clockwatching

clockwatching study, originally uploaded by aesop.

Over the last few days I've been working on my PhD studies and trying to get a little book together for an exhibition around a 'sitting room' theme. I've been working on ideas around grandfather clocks.

nightmilling (study)

nightmilling (study), originally uploaded by aesop.

uploading a load of material from sketchbooks now to add to my studio journal.

This study is from work for a series of prints I'm working on to do with windmills.

Reading room, Bristol Reference Library

Reading room, Bristol Reference Library, originally uploaded by aesop.

From a set of photos I took for the forthcoming book on the library, which celebrates its centenary this year.

The Amber Room

A question on, of all things, University Challenge, last night, was about The Amber Room, the famously lost treasure-room made of gilt-backed amber. It was a present to the Russians from the Prussians, and disappeared following WWII during which it was looted by the invading Germans. Various theories exist claiming that the work does or does not any longer exist.

It seemed to me that it might make a fine starting point for a book. Given my recent reading on hermeneutic analysis and the ways in which hermeneutics approaches objectivity, I thought something examining the history and possible continued existence of an object seemingly 'lost in time' (a thing I see in a lot of Stephen Poliakoff's films) would be an interesting way of exploring issues of being in an artwork. I propose not to produce something documentary so much as a poetic exploration. This would sit alongside my current projects; the 'windmill' project, 'Whistling Copse' and the version of 'The Three Ravens"

Holden's silence

a slideshow of the images used in my book Hoden's Silence.

Tanpit Woods

Tanpit Woods 9, originally uploaded by aesop.

I just wrote a series of 11 interlocking "haiku" commemorating a rather chilly picnic I had today over at tanpit woods.

More through the link on the picture.

coptic stitch

coptic stitch, originally uploaded by aesop.

A how to diagram for Guerilla Bookbinding which will be happening at Spike Island in February. I'm going to produce a whole booklet like this with the 6-10 different bindings I'll be teaching.

Click the picture to see at higher resolution (look for 'all sizes')

Bristl Flickrmeet

Link: Bristol Flickr Meet

It's time to have a beer or two and meet some of the other people currently viewing the visual world as a series of photo opportunities. speaking for myself, I'm in a sort of exhausted, post-jaded state where I seem to have taken all the photographs I know how to take. I'm now approaching some sort of other-state where I take the photograph because it wants me to take it, rather than the other way around. I think my recent pictures are unexciting, really, but they exist now, and I'm waiting for one of them to tell me something, so I keep taking them.

Maybe I'll learn something tonight?

Hugh & Andi at the LAB

Hugh & Andi, originally uploaded by aesop.

(Hugh Bryden and Andi McGarry)

At the London Artists' Books fair at the ICA this weekend. I had a really good, productive time 9even though I was surrounded by a superabundance of tempting artworks and all the expense that the metropolis can throw to a man with my modest tastes (I even order a cheap curry on a boozy night out)I took a lot of notes and made contact with a number of people whose work I'd like to find out more about. I came up with a couple of ideas whilst there, too, but they await a bit of further thought before I write them up. I was a bit disappointed in my own books. They looked a bit sad and unloved, and not really up to the standard I'd like to reflect. For the moment I'm putting it down to a bit of a flirtation with trying to make commercially-viable work, and a bit of aridity arising from too much computer work. Suffice it to say that at the moment my fingers are mucky with charcoal, and though I'm still a bit timid about feeling that my books are getting better, it felt good.

Lisle's Man

Lisle's Man, originally uploaded by aesop.

a mock up of the book I'm currertly working on.

Off to Wexford

I'm off to Wexford to take part in, and give a talk at the Wexford Artists' Books Symposium (link is pdf, sorry)

The Remembrancer

more work

I've been working hard on some outlining I have to do on my PhD, trying to produce concise and meaningful structures to the guiding questions I've been able to generate with the help of my advisors. This has been more difficult than it sounds, because I'm simultaneously trying to generate a sequence of research goals, (which may turn out to be the developing structure of my thesis), and engineer the practical methods I'll need to create the data that will inform my writing. Although the structure I've chosen is roughly chronological (from the inception of the idea of an artists' book, through its production to its ongoing post-production identity), clearly, examining the phenomenology and heuristics of artists' book production raises issues that can't be examined fully in one pass. At the moment I'm seeing my thesis design change as I build several passes on the data into its structure. Thus there are three iterations of the notion of a cycle of intention, the building up of the idea of artistic intention in relation to the medium, before the book is constructed, during the construction (how it turns up in the strategies of production employed by artists), and, finally, how it persists in the created object, now lonesome and at the mercy of critics who may have no truck with the artist's intentions at all if they're not evident in the work.

Something like this, which is an important notion in the work I want to do, bleeds off into many other areas, (intention and intentionality: theory of mind: theory of culture: cognitive characteristics of media, etc) and I think a strategy of iteration, so that the many different layers of influence that touch on the notion can be slowly glazed on the support of a simple armature, is the only way for me to proceed.

I'm finding that some of the reading I've done is starting to gel, albeit in a fairly brittle way, but I'm attached to the scope of the idea, and I think that my premise

that the practicalities (the problems and the tools) of artistic production need to be understood alongside the works and their historical placement in terms of technological and social possibility in order to describe what is best described as the practice of artists' books (as opposed to the "medium" or the "movement")

requires and deserves a proper breadth in backgrounding the significance and mechanics of artists' heuristics in motivating their choice of material. For this reason, I think that my examination of writing about media and cognition, of intention, of culture and communication, have been anything but redundant to my aims. However, collaging all of these things together, the task of creating the firm guidance that such a widely-populated arc requires,  has been a difficult task for someonelike myself.

moon drawing

moon drawing, originally uploaded by aesop.

A drawing I did some time ago, posted now in honour of this afternoon's meeting at Spike Island to talk about integrating my book arts teaching into the taster class they are organising across-the-board in August. Also in honour of Howard Plotkin's The Imagined World Made Real, a marvellous book that attempts to "marry the biological and social sciences". Fiercely attentive to critics that would accuse him of reductive reasoning that would throw the study of centuries of socil science, he sets out the landscape of these relationships and explanatory models with great emphasis on the detail and strangeness of culture. He's equally attentive to the necessity of using the explanatory powers of science to understand culture. One would expect the usual criticisms to hold true: clumsy, reductive, overly rational. Not so.

Very provoking, opening avenues of inference and speculation deep into my own thought on artistic practice and media.

farnsworth2

  farnsworth2 
  Originally uploaded by aesop.

Farnsworth. My collapsible goat.

This is his song.