Artgasm II

Carly Waito

Artgasm I

Francesca Woodman

December

Scattered thoughts again, akin to the kirby grips that have lost themselves on my floor. My favourite things of this month. The Sylvia Plath poem that described the night sky as carbon paper, the tiny fractures and tears made within the stars. The Francesca Woodman exhibition, her black and white photographs that seemed to capture the same exquisite fragility of those words. Walking along Southbank in the biting cold, seeing the river always settles me. Arcade Fire. Rediscovering a burning love for Haiti, discovering the Suburbs live. Snow. Borough Market and late night Tate visits, getting misty eyed in Analogue whilst browsing endless amounts of zines and beautiful books.

'She was angry with him, turning everything into words. Violets were Juno's eyelids and windflowers were unravished brides. How she hated words, always coming between her and life? They did the ravishing, if anything did; ready-made words and phrases sucking all the life-sap out of living things.'

Lady Chatterley's Lover

It reminds me of something about signs, semiology. How we communicate in reference the visual only through language, something completely removed from the visual. Or something. I probably should have been listening more in my seminars about the particulars of what I'm thinking but there's definitely something in there about how our world is framed. Maybe.

Edinburgh. Standing side by side with Faith as she said to soak it up. We stood at the top of some snow laden steps and looked upon the horizon. No photos, only memory. It seems to have done the job, I can remember the pastels of the sky, the lilacs and blues fading to dusk and the christmas lights rising to prominence against the dull browns of stone building rooftops. Discovering that the colours I am attracted to is the ever changing palette of the sky. Except for maybe anytime that it's a bit red. I'm not on that.

I've

only gone and done it again, left my blog gathering dust in cyberspace and now I'm too cluttered up with thoughts to enunciate or elucidate or something of the sort. What is important for the moment is that today I ate an entire pineapple and wallowed in post waitressing arm strain whilst once again listening to Jarvis Cocker's amazing tone and indulging in some Lady Chatterley's Lover in the bath. The 50th anniversary edition cover sold it to me. It is effectively an erotic Rob Ryan stencil cut. But it isn't Rob Ryan.

Movember

CHARLIE DUCK.

THAT IS ALL.

There

is no greater pleasure in life than it verging on winter, dispelling the cold with duvets, blankets and anything else I can find that makes me resemble a giant marshmallow, bed socks, milky coffee, browsing its nice that and reading poetry that makes me want to write, looking at work that makes me glad to be an art student and listening to jarvis cocker's sensuous voice on his sunday service show. Its like when Fran gets a bit too excitable in Black Books over the man that does the shipping forecast.

Muntean and Rosenblum

'We imagine that we remember things as they really were, while in fact what we all carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past.'

Frieze

The day was promising. The weather was beautiful. The sun beamed down on Regent Park's autumnal state. The attractive guy at the box office was very helpful when I got flustered over booking details and a lost debit card. However, never before in my life have I ever felt so completely overwhelmed and so disillusioned by art. The sheer volume to take in in a few hours was beyond ridiculous, it ended up as some kind of game where we would wander up to each work, assign it with a 'yes' or 'no' and dependent upon that choice may or may not linger over it for the next half a minute to admire it a little bit more. I was tripping over art, my bag kept getting caught on art and all the while I was annoyed with my need to lug around a two litre bottle of water in one of my many (failed) efforts at a health kick. There was a lust for me for the cheeky collages that were littered throughout, some of the intricate drawings, pencil or biro. Video lost its poignancy in the general hubbub of the place, saturated with gallery owners and art talk that made my head hurt. A group of men dressed in white shirts and brown trousers walked around together, looking at work in a puzzled manner, hands caressing their chins and their eyebrows signifying confusion. Lingering eye contact had to be diverted with a hand over their eyes and a glance in the other direction, checking again and again if you were still looking. It was brilliant. Among the highlights for me was Roe Ethridge's scored patterns on a massive photograph, Cary Kwok's amazing biro skills, Lorna Simpson's printing onto felt, Josh Brand's photographs. On further investigation in this interview I have found some kind of affinity in his method of process, in wanting to be involved in the darkroom and the fact that he speaks of his compositional habits, almost as though there are unconscious decisions made about his work that he doesn't feel the need or the want to justify. It is what it is.

Josh Brand, Untitled, unique colour photograph, 2008

The fair seemed like an unmanageable microcosm of the contemporary artworld, but this idea evaporated slightly when leaving at dusk, to be greeted in the sculpture park by beautifully lit pieces, surrounded by greenery and away from the almost unbearable white spaces (I remember a Berlin gallery had a blue space which I particularly appreciated, especially with its massive canvas of a piece of lined paper adorned with life sized pencil doodles). There was a moving mirror playing with the light reflection that spanned the park in a circle, hitting upon whatever surface blocked its movement. There was almost definitely some giant eggs, and a little park where you could pick wooden flowers. It was a day crammed full of culture that the only way to remedy it all was to watch x factor, have a chip butty and mushy peas, a lot of coffee and a ridiculous stretch of time strewn across a sofa in various states of slobbery.

