"you can't look at your-self in the ocean"...wall pieces...

The wall pieces hopefully offer an extension of the reflective nature of the box assemblage...I don't think it is a shared conversation or dialogue...closer to satellites... the presence/absence of experience, perhaps...the wall drawings/collages... reflections...but never a mirror image...disparate... connected and detached...this window space is full of hesitations... what does it allow access to?... closer to reflection than conclusion...vagueness than certainty...sp 

" match-box songs & gypsy hymns"...'you can't look at your-self in the ocean'...pages..3-6

I think it was Kant who expressed the notion that 'the hands were the windows to the mind'...I recall reading this at a time when I was very uncertain about the work I was making...in particular the box assemblage pieces that seem to evolve from a natural desire to gather and collect...the dialogue between etching and the collected object or surface was immediate...the collecting of course was never in terms of possessing any particular object...always with the intention of using it in some creative form...the inescapable element of 'the hand-crafted' associated with the construction of these works left me doubting whether the content was saying all that I needed to say...a visit to Japan cured me of any hang-ups about something that is well crafted not capable of possessing a deeper sense of connection to everyday experience...the contradictions of Japanese culture is what makes it so intriguing...yet within the realms of Japanese art or craft there seems little contradiction between the belief and the intention of creating something by a certain method or in the use of certain materials in order to say exactly what needs to be expressed...and if that needs to be expressed through something that is well crafted then so be it...I seem to have drifted somewhat...what i was thinking before I started was the notion of the hands...their surface touch providing its own justification and meaning within the act of gathering and therefore embedded within the making...of course this touches on Merleau-Ponty's notion of 'flesh' that I have mentioned in earlier reflections...it seems to make perfect sense to me...the surface of my hands providing all of the reasoning I require for making...sp 

   

"you can't look at your-self in the ocean"...page 1 & 2...

In keeping with my MVA research of relating phenomenology based concepts to the things I make I am beginning to think that text, in the form of simple descriptions of the individual objects that compose themselves within the final work, could be a significant element...given that phenomenology deals with description rather than explanation it seems obvious...but I think of these works as three and two dimensional descriptions...and that the viewer is the one who completes those descriptions...but it needs a particular kind of perception....the kind that you recognise within your own experience of things...of being told something that you only ever sensed but could never articulate... the difficulty is the use of text...does it remain separate...an independent component...or is it unified within the work...I find that I have difficulty reading lengthy text in a gallery...I'm just never that patient...perhaps I need to be making books...although i may explain these works as descriptions there is no doubting their sense of narrative...of story... generated by surface and materials...and the figure...it is the reflective nature of the very materials that provide the most subtle yet poignant sense of narrative...always detached because they remain de facto objects...I have no connection to these things apart from the need to make...but all creative expression is detachment...distant in order to connect...sp

"matchbox songs & gypsy hymns"...the ocean...

At times it is difficult to reflect upon what has been made...at least to the point of revealing something one can only ever really feel... then attempt to articulate...I'm not familiar with this work as yet...so it remains the same for me as it does for you...in the thought that the only clue to the meaning exists within its title...the unresolved, reflective searching it implies....it has everything and nothing to do with the ocean...the box is bookish in structure...a thin volume of six pages..a narrative of both presence and absence... of opposites...one page is simply a veil...dark but transparent...damaged...there is also a sense of something out of reach...all of it contained...portable...a black page with a white thread forming a cross or 'X'...suggesting a mapping or surveying of surface...preparation...construction...a mirror image scratched into the surface of another dark page...perhaps the only hint of a reflection...of looking and discovering of self image...a boxed figure above a forest of wooden and metal shapes...although I am now familiar with their intended use I recognise them as I first encountered them...strange...curious sculptured figures...natural...even human...the box figure has an absent presence...the last page is at times veiled... a cut-out 

figure...still...reflective..suspended...an inked shadow holding it to a metallic background...a small black and white photograph of the ocean....on the bottom white framed edge is written 'the ocean' in black ink...it is also suspended...floating on the edge...opaque...beneath the figure is a similar structure to what appears on the first page...a thin forest of hat pins...each one with a different coloured  head...contained, portable language...reflective...deep as the oceans we search for in ourselves...even in the city...  sp

"you can't look at your-self in the ocean"

the descriptions of the original piece have changed somewhat...as i expected them to...the title "you can't look at your-self in the ocean" comes from a Federico Garcia Lorca poem...and as has been the case with so many of the collage pieces it exists within associations...the most poignant are those that relate to discovering this box in an antique store..a portable hand-stencil duplication kit...on the same day I also found the wooden dart collection...at first not realizing what they were...without their feathers they were like delicate metal and wooden sculptures...the last item was a small black and white photograph of the ocean...it almost seemed accidental...at the bottom edge of the photograph was written 'the ocean'...these have been sitting in my studio for over a year...and the title has been with me even longer..but it is not simply the box/assemblage...as with each of the transitional exhibitions the space makes its own suggestions...the installation also includes 9 box collage pieces and wall drawings...as always it is a difficult space to document...I will reveal more over the following days...i hope you find something of interest...sp

"matchbox songs & gypsy hymns"...'you can't look at your-self in the ocean'

Opening Tuesday 23rd. November....'box assemblage...work in progress'...

