La Riviere Gentille 2007
Mixed media on paper, 42 sheets
38.1 X 99cm
Louise Bourgeois

A metaphor for memory, for a life looked back upon, Louise Bourgeois’s La Rivière Gentille (2007) is an astonishingly beautiful series on paper that wraps its way in three tiers around the upstairs gallery. Made up of 42 mixed media sheets, each almost a metre long, the series interweaves imagery and phrases from a text the artist wrote in the mid-‘60s which looks back upon her childhood in France. Moments of ecstasy, vivid incidents and dark passages are recollected in a liquid palette of blue, red and black, which snakes its way across each individual sheet. Bourgeois dwells upon sensate experience – the physical world of things and the pleasure they bring – whilst summoning the inexorable, onward flow of existence.

Bourgeois has always lived by a river. From the Creuse in Aubusson, to the Seine in Choisy-le-Roi, to the Bièvre in Antony, the river played a crucial role in her childhood. The water’s high tannin level was needed for the family’s business of tapestry restoration. Bourgeois remembers the dyed skeins drying in the trees. She remembers the colours of the flowers of the garden that her parents planted along the river’s bank.

Like all of Bourgeois’s imagery, there is contradiction. While water can be a metaphor for the origins of life, the passing of time and reverie, it also stands for destruction, the black well of depression, and a place to commit suicide. Bourgeois’s images of rivers are like the umbilical cord that ties her to her mother. The river acts like an unbroken thread that weaves the past and present together.

In all of Bourgeois’s works, colours and motifs are imbued with emotional meaning. Blue represents peace, meditation and escape; black its opposite; and red blood and insistence. The gentleness of the title is borne out through imagery. Pencil-drawn horizontal lines traverse the sheets like the staves that mark music paper, a device that also features in the portfolio work Nothing to Remember (2004 – 6) and of which Bourgeois has explained:

‘It is very peaceful to look at the lines of the staff paper. It gives a rhythm…. it gives a passive direction to the horizontal plane and it gives an active direction to the vertical plane.’ Often the meandering course of a river is described as hundreds of corpuscular forms, strongly suggesting the vessels of the body. These relate to the ‘cumuls’, cloud-like shapes that have been a recurrent feature in Bourgeois’s work since the late 1960s that she values for instilling a sense of reassurance and calm. Lines, flowing through all of La Rivière Gentille, are themselves a source of comfort: ‘The repetitive motion of a line, to caress an object, the licking of wounds, the back and forth of a shuttle, the endless repetition of waves, rocking a person to sleep, cleansing someone you like, an endless gesture of love.’

darkness sunk in the floor

Shibboleth 2007
Doris Salcedo

The Lady of Shalott 1888
Oil on Canvas
John William Waterhouse

This painting illustrates Alfred Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott. Draped over the boat is the fabric the lady wove in a tower near Camelot. But she brought a curse on herself by looking directly at Sir Lancelot.With her right hand she lets go of the chain mooring the boat. Her mouth is slightly open, as she sings ‘her last song’. She stares at a crucifix lying in front of her. Beside it are three candles, often used to symbolise life. Two have blown out. This suggests her life will end soon, as she floats down the river.

“[T]hings things always and memories I say them as I hear them murmur them in the mud” –– Samuel Beckett, How It Is (1964)

Miroslaw Balka’s box of darkness is disturbing in its historical echoes but beautiful as well. The Times

Miroslaw Balka’s black hole at Tate Modern is terrifying, awe-inspiring and throught-provoking. It embraces you with a velvet chill. The Guardian

The Unilever Series How It Is by Polish artist Miroslaw Balka is a giant grey steel structure with a vast dark chamber, which in construction reflects the surrounding architecture - almost as if the interior space of the Turbine Hall has been turned inside out. Hovering somewhere between sculpture and architecture, on 2 metre stilts, it stands 13 metres high and 30 metres long. Visitors can walk underneath it, listening to the echoing sound of footsteps on steel, or enter via a ramp into a pitch black interior, creating a sense of unease.

Underlying this chamber is a number of allusions to recent Polish history – the ramp at the entrance to the Ghetto in Warsaw, or the trucks which took Jews away to the camps of Treblinka or Auschwitz, for example. By entering the dark space, visitors place considerable trust in the organisation, something that could also be seen in relation to the recent risks often taken by immigrants travelling.

Balka intends to provide an experience for visitors which is both personal and collective, creating a range of sensory and emotional experiences through sound, contrasting light and shade, individual experience and awareness of others, perhaps provoking feelings of apprehension, excitement or intrigue.

annie

Cattrell works with a variety of materials and skills. She is drawn to working with glass because of its transparency and ability to reveal. Using different techniques she pushes the boundaries of can be achieved with glass, both physically and conceptually. Making the invisible visible and the ethereal solid, Cattrell offers a view of what is inside us and around us.

