visual art

Floriade: Giant Lifesavers, Tyre Swans, Rainbow Serpents

bheads

Here are some pictures of a few other things that took my fancy at Floriade – I like the roving entertainment more than the massed European flowers.

There was a rainbow serpent swimming in Nerang Pool, designed and created by Aeon Mortimer. Its a big inflatable, and apparently it can spray a fine mist of water from its spines, creating rainbows in the air around it. Nice idea. Aeon’s puppet play The Great Big Story Book was also there. Designed as a giant pop-up book, it tells a version of the dreamtime story of Tiddalik the Frog, with puppet creatures stepping out of the pages of the book. (My favourite picture book version of Tiddalick is What Made Tiddalik Laugh by Joanna Troughton. It has lovely illustrations, and the kind of lame jokes that pre-schoolers love because they are so lame.)

I was also enjoyed catching up with Jigsaw‘s Flotsam and Jetsam, a one-woman show acted by Chrissie Shaw, and based on collected stories of children who lived on lighthouse islands in Australia. I particularly liked Mrs Ingram’s windswept dress that could be slipped into and out of in a flash.

Icarus Performance Troupe from Sydney were lots of fun, jogging about the gardens as giant muscle-bound lifesavers. They blew their whistles, bossed the crowds into swimming between the flags, and struck stong-man poses (complete with appropriate grunts and roars!) at the drop of a hat.

The flock of 100 black swans made from old rubber car tyres interested me not so much for what they were, but as a reflection on the fact that when they were common garden decorations in the 50’s and 60’s (or earlier) they were always painted white. I suppose they were part of that era’s acceptance of the idea of England as the home. As reported in the Canberra Times, the swans were made by Greg Hedger of Limestone Creek Enterprises:

‘Mr Hedger said each swan took about an hour to fashion – once he had the design sorted – plus a bit of time for painting. The tyres were heated by engine exhaust or in a glasshouse so the rubber was easier to cut and twist inside out.

The tyres were sourced from a company in Melbourne, which was believed to have held a stockpile for use as swings. While the steel belting in a modern radial tyre is good for motorists, it does not wear safely in children’s swingsets. Neither is it suitable for swan sculpting, because it’s too difficult to slice.

Sizes ranged from 12- and 13-inch car tyres to truck tyres. Mr Hedger’s offerings have been planted with a new variety of pansy, named Waterfall.

After the festival, Mr Hedger intends to take the swans under his wing. While the Floriade examples are under offer – Mr Hedger’s wife has her name on two – he’ll take up the slack afterwards. He’s already had orders from ladies in Burra and Orange and a school in Armidale. He had no idea what the swans would sell for, but would probably charge less than $100 apiece.’

There is an article about the traditional Australian art of sculpting swans from old tyres here.

Finally the Scarecrow Competition :-). I have a soft spot for the scarecrows because they come so much from the everyday community, and because such a wide interpretation of the concept of a scarecrow is acceptable. Here are some photographs of just a few of them that took my fancy:

Domestic Goddess (Woman of Steel, With Forked Tongue, Ready to Spring) by Barlin Event Hire
In Bega Everyones Dreaming of Rain, by Merimbulla Rudoplh Steiner School. The Bega Valley down on the south coast is dairy country, and must be feeling the drought as much as any of us.
French Frog by Telopea Park School. Appropriately, Telopea is a bi-lingual English/French public school.
Bunyip, by Hindmarsh Student Group (?)
Mermaid, by Braidwood Preschool Association. Their use of tin lids for scales is very effective, just as good as the CDs that many others used, for instance in the following one.
Fish, by Waniassa (?) Learning Support Unit
Refugees and Asylum Seekers don’t want a Red Carpet Welcome, by Amnesty International. I’d like to think they were prompted by my Howard last year.
Person in the Bath, by Radford College
Dragon, by the O’Connor Co-operative School. A long rhapsody in plastic!

World Refugee Day 2004

World Refugee Day 2004 was held last Sunday, June 20th. In Canberra the day was celebrated with the installation of a Field of Hearts on the lawns outside Parliament House. The hearts had been sent in from all over Australia, and with messages of support for refugees written on them, were symbolic of a wish for Australia to be a more open-hearted country for refugees.

I dusted off my my two John Howard effigies for the occasion. I managed to find a way of anchoring the John Howard scarecrow in one of the dreadful white plastic bollards which, at the cost of $80,000, were installed as a security barricade around Parliament House at the time of the anti-war demonstrations in March 2003, and have remained ever since. (The government has recently approved spending $11.2 million on building a “low wall” right round Parliament House to replace them). My other John Howard puppet was one made for the coincidence of World Puppetry Day and the anti-Iraq war demonstrations. This time I sewed his lips together.

The poster I would have liked to take to World Refugee Day is the one on the left, made recently by my daughter. Its made entirely out of plastic and tapes of various kinds. This picture of the poster was taken at Reconcilliation Walk, with Old Parliament House in the background, and the ‘garden sprinkler’ flag pole of new Parliament House behind that.

