Artists experimenting in new mediums, or changing the speed of the record.
Lutz Bacher ‘Black Beauty’ at the ICA
Lutz Bacher
A shattered mirror set on a slag heap. Or is it obsidian which is altogether more magical.
Lutz Bacher
The space is sparsely populated, it is the crunching underfoot that is the joy. And no doormat.
Lutz Bacher
Upstairs it is all glitz and showbiz, a strange game of chess to one side and the eerie mechanical rotations of a deserted fairground to the other.
Lutz Bacher
All the while the slowed down lullaby of an Elvis Presley classic weevils soporifically into the brain.
Lutz Bacher
It made me smile but there was something sinister about its clean cut image.
One of the spaces often used for performance at the ICA had been painted by the Shanghai artist Zhang Enil.
Zhang Enlli
I wonder if the finished result ‘space painting’ fulfilled the artists expectations. I could appreciate the task undertaken here but think I would maybe like to see his other work that encompasses tangled wires and cardboard boxes. The room itself felt temporary with its flimsy walls and therefore any sense of transformation was lost.
Glasstress – White Light/ White Heat was a collateral event at the Venice Biennale.
Missed it first visit so on my second trip to Venice, this time with my RCA fellow students I wanted to have a look at this show with so many of the artists I admire in it.
The artists were invited to respond to the theme of light and heat using the medium of glass in some way. Being in Venice.
Some of these transgressions into an unfamiliar medium worked better than others.
Glasstress White Light/ White Heat
The setting once again was palatial.
Lucy and Jorge Orta ‘Amazonia: Tree of Life’
Matt Collishaw ‘East of Eden’
A very gothic and theatrical almost pantomime piece from Matt Collishaw. The mirror darkens and a swirling serpent appears. Impossible to photograph in the darkened setting, illusive like the snake.
Joana Vasconcelos ‘Babylon’
Rather than go with the glass itself Joana Vasconcelos has used her signature crochet work to create the mother of all chandeliers.
Not the tampons this time.
Hew Locke ‘Mummy’s Little Soldier’
There were stark contrasts in Hew Locke’s work, high end opalescent glass with all the little brown rubber arms reaching out – the fragile and the malleable. The child at play, the child at war.
Cornelia Parker ‘Decoy’
A tantalizing glass drum from Cornelia Parker.
Recycle Group
The Recycle Group aka artists Andrey Blokhin and Georgiy Kuznetsov created a dramatic clash of the natural spliced with science fiction.
Ron Arad ‘Last Train’
“Last Train” was inspired by a late night romantic episode experienced by Ron Arad as he witnessed a man with a large diamond ring graffiti on a train window. He was so mesmerized by watching the man draw onto the glass that he missed his last train. To recreate this experience he has invited artists such as Anthony Gormley and David Shrigley to use a specially created iPad programme to manipulate a virtual hand that scratches their drawings into a large piece of plate glass.
My own excursion into new mediums was to print a lithograph onto polyester.
I wanted to layer images of Avondale and Rialto over the image of the Avondale Rialto caravan. Dreams of grand excursions. Places this caravan will never visit.
The zinc plate was hand drawn with waxy pencils and printed over the sublimation images.
I also tried to make the polyester more translucent by applying extender the lithography press. I did several coats each side of the fabric and then hung it to dry in the paper dryers. This was not very successful.
The fabric dried in the shape it was hanging and it wasn’t very translucent in the dark areas.
The extender has given the fabric a strange quality though.
I have not quite given up on this image yet.
Susan Eyre 