Category: Process

Flowers with their own stories

7/10/2017

Excerpt from the OpenART 2017, Sweden Biennale catalogue

The catalogue shares some of the stories behind the flowers that were contributed for my installation "Blossom Flourish Wither Perish"

"....Used items carry memories. They have a history, some more clear than others, says Kerstin Wagner, assistant curator, and then shares a special story.
A woman came to the office at Kopmangatan and dropped off an IKEA bag filled with dried flowers. The flowers turned out to be gifts from her late husband and other gifts.
The woman had a hard time separating herself from the flowers, but when she knew that an artist would be able to use them, it made the whole process easier.She brought her bridal bouquet in and asked if we wanted that as well.
The woman Kerstin talks about is Lena Wickberg and when she heard Open Art was collecting flowers, she decided to donate her own collection. Lena started collecting flowers when she and her husband moved in together in the late 1980s. On top of a blue cabinet she put flowers from birthday parties, some of which she had grown in the garden of her country house, and gifts. When they moved to a new apartment, the cabinet and the flowers came along with them and slowly, but surely, the collection grew.

They are getting more and more fragile and of course drier by the day, but they are amazingly beautiful, especially the roses, says Lena.
In September, it will be two years since her husband passed away and Lena started thinking about what she would do with the apartment, and with the flowers when she heard about OpenArt needing flowers.
The flowers have such a sentimental value to me that it felt great to be able to give them to the art instead of throwing them in the bin, Lena says. There's hardly anything left of my bridal bouquet from my first marriage; it's mostly just wires and a few roses and corn flowers- they get very fragile when you dry them- so I am very excited to see what the artist can do with them.
Lena, who paints with watercolors herself, believes the connection to art through the donations is very important to the people of Orebro. Art should be close to people who otherwise might not get the chance, can actually meet the art. Lena says that she is very inspired by the fantastic ideas the artists have and that they inspire people to be creative and even a little crazy..."

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On creating abstract art

10/9/2016

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A painting, a life, a process.
The allure of abstraction lies in finding more and more of me on the painted surface. Vulnerable, true. Every mark on the canvas, like an event that leaves its trace on the painted surface -does it complement the ones that came before or does it go so far beyond that it makes them redundant? So many get painted over in subsequent layers, others are allowed to show through. But when a painting is done it is still only a link to the next one. Each painting is but an event in the ongoing saga.

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Collaboration Journey with Denise Schellmann, Instinc Artist in Residence from Vienna-Halfway Point!

10/21/2015

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Halway through my collaboration with Denise Schellmann and we are having a blast! Denise is an artist from Vienna who is doing her artist residency with Instinc in Singapore. It was just wonderful to find ourselves so much in sync regarding our attitude towards art making and the role art plays in our lives.
Since Denise's is a drawing based practice I seized the chance to develop my own drawing working with her. We were both attracted to tracing paper as a drawing medium and so we bought rolls and pads of it and set to work.

Denise at work in my studio.

Initial Experiments Denise (above) and mine (right)

In the first week or so we explored each other's ways of working. For example Denise started with working on 3D drawing and I started with markmaking on paper. But soon I couldn't help but crumple the paper in search of texture in the material of the paper itself. The texture experiments continued for a while – I added wax (and some other materials as well) and experimented with different weights of tracing paper (example image on the right).
But then i needed to mould the paper some more and see how much I could do with it. A variety of scupltures in several sizes and shapes and that's how these forms were born.

What helped us work easily together was that spirituality and its link to biology were an integral part of Denise’s practice as well. (Yeo Shih Yun of Instinc residency has managed to match us very well.)

While I was texturing and sculpting with tracing paper, Denise moved back to drawing on flat paper but her use of colour and mark-making expanded and she also started drawing on a much larger scale.
A month into the collaboration we had both developed a solid body of studies (and Denise even had some finished works) that we felt we could take forward. However we felt that there was a lot to be gained from embracing the challenge of merging what we had developed into the same work. This was not easy. Every artist has her unique style, like a handwriting and trying to merge 2 different styles into the same work was initially challenging. I had to modify my textures considerably and she had to make her marks a lot bolder. But we are now at the stage where we are quite thrilled with what we are developing. The final work will take the form of an installation where we are literally "drawing into space". Many thanks to Alexis Butt at the Affordable Art Fair who has been very supportive of our endeavour in allowing us a prominent space to exhibit our installation at AAF this November. This will be followed by a two-person show at Instinc. (More details in subsequent blogs)

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Winter Residency in the Australian Blue Mountains

7/23/2015

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It was wonderful to be back in the Australian Blue Mountains for another residency, this time during the Australian winter. This residency was sponsored by the Hawkesbury Regional Gallery and a good portion of it was spent creating site-specific installations at the gallery. But there was enough time to explore other work as well. High on the list of priorities was my investigation of the fascinating plant life in the area.

I was also intrigued by the powdery lichen on the tree barks and stones. Rae Bolotin (a wonderful artist who runs the residency program) and I played around with some indian pigment that had been lying around in her studio for 15 years. This became the starting point for a series of experiments in blending artificial colour onto organic materials. I tried out various colours, materials, textures as well as installation options.

