sze explores the desire to locate our place within a disorienting world.
Sarah Sze Triple Point
Her fragile sculptures echo the balance and chaos of the world around us.
Sarah Sze Triple Point
They appear to spin or be in the process of expansion, beautifully mysterious like the working of the atom or the universe they are full of wonder.
Sarah Sze Triple Point
Playing with pattern, order and taxonomy she creates a laboratory busy in its own pursuits which makes us feel we are close to understanding something great.
Sarah Sze Triple Point
I was excited to see she had used moss a lot throughout this installation, even turning its image into wallpaper.
Sarah Sze Triple Point
Triple Point refers to the phase when gas, liquid and solid form of a substance are all in equilibrium, her use of natural forms keep our ideas grounded in our surroundings while drawing us into the mysteries of evolution.
The extraordinary collection of stones once owned by artist Roger Caillois were on display in the Central Pavillion.
Roger Caillois Stones
Caillois believed that nature should be examined as something other than as the utilitarian force that Darwin purported and that aesthetics and the need for decoration should be considered integral to our understanding of the natural world.
Roger Caillois Stones
He considered the beautiful patterns within ancient natural forms were a sort of cryptic ‘universal syntax’, a unifying aesthetic language.
Roger Caillois Stones
He wanted to understand the mysteries of the subjective experience through its relationship to factual reality.
I find it fascinating trying to understand the aesthetic experience.
Gerhard Richter’s tapestries at Gagosian, Davies Street emanate pure aesthetic pleasure, colours and form coalesce erupt and fade.
These works are based on Abstract Painting (724-4) (1990). The visual effect of the tapestries is a Rorschach-like multiplying of the forms and colours of the original canvas.
Gerhard Richter
Like entering a hypnotic state, like staring into space both literally and metaphorically you are transported to a place where it feels familiar and strange at the same time.
Gerhard Richter
Venice was a perfect location to think about mysteries, the sacred and the wonders of the world.
Susan Eyre 