Coffee Chat Upside Down - Completed!

Last night or better said early this morning I finished the ceiling installation at the Forest Cafe. I am absolutely nackered. Photos will follow shortly.

Coffee chat upside down - installation 1

Last night I started taping the Forest Cafe's ceiling. I was up and down the ladder from 12.00 till 4.00 in the morning. Lucky for me the ladder is quite steady and I had Martin holding on to it as health and safety precaution. It is a very slow process, but I will get there in the end. It will probably take 2 more nights of taping to get it finished. So tonight I will be back on the ladder. I have definately overcome my fear of heights!

Rolling Design

As earlier mentioned on my blog, I am interested in hosting events as part of the design process. For sustainable design there has to be a link between place and the surrounding community, as they will be the ones maintaining and should be using the park. By hosting events open to all and aimed at all, you would create a sense of a place. This sense of place is an emotional link within people’s minds to a place. It is what turns a site into a place. Once this link is established durable and sustainable design can start. Sustainable to me is more than an environmental aspect; it is also about the community involvement and timing. Within rolling design, there is a stepped design process. Instead of complete (re)development in one go, the stepped process will be drawn out over time and really feed of the needs of community. This design approach would be most suitable for Council owned land, as costs would be spread over time and by community involvement there might be a reduction in cost of maintenance.

Process:

Events

First part designed or improvement of infrastructure.

More events

Second part designed

More events

Third Part

…

Events

First part designed or improvement of infrastructure.

More events

Second part designed

More events

Third Part

In rolling design the design process never stops as our landscape never stops evolving. This approach would make sure no park or public space ever gets run down and means small gradual costs instead of one great big expense, which isn’t even half as sustainable.

Contemporary Wayfarers

I was reading Tim Ingold’s book ‘Lines’ yesterday. It has this section on wayfaring and transport. Wayfaring to him, as I understood it, is a way of life. The wayfarer is his line of movement. Within wayfaring, there are no endpoints. In transport, the journey has no importance. It is merely the means to get to the needed location. Every journey, within transport, has an ending.

This section was to me extremely important as I could really see myself as a contemporary wayfarer. I have no home, and although I tend to linger in one spot for quite some time, there is this constant craving to move on. I am not so much influenced by my physical environment, but by the opportunities that lie beyond. I will go where the best opportunities are. When I leave a place I leave with an open network in place, human connections. My traces are left hopefully in people’s minds and emotions, not so much physical.

It is that kind inter-human and also spatial connections I try to map. I try to visualize my fellow contemporary wayfarers’ movements/traces as they tend not to have a physicality themselves.

OS 1st Print

OS 1st Print was my second attempt to have a solo exhibition in the Tent Gallery at ECA, Evolution House. This time no buildings collapsed and everything went according to plan. OS 1st Print was a follow-up on the mapping theme from Chicago. For this project I walked Edinburgh waterfront from the river Almond at Cramond to the river Esk. During the walks I was constantly writing down my personal thoughts. These writings I later used to form a 3D map of Edinburgh's waterfront. The whole idea was based on Derrida's sentence: "Just as texts are built, so are buildings written". For me the same can be applied to the landscape. The landscape as we experience it is a product of our reflections.
In this art work I used my personal background and physicality to write the landscape. The map that was created is irreversibly linked to me; this is my perception/reflection on Edinburgh's waterfront. When walking I was exposed to the elements, which influenced my moods and thoughts. The map is a snapshot of time, my thoughts and experiences of the waterfront changed from day to day. I could not complete the whole walk in one day. I did not attempt to get back to frame of mind where I was when I started walking again. Every section of the walk has its own style, and was not edited except for a few spelling mistakes. This does however not interfere with the coherence of the text as it is all written by me and my specific writing style. Also the presentation, wherein the text loses it appearance of text over a distance, helps to create a sense of coherence.
The 3D aspect of the map was for me essential as it allowed people to walk around the art work just like I walked along the waterfront. There is a long line of artist which saw walking as an art form, for example Richard Long. I tried to take this, to me highly reflective action which formed the base for this installation, back into the gallery. To make people wander I wrote the text from left to right, but printed it on 5 sheets of acetate, which where hanged from the ceiling following an abstraction of the landform of Edinburgh's waterfront. The distance, over which the sheets were hanged, and the size of text forced people to walk, if they wanted to read the text. Hopefully it gave them the same reflective state of mind as I got when walking the waterfront. Another aim of this work was to make people think about Edinburgh's often forgotten waterfront and its development.

Coffee chat upside down

I'll be again installing in the Forest Cafe, but this time on the ceiling and it will be semi-permanent. I will start installing this Sunday night, so from Monday onwards have a look up when you are in the Forest Cafe in Edinburgh.

An interesting question

Just recently I got asked whether I took the patterns I made in an installation back to the studio to keep on working on it. The answer is no, I don't. The only thing left of my installations is just piles of used tape and lots, and lots of photographs. The whole taping thing is about spatial awareness and bringing people more in touch with the environment they live in. To me the most important thing within the whole installation process is the installing itself. The taping is such an in the moment process. For instant with 'Unearthed' if I would have made it on an other day it would have been completely different due to people working on different locations. In this way my work is also related to time.
I do produce some studio work in the form of notes and sketches for possible installations. Also my section drawings and notes made while reading books I consider to be studio work. I actually do not spend a lot of time in one specific place, which I would call studio. My kind of art permits me to be out there, observing people and their interaction with their environment in a specific time frame.

