Beguile the Night exhibition at Dark Matter Studio had quite a spiritual ambience.
Gary Colclough Uprooted
The quiet and solitude of after dark meanderings in creative processes came across in a collection of work imbued with mystery.
Patrick Jackson Companion of Odysseus, Fleeing the Blinded Polyphemus
The intensity of a directed concentration was evident in an opening up of space to reflect and wonder.
Mary Yacoub Proposal for Modernist Teepee in Poured Concrete
Marianne Walker Grotta (Neo-Delphic)
Zoe Dorelli The Division of the Waters
The exhibition Stranger than Fiction at the Science Museum was billed as questioning the truth and reliability of photographs.
Fauna – Joan Fontcuberta
Joan Fontcuberta is supposedly setting up a fiction that, through documentation, the viewer is lulled into believing.
The fauna series is both visually striking and disappointing. Bad taxidermy and impossible juxtapositions create sad undignified rather then magical creatures.
In some of the black and white aged photographs there might be something fantastical to be grasped at
Joan Fontcuberta
but placing the evidence of the constructed enigma next to the documentation means all illusion vanishes.
This may be the intention.
Joan Fontcuberta
The Orogenesis and Constallations seires were more rewarding for me, using a more subtle intervention in photography resulted in dramatic landscapes that you could get lost in.
The annual Deptford X festival proved an opportunity to catch up with new friends met though the neo:print prize.
Kaori Homma presented an interactive performance in the square as part of her ongoing interest in the conventions of the east/west divide set by the meridian line at Greenwich.
Homma Meridian – Deptford X
Carol Wyss was showing her beautiful large etchings in a summer house in the green and tangled setting of Old Tidemill Wildlife garden.
Carol Wyss
Carol constructs her etchings from images of human bones, building up the form with multiples of shoulder blades or tibia.
Also in the wild garden was artist Anita Gwynn with her detailed mono prints installed inside a polytunnel.
Anita Gwynn
In the crypt of the magnificent St. Pauls Church in Deptford were 2014 Art Action UK award winners Komori & Seo showing their moving new work derived from working among the victims of the 2011 Tsunami and nuclear fallout disaster in Japan ‘Moving the Mountain’
Seo and Kamori Moving the Mountain
We watch a woman returning to where her childhood town once stood, where her parents were swept away along with her neighbours and all the buildings, but not her memories. She washes and folds her parents clothes over and over, trying to dislodge all the sand from the fibres knowing every tear and abrasion in the fabric represents a trauma to her parents bodies during their violent death.
Read more here Art Action.
The magnitude of the loss has the same incredulity as a myth, how can a whole community be swept away so suddenly and with such force. The machinations of the gods seen in the power of nature.
The stories that Xanthe Gresham-Knight tells also hold you in awe. In her stories people are searching too. Searching for truth, searching for paradise.
I have been introduced to the wonderful Treadwell’s Bookshop. A bit late for my dissertation research but for future interests it promises information on any aspect of Western pagan spirituality or the esoteric traditions of Europe.
Downstairs with wine and snacks Xanthe gave an amazing physical performance of hypnotic singing, playing the accordion and morphing into a myriad of characaters.
She tells of Celtic poets who would make a boat from the flash of a teardrop and sail out to the Land of the Ever Young in search of a goddess.
Centuries later, a man, desperately googling for a Paradise Bride accidentally summons ‘Her’ again. … ancient myths of Britain and Ireland collide with the modern world.
It couldn’t have been more apt, a collision of ancient and modern still searching for paradise.
More storytelling at Holborn Library with Jose Damasceno’s PLOT an Artangel commission.
Local authority libraries on the whole are not very inspiring environments. On the ground floor the architectural figures on the ceiling and decimated encyclopeadias did not manage to compete with the setting.
It wasn’t until we reached the fourth floor that we were suddenly transported into the drama of a possible plot.
A bizarre empty theatre space of panelled wood and reflections
Jose Damasceno
lit with the pink fluoerescne escaping from the small high windows of a room where a neon sculpture is held and is only made visible via a monitor in the outside corridor.
Jose Damasceno
Another world where the laws of physics appear overturned is the digital space.
Digital Revolution at The Barbican
Our known perceptions of landscape are challenged here.
will.i.am debut artwork with Yuri Suzuki
There was spectacle in immersive scale allowing you to physically enter the space
and engage with common fantasies
communicating with other species
being plunged into a drama set in the place of your birth
even Kessingland
or being transformed into a bird and flying
Chris Milk The Treachery of Sanctuary
There was a reminder of research from my dissertation –
the dystopian future of London in Kibwe Tavare’s short film, Robots of Brixton
Robots of Brixton
I didn’t end up writing about the film but it made me want to see it and it kind of fitted with ideas of urban bad/rural good that abound through the ages.
The mythologizing of the rural began even before Virgil’s ‘Bucolics’ and continues today massaged by technological spectacle in mass entertainments such as ‘Avatar’.
Handing in the final document of my dissertation ‘Finding Paradise’ unleashed a new energy.
Back for my second year at the RCA its time to put all that thinking into my work.
After such a break from making over the summer spent at the computer screen I thought the best thing to do was to just get on with something.
I started a soft ground etching of the Chapel of Rest in Paradise Industrial Estate, Hemel Hempstead.
While working with my magnifying lens there was a moment of euphoria – a bit like finding that illusive paradise
I am excited by this new development
Susan Eyre 