Some thoughts on Ernst Haeckel and Peter Carey’s ‘Oscar and Lucinda’

I’ve always had a feeling that the time around 1860 was a watershed in many ways. Apart from anything else it was when Darwin published his revolutionary ‘Origin of the Species’.

Earlier this year Scott Draves released a rendering of some of the beautiful images in Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of Nature). In these the alpha (transparency) channels in the PNG files are released under the attribution share-alike Creative Commons license, under which you can use them to composite them into other images.

Ernst Haeckel lived from 1834-1919, and became a supporter of evolution after reading the ‘Origin of Species’ in 1859, although he was more of a Lamarckian than Darwinian. In 1862 he became a professor of comparative anatomy in Jena, Germany, and in the 1860’s worked on many invertebrate groups, among them radiolarians, a group of aquatic protozoa. Kurt Stueber has made available online scans of Haeckel’s lovely Die Radiolarien drawings , and a complete index of his Kunstformen der Natur drawings. The exquisitely fine detail and natural patterns in the drawings are a delight, and the geometry always intreguing.

The drawings also made me think of several passages in Peter Carey‘s novel ‘Oscar and Lucinda’, where Oscar has to help his father, Theophilus, collect specimens of creatures from the sea, a job that he hates and fears.

‘In the sea-shells on the beach he saw the wonders which it was his father’s life to label, dissect, kill. He also saw corpses, bones, creatures dead. Creatures with no souls. When the sea lifted dark tangles of weed, he thought of jerseys with nothing in their arms.’

and later:

‘He ran, the guilty and obedient son, to help with the little creatures his father had captured, the anemones, antheas with fragile white tentacles, red-bannered dulses, perhaps a sleek green prawn or a fragile living blossom, a proof of the existence of God, a miracle in ivory, rosy red, orange or amethyst.’

Describing Oscar’s father, Carey writes:

‘Theophilus Hopkins was a moderately famous man. You can look him up in the 1860 Britannica. There are three full columns about his corals and his corallines, his anemones and starfish. It does not have anything very useful about the man. It does not tell you what he was like. You can read it three times over and never guess that he had any particular attitude to Christmas pudding.’

‘He was a dark, wiry widower of forty, hard and bristly on the outside, his beard full, his muscles compacted, and yet he was a soft man, too. You could feel this softness quivering. He was a sensualist who believed passionately that he would go to heaven, that heaven outshone any conceivable earthly joy, that it stretched, silver sheet, across the infinite spaces of eternity. … He was one of the Plymouth Brethren.’

So the stage is set for the wonderful story of how a taste of Christmas pudding leads Oscar at the age of 15 to abandon the Plymouth Brethren for the Anglican Church, and become an obsessive gambler to Lucinda’s compulsive one. Its also the story of how our lives and histories are governed largely by random incidents and circumstances. I don’t think it is any coincidence that the time-frame Carey chooses is the same as that of the emergence of Darwinism, and the religious doubts that that brought to society, stemming from the idea that we are no different to any other species: that humans, like other species, evolve and survive directly in relation to random events in their environment, rather than being subject to some divine influence.

One of the pleasures of Carey’s work, and one of his hallmarks, is the way he plays with fact and fiction. I googled to see if there actually was a naturalist called Theophilus Hopkins, and whether perhaps there was a way in which Haeckel fitted in. Instead I came up with another intrequing idea. In an essay in Gerard Manley Hopkins Online, titled ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins and Oscar Wilde – Victorians and writers’, parallels are drawn between Oscar Wilde, ‘the greatest talker of the Victorian age’, and Hopkins, ‘its most silenced poet’. It then goes on to say:

‘Peter Carey shows that the easiest way to conjoin two Victorian paradoxes is simply to combine their names: Oscar Hopkins of Oscar and Lucinda, or the devout Anglican priest with a passion for gambling. According to Norman White, Peter Carey based the Reverend Oscar Hopkins partly on Gerard Manley Hopkins; Oscar’s father is the Rev. Theophilus Hopkins; Gerard’s father, Manley, used Theophilus as a nom-de-plume.’

I don’t know if this is in White’s book ‘Hopkins – A Literary Biography’ (Clarendon Press, Oxford. 1992) or elsewhere. It would be great to follow it up and see if there is more information available. Was Gerard’s father a naturalist, or did Carey invest some Haeckel in his character?

As a sculptor of organic geometrical forms, George W. Hart has been inspired by Haeckel’s artwork.

Haeckel’s theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that foetuses step through their evolutionary history in the womb, is still controversial in the evolution/creation debates. As an aside, its intreguing how often when I am carving a puppet creature, its face passes gradually through different stages, appearing like numerous other creatures before finally becoming the one which I am working towards. The experience gives the decided impression that we are related to other creatures in ways that we may not be aware of.

‘Ron Mueck: Boy’ by Gautier Deblonde

Amazon UK has a couple of copies of the book ‘Ron Mueck: Boy’ by the photographer Gautier Deblonde. This is a photographic diary of the nine months it took to construct, ship and assemble the sculpture in Venice. It was the ‘Art in Photo Essays’ award recipient in the World Press Photo of the Year, 2001, but seems to be out of print at present. I was interested to see the sculpture in segments, and crated.