"matchbox songs & gypsy hymns"...intermission..

an unidentified timber box..upright and open it reveals two hinged panels that turn like the pages of a book...the first is a wooden panel that frames a black inked surface...in each corner there is a drawing pin...a length of white cotton is woven around each pin to form a cross or x...on the reverse side is a detailed description of what the viewer is looking at...it is hand written in pencil..the second hinged panel has a timber boarder and it frames a transparent black  fabric...silk perhaps...it is torn at the lower edge...behind the transparent silk is a bone white cut-out figure of a woman's upper body...it is held in place with two silver clips...beneath the figure is a wooden sphere...although it is not a perfect sphere as it is slightly flat on the top...in the background of the cut-out figure is a black inked panel...deliberate but not totally controlled...the impressions of a mono-type remain embedded in the surface...it suggests a coastline and the ocean...to one side and in reverse the words 'the ocean' is written...on the very opposite side of what could be considered as the inside lid of the box a small cardboard assemblage is hung...the top consists of a collection of post cards from which the shape of a man's upper body has been cut away...in the window it creates there is a map and several dress making pins have been pinned to the map...the collection of post cards have been bound with white thread to form a cage like frame...beneath the box figure a series of sewing needles with coloured thread have been placed in a row...each one has a number and a date written in pencil...along one edge is a title...also written in pencil..."you can't look at your-self in the ocean"....

coming soon...sp     

"matchbox songs....last day of 'miscellaneous'...

As has been the case since the inception of this series of transitional shows I am uncertain as to what will be next...at present all that I have is a title..."you can't look at yourself in the ocean"...a line from the book of Lorca's poems that I read during my morning train journeys when I first arrived in Brisbane...it may be something...at times all one needs is a title and the rest falls into place...we shall see...perhaps they will continue to be 'hesitations'...which I do not mind...eventually, either singularly or collectively they will say something...I have been reading of Joseph Cornell this week...they say that you should never meet your heros...but I would not have wanted to meet him so much as to have followed him...his bike rides through Flushing and the sojourns through Manhattan...a mind that was truly a stream of consciousness...child like in every way...there was a wonderful story of how he would often buy a new record and take it to a friends place for them to keep for a time...then he would return in a number of days even weeks to collect it.. still unopened...a way of prolonging not only the experience but the sense of expectation of the moment...in small ways I do similar things..deliberately having books wrapped in brown paper and leaving them overnight before I open them...some times the same thing will befall a new CD...thank you again to those who have taken a moment to peer into my window...someone asking about the binding of things...I am not so sure that I have worked that one out myself ...I guess it is all of the associations that are implied with such an act..but I think the connection is between the act of binding and what is presented...the doing is no less significant then the result...the viewer is hopefully aware of both elements...and apart from my time in London where I had a job binding rope around bundles of newspapers before they went out to the news stands I can't really say much more..or won't..sp

"matchbox songs & gypsy hymns"...more hesitations..

the final days of 'miscellaneous'...I am writing about the correlations between collage/assemblage and phenomenology at present...still convinced that there is a certain clarity to my reasoning...although as with most things it is more of a sense of the existence of their connection....it seems that the quotations from the artists themselves provide the most succinct explanations...I am aware that this 'miscellaneous' collection of 'hesitations' is missing the element of written descriptions of each item...each of the original pieces that have been presented in a frame or on a gallery wall have been accompanied by hand written descriptions in pencil...nothing ponderous...just a naming of the object...in some cases they appear almost like a poetic itemized list of the objects one is viewing...it is only a minor referencing of phenomenology's concern for description rather than explanation...but it is also a continuation of my relationship with  text...with writing...of course with my sign-writing trade...and now almost 25years of hand written diaries I have noticed in the past few years my somewhat tentative blending of image and text...such a difficult relationship I find...several of my first year print students made very strong text based works this semester...but shortly I will be attempting a new series of etchings that are predominantly text driven...my only concern is that I will run out of things to say...sp

  

"matchbox songs and gypsy hymns"....miscellaneous hesitations...

