A Country Refuge

The project was a collaboration born of a conversation about the mutual feelings of exposure and vulnerability Kirsten and I felt whilst on a drawing assignment to the rocky headland on the south coast of Skye a few weeks ago.

On facing the elements, unprotected and alone, we felt an overwhelming desire to find shelter, warmth and protection, and as there was none available, we decided to build our own safe haven, using the only materials we had available, those which existed naturally on the Island; branches, twigs, grass and rocks.

This work stems from a common interest in the theme of human vulnerability and the desire to protect, encase and self-preserve that comes instinctively to us. The built environment exists to give people places in which they can find shelter, thus in the natural environment we must, like animals, find a way to create shelter for ourselves.

Sadly we ran out of time so the shelter remains unfinished, however, for me, it has taken on a new character as a drawing in space, a natural curiosity that I hope future passers by will take a moment to ponder upon. Had the shelter been completed, our idea was that in it's very making, it would be unmade, the structure flowing from the lines of the rockface becoming an extension of the natural environment from which it arose from.

Not a word was spoke between us, there was little risk involved
Everything up to that point had been left unresolved.
Try imagining a place where it's always safe and warm.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Thank you Bob Dylan

The Everyday and the Extraordinary

Sunday Afternoon in the Queen of Parks

Following all that heavy stuff about the economy and our world in crisis I thought it prudent to remember that some things are free, nature is beautiful, and for the paltry cost of a pencil and a piece of paper, a lovely afternoon can be spent, close to idle, whiling away the day drawing in the park.

To Let

A Felt Covered Solution for a New Crisis

Joseph Beuys, Infiltration homogen für Konzertflügel (Infiltration Homogen for Grand Piano), 1966

Beuys died three years before the reunification of Germany, in a time that is no longer our time. And history has changed the significance of his work. Freed from his overbearing presence, his art reveals its fullness. In his lifetime Beuys was the unequivocal author of his art, telling people, for better or worse, what it was. Now, his assemblages have to find their own place, without him to explain them.

Because Beuys is a German artist, it is impossible not to see the wounds of history everywhere, with a surpassing melancholy that dwarfs his attempts to commit his sculpture to an optimistic democratic politics. Beuys hoped his lumps of fat spoke of fluidity and progressive change. In fact, they are blocks of rancid yellow memory - fat from Germany.

The first Beuys I ever saw was at the Georges Pompidou Centre: a grand piano smothered in grey felt, with a red cross sewn on it. It struck me as tragic, and it still does. The piano is German culture, the heritage of Beethoven, sealed now inside felt, with an ambulance sign - damaged, wounded, recuperating. It is the sculptural equivalent of the sanatorium in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

When I tried to find out more about Beuys, I was baffled. The felt swaddling the piano, according to Beuys, was meant to heal it, to save it. Yet this efficacious magic doesn't actually form part of the piano's aesthetic impact. There is no sense of redemption - just of sickness. Now I realise it doesn't matter what Beuys said; probably at some level he knew he was whistling in the dark when he claimed his art was upbeat and spiritually transfiguring, when really it is shockingly lumpen, and macabre.

Some other ways to make use of a 'For Sale' sign

Simon Starling - Three White Desks - Tate Triennial - Altermodern

This work by Simon Starling (Three White Desks) was created by sending 3 cabinet makers in 3 different countries photographs of a desk once owned by Francis Bacon. Starling requested that each cabinet maker recreate the desk as closesly as they could to the likeness in the photograph accompanying his instructions, no dimensions or further information was sent enclosed. Starling sent the instructions to each craftsman in turn.

When the first desk arrived, Starling photographed it and sent the image off to the second cabinet maker and so on, until in a Chinese Whispers style way, the likeness of the desks degraded, through the effects of transit, digital communication and distance.

This work makes me think of the way families and friends move or are diaplaced throughout countries and continents and are therefore forced to communicate in a second hand way, the ever decreasing quality of the desks serving as a metaphor for the weakening of the social structures and communities in which individuals find strength and inspiration.