Tunstall

I really don't care. She's back. I love her.

Oh my god and again. It's like two of my favourite things in the world ever have come together and I am deliriously happy. Even more happy than when Ellie left me a brownie on my bed for me yesterday and when Anna brought me an Aero yoghurt today (they know the way to my heart is through chocolate). Though it's definitely a close run thing. Pathetic fallacy would have shooting stars across the sky. It's that good.

Whiteread

Demolished House Site

Crush

Autumn is definitely here. It hasn't stopped raining, it seems pointless to even try and control my hair by any artificial means. Throughout the grey drizzle I have found solace in a couple of new artist crushes, namely Rachel Whiteread and Darren Almond. The disconsolate aura that a wet London provokes was completely shattered on sight of Whiteread's drawings. They were beautiful. The use of graph paper and enamel paint and resins and sumptuous pastels. The graph paper provided a foundation to the drawings that could either be acknowledged or abandoned. There was an inherent humour in her collages on graph paper, an array of cardboard boxes upon a sheet full of squares. Boxes on boxes. Horton would have died. It's definitely made me want to invest in a large stock of graph paper.

Study (Blue) for 'Floor'. 1992

Her work investigates, 'notions of absence and loss, void and presence, and the subtle observation of human traces in everyday life'. There was something beautiful (I need to find a different word but you pretty much get the point) in her isolating objects on paper, in altering their contexts and questioning the space in which they reside. It was interesting to see drawings as a blueprint for three dimensional work, but being explored in two. They would have stood up even without being preparatory work. Work involving tippex on coloured photocopies held all the aesthetic qualities I appreciated, that of empty spaces and dusky colours. The idea that they were then transformed into beautiful resin sculptures that went onto explore negative space, passages of times in certain places being solidified, almost made monumental is one that I want to ponder.

Study for House

You can see the sculptor within her in the drawings themselves, the way the resin spills outside the ink lines, or the way in which the graph paper loses its tautness on contact with enamel paint, the materiality is something continually being explored. (I really agree with this review). I fear a chunk of my loan will have to go on her drawings book, along with some new trousers. I got a perfect spherical white circle on my leggings after painting my wall white and my top to bottom balance within my wardrobe was rendered even more unequal.

Saturday saw a hot date with my housemate Anna to Mason's Yard White Cube for the last day of Darren Almond's 'The principle of moments'. I think the use of the word sublime would be appropriate to describe the work. Almond captured the same view of the Faroe Island coast for every hour of every day for a week. 1440 images. An image that contained a cliff face, a waterfall, greenery. The passing of time barely registers between each separate image, but it is the culmination of all of these moments that allowed almost extreme changes to be laid bare. The passing of clouds over time sometimes obscuring the entire view, leaving nothing but a twilight haze, other times the view is so clear that it almost looks like a kitsch postcard which is missing yellow typography exclaiming the destination. It couldn't be described better than the guide for the exhibition itself, in which the, 'photographs present a constantly shifting canvas and a melancholy register for the passing of time.' The set up, miniature photos in white frames, seem to allow the colour changes of the light to register. It becomes an abstract Dulux colour chart when you squint. Downstairs we got lost in his abstracted videos of ice breaking and in his capturing of the most northernly railway, the severe weather conditions of which became almost like destroyed film. It was pretty intoxicating, especially given the Max Richter soundtrack. Eventually though we heaved our numb bodies off the floor and became giddy in Fortnum & Mason's and Phaidon, before bumping back down to reality with heavy showers and a Boots Meal Deal.

The morning after

Today I was described as a beautiful mess. I didn't know whether to take it as a compliment or not but it will definitely teach me to a) not forget to tend to my hair before leaving the house b) remove last night's make up c) not lie with Maggie in a melancholic heap on the studio floor looking up at the ceiling whilst the new first years come round and see you in the grasp of varying emotional crises d) try and avoid being hungover as it inevitably leads to an alarming dependence on cherry coca cola and orange ribena and everything else I can't really afford.

I will return to cultural things soon. Honest. I have a bookshelf of untempered pages, an art gallery section in Timeout requiring some much overdue attention and a new studio space which is very definitely going to be the proud owner of a coat hook. I also has some minor flashes of inspiration involving thread when I was struggling back from Asda with some baguettes.

To Sophie

Happy Birthday! I hope it is filled with less sexual innuendos and more cake.

