RED SOCKS and RUBBER BANDS

Planet earth

wild things

Save our bees - mass participation - National Science and Engineering Week

Bees are in danger and I will be working with local primary schools to make a large community collage to share our interests and concerns for these creatures.  We want to celebrate their good work and all that they stand for, to ask ourselves questions about how we treat our environment and how it impacts on others.  The project begins this week in National Science and Engineering Week and I hope that it will be an on-going project, to look at how creativity can be used to spread the word and engage people in protecting and caring for our environment.  Buzz bee from Bees United (Brentford Football club) will be joining us on our new adventure - thanks to the Bees for agreeing to share the message with the fans and for supporting the local community of budding artists

Ancient bee story

 

art appprentices

I have just set up a blog site for a new venture with a young artist called art apprenticeships. This is an experimental, conceptual art idea that we are exploring together.  We will post according to need so keep an eye out for developments in making art

art apprentices

another world - in the process of making

a different reality

'a different reality of long shadows and uncertain shapes; and always, waiting beyond the edge of light, would have been the unknown, unexplained, half-imagined forces'
Baroness Greenfield - Tomorrow's People

I am finally settling into my residency at the Institute for the Future of the Mind.  A tricky job making work based upon what goes on inside other people's heads, but I have a plan.  I have three scientists who have agreed to let me coach them into using art-based techniques to explore their areas of research, with a view to making it more accessible and to communicate it to a different and wider audience.

I am also making my own work based around ideas of letting go, of working with blank spaces and seeing what emerges.  So far this has resulted in using syringes and microscopes to make drawings.  This also links in with my recent work at OVADA - in the wild wood, exploring notions of the unconscious.  In the Wild wood (see photo albums) is a significant starting point for the development of my work in relation to drawing from the unconscious, creating secret worlds of the half-imagined.

I visited another wild wood a week ago - the house of lords.  Baroness Greenfield was speaking on Stem Cell Research and Science Education.  It was like being cacooned in another world for a day to emerge into the daylight feeling that you had taken a journey into some wild and crazy place that had an auro of calm and discipline about it.  Surreal.

I have been reading Susan Greenfield's book - Tomorrow's People.  It is a place I would rather not go (and I like to think of myself as actively interested in adopting new ideas).  It is clear to me in my current work and from the piece quoted above, in Susan's book, that I am more interested in a world of the imagination, a world with a sense of touch, a world that can be created by ourselves rather than for us.  A world where we can be in touch with what it means to be ourselves.

 

the exhibition

In the wild wood

A selection of photographs from the exhibition are now posted to the photoalbums on the blog

See also the OVADA Gallery site OVADA SHOW

a bit about PINK

In the wild wood - thinking about PINK

the show is more Pink than red.  Pink and red have dominated my work over the past year so I have decided to pay more attention to the history and breadth of the colour pink in the development of future work.

How does the brain process the colour pink?  Are girls more prone to the reception of pink and if so why?  Questions emerge about the colour of pink re gender and how this has reversed since WW2.  If pink was seen as a more dominant and more certain colour than blue doe this translate into the current phenomena of girls choosing pink as a result of being more certain and in control of their world.  Are girls attracted to pink through a complex set of cultural messages attached to it or is there a biological pre-disposition?

PINK and Gender

This posting will capture my research and interested in the colour PINK.  If you have any comments please add them using the comments link at the bottom of this blog.

Exhibition of work

in the wild wood



another show where you get the chance to participate.  I will be exhibiting my latest body of work, a series of paintings and drawings based upon surrealist notions of automatic drawing and the unconscious (an area of the brain I call the wild wood!).  Visitors will have the opportunity to make their own crazy worlds visible on paper in the window of the gallery, using charcoal pencils and paintbrushes attached to large sticks.

As with my previous exhibitions this show will evolve as people make their mark, giving me the opportunity to use this material to create further work during the exhibition.  I will not always be in residence but hope to maybe see you (or your mark) there.

from 13th April to 21st April 2007 in Oxford (by the bus station) at

Ovada link

(not Sunday or Monday)

Series Two (extracts)