Boats in basements

Boats.

Basements.

Journeys.

I'm trying to blog without sounding angry. It is hard. The internet was clearly made for people to post blogs cause no one wants to here them complain about stuff.

OK I went to a basement exhibition which I hear is all the rage at the moment, people doing it left right and centre.

I'm just going to sum up cause... i don't want to write crap. OK. The piece was about fictional characters that go on big romantic journeys or quests which eventually come to nothing so the artist built a boat in his basement and spent 24hours in it. I like the concept to a certain extent, i felt like it was possibly missing something but of further reflection this probabally adds to the concept. The exhbition space was a tad small for a piece of this size, if there was one person there it would have been fine but it makes for an awkward opening night. I'm sure people got over it with wine though.

bye.

Pages and pages

I went to the artist book fair on friday and it was really lovely.

Somehow they'd managed to get an equilibrium between pretentious artist and jumble sale which worked really well, so no one felt like a fraud being there. WHICH is always a good thing.

There was quite a few peoples work from the college which was good to see, again the mix between younger and older artists was a fairly good one. The thing I found really interesting about the fair was the diverse interpretations of 'book', there were standard art books, there were books that open up to be more like elaborate colourful sculptures, books made of material a healthy plethora of ideas milling around anyhow!

.that is all.

Mittens and Ears

Hello blogosphere its been a while..... because I'm a failasaurus, however I have bits and bobs to quickly mention! Over reading week I went to the theatre to see 'Dancing at Lughnasa' in Birmingham, i had initially planned to see what was up at the Ikon gallery HOWEVER the 40min journey to Birmingham somehow managed to take 2 and a half hours so I had to go straight to the Ikon gallery cafe for food (with strange array of people, most of which I didn't know).

THE PLAY was really nice, more atmospheric than plot driven and was quite sad at times, but it was good- one of the characters were a little ambiguous but on the whole it was good.

I have been a little art deprived of late however I got myself back on the horse (so to speak) by going to Beth's opening at the place she has a studio. It was really interesting to see a show put together by people in not and ENTIRELY different place than me. There was quite a mix of people that showed up to see the work, a lot of the time you can go to an opening and you know that people can TELL you're the token students, so it was a more relaxed atmosphere. There was quite a diverse mix of work there, some interesting life drawing with stitching and some pattern work. It was good to see Beth's work, obviously I've seen it up until now and know what she's been thinking and doing as it was stuff she had been working on for this project- it's exciting that her work it showable at this stage (if I were told to show stuff from this project I'd pretty much just have a pile of crap... with my name next to it) and also exciting that it's at a stage with loads of possibilities.

Rivers and Ragdolls

So this week I've managed to drag myself out of the house a few times, an achievement in itself I must say!

I went to Halifax on Thursday with Mel and Katie to see a play, the name I'm pretty sure is Lost Soul Music... or something to that affect. The play ran over three evenings and each night had 2 stories, but the stories were independent from each other so it didn't matter that I only attended one of the nights. The first story was one character monologuing with the occasional song, the set was various things one might find in someone's house, but most of it was covered in brown paper and there were certain quirks to some of the props, biscuits stashed in a hollowed out book and a teapot that doubled up as a watering can. The story itself wasn't extremely riveting, I did drift off in to Robyn world a few times but was quite easy to pick up anything I hadn't heard, however it was quite sweet and the character (who reminded me of someone but I never quite put my finger on it) was very likable, and had an interesting turn of phrase.

The second story had 3 parts that came together in the end, the link being a river, there were 3 people in this part and each took turns telling a story. The first part of the story involved a young boy and a suicidal man, the two that were not narrating helped demonstrate the story, one playing the man and the girl controlling a handmade puppet to represent the little boy, the puppet was kind of creepy but the story was interesting so wasn't too distracting. One thing about the play was that on the poster for it, it said; "No Happy Endings", which is essentially true but that line made it unnecessarily sinister when the stories both had quite sweet, sentimental aspects to them.

The other art related thing I attended this week was at Trinity Arts, where a performance piece was shown on Friday (I am unsure what it was called), it also had about 6 video pieces, some paintings and some hats. As far as logistics go (I hear this is supposed to be involved in the whole fine art blog...) on of the main things to note is the videos, only one of them you could hear and the rest you had to put on earphones and sit on the pew and watch. it also had a little sign ay 'press play', which is a little like when in films people send videos for blackmail etc.

The performance piece was a girl dressed as a marionette, with rope attached to her wrists and ankles attached to the pillars in the church dancing to a guy playing piano/drums. I found the piece quite stressful to watch, there were quite frantic moments in the music and the dancing and the ropes would get tangled, maybe a feeling of stress was the desired affect?

Just one more thing...

I’ve been going on little excursions or trips, the initial tag line I’ve been attaching to it is ‘A Lesson In Living Not Existing’. At the moment what’s interesting me is what can seem the more banal aspects of traveling but can be quite important. This is the National Express station in Manchester.

Manchester

So I have completed excursion 2 and although I would not dub it entirely successful it was still in someway productive.

I did not get something sent back to myself other than a post card, however I did not know what the postcard had on the front until I got home which was mildly interesting. This was my second postcard and so I tried to write it as a guide to myself of how to be a better version of me? But it did seem kind of cheesy when I received it so the postcards have to be fine tuned. I did manage to get some stuff by asking people to give me something that they have but don't need (someone offered sperm.. I respectfully declined).

As far as furthering experience etc I did 2 things, I went on a motorbike for the first time and learnt how to srawpedio... alcohol science is fun.

I also saw quite a cool exhibition at the cornerhouse (http://www.cornerhouse.org/), cairo - the breaking up of the ice by Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan (photo of man in tree is from it), it was a good collection of stuff to gain an overall picture. I think I mainly responded to the whole mission or expedition of the whole thing, i like the idea of getting fully involved in something, not that you can't be fully involved in a different way but with something like that you're absorbed by it for the length of the trip that's why you're there, you are living something.

This is just a quick add on to this post, I've taken a couple of shitty videos from the coach on the way home, I kind of like the rhythm of the lights and I like the whole night coach thing and I think when people think about traveling they think about lights on the way. For me I see coach journeys as a reflecting time, a lot of the time it's going home from uni or coming back so thats a few hours to reflect on the term or holiday and it's quiet, especially when it's dark.

Pre Post-post

I am currently on excursion number 2 of the project. So this is a pre-post for the post I shall post when I get home and have processed the things I have seen. I JUST TYPED POST TOO MANY TIMES. So this is kind of a reminder to myself that I need to write about a) the art I have seen b) the cool things I have seen and c) What I'm actually doing! Carry on creating kids, BYE.