Cold

It is getting dark at seven in the evening and I am awaiting winter's onslaught. My iPod battery died when the sky was fuzzing into twilight. There are galaxy caramel fingerprints on my keyboard and I woke up in a pile of orange peel this morning. I have £3.76 in my bank account and a library fine that knocked £18.60 out of me. I am typing in my dimly lit room and feeling a sense of melancholy wash over me. I blame Barthes.

'The Ghost Ship

errance / errantry

Though each love is experienced as unique and though the subject rejects the notion of repeating it elsewhere later on, he sometimes discovers in himself a diffusion of amorous desire; he then realizes he is doomed to wander until he dies, from love to love.'

A Lover's Discourse.

Scribbles

Grey

Rainy, miserable. That means only one thing. A day indoors with a really badly made cup of coffee (a skill I need to master), the internet and my den's worth of books at my disposal.

Having watched The Boat That Rocked for the first time I have become attached to the soundtrack. One problem, I'm trying to read about Brechtian theatre and be generally productive for lectures starting. This is impossible when I get so emotionally involved in Procol Harum, Cat Stevens and Otis Redding, they make me want to lay back on my bed and contemplate life. I'm sure Brecht and the Kinks are pretty incongruous anyway. I have become worryingly attached to my earphones recently, so much so I get slightly annoyed when I'm not travelling on public transport on my own, thus meaning I can't block off the world and form a shit soundtrack to the sights of Peckham that crawl on by.

Work. After three months I have managed to set up my scanner. Impressive work Ann-Marie. It pretty much follows my daydream reverie about clouds and patterns, also the idea of forming something as a whole and creating multiple possibilities for it. Blah art talk. So below are a few things I have done, I'm not inventive enough for titles.

New Favourite Song

Up on Melancholy Hill

There's a plastic tree.

Are you here with me?

Just looking out of the day of another dream.

Yes yes and yes

Greg Eason

Twix fino

What a day for going Cass Art shopping and buying yet more things that will probably prove fruitless, for drinking coffee, trying out the new twix bar (like milkyway rolls without the nice bit) and doing the guardian crossword, for getting excitable in hannah hood's and maggie's veritable trove of art books and walking home to peckham laden down with canvasses. It makes up for the interesting men I met last night, one of whom told me I should go to mass more often, the other berating me with stories of his married life and his erectile functioning.

Art wise I am dreaming of clouds and pattern and coloured stickers and silkscreening over etchings. Aquatint and immaculate pencil drawings. I had one of those nights where I couldn't sleep for ideas, that would obviously be the night where I had no pen to hand so they have all disapparated and are floating around my inner creative purgatory like millions of little pixels needing to find each other to seek clarity. I also may do something with pixels. Good work.

Caffeine High

Post Bestival Blues. Well, they have materialised in the form of yellows and greens, thanks to Tesco's finest cold remedy capsules stock full of caffeine and paracetamol that I am knocking back, probably going a long way to explain why I feel it is appropriate to be blogging at two in the morning about nothing in particular. That's always the way. Four Tet were amazing. I lost my voice during Mumford and Roxy Music and got a bit emotional. I'm listening to Fever Ray now and trying to remember how everything was just right and how the music was so intense. Bombay Bicycle Club's acoustic set was one of those moments when you realise everything is just so good. Or at least you think so until you turn round and see your housemate conked out on the grass. I have realised that I am an old woman in a twenty year old's body, or at least I thought as much until I got embroiled in the most ridiculous mud fight ever and allowed my Captain Scarlet clad brother to water pistol red bull and vodka directly into my mouth. I should really have gone as a Mysteron circle and stalked him the entire time. Snow White was a bit obvious really, though not as obvious as the ridiculous amount of Where's Wally's. Turns out they were all quite easy to find. I have never camped in such luxury, having never really camped at all it wasn't much of an achievement but I never realised how much difference a blow up bed can really make. A big enough difference it seems to attract housemates who should be sleeping in tents opposite but get so attracted by something inflatable and flowery sleeping bags that the double became a tad cramped. It was fine though, we had late night chats as we watched the stars. There were more stars in the sky that I have seen for a while. The most I have counted in Peckham at any one time has been eight. Really and truly. There's probably so much more I could talk about, like the first night where I was pleasantly surprised to see strangers smile warmly at me, until of course remembering that I had my face painted like a mannequin (of course I meant a harlequin), but what I can remember so explicitly are the car rides. Intermittently waking up from sleep to find the sky at different stages of lightness, stretching towards dusk, twilight, until being basked with a charcoal grey tinged with orange from the street lamps, looking out at the motorway and being a child again and pretending that the car isn't actually moving but the whole world is moving around a static car and the motion is turning the roads and the trees and the hedges into differing striped blurs, wanting to do a Wolfgang Tillmans-esque thing and take pictures of the sky at every hour and create a colour chart for hours of the day.

