This past week the bulk of my time has been spent sanding. Although I am leaving the sculpture textured, I wanted to smooth it out a bit before I finished. Today I applied the first coat of stain (dried pig’s blood mixed with water) and next week, I will begin applying the oil finish.
I have been in contact with the University’s Estates department to discuss the hanging requirements, and once the paperwork has been passed throughout the programme director’s office, they will be installing an anchor point in the ceiling. I am ordering up some natural hemp rope, and will use it to bind his ankles together and hang him from the ceiling.
The paintings are coming along and I am working on the best way to display them. I am considering mounting them to slightly smaller pieces of hardboard and hanging them using french cleats. This will place them off the wall by about .75 inches, effectively creating an unframed shadowbox effect.
As part of the publications team, the group coordinating the catalogue, I am working with Jake, Emma, Rachel and Stephen to decide on the look and feel of the degree show publications. The show will be called Masters of the Multiverse and in a meeting with the PR group, we chose to make our logo inspired by the 80’s movie version of the Masters of the Universe. I created the logo in Illustrator Friday afternoon.
Finally, I am also working on a book that will hopefully be available at the show. I plan on using the images I’ve made to illustrate the Norse myth the Mead of Poetry. Although the images are abstract, I am finding that many of them are shapes and compositions that can be interpreted as illustrations. I’m finding it interesting to choose the images that go on each page and I wonder if people will see similar things to what I see. I expect the the juxtaposition with the text will help to inform the viewer’s mind what they are “supposed” to be seeing. At any rate, it is an interesting experiment if nothing else. I expect I will test it on some poor unsuspecting people before publication and determine if it works well enough to spend the money on printing. Time will tell.
Yesterday I moved my sculpture up into my studio from the metalshop where I had been working. I am now past the point where I am generating large piles of wood chips and making annoying, loud noises, so I figured I was able to move to the studio without upsetting my other studio-mates.
What I have left to do:
Finish the hands
Finish the face
Finish any other details I may have missed, or refine other areas
Give the piece an overall sanding to even out the form while still leaving the marks of the chisels and gouges.
Apply stain
Apply oil
Hang for display
In order to finish all that I expect to be in the studio a lot in the next few weeks. When we return from our spring break we will be moving studios, so I want to be done (or close) by then, which means working over the break.
I’m also, concurrently, working on a book which is sort of a combination Art Book and Story Book, which tells the myth of The Mead of Poetry, with my images alongside the text. If all goes well, that will be available for sale at the degree show.
I am also now working on paintings, since the mono prints weren’t working out the way I wanted. I am still using the dried pigs-blood in acrylic medium, but am now simply creating images with my hands directly on the paper, rather than on a shed ofglass which was then transferred to the paper.
An in order to try out some different finishes, I have also carved some smaller pieces that are completely unrelated save that they are from the same wood and use finishes I am experimenting with.
With only three months left before the degree show, I find myself a little worried that I may not get everything done that I want to for my pieces. I have been concentrating lately on my sculpture, a life sized carving of a man hanging inverted by his ankles like a side of beef. This was inspired by the Norse myth of the Mead of Poetry, which you can read in a previous blog post.
Since my last post about it, I have moved it indoors into the Metal Workshop. Why there instead of the Wood Workshop? Because they have a gantry in the Metal Workshop from which I can hang my piece when I need to see it in its display position. That and Mark is one of the nicest technicians at ECA and is happy to have some woodworking going on in his shop.
Here, I built a trestle to rest the body upon and have been carving away at it. So far I have done some of the broader forms of the chest, worked on the neck and shoulders, carved away at the back between the arms, and recently began to work on some of the fiddly bits like the hands, feet and arms. The hands are blocked in as are the feet. I expect to continue work on the arms and then move back to the ankles and calves before really settling in on the head, although I may begin roughing in the face sooner.
Once the entire figure is roughed in and blocked out, I can go back and work on the finishing details. I have yet to decide whether I want to keep the body covered in a carven texture, bring it down to a smooth, natural texture or leave it somewhere in between. I am also not certain what sort of finish I will use on the wood, nor whether I will fill in the cracks with resin. Though decisions will be made as I go along, and as I get further with the piece.