This residency took place during the Australian winter. Experiencing winter in the southern hemisphere for the first time forced me to rethink my assumptions about how I perceive weather, seasons, the position of the sun in the sky.

My fellow artists-in-residence, Rhona Eve Clewes from the UK and Sarah Fuller from Canada, are photographers. Sarah taught us how to make anthotypes-prints with light sensitive material like pulped spinach, beetroot, wine.

The walks around the area were perhaps the most productive part of this residency experience. Experiencing the beautiful sights, bird sounds and the smell of eucalyptus in the air quietened my mind. Soon creative ideas and solutions for things I had been wrestling with for some time came popping in. Things just fell in place and after a long time I was filling sketchbooks with fully formed ideas I can begin work on.

Here are some photographs from my walks...

(For details of my installation see my blogpost "Exploring BigCi Exhibition at the Hawkesbury Regional Gallery". Here are the links to the completed work at the Hawkesbury Regional Gallery Dead Plants Don't Grow 2 , Unknown, Unsung).

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The Making of "The Tree and Me"

4/24/2015

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In the hurly burly of everyday city life I often long for that experience of connection, of deep stillness, that comes when one is in natural surroundings.

When in nature I am particularly fascinated with old trees. I often stop walking and look at them for ages. I have sketchbooks upon sketchbooks filled with sketches and writings about trees. The act of focused observation brings about a deepened awareness of nature and of the moment in time.

My imagination is tickled by the fact that old trees have been around for generations before I was born-they have eavesdropped on the secrets, heartaches and fears of those who came before and they will probably be standing tall when my own life and all its components so precious to me today are over. There is something oddly centering in this reflection.

Nature and its processes are unresting and also unhurried. The more I focus on this vein of thinking the more I am aware of a depth in the processes of the universe that makes our petty everyday concerns seem like surface ripples.

Some of this idea of the ephemerality of our walking the earth is expressed in these studio experiments. Made out of newspaper and grass these empty footprints mark absence, loss and fragility of existence.

Newspaper with all of its stories is the very essence of worldliness. It also epitomizes the ephemeral as its value is over as soon as it has been read. In this work I have dissolved newspaper into organic materials-grass, henna, vegetable wastes, coffee, to contemplate upon the fleeting nature of worldly concerns in the face of the more pervasive nature of universal forces.

The processes of preparing the materials by boiling with chemicals draws upon traditional techniques for paper making from vegetable material

The very act of building up the work one layer at a time, waiting for it to dry before the next layer could be applied began to mimic the processes of the natural world. The structure took months to complete.

The smaller sculptural forms scattered at the base are each the negative form within my own fist reflecting upon the futility of trying to grasp things which would inevitably slip through ones fingers. To see these more clearly as well as to see the finished work click here: The Tree and Me

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The Making of "Dead Plants Don't Grow"

1/14/2015

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Why Dead Plants?

This work was done during a November 2014 artist residency at BigCI (otherwise known as Bilpin International Ground for Creative Initiatives). BigCI is located at the edge of the Wollemi National Park (part of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area in Australia). I was told that this part of the world has the largest variety of flora in the world after the Amazon Basin. I would walk for hours in the “bush” (Australian for forest) soaking in the natural beauty of the area, often stopping to sit on a rock to sketch or write something in my sketchbook. On one of these walks, some dead plants wedged between tall grass and shrubs caught my eye. They just lay there almost invisible amongst the amazing vegetation that grew all around them. Fascinated by their fragile unique beauty I took them back to the studio and started studying them through drawing.

After that day, every time I was outdoors I started noticing more and more of the dead plants. Their woody rhythmic shapes, the forms of their leaves, pods and branches all fascinated me. The very fact that I often trod on them as I navigated my way through the bush brought home the humility and fate of these amazing creations of nature.

Every walk ended with me bringing more of these plants back to the studio. I laid them out before me on the floor and the tables and suspended them in the air. I wanted to see them in their uniqueness –freeing the forms from the clutter of an abundant forest.

Cycles of Life

Working in this way I pondered the ultimate destiny of my dead plants- to be absorbed back into the earth from which they had grown. Yet in their ceasing to exist they would provide nourishment to the next generation of forest undergrowth and even the tall trees of the bush.

The nature of life is cyclical whether it is plants or humans. I thought of the floral veils that are used to decorate a bridal home in India. The fragrance and colour of the flowers are intrinsic to the bridal festivities. Yet on the day after the wedding when the bride leaves her parent’s home and goes to her husband’s house these flowers are already wilting. As the floral veil is taken down to be thrown away there is a melancholy associated with the act of saying adieu to a daughter or sister. But even in the midst of this sorrow one looks forward to happier events around the corner as she embarks upon a new life. Influenced by memories of floral veils, the work took on the form of a veil.

The Urban Veil

One of the dictionary definitions of a veil is “something that conceals, separates or screens”. A city dweller often views the natural world on a handphone, a computer or the television. Even when we get closer there is often a camera lens or a car window that separates us from nature. All these “screens” conceal from us our connection to the natural world. How often are we able to enter into natural surroundings and know ourselves again as a part of it?