Caffeine makes me use the word 'and' too freely.

And apparently makes me forget about paragraphing. We'll just let this pass as a stream of consciousness.

Night blues

One living room. A trumpet, a guitar, rainymood.com. Shut your eyes and pretend you are in a jazz bar in downtown Chicago in the fifties, everything in black and white, smoke escaping from pursed lips and permeating the worn carpeted interior. A mix between Mad Men and that really great Jonathan Creek episode where the blind trumpet player turned out to be not so blind. I obviously don't know enough things about trumpets if that is my first reference obviously.

Also you can never go wrong with an improvised song about John Berger's Ways of Seeing and Simon and Garfunkel.

Peckham

Sitting in a cut up Hard Rock Café tshirt on my bunk bed. It is somewhat of a den.

I want to be better at writing, at creating beautiful images of the mind. But they just end up sounding as tacky as new age posters with dolphins with singular words festooned beneath. C A L M or T R A N S I E N C E or something.

My past two weeks. Huxley's fictional worlds where people are green, where organs emit scents and trumpets colours seems almost on a par with Peckham, the colours that spill out in the fruit on the roadside, of the flourescent lights advertising phone unlocking and foreign calltime. It's buzzing. Chinese minimarkets that sell fresh lychees, noodles in every shape and size and a really peculiar drink that I thought was melon juice transpiring to be a winter melon tea. Pleasant was not the word for it. My favourite things about Peckham so far include the pigeon I saw eating fried chicken. Cannibal. The brothel purporting to be a twenty four hour massage parlour, pretty much opposite the church on Old Kent Road with a black exterior and a neon sign flashing the 'Holy Ghost Zone' and the man that we met at Camberwell Green at four in the morning that had been to four weddings in one day. He assured us there was no funeral.

Art wise. Francis Alys. There was such a saturation with video, I was finding the whole thing a bit mind numbing. Just as I was about to give up completely the room of tiny illustrative paintings embedded themselves into my conscience. The content was so fragile yet displayed on heavy looking materials, with resins, varnishes, spills. The disparity was endearing. The tornado video blew me away. HA HA HA. I'm sorry. It was pretty incredible, the physical representation of being completely engulfed, being rendered completely useless by something that was bigger than you, that you have no control over. When I write this now it makes me think of emotion, I know that's probably not the point, but it resonates completely, the idea of not being able to reason with it, it has to lead you on a tumultuous course.

These past two weeks have been cluttered with furniture hunting and failed bartering, job hunting, manipulating the photocopier once more, a bit of Woody Allen box set action. Bananas was awful. Me and Marie watched it whilst falling asleep and I thought the slapstick was due to me slipping in and out of consciousness. It wasn't. It was inherent. House meals, balloons in the bath, the National Portrait Gallery for the BP Award and the Camille Silvy exhibition. The £4 spent on the entrance for Silvy seemed to pay for respite from the hustle and bustle of the Portrait Award than anything else. The exhibition was a bit like a serene history lesson, conducted under warm mood lighting and green paint, most of the photos within have now been rendered slightly kitsch. I couldn't really appreciate how groundbreaking they may well have been in the mid-nineteenth century. I was merely picturing how much fun it would be to cut them up and collage them. For that end a CV session in Greenwich served these means particularly well, finding myself in an old bookshop, leaving with ten pounds worth of collage worthy material including a particular gem on birds by the RSPB. My best book find of the past two weeks has to be an old ladybird classic entitled 'The Camera.' I am intending to actually learn how it works. It has illustrations of photographs instead of actual photographs. Which seems weird. We are also now a household with a record player and some amazing vinyls. I bet not many other people get to indulge themselves in the Shaft soundtrack while they are eating dinner.

Perhaps the most relevatory discovery of the past few days is the discovery that I'm employable and may be soon heading to a catering event near you. I was having daydream reveries of working in an art bookshop. It would have been like High Fidelity. With the same need for list making but with no relevance to music. I dug out the old VHS copy of it the other day. It was brilliant.

The question is, 'what did come first, the music or the misery?'

.

I have built up so much to write about that I can't even get it out.

Wolves

My life has been packed up into varying ikea bags and boxes and stowed away in the back of a transit van, making its way southbound. The idea of leaving Wolverhampton made me want to document my favourite bits. The matchbox pinhole worked well until, being a woman and all, I played around with it and promptly broke it. I need to stop fiddling. Luckily matchboxes are seventeen pence and I have enough black electrical tape to last a lifetime. So, Wolverhampton. Described by blandness, patterns, line. Dusky colours, freestanding walls that have been waiting to be demolished for at least two years, my favourite ever typography in sign form on a hotel that in my twenty years I have never seen anyone go in or out of. I think that's being demolished too. Walls with barbed wire that look like they belong in East Berlin and signs that incite the possibility of apocalypse any day now. Come to think of it, my cycling always gets a bit uneasy at this point.

