Mixed Media Gallery
A visual art practice built on ‘Animating the Spirit’…
I embark on scavenger hunt through a personal and cultural memory of headlines, magazine images, photos, ephemera collected from the bottoms of drawers, remnants of nature, stamps and stencils, which is textured, coloured, glued, torn, over-painted. The sum of it considered with the undertones of symbol and metaphor, politics, science, anthropology and futurism.
The art pieces reflect my interest in experimenting with ideas, materials and techniques. They also embody my enduring curiosity about the world we live in – looking for the human motivation or the systemic history for why things are the way they are, and how they might change, or might not.
In my quest to understand, I explore, at a luddite level, all sorts of ‘Intelligence’. From the principle of Minkowski Space, (a four-dimensional continuum that joins, in a mathematical model, space and time) to the notion of a cube map. These discoveries are interpreted in the art pieces either before, during or after creation. I share them in the hopes of galvanizing others to wonder too.
GEDENKE DASS ... This German phrase means ‘Remember That’. I know I’m lifting this out of its sheet music context but the singing fish might have lots to draw our attention to recall.
BLUE ... A quick piece reminding me of the Rocky Mountain skyline at a time when I am far from home.
THE DEEP ... This piece inspired a narrative poem that I now use in a puppet theatre production. The haunting and beautiful shadow puppet play explores the wonder of the deep-sea environment. “For more men have walked on the moon to date than have walked on the ocean floor”.
47 HELP
H2O ... The Water Organ at Historic Kilmun on the banks of the Holy Loch in Argyll, Scotland is a rare and intriguing curiosity. Contrary to most organs, it uses the weight of water to pump air through the pipes, a technology with roots in 3rd-century BC, but still useful in a 1909 venue with no electricity. The lively musical pieces played in that sunny afternoon concert were a delight. But as the last notes faded, the looming presence of silent Celtic gravestones, ancient oaks and the huge domed mausoleum took over, their silence a contradiction to the tumultuous history of 1500 years of human habitation on that spot.
KEW ... The KEW Garden greenhouses on a cold rainy-day embody a physical paradox. Their overwhelming lushness, vibrancy of colour, smell and temperature provide a whole-body experience. As one enters the ornate glass and filigree iron doors verdant life pounces and fills one’s senses. The next ‘disruption to the familiar’ occurs as I climb a little winding Victorian style staircase to the walkway above the plants. Seen from above the foliage seems remote and the patterns coalesce into a palette of green shapes – no one plant is identifiable. As land bound animals we rarely get a bird’s eye view.
VAM ... The Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington London, England is 12.5 acres or 5.1 hectares of new ways of seeing the world we live in. It adds, confirms, contradicts, or introduces the wonderful diversity of human invention and endeavour from 5,000 years of human creativity. The plaster gallery, with the cast of Trajan’s 35-meter-tall column, challenges our perception of what stone carving should be. Boggling my brain are the snuffboxes with virtually microscopic mosaics. And the rendering of an elephant sculpture by a craftsperson who had never seen the animal is a charming contradiction of reality.
HMS VANGUARD
TWITCHINGS ... A response to a staycation summer, this piece has to do with the observed cycle of lives, seen in my back yard. A squirrel buries a peanut, tracked by a magpie. A mouse balances on a tomato plant and nibbles through half a ripe fruit. Little green larvae reduce raspberry leaves to skeletons. A young golden eagle does a fly by every morning, the merlins are eating robins, the flickers are pounding on the light standards, and the sparrows - are so busy-busy-busy. Life goes on. And as it can, human impact notwithstanding, it prevails, overlaying human headlines and schematics.
SHRINE OF COMMERCE ... Factory fishing and whaling references
WATER ... A little fish probably involved in more than she can handle…
3 FOR CC ... Possibly named for something that was on the radio at the time of creation. Otherwise no idea why this picture is called this.