'Unearthed' installed

The weekend up in Birnie, was fantastic. I arrived in on Friday lunchtime. I got picked up from the station by Tania, one of the digger supervisors. She then dropped me off at B&Q to pick up some more materials for the installation. About an hour later we arrived on site. There I saw for the first in my life an archaeological dig in action. I got a site tour by one of the students, named Tanya. After that I just observed and chatted to some of the diggers. The dig day ended with a site overview presentation in which we had a brief update on what had been discovered in each trench that week. After this we left site and had dinner with the group and a birthday party in the evening as it was one of the student's birthday.

The following day, it was a day off for the diggers. There was an excursion planned. I hopped along to see a reconstruction of an iron-age roundhouse as research for my installation the following day. I had an early night as I wanted to get to site one hour before everyone else so I had a moment alone there and to have a good kick-start.
The following day, it was a day off for the diggers. There was an excursion planned. I hopped along to see a reconstruction of an iron-age roundhouse as research for my installation the following day. I had an early night as I wanted to get to site one hour before everyone else so I had a moment alone there and to have a good kick-start.

Sunday morning I arrived on site at 8.15 and had the spot all to myself. It was quite mystical. Eagerly I started setting up the bamboo canes. As soon as I started, I hitted the first problem: "ROCKS!". Although the site has a sandy soil, it also has a lot of rocks, making it quite hard to set-up the canes. Luckily, I got some assistance from Craig. The setting up of the bamboo canes took much longer then anticipated. When the canes where up it suddenly dawned on me how big this roundhouse actually is/was. I was trying to reconstruct roundhouse D, which was located next to where I was setting up. The third problem I encountered was the wind, which made it impossible to tape up the bamboo canes. This is the reason why a project like this requires planning and at least one site visit before, to test things out. On the other hand doing this this way makes you more inventive and puts you actually more in touch with the site. In the end I taped only on the ground. The bamboo canes were the only upstanding element. I used colour-coding for different elements.
Grey and black = bulks, also called sections
Silver and white = archaeological features left in-situ
Light blue = inner post circle of the roundhouse
Brown and pink = Outer post circle and wall of the roundhouse
Other colours = Archaeologists’ movements; with the lines for movement from point a to b and fields for concentrated movements on one spot like digging, drawing,…
It was a really hardcore taping day as the only break I had, was 20 minutes over lunchtime. The process of taping was slower than expected because of the wind, the first time use of gaffer tape on grass and the need of pinning the tape down with nails.
In the end I did not manage to do all of what I had envisaged, but I did manage to end up with a strong composition which reflected my ideas. It was a bit of a creative and partly emotional rollercoaster, but one which ended up being a hell of a good ride!

Where it all began...

In 2007 I started my second year of my MFA in Art, Space and Nature. The first month an a half I spent thinking about what I wanted to achieve/do with this masters. I started reading books, mainly philosophy books. One of them was called 'The Fate of Place'. this book gives an overview of the history of the notions of place and space in philosophy. Both the thinking and the book accompanied me on my 2.5 week residency in Chicago at the John David Mooney Foundation as part of my course. While travelling there I decided that whatever direction I would take it needed to relate to landscape/space and people. While being in Chicago I tried to have a look at an old airfield/park to maybe re-design. During one of the field trips to the derelict airfield, the cold drove me into the Field Museum. It is there where I discovered the mapping festival, which was on while I was there. I bought a ticket to see the map exhibition and darwin exhibition. I think I spent about 2 hours looking at the most fantastic maps. The most beautiful one was this Japanese map depicting the route from a certain city to the Emperor's Palace. The unusual thing about this map was that it was drawn 3D with the route being a straight line with very detailed sketches of what was along the route. It pictured more the experience of the route, then an actual cartographic plan/map of the route. An other interesting thing was the medium it was drawn on. It was drawn on a rice paper scroll. I can still remember looking through the protecting glass box longing to unscroll the whole thing. I wanted to see the complete story. It was at this point that I realised that our daily maps have lost their human connections and that landscapes are to be experienced to be fully appreciated and to be loved. I could/can only hope that one day I will be able to make people feel and understand the landscape as I did that day through that drawing/map.
The following day I started to explore the wider city. During these explorations I made these abstract sections through the city (drawings). I also visited the map exhibition at the museum of contemporary art, which was again interesting, but nothing grabbed me as the scroll map. I continued my daily explorations till the last week. On one of my walk abouts. I followed the chicago river North. Reaching what I think to remember was North Avenue. There I discovered a big art supply shop. These kind of shops are to me what, a candy store is to a little kid. I walked in browsed through the different aisles. One aisle in particular, caught my attention, the ailse with the adhesives. 'Eureka', I thought, 'for my last night presentation, showing what I had been doing during my stay, I could make a wall drawing with coloured masking tape'. Using tape meant, I did not need to re-paint the walls, saving myself a lot of time.
In the last week I started my drawing on the wall. It became a big map of Chicago covering the 3.5 by 5m wall and and the same amount of floor space. There was one peculliar thing about this map. In the centre where I had been walking I followed the map faithfully, but where I hadn't walked the artistic composition took the over hand. By doing this I questioned the map of Chicago. Why would I believe a piece of paper if I myself had not seen this landscape and verified it? A map quite often is just a snapshot of a specific time and can be out of date and wrong. This was my first tape installation. The wall drawing itself evolved lots after talking to John David Mooney, who told me: "It is not finished, I give you 2 hours to finish it and you know what to do". And I did. He gave me the right push at the right time.

White line through a lens

Image by Jose Cava, Dreamer