Manhattan

'Not everybody gets corrupted. You have to have a little faith in people.' Manhattan.

The subtle optimism that glazes the final scene of Manhattan seems to have seeped through to me. I found myself half skipping down Swan Bank whilst re-falling in love with the Mystery Jets and Behind the Bunhouse. Everything feels good. Especially with Blaine's heartfelt choruses and bike rides at dusk, the lights cutting through the clouded blue. In keeping with my aim to be more in tune with art and culture and stuff I am half way through Brave New World. If I ever took soma and spent a night in a wistful state that no crippling emotion could penetrate I'd be willing to bet that if it had to take a musical form it would resolve itself in Four Tet's 'Everything is Alright'. Closely followed by Blur's 'Badhead'. Washed down with some Tesco peach sparkling water and visualised through a disposable camera form.

I'm captivated by Woody Allen at the first time of asking and I'm only one sixth of the way through the box set. I hope the same rings true for Hitchcock.

Sleep

continues to elude me.

It is most likely because I insist on watching 4od until the early hours of the morning and unwittingly (who am I kidding) fantasize about Richard Ayoade.

Quote

It makes me want to embroider.

'Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle, everything I do is stitched with your colours.'

Hurry

Every time I'm in a rush in London it feels like I'm in Sliding Doors. Except Aqua will never permeate my conscience at times of great hurry, nor am I as graceful as Gwyneth Paltrow. I always seem to equate public transport with running. Yesterday saw us legging it for the train home. Boots stuttering a rhythm on the marble, manically sloping in amongst the crowd, deftly weaving, clambering onto my bag to avoid bludgeoning unwitting and flustered strangers. Though those that leave their cello cases and wheely suitcase deathtraps in our path seem to deserve this fate. Something monumental feels like it should happen for making it, perhaps the train we are in time for will provide a brief encounter, a lustful hour and forty five minutes. No. Getting to the platform on time merely means I have time to buy an Appletiser. A girl can dream.

London II

Borough Market. My aim in life is to be able to afford food from here.

Tate Modern. My aim in life is to be able to afford most of the books from here.

Brick Lane.

The LCC Photography and Communication show was good. It had floating balls and a crowd of onlookers. Light boxes for slides for every hour of the day and a sensored orchestra you could control when you touched a coloured pad. Apparently each individual has their own specific electric charge so the outcome for everyone will be different.

What was less than impressive was the De Montfort Photography show. I'm not usually negative about work, which is perhaps a flaw I need to correct, for I remember someone saying your individuality is determined more so by what you hate than by what you like. If this is the case then my personality is dictated by my dislike of diamante and the word 'armpit'. Make of that what you will. Anyway, there was about two pieces in the entire space I liked. There was work supposedly conveying a serious political point. It didn't. It was kitsch and looked cheap, like those canvases you buy in homeware shops with black and white images and then a solitary red London bus or something. A photo that referenced Blair's role in the Iraq war was rendered thus, any serious gravity it held was completely undermined by a shocking aesthetic. Fluorescent yellow police jackets against a grainy black and white image. Oh dear. There was work that seemed to bear little consideration as to a subject, as though a sustained practice had yet to be salvaged. If anything the work on show was a chance to merely show off the quality of the camera used and the colour saturation than anything else of any significance. On the plus side there was a couple of nice double exposures and it was in a really nice setting. Though I got bike envy every single time an indie girl cycled past.

London

I can't wait to be embraced by your humid tubes, your concrete stare and your sporadic greenery once again.

I knew I was glad to be back when walking through London Bridge we met the sight of a woman unashamedly carrying a five foot long stuffed banana under her arms. I almost wish I'd kept sight of her long enough to see her navigate her way through the ticket barrier. Trailing behind was a flustered man embracing a cuddly love heart with arms.

The parched grass of Hyde Park led the way to the Serpentine, the toilets of which provided ample base for a strip show after the ridiculous heat of the underground. Wolfgang Tillmans. Amazing Venus transit series, circular visions of the moon with Venus gradually moving across its face. The 'mechanics of the sky'. Looking to abstraction within the real world, he found it. Folds and creases of photographs, large scale images, dusky colours, the wistful, ephemeral large scale images of delicate wisps, the manipulation of light on paper. He seems to possess an intuitive nature in relation to framing, in displaying grainy faxes and photocopies, of putting up photos with just double sided sticky tape. Escaping the wrath of the swans on the way back to the tube (they can break a man's arm you know) me and Pip headed onto the Photographer's Gallery, accompanied by a bottle of apple and raspberry juice and a packet of much needed bourbons. Sally Mann was what awaited us. Some really beautiful images captured using antique cameras and the wet plate collodion process. What this is I don't know but I think it involves silver nitrate. Maybe maybe. But whatever it was they incorporated any slight flaw of the technical process. Elements of dust, of outside interruption were embraced. I like mistakes, very much so.

