Barbican -Bauhaus: Art as Life
There’s an amazing learning resource to download from this page. Superb!
small garden 2 - lemon grass
small garden : 1
Inspired by Joy Lai and Japan I made a small garden today. It’s a draft work, a try-out, an esquisse for the “Diminuitive” show at UP Space in September. Something to play with and think about.
The first state (without plants, without water) is rather like a Morandi crossed with a De Chirico. It looks very painterly in the thumbnail at least.
The second state is kind’ve cutesy. And I started wondering about can it be art if it’s not ugly.
The third state (with plants, water, moss, quartz) is getting to a place I like, making a whole little world which will fade and decay and might sprout and become stinky.
studio work: week 22, 2012
walkways and waterways: Shibuya
From my window: Shibuya Granbell Hotel
arriving in Japan: Sunday
notes:
- rice paddy
- morning sunlight, river, van, cat
- flat: rice and houses, hills: wooded
- Mt Fuji way, way off in the distance
- hotels with funny names: Hotel Slit, Hotel Calm, Hotel 2001
- hotel: Shibuya Granbell Hotel
- walking
- shrines and walls
- signs and signboards: very useful
- petrol station: without pumps!
- graveyard: with trees
- art gallery: The National Art Center, Tokyo
- umbrellas: women walking with parasols against the sun, a special storage facility for umbrellas, not “cloaking”, but “umbrella-ing”
- places to sit
- Cezanne: it’s nice to see “our” Cezanne in the exhibition although it looks very different out of context
- kimono
- art gallery: 21_21 Design Sight
- objects from Tohoku: beautiful and inspiring - make real things
- small dogs: lots of poodles in Tokyo - the poodle will not die out (I have been vaguely anxious about this given the preponderance of spanoodles and labradoodles and other varieties of oodle in Sydney)
- vending machines, rubbish collection: ultimate convenience
- walking
- walkways over busy roads
- art gallery: Hikarie8
- a department store with an art gallery floor: I am not sure about this
- Damien Hirst: yes, I saw his work in a department store in Shibuya
- objects and shopping
- walking
- pizza: I know how to say this
- sleep
homemade travel journals
I’m going to Japan on Saturday, just for a week, and I thought a new journal would be good. Also I’d been t-shirt shopping and had a paper bag handy for the covers. So this afternoon, instead of going into the studio, I got busy with paper, pen, ruler, scissors, linen thread, needle and awl and whipped up some notebooks. Very good.
excursion to White Rabbit Gallery
Last Saturday night we were talking about galleries for contemporary art and I remembered that Tim hadn’t been to the White Rabbit Gallery yet so we agreed to go on an excursion. White Rabbit Gallery is a private collection open to the public, a novel concept in Sydney. It’s very jolly.The White Rabbit Collection is one of the world’s largest and most significant collections of contemporary Chinese art. Founded by Kerr and Judith Neilson, it focuses on works produced after 2000.
The exhibition has changed since I came with Matthew and with Phoebe, all the work is different, even the rooms have moved around, the partitions must be rebuilt for every show. Again there is some amazing beautiful work here, and again, things I don’t like quite so much.
Things I like:
3 works by Wu Jian’an — Gazing at the Moon, 2011, Fuxi , 2011 and Fused in Desire, 2011. All paper cuts, intricately cut coloured paper arranged in layers to represent landscapes, tall mountains, the moon.
Chen Chun-Hua — Imitating Fan Kuan’s ‘Travellers Among Mountains and Streams’ from the Song Dynasty, 2011. A black and white work looking simultaneously like impressed porcelain tile and a clipped velvet hanging, then as you move closer to the work, like fur, when in reality it’s made of headless nails.
Fung Ming-Chip — Departure, Sand Script, 2010. Calligraphy, script with a rough plane drawn over the top, very simple.
Cai Lijuan — Linear Space Series 1-5, 2011. String art in layers of colour, bold and subtle at the same time. Lovely.
Now we are sitting in the tea house drinking beer and eating savory snacks. Super good.experiments - week ending 4 May 2012