As far as finishes go, I have some scrap wood that I have been carving on which I plan to use to test some finishes. Right now it is untreated, but I expect that I will try both traditional and untraditional finishes on it or similar pieces of scrap wood.
At our last group crit, it was suggested that I consider experimenting with blood instead of ink or paint with my mono printing, since I was not able to convey the underlying gruesomeness of the myth, The Mead of Poetry. Since the wetness and sloppiness of the concept was what led me to mono printing in the first place, I decided to give it a try.
After visiting several family butchers around Edinburgh, I discovered that in order to sell blood in the UK, a butcher must go through several governmental inspections and red tape, which most of them are not willing to do. None of the ones I tried were, anyway. The last one did, however, mention that I might be able to find dried blood and, after a quick internet search, I did, from W. Weschenfelder and Sons Sausage Making Supplies. I ordered a kilogram of dried pigs blood and a few days later it arrived.
After trying various experiments, I ended up using acrylic gloss medium mixed with acrylic gel medium to give it body, which was combined with a mixture of dried blood and water. This gave me a media very much the consistency of frosting, which I spread on my glass and then applied the paper. This results in a different effect than the paint I used previously, rendering an interesting pattern of fractal like shapes when the paper is removed.
I am still experimenting both with the media and with the paper, to determine what is the most desirable effect, so I will probably be posting more on this later.
With assessments coming next week and the end of the semester the week following, I thought I would post a little about what I’ve been up to. Oddly, after working all semester, I feel like I don’t have much to show for it, but I think that is mainly because I don’t have many completed pieces. I have been doing a lot of preparatory work and experimentation this semester which will (hopefully) come to fruition in my degree show next semester.
The Mead of Poetry
As mentioned previously in my blog, my maternal great-grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Norway. I have been interested in Norway for some time, fascinated with the traditional design elements which spread, blended, influenced and were influenced by the Celtic styles. This past summer, I spent a little time in Oslo, visiting museums and familiarising myself with the culture (blog posts here and here). From this trip, I brought home a number of books of Norse myths and folktales.
Amongst these stories, I found one that left me with a compelling image which could be interpreted in any number of ways, gets still be true to the source. In brief, the story of the Mead of Poetry begins like this:
At the conclusion of the Aesir-Vanir War, the Aesir and Vanir gods and goddesses sealed their truce by spitting into a great vat. From their spittle they formed a man whom they named Kvasir (“Fermented Juice”[1]). Kvasir was the wisest human that had ever lived; none were able to present him with a question for which he didn’t have a satisfying answer. He became famous and traveled throughout the world giving counsel.
Kvasir was invited to the home of two dwarves, Fjalar (“Deceiver”[2]) and Galar (“Screamer”[3]). Upon his arrival, the dwarves slew Kvasir and brewed mead with his blood. This mead contained Kvasir’s ability to dispense wisdom, and was appropriately named Óðrœrir (“Stirrer of Inspiration”). Any who drank of it would become a poet or a scholar.
When the gods questioned them about Kvasir’s disappearance, Fjalar and Galar told them that Kvasir had choked on his wisdom.
Now granted, I am extrapolating on things a bit here, but I envision the murder of Kvasir to be a ritualistic and gruesome act, much like the slaughter of an animal. I picture Kvasir bound and strung up by his feet, inverted and ready for his blood to be drained, in preparation for the brewing of the mead.
To this end, I am working on a wooden sculpture of a man, which will ideally hang inverted from the ceiling of my studio. Work so far has involved getting a 6ft block of limewood to carve, and the basic roughing out of the form. I anticipate working first with power tools (an ArborTech Wood Carver) to working with traditional chisels and gouges once the rough shape is completed.
When finished, I hope to hang the figure by the ankles from the ceiling of my studio. This will, of course, depend on a number of issues, not the least of which is Health and Safety. If the piece is not too heavy (the block began life at approx. 200 kilos) and a beam can be found to support it, and I can get the appropriate assistance from the technicians, then it will hang, approximately 3 feet off the ground in the centre of my studio space for the degree show. If this plan fails, then I will need to build a scaffold of some sort and hang it from that, within my studio, probably much lower.
The sculpture of Kvasir as he is today.