THE RIDGEWAY ... The Ridgeway was a favourite walking spot one beautiful fall
IT WAS ONLY MUCH LATER THAT I FOUND THE ANSWER ...This large piece reminds me of Leonardo’s sketches – a clutter of anatomy, machines and ideas – some of my favourite things. The ‘answer’ is my accidental usage of the number 42 – known to Douglas Adams fans.
closeup - IT WAS ONLY MUCH LATER ....
LIFE BEGAN ....I don’t know the people in the photo – discarded as they were in a bin in an antique shop, but as the shard of text says they are a direct line from when life began in the oceans so many millennia ago.
VALUED HIGHLY ... The fun thing about taking titled from scraps of paper is that you have no idea what they are referring to. Just what was highly valued?
UNLIKELY MEETING ... I enjoy the bizarre creativity of Surrealism – this piece is a reference to the line “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” (Isidore Ducasse, 1860’s)
CORMORANT WAS ... Based on my photo of a dead cormorant on a Cornish beach, there is also a war – news article layered in the piece. Life and Death are never far away.
BROWNED LEAF ... Just playing around with textures and shades of brown, stamps leaves, etc.
UNTITLED
HIDING ... Sneaking a few orange scales into view a Clown Fish hides in the seaweed.
BRIAN'S GARAGE ... Even the swallows had a hard time finding their way around this ultimate man -room. but what a wealth of stories, good intentioned projects, and decades of history.
THE EYE OF THE STORM SEES THINGS DIFFERENTLY ... Starting as an exploration of media, during a cold and wintery evening, the notion of ‘storm’ rose from the ink spots. The ‘eye of the storm’ is a calm, yet dangerous place in the middle of a hurricane. My inclination to animate things, made me wonder, if you were literally, the eye looking out at the chaos in our world today what would you see? And with the detached and enduring view point of nature, wherein a human is a small (though significant en-mass) entity in the universe, does this put into context our human challenges?
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PERSONAL GPS ... December 2024 - It's a topsy turvy time - when a Personal GPS would be helpful.
CARTE POSTALE
AFTER KIM
TT SELF PORTRAIT
TANGL;ED
SOUNDINGS IN FATHOMS
MOTH MARVEL IN MINKOWSKI SPACE*** ... Starting as an exploration of textures, architecture, colours and ephemera the piece gradually coalesces into a statement of my astrophysical marvelling. Organized into four sections the collage represents the four cardinal directions, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, four seasons, elements, noble truths, humours, moon phases, the four ages, the four types of animals. Four is the number of Order in the universe. While four divides and orders the whole, the whole is all connected on the canvas we call earth. Repeating elements of wood bits, stamps and round shapes against the continuous background patterns provide unification. Even though the Butterfly Effect does not determine the weather across the globe, as a pop culture meme would suggest, it can connote global interconnection, and so there is a moth fluttering across the canvas. The sweeping colours across the scene, with the sun in the east and the moon glimmering in the west, recollect the earth’s rotation in an immutable universe, that some say, was not built for the human mind to understand. Intrepidly, we persevere with Mars landers and OSIRIS-Rex. The year 2020, ironically a human construct of clear vision, brings a time of uncertainty, of existential angst, and even though ‘four’ can be the ground for our feet to stand on, our heads are in the clouds of cosmic insignificance. Yet, I agree with the author of a Scientific American blog post*, there is a better response to the vastness of the universe and the insignificance of humanity. It is to marvel at the human mind itself, exploring the cosmos, calculating the electroweak epoch beginning at 10−36 seconds after the Big Bang, and even conceiving of Minkowski space, a four-dimensional continuum that joins, in a mathematical model, space and time. I didn’t finish reading The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)*** by Katie Mack, which I started recently and promise I will complete some day before everything ends, I did read enough to once again, be in a state of wonder and marvel. The ideas come together to be represented in this piece Moth Marvel in Minkowski Space. *https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/how-mere-humans-manage-to-comprehend-the-vastness-of-the-universe/ **Minkowski space is a four-dimensional continuum that joins, in a mathematical model, space and time, helping cosmology to understand how the universe works on a macro and micro level. ***http://www.astrokatie.com/book