Katinka Matson: flatbed scanner imaging

Katinka Matson makes stunning images of flowers and other natural objects, using a flatbed scanner and other new technologies:

“The process involves scanning flowers and other natural objects on an open-top scanner from underneath the objects with a slo-moving sensor. This technique allows for unusual opportunities to explore new ideas involving light, time, and rhythm.

It is a radically new digital aesthetic involving both new hardware (the scanner and the inkjet printer), and software (Adobe Photoshop), that allows for a new naturalism fusing nature and technology.

Without the distortion of the lens, highly detailed resolution is uniform throughout the image, regardless of the size of the printable media. The lighting effects from the sliding sensor beneath the object, coupled with overhead effects involving lighting and movement, result in a 3-D-like imaging of intense sharpness and detail. Images created by scanning direct-to-CCD cut away layers, and go to a deeper place in us than our ordinary seeing and vision. “

There are three archived galleries of her images: “Five Flowers”; “Forty Flowers”; “Twelve Flowers”.

Snowflakes and Paper Cutting

Make-a-Flake is a cool flash application that enables you to make snowflake patterns like the ones we cut out of paper when we were kids. They have a gallery of the beautiful patterns that visitors to the site have made, and you can add your own.

Playing with the snowflake maker reminded me of the work of Béatrice Coron. I particularly like her vast but finely-detailed city scapes, such as Innercity; ExCentriCity; and Chicago. Also, SagaCity, the cutting edge is a photographic account of Cororn’s installation at the Chicago Center for Book & Paper Arts in 2003.

Its interesting to see the other directions in which Coron’s book art goes. For instance, she has recently make a 9 foot high stainless steel cut out sculpture called ‘Working in the Same Direction’ to represent the first merger of the Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services in New York City, in which the design of two panels is like an open book preserving ‘the independence of the two separate entities sharing a common goal’. I also like the idea of the two weathervanes — a fireman and an emergency medical worker that ‘move with the wind, watching in all directions’.

Here are a few other papercutting links that I have been interested in:
Diana Bryan’s Shadowtown
Gerlof Smit,in particular his Delicate cuttings.
ChinaVista
Sun Erlin: A Cut Above
A Chinese Zodiac

Elmgreen & Dragset’s ‘Dying’ Sparrow

An exhibition by two Scandanavian artists, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, is causing a bit of a stir at London’s Tate Modern gallery this month. In an otherwise empty new gallery space 25 metres by 7 metres, a sparrow is trapped between the panes of a double-glazed window, apparently dying. The sparrow is, however, animatronic. It cost &pound12,000 and was made by Crawley Creatures, the company best known for the creatures in the BBC’s/ABC’s Walking with Dinosaurs series. The artists make a connection with the general demise of sparrows and that of London’s working class, though other interpretations have been made.

A selection of reviews
30 second video of the animatronic sparrow
Pictures 1, 2

The picture here is a woodcut from an early (1820 or so) chapbook, An Elegy on the Death and Burial of Cock Robin (York: J. Kendrew), reproduced in The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, by Iona and Peter Opie, (ISBN: 0 19 869112 2).

Who killed Cock robin?
I, said the Sparrow,
With my bow and arrow,
I killed Cock Robin.

Maybe he can’t afford to be so jaunty any more.

Endangered Butterflies: Ken Yonetani’s Installation

I got chatting to someone out at Walker Ceramics in Fyshwick yesterday, who was telling me about an installation that took place in the CSIRO Discovery Centre late last year. Ken Yonetani, a post graduate student working in ceramics at the Canberra School of Art, made 2000 tiles, each 30cm square and only about 5mm thick, fired in the Japanese ‘fumie’ style tradition. The tiles took about 6 months to make, and were white and fragile, with an image of one of 6 different endangered butterflies cast in relief on each one. They were then laid wall-to-wall on the floor in various spaces in the Discovery Centre, and the people who had gathered for the launch were invited in… Within a short time the tiles were broken into tiny pieces. Jeff Doyle’s article in the Journal of Australian Ceramics, ‘Ken Yonetani’s installation at CSIRO Discovery, ACT’ gives pictures and details of the installation, including the reactions as people realised the implicit metaphor involved in the destruction. Cool stuff!

I still like the butterfly alphabet posters that have each letter illustrated by close-up markings on butterfly wings. Apparently they took 24 years to source.

Ron Mueck again : Big Man

I’ve come across two new links for Ron Mueck since my previous post about his work. There is a very unimpressed review by Adrian Searle in the Guardian in March 2003. Secondly there is ‘A Conversation with Ron Mueck’ by Sarah Tanguy, in the International Sculpture Center’s July/August 2003 magazine Sculpture. Mueck talks about the making of his Big Man sculpture in particular and in detail. There is a really interesting sequence of 6 photos which show the progress and techniques that were used.

Update: I noticed today (30 Oct 05) that the second link about the making of Big Man had been changed since I made the original post, so I have corrected it. I’ve been getting quite a lot of hits here, presumeably because Big Man is on show in Paris, so do take another look!