I'm beginning to wonder if I have reached a point of having exhausted my descriptions...both visual and literary...as phenomenology requires one to do...perhaps it is because I have not been collecting...and therefore not making...that is really all that phenomenology is...a gathering of descriptions...and with description comes hesitation...most of my works are precisely that...hesitations...sp

"matchbox songs and gypsy hymns"...'miscellaneous details'

this may very well be one of the miscellaneous pieces that have a very short  'use by date'...but it is somewhat indicative of how i have been making things since my arrival in Brisbane...disparate objects finding each other on the studio walls...moments of self-contained reflection....the closest thing to a formula i care to find just now..their disparity is connected to living within the realms of an inner city...everything fits but nothing lasts.sp

"matchbox songs...'nebraska'...'sewing needles and poetry...'

...nebraska...sewing needles, coloured thread, poetry and diary entries...of all the miscellaneous items this remains the most curious...out-of- the-way oddity...perhaps due to its self-contained completeness...the cover is from the original album I bought in 1983-4... I'm not certain how bleak, first-person ballads of a mid-west state in the USA are able to resonate with a twenty something year old living in North Queensland...but they did... not just in the intimate voice of Springsteen accompanied on little more than an acoustic guitar..it was something geographical...the same sparse, desperate, poetic associations of the nebraskan  landscape unfold in a similar fashion in the north...the North Queensland highway has stretches of bleakness that mirror the same narratives expressed in 'nebraska'...it has an embedded history of murders,shootings, abandonment, runaways, and lost relationships..you think of a lot of things when you drive the north's highway...and so before I even make a mark there is already in place associations of meaning and identity...so where is the phenomenology?...its most deliberate association exists within the realms of the relationship between presence and absence in all that we experience...but in the end it is something you either get or you don't..

.(to be continued)sp.  

"matchbox songs & gypsy hymns"...'miscellaneous'

                                                                                                                                                                        

 The miscellaneous can often provide a certain immediacy to ones response to experience... that for the artist or poet reality simply requires description and not re-constructed...descriptions that belong to the sensory world..accounts that evoke varying degrees of historical circumstance...the incidental and ready-made permeate the historical...narratives... suggestive of a particular awareness..descriptions of silent disclosures...the miscellaneous anticipates...wild thought.. immersed within the senses...remaining incomplete...this incompleteness exists within the realms of the relationship between presence and absence...but more deliberately it implies merleau-ponty's idea of "flesh"...la chair...something so close to the essence of experience that it dissolves the distance between self and object...that possible moment of dissolution, if it exists at all, belongs within the process of making...the studio provides that moment...what proportion of that 'flesh' moment is gathered or retained  within the work is difficult to gauge...but it remains inarticulate...beautifully silent like a child not wanting to be found...it simply can not be explained away... the "durable flesh of the world" (m-p) contained within the miscellaneous...sp

"matchbox songs & gypsy hymns"...'miscellaneous'

'miscellaneous'...a lacing of collage + assemblage + objects...reflective moments from the studio walls...a short 'use by date' for many of them...some will last longer than others...threads of entwined narratives...short stories...poetry...phrases...single words...nebraska...needles of coloured thread...the moment...transparent envelopes... memory...embedded horse...mythology...clothes-peg bird...transition...bindings...the silence between language and image.sp 

"matchbox songs & gypsy hymns"....piano key portraits last day

Several conversations this week about the piano key assemblages...the layering of surface and image somewhat excessive for some...too many surfaces...image and texture over worked for such a confined surface...someone else recognising only death...bleakness and melancholy...nostalgia for one...are the piano keys a metaphor?...someone liked them because they played the piano...another not recognising that the 'wooden sticks' were piano keys... do the numbers represent collecting and cataloguing?... repetitious...a single narrative re-told...is it like a single note repeated? are the photographs of anonymous male figures a metaphor for identity or the transitory nature of things?..are they self-portraits?...are they meant to be held like an old fashioned slide-viewer?..are they meant to represent a collection of curious instruments?...was your father a butcher?...and to all of these I answered 'yes'...sp

"matchbox narratives"...

On my train journey this morning i suddenly realised why these works remain quite unfamiliar to me..no sooner had they been assembled before they were put in a box and sent to Townsville for the "Alter" exhibition...even in Townsville i had little chance to spend time with them... they have remained in a box until last week...i feel rather vain standing before my own studio window...but i have done that especially with these works...i'm not certain they belong to me..if they ever did....in a sense they don't...they exist in a space somewhere between myself and the notion of 'other'...it makes them sound like an offering...if the other is capable of providing the source of a meaningful sense to experience then each of these pieces are hand mirrors...but hopefully not just for me...anyone can make use of them...perhaps there is more light in them than i first thought...maybe i didn't have the angle right at first..or just a change in the weather...sp