Sunday, 11 October 2015

Leavenotrace@laundrodrama







Leave No Trace Collective

Follow their residency at the Laundry Room, Totnes
and tweet your thoughts about life and laundry....

Leavenotrace@laundrodrama

Laundrodrama



The Leave No Trace collective are occupying the local launderette in Totnes for October.

Sarah Scaife, Shelley Hodgson and myself.










My intention has been to use the launderette as source material rather than a site for interventions.
I spent a lot of precious time in my first two visits just sitting, watching and taking in the environment. Worrying as usual about grabbing and hurrying some ideas along.  I felt conspicuous because I wasn't washing anything.  I wrote a bit in my sketchbook, mapped out the customers' movements (as surreptitiously as possible) and studied the movement of the drums of the machines.
Yet, if I do manage to translate these movements into images I still feel the need to feed them back in to the place of source so I'm researching the possibility of a newspaper placed towards the end of the residency for the customers to browse.
This satisfies many urges for me. I want to make marks, I can't give up the habit of intervention in public spaces and I am really keen on the intimacy created by providing a small work that can only really be absorbed by one person at a time.

The launderette has always been a place of internal meditation for me - even though your smalls are bouncing around behind you for all to see - it is a very quiet, private space: like a library. The inspiration I find there is very rich.










Windmill House Residency



An odd collection of work, really.
I made things with found papers.
I drew on a wall.
I played with photography.
I completely got lost in what my own practice looks like.
And how to carry on.





I even picked up a paintbrush and canvas again...


it all seems to be by 3 different artists and that is bizarre but it was liberating to investigate these various methods again
i think with it being a residency the most important and enjoyable part was making something that visitors could engage with and become intimate with - small books sitting in a suitcase intrigued people and they were made with captured words from the visitors
it felt right to give back

Monday, 4 May 2015

Leave No Trace?




















I drew back on to a tree with some charcoal that was made at a
day of woodland activities a while back.  It felt slightly wrong
but sort of alchemic......

The image came to mind whilst pondering the phrase Leave No 
Trace? which is the working title of a current group project.

Along with artists Sarah Scaife and Shelley Hodgson I will be
spending May and June in and out of a backpackers' hostel here
in Totnes called Windmill House.
 
The hostel will become an artspace for experimentation, expression,
documentation and collaboration.  Juicy plans are afoot!


Saturday, 7 February 2015

threshold )more(










what is a pain threshold?


is it the limit to which you will tolerate pain before it's unbearable?



is a low pain threshold indicative of someone very tolerant or is that a high pain threshold?






notes to self

















a couple of days of scribbles
still looking sorting thoughts and feelings
corners are interesting
there are no corners in nature?
jumping around and not in travelling in a linear exploration
although i'm working in lines
reflects my internal stuff at the moment

Friday, 23 January 2015

Threshold III

Threshold. 
These are photos of Threshold from a few years ago (it's been lurking for a good while). I did lots of drawings of doorways and rubbings of gates but I always wanted to get past the representational and symbolic constraints, purify it somehow. 












I came back to it by photographing signs on gates denoting thresholds and boundaries but this fuelled my frustration. It occurred to me that this precipice or sublime sense of threshold, being on the verge of an idea, is what I want to investigate but how? 








Graphic Memoir project

Over on https://spacegirlproject.blogspot.com/ I began a  blog for my developing PhD research The Graphic Memoir as a Device for Healing. I ...