Her work captures moments in time, fleeting things, clouds on a particular day, a breath inside a human lung. Her subjects stem from her interest in areas such as neuroscience, anatomy and meteorology, and she is drawn to the fusion between science and art.

'I choose the familiar, for example a cloud, so whatever language you speak there is a kind of universal understanding. It is the transformation and freezing into three-dimensions of this iconographic subject matter that interests me: what happens when you contemplate something you think you know but shouldn't really be seeing this way. This three-dimensional vantage point allows the viewer to examine the subtle shifts and rhythms which ceaselessly occur in the natural world and within the body.'

iniva

(Institute of International Visual Arts)


Good online resource for talks, events, exhibitions, books and contemporary artists - both renowned and/or recently established.


http://www.iniva.org/home


e.g

Nilbar Güres (because it makes me smile)

Playing with a Watergun 2010
Photograph
180 X 120cm
Nilbar Güres

Using a variety of media including photography, collage, drawing, and textiles, Güres produces theatrical tableaux of women, moving between performance and the everyday. Her first solo show in the UK will run from 10 Dec - 5 Jan 2011.

ernest

This is a picture of a picture of Gregorio Fuentes, the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea - a story which Hemmingway wrote in Cuba in 1951 and which was the final work published in his lifetime, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He said it was 'the best I can write in all of my life'.

Found in a small fishing village, 2 hours from Havana

I love this picture. I love the act of him throwing the net into the wind and the freedom with which it then moves, as if the great force of the sea is instilled within it. The power of the wind echoes that of the tide so that the net embodies the traveling white horses, that dance on the surface with the delicacy of lace despite the rising power beneath. 

hemmingway

I visited his house in Cuba in the summer. It was wooden and there were cats and trees and globes and books. Infact there was the most exquisit collection of objects, preserved and suspended in time.

lovely videos

http://www.tellnoone.co.uk/


Seaweed from Tell No One on Vimeo.

Three verticals at approx 30 second intervals, 11.42 - 11.43am
 21 Jan 2009
Saltburn-by-the-sea 2010
Pencil on card (3 parts)
49 X 35.5cm each
Richard Forster

Late Winter Light - The Source of the River North Esk Rushing from
Loch Lee 1997 - 2004
Glen Esk, Old Angus, Scotland
Silver gelatin print
43 X 60cm
Thomas Joshua Cooper

tissue

after

Untitled (from Vanishing Point) 1998
Beeswax, porcelain, aluminium
Valeska Soares

Brazilian-born artist Valeska Soares has consistently transformed neutral environments into works of art, but unlike most installation art to date, Valeska’s work focuses on what happens beyond the space and time of the exhibition itself. In a way, her installations work as life-size models, oddly-scaled metaphors for events that could have happened long before the exhibition ever takes place. In Valeska’s installations, the spectator/participant seems to experience a split between real and representational time; you become aware of the immensity of your own daydream. Through a seemingly inexhaustible range of techniques, themes and strategies, Valeska’s work oscillates between materiality and memory, desire and decay, sensation and intoxication. Although she keeps a studio in Brooklyn, most of her work involves traveling and exposure to the environments for which she will produce works.

Untitled (from Fall) 1994
Cast beeswax and red roses
Valeska Soares

Timeline 1 (detail) 2010
31 book pages, copper wire
Length 19'10"
Valeska Soares

Untitled (from After, Mattress II) 2008
Hand carved marble
Valeska Soares 

collective memory and consciousness

Unland: audible in the mouth 1998
Wood, thread, hair
800 X 750 X 3150mm
Doris Salcedo

Over a period of three years, Salcedo traveled to the northern heartland of Colombia’s civil war and spoke to children who had witnessed the murder of their parents. These testimonies inspired a series of three sculptures given the collective title Unland. Conjoining two fragmented tables, this work suggests the dysfunction caused by extreme trauma. "We spend our life around tables and their familiarity helps to draw you in", Salcedo has said. "Yet these objects have been forcibly united... and appear to be like the mutated remains of an accident".


While Salcedo's sculptures are concerned with the victims of violence in her own country, they are not bound by this frame of reference. In a much wider sense they deal with the life of anyone who has been bereaved and the manner in which those individual experiences can be conveyed and understood by others. At the same time, she is preoccupied by the formal language of sculpture and its material presence for the viewer.