Covered in London transport grime, I experienced my first jaunt down Savile Row. The adverts in Vogue proliferated into living form within one street. I got excited about Chanel. About Stella McCartney. About Hermes. Pip almost had a fashion induced heart attack. And probably explained as to why we walked around in circles for a good half an hour whilst getting sidetracked from the gallery we had planned on going to (Kurt Jackson exhibition). There were bouncers on the door, seemingly with the distinct ability to scare off all those who fell under a particular wage bracket. The only thing more ridiculous than the doormen was the yacht shop we walked past. I certainly felt like a bit of a fraud entering Vivienne Westwood wearing Primark. My scuffed Urban Outfitters boots only slightly redeemed this fact. Only slightly mind. The rain came. We hid in Berkeley Square planning our next manoeuvre. I enjoyed the sight of a doorman at a seemingly prestigious hotel take cover under two umbrellas stuck into some greenery to keep aloft. Hands free indeed.

Hoxton Square was the next stop. Dinner. We persevered with chopsticks but the forks won in the end. The toilets once again became our changing rooms. The hope was that they wouldn't recognize us as we were walking out as we couldn't afford to think about, let alone leave a tip, it was heart breaking enough leaving the Photographer's Gallery shop empty-handed due to my lack of funds. Broken Soul Night. Banging. Smoke filled room so you couldn't even make out the face of the person standing next to you. Hip flask came in handy to spice up our overpriced coke. It was one of my proudest moments.

We finished the night on the tube to Archway, to be met at the station by Marie. To be guided up the rolling hills of Northern London. To be presented with cupcakes taken from the funeral gathering at the pub Marie worked at. It was a really good cupcake. And a really comfy sofa.

Blog Trawl

Corriete Schoen

'Colour Me Summer'

A Nice Idea Every Day

Manifesto

Manifesto to myself, as copied word for word from my notebook

'Stop being so serious about what you are doing. Play around more. Be like the ridiculous Barry M nail colours you wear that undermine any allusion you have to maturity. Have fun, try and be productive. Also sort out you hair.'

I shall hopefully take this through to second year, especially the bit about the hair. I may write it in lipstick on my mirror. but that's a lot of words and a lot of lipstick. I also foresee the use of a lot of cleaning product that i probably won't own.

Little Thoughts II

Wolverhampton. I spend my time cycling to swimming, picking up habits along the way. Always a glance at my silhouette as I ride past the car dealership's glass casing, the dainty image i wish to project on my seventies bike (you can tell by the rust) being somewhat ruined by the bulbous old school backpack stuffed with my swimming towel. Always standing up on my bike to freewheel down into the subway, always holding my nose when gliding through the urine infused alley and always being bemused that the one stretch of cycle path that Wolverhampton seems to possess, people use as an extension of the bus stop queue. If ever there was a documentation project waiting to happen, this is it. My matchbox pinhole is in progression as we speak, but I am lacking a fiddly bit of plastic that my scavenging the house has failed to yield. Though in the process I found the Rayney 'man drawer'. Coins, old and foreign, batteries of varying shapes and sizes, foreign travel adaptors, marbles and old chapsticks lay at peace in the haggard wood. Sadly none of them were strawberry flavoured otherwise I would have disturbed their dusty hibernation.

I finally did away with the entrusted cellophane that had clung to my Voyeurism catalogue. It was very much worth the sight of what resembled a plastic cloud emanating from my bin.

'A writer knows that to see people, he must remain unseen. The world changes when you stare straight at it: cowards become heroes and heroes puppets. This second world can be studied in the shop window of any provincial photographer: the frozen pupils, the feelings combed back like hair, and that undemanding game which none can resist...

But what's one to do with a camera? A camera is clumsy and crude. It meddles insolently in other people's affairs. The lens scatters the crowd like the barrel of a gun.'

'My Paris' Ehrenburg

Feelings combed back like hair. Individual traits lost. An insolent meddler. I want a camera that is an inconspicuous meddler, though being inconspicuous may undermine the meddling aspect. An inconspicuous eye. Maybe. Who knows.

Reason

For wanting to go brunette. More brunette even.

That and Audrey Tautou.

My pledges

Genna. I will buy a colouring book, felt tip pens and listen to Fela Kuti.

