Friday was a good day. Studio was busy despite it being reading week. I got some good clean bullets made of jewellery wax ready for my visit across the road to call for Vincent and Kevin. Left the bullets in Kevin’s office and then took them both for a pint.
In the afternoon I took some of the fourth year girls from my studio, down to see the Physics Barn space.
On a second visit the space looked more appealing, and I wondered weather I had made a mistake in not taking it immediately. We shall see.
Got in touch with SJS who own the Egyptian building and received a polite "sorry but nothing goes on in the building as it’s structurally unsound" answer. Spoke to a contact at the Round foundry and he said he would meet me at 10am on Tuesday.
Friday night was work and then home. I let the women finish early as they all had family fireworks to get back for. Packed my bags and collected up all Jamie’s Transformers ready for Saturday before knocking myself out with a couple of beers.
Had a great day on Saturday, after football we went for Tapas, their was nothing on at the cinema so we bought fireworks and went to play football. Once we finished playing at 5 we started to light fireworks. We both enjoyed the rockets the most until one nearly blew me up with a premature explosion. Comic, lemonade and pocket money followed by home. I had taken a pound out of his pocket money for telling his mum a fib. We kissed and said goodbye.
Penny said I could take him to the football from now on as it was during my contact time anyway. This was something I had suggested several months ago, but then that was before she was pregnant again.
Drove to Liverpool, bonfire and fireworks gone but still some scouse left stewing in the pot. Cooked over two days. Robs Staff/ Pit-bull cross, waited at my ankles for some scraps which I obliged with until Robs wife, Linda said he’d already had 3 bowls. No wonder he resembles me around the waist.
Everyone was disappointed I had not brought the DVD of me and Rob attempting to steel a Banksy door from a disused building in Liverpool. The Liverpool Echo ran the headline “Forget Klimpt, Art thieves eye up Slater Street door”(10)
Had some interesting conversations, Linda’s sister Julie had just had two boob jobs. Julies husband Carl, had just seen a woman killed when she got sucked off the platform, the draft catching her umbrella and sending her onto the tracks where she was hit by the oncoming train. Such is the fine line between life and death. I retired at 3am and left the entire older crowd still going at it until 5.
Woke and took the Dog for a walk on Crosby sands. Just me, the shivering dog and a hundred or so casts of Anthony Gormly. “Another Place” by Gormly is another of his works like “The Angel of the North” that seems to strike something within people. Gormly, whether intentionally or not, has started to have a slow effect over my practice. More and more I have started to work through a sculptural process.
“The reason I went to sculpture was to escape words, or to communicate in a physical way.”(10)
Since my work with the Yorkshire wildlife organisation at Spurn Point my most successful and fulfilling projects have been site related, not specific. As prescribed in “One Place after Another” by Miwon Kwon. (11)
“What is this work that I do? A kind of mad DIY ritual for one in which I am the alter, the sacrifice and the celebrant, trying in some pathetic way to make something of my life: to make the moment matter, an act of resistance against amnesia and the way that moments have of disappearing into oblivion.”(12)
The idea of making a sculptural object or objects to be placed in an environment where the viewer may not be expecting to find them interests me deeply. Through Gormley’s success the surprise is mostly gone yet the impact and the audience involvement are not diminished. The world is the Gallery.
“The subject of sculpture has to be being: what does it feel like to be alive? Set aside all ideas of representation and replace them with reflexivity. We have to allow for a heightening of awareness that links the act of perception with being itself. The perception of art is similar to that of nature. When you stand beneath a mature oak, or looking at a glacial lake, or at a mountain, there is the sense of being held in the presence of something that is greater in terms of time and more resilient in terms of space, rooted present, and present-ness of that perception enters into your being. I think works of art aspire to this condition of present-ness and so can endow the viewer with this heightened sense of self.”(13)
Liverpool has now supplied a number of influences to my thought process. One not already mentioned was the untitled installation of upturned boats in St Luke's Church by Slovenian artist Mattej Andraz Vogrincic.
Spent the rest of the day watching Sky Sports only getting up to fetch the papers and my breakfast. Watched the Hammers beat Arsenal followed by Tottenham dish up Chelsea before returning to Leeds.
Got home and went to bed.
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(9) Liverpool Echo November 30th November 2006. (10) Antony Gormley “Learning to Think: Sculpture as Physical Intelligence” pp1 http://www.antonygormley.com/ (11) Miwon Kwon “One Place After Another”. Kwon believes that a “Site Specific” work must have three types of site specificity. Phenomenological, social/ institutional and discursive. The institutional is a bridge between the phenomenological and the discursive. (12) pp2 paragraph 5 (13) pp paragraph 13
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