Monoprinting
This semester, I also joined the Print Portfolio project, which was originally to be a group of us who would each provide an edition of prints (probably one per person, with an edition of 20-30) to be collected into a boxed set and (hopefully) sold and displayed. We would each get a set of prints for ourselves, to eventually be sold for a fortune when we all make it big. Unfortunately, the parameters of the project have recently changed and I’m not certain what the status is.
Anyway, in addition to the print portfolio, I wanted to utilise the prints in my degree show, as a sort of adjunct to the hanging body of Kvasir. I have toyed with the idea of creating illustrative, narrative prints which will tell the story, as well as simply some more abstracted images which might explore the idea of the Mead of Poetry, which I am thinking of as being similar to a mind-expanding drug.
So I began experimenting with Mono-printing. a method of creating essentially one-off prints. There are several different methods and I tried a few before settling on one which works and gives me the effects I want. What I do is essentially finger paint on glass with limo-ink, then lay the paper on the glass and run a roller over it lightly. This method gives me the possibility for 3 to 4 prints, each of which are significantly different.
I am also experimenting with images in the computer. The idea is that if I get an image I like, either mono-printed or in the computer, I can try (another experiment) using the CNC Router to create a woodcut of it and print multiple images from that. This method would be similar to the one I used in my piece for the Project Space, the Contemporary Stave Church Portal.
For my degree show, I am considering having prints hanging on the walls, but I am also considering printing on the floor of the space, perhaps in a spiral around the hanging figure. Either way, I would like to utilise mono-printing as the starting point for these images.
An example of four different images from the same print. Each time the paper is removed, the image is altered.
Assessment
The physical pieces I have for assessment at the end of the first semester seem scant to me. I have my Portal, which leads into my studio space. I have a rough hewn block of wood which seems to have taken me most of the semester to acquire — locating sawmills and tree surgeons who deal in pieces that size; finding one who had one that was in a wood that I wanted to work in; and finally rationalising the cost and getting it delivered— took me nearly two months. The last thing I have are the mono prints. These currently number around 100, but there are probably only 20 that i consider successful and maybe 10 that I want to show. Very few of these are on archival paper, since I considered this both an experimental and a learning process. Newsprint is cheap and plentiful, so although I tried a few different paper types, the bulk of these prints are on newsprint.
I feel like what I am putting on display are simply stepping stones to my degree show, which hopefully is what the tutors see them as. Although there is a lack of truly finished work, I think the pieces speak to the path I am currently taking.
This past week I spent with classmates in Venice for the Biennale. In order to try and organise my thoughts, I will divide this post up into three sections, the first of which will be my thoughts about the trip in general and Venice, the city, in particular; next I will concentrate on the Biennale and finally on some of the works which I viewed and enjoyed.
VENEZIA
I awoke at 4.00 AM in order to make final preparations and to consume enough coffee to get to the bus stop and catch the 35 to the Airport at 4.45. I had packed the night before, so was able to simply take care of my morning ablutions, dress, and imbibe caffeine with a few minutes to spare. The trip through the airport was smooth and uneventful and I had made it into the plane with the rest of the MFAs on the trip. We settled in and flew away.
We arrived at Marco Polo Airport where we caught the bus to Venice. Being an island, Venice does not have room for an airport, so there are two nearby, Marco Polo and Treviso. The bus dropped us at the train/bus station, Venezia Santa Lucia, in the middle of the western edge of Venice. From here we divided because our lodgings were in different locations; one group in a flat called Academia II, another to one called Castello and a third in the Santa Margherita Guesthouse. My group, Jake, Tim, Tam, Emma and me, were headed for the Academia II which ended up being on the Calle Dei Tedeschi. We walked in a slow semi-circle south and east, crossing canals and wending our way through the narrow alleyways of Venice until we arrived at the dock near our flat. Here we met our key bearer who showed us who to get to the flat itself and inside. The flat itself was smaller than I was expecting and smelled of mould, but was serviceable. We had our own kitchen and bath and although it was cozy, we were able to sleep five without any complaints.