Horton. I will write something good about you soon, I just don't know what but when the time comes it will be special. I shall scan in our birthday goodness though, can't not let the world know about bolty pole.

Myself. I shall be more proactive, not lapse with my blog again and try not being as self involved with a narrative of my life and try and write about art and culture and stuff. I'll try my best. I shall listen to David Bowie and Neil Young because I didn't realise how good they were. I shall not lose or break my hard drive and I will read all of Murakami's books. I shall try and complete my 'things to do list summer 2010'. I shall stop buying dresses. I have enough. I shall read 1984 because it is about time.

Memories

Explosion

Sitting down and actually thinking does have its merits, I even had an excited two minute spurt in my notebook.

These are my favourite pictures from the last month.

We paid £3.99 for a bucket and spade and a retarded ball. It was oval shaped and made us look even worse at football, if that is at all possible.

This looks idyllic. However I was the only one stupid enough to go running through the sludge and so my legs got covered in mud. Also we got surrounded by some very evil seagulls later on when we were eating extortionately priced chips.

I don't even know what this is but I love happy accidents from processing.

We had to walk through a field of corn to get to the train station. I got excited when I thought my feet had tanned but it was in fact dust from the track.

Genna's arse. We spent a good twenty minutes throwing little rocks at this rock to see if it was a big rock. It was. Ellie and Cathy also came back with a jellyfish. I don't like jellyfish (for future reference).

The Shire. This was on our break from our Pride and Prejudice marathon. In fairness I had fallen asleep for at least two of the episodes but the action was so slow that it didn't take too long to catch up. Honestly, eight episodes, six hours and all we got was a kiss and Colin Firth taking off a jacket and getting wet. Come on Mr Darcy, don't be a tease.

Nettles sting through tights. I found out the hard way. I am still not accustomed to country living. However the local supermarket was brilliant, it sold 'The Farmers Guardian', animal feed and ridiculously large jars of spices. The train to Bucknell was one carriage long and you had to make a request stop. There was one very surreal moment when my iPod reverie was somewhat disturbed by a group of at least thirty pensioners descending onto the train in full climbing attire. Lots of poles. I was wearing my nan's cardigan so at least I didn't feel out of place.

Sheep. We met some very friendly sheep. These were not them.

This was an amazing view. What was very annoying was that we forgot to take the kite with us.

DRAWN

DRAWN. An exhibition for local artists at the local arts centre organised by Megan. My first week back at home involved finding glass bottles and jam jars for flowers, buying ribbon, cutting tablecloths, freeloading some cardboard from M&S and then having to carry it around town. Think small person carrying cardboard that is twice the size of her. Spent too much time wrapping prints up with cellophane. The exhibition itself was lovely, it was almost like a reunion of minds, seeing people from foundation and seeing the impact the last year had on their practice. There are definitely some talented folk in the Black Country. Bostin'. There are reasons to come to Wolverhampton, more so than to see Britain's very first set of automatic traffic lights, though that must be tempting?

DRAWN. The night. The equation. Money made equals bottles of wine equals lots of dancing equals Faith asleep on my leg at four in the morning.

Nom

I have to show this.

This is my friend Faith's work. She came to stay with me in London for five days, in the process of which I managed to completely destroy any health kick she had plans for. Her work makes me happy, in the way that I destroy any allusions she has to healthy eating, she looks at disrupting normality, at intervening. I imagine her mind to be like Science of Sleep, filled with stop frame animation ponies galloping across fields, water that is made of cellophane and clouds that are made out of cotton wool. I bet Michel Gondry has some kind of telepathic connection with her.

We had many adventures. Together we rode the wave of graduate shows, Goldsmiths, Central St Martins (Graphic Design), Slade (MA), my tattered notebook taking a hiding from all the scrawled names. We spooned, we decided this wasn't making for a comfortable nights sleep so she got the mattress on the floor. We grimaced our way through Curb your Enthusiasm (I actually had to stop watching it). We went to Tate Modern, to Club Sandwich, from which I started collecting bruises, warehouses in Peckham till four in the morning, we sat on the 343 as it took us through the greener route back to New Cross and arrived back as the sun was rising and the birds were singing. I wore my onesie. We did 'the pineapple'. There were many other things that escape my memory, however my favourite thing we did was saunter down Oxford Street at a ridiculously slow pace and let London pass us by, being unwittingly obstructive. Oh, and of course the great freezer clearout, akin to the greatest ready steady cook episode you ever did see.

Thought in fairness the next night did see a bottle of champagne, fishfingers, waffles and beans and me passing out on Genna's bed whilst we were halfway through the Royal Tenenbaums. I never did finish that.

Return

It's difficult to know what to say.