Unland: the orphans tunic (detail) 1998
Wood, hair, woven cloth
Doris Salcedo

Salcedo addresses the question of forgetting and memory, taking ordinary household items and transforming them into memorials. The seemingly mundane table when considered closely, captures the viewer’s imagination in its unexpected, haunting visual and material presence. An everyday piece of furniture is in fact made of two destroyed tables joined together and covered with a whitish veil of fabric, presumably the orphan’s original tunic. Upon even closer inspection, hundreds of small human hairs appear to be the thread that is attaching the tunic to the table. The structure of the table can be equated to the body. If the tunic is like a skin then the table gains a metaphoric presence as body, not now of an individual orphan but an orphaned community. Salcedo’s Unland is a memory sculpture, presenting the past of her own country of Colombia to the international art audience.

“The way that an artwork brings materials together is incredibly powerful. Sculpture is its materiality. I work with materials that are already charged with significance, with meaning they have required in the practice of everyday life…then, I work to the point where it becomes something else, where metamorphosis is reached.” DS 

“The silent contemplation of each viewer permits the life seen in the work to reappear. Change takes place, as if the experience of the victim were reaching out…The sculpture presents the experience as something present- a reality that resounds within the silence of each human being that gazes upon it.” DS

Salcedo employs objects from the past, objects imbued with an important sense of history and, through these contemporary memory sculptures, illustrates the flow of time. She joins the past and the present, repairs what she sees as incomplete and, in the eyes of Andreas Huyssen, presents “memory at the edge of an abyss…memory in the literal sense…and memory as process .”


http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/04spring/unland_paper.htm

fleet

Bourgeois’ new works express both fragility and anxiety, and ultimately optimism. As is typical of her art, they seek a reconciliation of opposites, of hard with soft, geometric with organic, enigma with familiarity, and trauma with restoration: ‘I am trying to seek a balance between the extremes that I feel. I want to be reasonable.’ A series of standing sculptures (all 2007) continue the processing of the contents of her wardrobe as raw materials, a practice begun by the artist in the mid-nineties. In these new works, Bourgeois has re-stitched, draped and stuffed her clothes to create abstract forms, which she has then cast in bronze and painted. The resulting works are reminiscent of her early personages of the 1940s and 1950s. Bourgeois sees the folds, knots and orifices of these bronzes as suggestive of maternal nurturing and warmth, yet the sculptures’ whiteness and extremes of shape are also unsettling.

Untitled 2007
Bronze painted white, steel
233.6 X 48.2 X 30.4cm
Louise Bourgeois

Hauser & Wirth also exhibited Nothing to Remember (2004 – 2006), two 22 page portfolios of coloured images and text on top of hand-drawn music manuscript paper. It followed from an earlier book, Ode à l ‘Oubli (Ode to Forgetfulness), which Bourgeois made entirely out of fabric, using the linens and clothing remnants from her past. The words and images in Nothing to Remember are tentative and delicate, conveying the significance and fleetingness of memories.


http://www.hauserwirth.com 

process over object?

Gestures of Resistance

Visitors to the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon, will be able to observe the day-to-day studio practices of eight artists as they participate in a conceptually provocative and communally based art performance. Working sequentially over two-day to three-week periods, the artists, comprised of six individuals and one pair and ranging from woodworkers to a seamstress, will work in the museum’s first floor gallery. There they will add to, modify, or subtract from the objects of their colleagues. In doing so, the artists will physically illustrate the game of “Telephone,” in which the initial and final phrases, in this case environments, are almost guaranteed to be different.


http://mocc.pnca.edu/exhibitions/1278/

porcelain seeds

Useless or useful: it all relates to value judgement and aesthetic judgement. AW

droog

Knotted Chair 1996

Carbon and aramid fibres, epoxy resin

50 X 64 X 74cm

Marcel Wanders

This lightweight chair combines industrial techniques and handcrafting. A thread constructed of aramid and carbon fibres, is knotted into the shape of a chair and then impregnated with epoxy resin and hung in a frame to dry, leaving the final form in the hands of gravity.

body

Slipper 2010
Interfacing, canvas, muslin, thread, cotton wool, leather, lambswool in moss stitch, pussy willow
size of own foot

curation

http://www.mariangoodman.com

This gallery comprises solo and collective exhibitions of some of my favourite artists.

Vorhang (Morandi)

Curtain (Morandi) 1964
90cm X 65 cm
Oil on canvas
Catalogue Raisonné: 58
Gerhard Richter

The book conceived in tears will be born drowned.

lou lou

Swaying 2006
Etching, ink, watercolour and
pencil on paper
149.5 x 33.9cm/ 58 7/8 x 13 3/8 in
Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois' drawings and sculptures occupy her work like inseparable, closely bound siblings. Both derive from the same strong emotional core: angst as the critical torque between past and being. Drawing, as the delicate and sensitive sister to her assertive brother sculpture, is for Bourgeois like a personal letter. The act of drawing is in its form and in the intimacy of its treatment of pencil and paper akin to daily writings to the demons of recollection.