We spent our first day settling in and wandering about. I did a bit of exploring on my own, with my camera, and managed to get some interesting shots of Venice. Venice is a city that seems suspended in a state of glamorous decay. Nothing appears new, but so much is breathtakingly beautiful. There are no cars and I saw only one bicycle while I was there. The canals provide a transportation network on the water – water taxis, gondolas and barges – that allows for an alternative to walking. Most people walk because that’s the most practical way of getting around. The bridges over the canals are stairs rather than ramps, and the spaces between buildings which make up the streets would get termed as alleys in another city. Many of the streets are only wide enough to walk two abreast, while others you could drive a care down if you could get it there. Every neighbourhood seems to have a piazza or two and every piazza has a well. These wells connect to a cistern where rainwater is collected and stored, and though they do not seem to be used at all today, they were once the main source of fresh water in Venice.
LA BIENNALE
Each evening we would meet up as a group (all 13 of us) and get dinner and/or drinks, but during the day, we tended to stay in our housing groups or split up while we were at the Biennale, meeting for lunch or other prearranged times. The Biennale was open until 6pm, with two main sites, the Arsenale and the Giardini. The Gardens were created during Napoleonic times and in 1894 the main pavilion was built. The Biennale webpage explains that the national pavilions were added later.
The pavilions were built over the years, in the following chronological order (name of the architect in brackets): 1907 Belgium (Léon Sneyens); 1909 Hungary (Géza Rintel Maróti); 1909 Germany (Daniele Donghi), demolished and rebuilt in 1938 (Ernst Haiger); 1909 Great Britain (Edwin Alfred Rickards); 1912 France (Umberto Bellotto); 1912 Netherlands (Gustav Ferdinand Boberg), demolished and rebuilt in 1953 (Gerrit Thomas Rietveld); 1914 Russia (Aleksej V. Scusev); 1922 Spain (Javier De Luque) façade renovated in 1952 by Joaquin Vaquero Palacios; 1926 Czech Republic and Slovak Republic (Otakar Novotny); 1930 United States of America (Chester Holmes Aldrich and William Adams Delano); 1932 Denmark (Carl Brummer) enlarged in 1958 by Peter Koch; 1932 Padiglione Venezia (Brenno Del Giudice), enlarged in 1938; 1934 Austria (Josef Hoffmann); 1934 Greece (M. Papandréou – B. Del Giudice); 1952 Israel (Zeev Rechter); 1952 Switzerland (Bruno Giacometti); 1954Venezuela (Carlo Scarpa); 1956 Japan (Takamasa Yoshizaka); 1956 Finland (Alvar Aalto Pavilion); 1958 Canada (Gruppo BBPR, Gian Luigi Banfi, Ludovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti, Ernesto Nathan Rogers); 1960 Uruguay; 1962 Nordic Countries: Sweden, Norway, Finland (Sverre Fehn); 1964 Brazil (Amerigo Marchesin); 1987 Australia (Philip Cox); 1995 Korea (Seok Chul Kim and Franco Mancuso).
Each pavilion is a marvel in and of itself. The architecture varies from Neo-classical to more contemporary forms, but they all seem to fit well into the setting. The Main pavilion was used to house the Encyclopaedic Palace, a show based on a concept by Marino Auriti who designed a museum to house all the world’s knowledge together in one place. Although the majority of artists represented are still living, the show does seem to collect a wide variety of pieces and styles from the past century.
Thetitle chosen by curator Massimiliano Gioni for the 55th International Art Exhibition is Il Palazzo Enciclopedico / The Encyclopedic Palace. Massimiliano Gioniintroduced the choice of theme evoking the Italo-American self-taught artist Marino Auriti who “on November 16, 1955 filed a design with the US Patent office depicting his Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace), an imaginary museum that was meant to house all worldly knowledge, bringing together the greatest discoveries of the human race, from the wheel to the satellite. Auriti’s plan was never carried out, of course, but the dream of universal, all-embracing knowledge crops up throughout history, as one that eccentrics like Auriti share with many other artists, writers, scientists, and prophets who have tried – often in vain – to fashion an image of the world that will capture its infinite variety and richness.”
The National Pavilions are just that. Each one houses an artist or artists that represent that nation. For me, the National Pavilions worked better than the Palace, since you were rarely bombarded by more than a handful of ideas at a time and you had the chance to digest what you had seem while you walked from one pavilion to the next. The Palace was like a never-ending art gallery with hundreds or possibly thousands of different artists, themes, styles, concepts and ideas constantly vying for attention. Although I saw a lot of wonderful artworks in there, without my camera I would have forgotten so many simply because of the sheer, overwhelming spectacle of it all.
