PhD Archive

Afternoon with Ben making parts for drawing machine

Meeting with Kel Portman and Suze Adams.

Nature and Nurture Walk. Led by Steve Roberts. Opportunity to make some work – video and sound – this work is the next phase of Weave walks.

Led by Lucy Guenot and Valerie Coffin-Price (Ffin) as a part of the Stroud Walking Festival. Walk was at Critchley Hill Country Park and focused on the writing of Ivor Gurney.

Great that other people had led the walk. Also a stunning day and opportunity to make some work. Video and sound.

Aired the idea of a joint exhibition as part of PhD show

Preparation for Weave Advisory Board and Festival of Nature

Meeting with Ben Prothero, artist blacksmith to make drawing machine – also more reading, writing and amending animation.

Interesting to work with Ben in the context of making; I was particularly aware of how much he relied on making fine judgements by eye.
As part of the process I bought some drive belts in a specialist shop in Gloucester (AC Belting) and had an interesting conversation with the shop keeper about standardization and deskilling of sales people – “they don’t know anything about what they are selling and just look at computers.” This thread of ideas about making, real/unreal, standardisation is reflected in the reading and writing.

22nd to 30th – Reading and writing plus numerous minor amendments to animation.
Also found a push chair abandoned on the edge of Gloucester which will make an ideal chasis for the Drawing Machine needed for the festival of nature.

Attachments

introduction-august-september-1315468093.doc

Walk with Sue Porter around Lydney Docks exploring the liminal and other ideas of edges, boundaries and transition.

Wrting and circulating draft programme for Open Meeting

Making alterations to animation and uploading to Vimeo. There are still problems with the online version and I will need to review the way I either save the animation as a “movie” or the way I upload to Vimeo as the source material is as it should be.

In making the alterations I experimented with projecting my drawings onto live foliage and videoing the projection and also with projecting video of moving water onto my drawings and videoing this. My purpose is to emphasis the nature of being in a place, to directly portray the landscape. Technically the later approach was more successful but I want to develop the first approach as I feel it would be more direct and less obviously a collage or overlay, a real outside event in itself.

Large animations taking time to upload, useful reading time.

Attachments

open-meeting-draft-programme-1314009851.doc

Meeting with Tom Keating about developing projects in Corsica.

Drawing with Seb Buckton in Folly Wood, exploring the relationship between cognitive and subjective appreciation of nature – marking-out and drawing/surveying species in various square metres of woodland floor.

Meeting with Max Comfort about upcoming public meeting

More reading

Drawing with Lucy Guenot near to the Heavens. Experimenting with using drawing machine so that the images scroll up and down rather than side to side so as to give a feeling of approaching something rather than passing by. It also rained and the drops on the paper are an interesting aspect for future exploration in terms of engaged aesthetic of place.