Bloc

If I could do it again, I'd make more mistakes

I'd not be so scared of falling

If I could do it again, I'd climb more trees

I'd pick and I'd eat more wild blackberries.

Bonobo

Sums up this week really.

Daydream

I need to stop sleeping in the day. Daydream reveries partially induced by Murakami, partially by the fact it is pretty much inevitable if you lie on your bed with a book. The Wind up Bird Chronicle this time. I made it fifteen pages in before drifting off. Thats not any kind of comment on the book, more a comment on how cosy my shockingly thin mattress actually is and how tired I must have been

Another list for the week

Achingly hot, vague resemblance of a tan line, ensuing pride (you need to understand just how pale I am), kew gardens, sun dappled fields and plant meadows, roaming geese, ducks and the occasional peacock, that really good but expensive lemonade that comes in a can, so good that obviously i can't remember it's name. Flatmate fun, drinking, dancing and another three o clock in the morning pasta session. Sloane Square, Newspeak, Saatchi, massive paper and cellophane sculptures, one in a pastel blue that looked like a massive wave, clunie reid's collages and prints on aluminium, black abstract paintings, a tower of speakers and a self playing piano, getting a bit excited seeing mat collishaw having a gander through (with a burberry bag draped over his shoulder no less). Richard Wilson's 20:20. I think it was love at first sight, especially on overhearing bemused american tourists wonder where the smell of oil is coming from. Amazing art shop that sold pigment in massive jars and held etching tools within tiny drawers, almost like an apothecary, British Museum, Italian Renaissance Drawings, awe, da Vinci's advice to an apprentice, 'draw and don't waste time.' Catch up gossip in Starbucks, £2.95 on something that wasn't worth it. It never is, I will never learn my lesson. Royal Academy Degree Show, a ridiculous amount of postcards picked up to adorn the walls of my room next year, Lydia Carline's prints being the most beautiful thing in there (though it was a close run thing), Mr Whippy, being caught off guard and so going to Hampstead Heath sans Murakami and sans bikini. I made do with Glamour and a paddle until I saw the tadpoles. Les Miserables matinee, Eponine, being offered a box of maltesers with one solitary little chocolate ball left, falling into the trap I always do after seeing a musical in that I believe I can sing, eating at a diner with a jukebox that has got me back into motown in a big way, royal albert, pimms, trivial pursuit, my favourite question being 'Who had her toes sucked by her financial adviser? HRH Fergie'. Every day is an education.

This isn't really as much a list as it is a Jack Kerouac type splurge. I do love London.

Writer's block //

So

A two hour nap in the day is never a good idea.

A re-acquainted music obsession. Young Runaways. I'm in love with Lifeline.

They're from Wolverhampton and everything. Thats always a bonus.

Exposed

Voyeurism, Surveillance & the Camera. New Tate exhibition, one which I found myself completely absorbed in. Have visited it twice within three days and managed to leave maggie in search of a brew whilst I got so spell bindingly distracted by a Nan Goldin video. I genuinely think I was in that little cuboid room for a good forty minutes. 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency', hundreds of photos of her life, intimate snapshots flicking by to what I'm sure I remember as Petula Clark's Downtown. I'm never good at trying to explain why I like work but this was mesmerising. You become a voyeur of her life almost, an onlooker to scenes of domesticity, family life, relationships, drug abuse, addiction, sex. The closeness of Goldin to those being photographed was obvious, there was never any distance in the photographs, just a complicit sense of trust. The colours were amazing too. There, that was a half decent explanation.

The charm of this exhibition is that it satiates curiosity, what individuals do and how they behave when they are unaware of any other presence, when they don't have to uphold any pretense or maintain any illusions for the sake of how they may be perceived. There's something of a charm about it, especially with reference to the photographer who roamed the streets with his Fallowfield Facile, a six pound box camera that was carried under the arm and wrapped in paper to be disguised as a package. The unseen photographer sounds like quite a good role to undertake. I love the idea of Miroslav Tichy roaming around communist Czechoslovakia with handmade cameras, taking pictures through the aid of tins, of general assortments of rubbish, which no one believed were real. I have visions of many pinhole camera projects next term.

Popped to the Amersham last night to see the Adult Youth exhibition. Some of the work was beautiful, in particular melting blocks of ice, photocopy art, abstract paintings and a tiny drawing that was hidden high up on the stairwell. Another ridiculously sized roast was made yesterday and I have enough apple sauce to last me for a year, sadly none of the actual food remains, that's where the issue may lie. I have also decided it is completely pointless to keep on tidying my room, the wave of visitors is akin to the waves of the sea, however, instead of the sand being left beautifully smooth with the receding of each wave my room looks like its been hit by a food, newspaper, magazine and general chaos bomb with the exit of each guest.