The Arsenale is located in another area of Venice, and housed even more art. As the world has grown smaller, more and more nations want to exhibit at the Biennale and there is simply not enough room at the Giardini. The Arsenale is a complex of buildings which were used for manufacturing, ship=building. storage and so forth. The first buildings were built in the 13th century with others being added over the centuries after.
The Arsenale is the largest pre-industrial production centre of the world. Its surface occupied forty-six hectars, and it would host up to 2000 workers a day in full swing. It is an important place for Venice, not only because the Serenissima fleet was built there, but also because these shipyards, depots and workshops were the symbol of the military, economical and political power Venice had back in time.
Although it was not completely filled, the majority of buildings housed either national or groups of artists. Because of the size of the spaces, few of them were filled completely which made the pieces easier to digest before going on to the next.
SOME OF MY FAVOURITES
Over the two days exploring the Biennale I saw a lot of great art and though some of it was overwhelming in scope, I definitely did come away with some I liked and some I remembered.
Pawel Althamer, Venetians. The unconventional use of materials in these sculptures really intrigued me. Althamer had life masks made from volunteers here in Venice, then attached them to metal armatures in various positions. These were draped with different types of thermo-plastics which were shaped and melted on the body to suggest muscle, ligament, tendon and skin, as well as clothing and hats. They remind me in some ways of Gunther van Hagen’s plastinated figures.
Shary Boyle, Music for Silence. This piece interested me in a number of ways. I found myself fascinated by the way that lighting can transform a piece. To me, the way she used lighting on the main piece transformed it into three separate pieces. The piece as a porcelain sculpture, in white with lighting that described its shape was interesting to me as a sculpture. The shadowed piece appeared to be formed of separate two dimensional pieces, like a collage, while the piece with the projected colour images on it became a nearly solid two dimensional piece. Her other sculptures on display were interesting, but didn’t affect me as much.
Yiqing Yin, In Between. Something about this spoke to me and I am not sure I can articulate it yet. This piece was in the Padiglione Venezia, a pavilion dedicated to textile works, along with other textile artists. The sketchy quality of the figure, the ethereal way the fabric move in the breeze, the excess thread which collected below and anchored the figure to the ground all seem to contribute to an otherworldly quality that appealed to me.
Patrick Van Caekenbergh, Drawings of Old Trees. As a naturalist artist, I really liked the devotion to detail of form and texture that are conveyed in these pieces.
R. Crumb, The Book of Genesis Illustrated. I was surprised and pleased to find R. Crumb represented at the Biennale. In the past, I have known fine art aficionados to dismiss his work as purely illustrative, after all, he’s only a comic book artist!But he is also a creative genius and, like Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish, has given the U.S. many iconic images from Mr. Natural to Fritz the Cat and the Keep on Truckin’ slogan of the 1970’s. It seems only fitting that his 207 page black and white illustrated Story of Genesis be represented here. Each panel reflecting the biblical text in a way that has not been seen previously.
In addition to R. Crumb, there were a number of other American artists included in the Encyclopaedic Palace– Richard Serra, Robert Nagel, John DeAndrea, Charles Ray, Duane Hanson, Paul McCarthy, Eliot Porter, among many others. I find that my US-centric education has made them more familiar to me than their non-American counterparts, and although I am trying desperately to catch up, it is always reassuring to know that those artists that I studied in school and recognise are also recognised in a global context.
Other pieces I saw, felt compelled to photograph, and liked enough to include are:
On this trip, I took 538 photos, the majority of them at the Biennale. I will try to post some more of them later, possibly without comment. I think this post has gone on long enough as it is and I need to do something other than blog this weekend.
Below are some videos from the Biennale’s YouTube channel which go into greater detail about some of the pieces.
Pawel Althamer, Venetians
CANADA: Shary Boyle, Music for Silence
GREAT BRITAIN: Jeremy Deller, English Magic
FINLAND: Antti Laitinen, Falling Trees
BELGIUM: Berlinde De Bruyckere, Kreupelhout – Cripplewood