Do come in

On what we don't

Watercolour and Ink

You go, We go

Bit

No sleep year

We eat them, those things.
Those small
Things
They instensify

Intense things
They were normal before

To the High Castles
No more ground for your tiny feet
No more
No more rest
No more rest for you
No more rest for you
No

High feet
eating castles

Loose Castles

No more for you

Our barbeque is an aquarium

Our barbeque is an aquarium
And our mint is queen on rebirth
The empty bottle might become
part of

Our Back Yard


White
Thick
Smoke
The future seems less

Important




There are melted holes
Black deformed spaces
On our green plastic table

From the jungle of our bushes
I can see

The gate that never opens and the wall that lies behind

After nothing comes something

After a month off Uni I started working on my project again. It's quite nice not to have worked on it for a while, I feel like I can start over again. Fresh

I have done a few paintings that I want to post here, I know I haven't been posting that much lately, but life and the weather have just been too good to spend time at a computer.

I decided to work with the ties, they seem to work, so I just spent the day rearranging them and trying different compositions. I like how they reflect light, and the shapes they turn to when I put them in the blender.

Ties and Chicks

Two new pieces,

Continuous ties

Serial chicks

I had a good chat with one of the tutors and started spending more time in my studio and producing more work. I have been messing around with the blended items and doing some collages aswell. Produce produce. Have also tried to go and see this chocolate factory in Winchester but apparently health and safety rules do not agree with my visit.

Touch of no words. It grows slowly

This abyss ocupies too much space.
Suspended sounds of sunken times not to come. He came. Abysses came too. They came to me, they rose from you.
Sounds tickle my skin, my ears melt to melodies. Suspended melodies, melodies of times that will not come. Skin and skin. Skin that longs for the kind touch of no words. Touching with Fear of What Could Happen. Fear of what could happen grows slowly. Slowly it grows. And it tastes bitter. Taste of no future.

Don't start up a fight, you can just close them. I will show you. Close the door, close the window. Close. Close the whole house, close the curtains. Do not let melting ears and tickled skin feel the bang of your kind touch of no words on the wall. Shut, lock, enclose. And it tastes of no future. Nothing could happen because. It slowly grows. Lock it.

Blending time

After two weeks of research and thinking, I have started to do some work again. My Tescos Value blender arrived and I am now destroying horrible fake things. This week I destroyed some flowers, gift ribbons and stuffed mice and chicks.

I like what comes out of the blender, and now I am experimenting with the blended things. I still don't really know what to do with them but at least I have started doing work again.

whattodoidontknowiamlost

Today I bought a blender. Tesco value blender that is. I want to blend toys and plastic things. I want to destroy some horribleness. Or destroy things that took a lot of time to make. I still don't know.

I want to find out what transitory means, so today I am going to look at all the definitions there are for this word. Maybe words will help me go somewhere, as I feel a bit lost with my work right now. I have been looking at some Javanese and Malay shadow theatre books the past few days. The reason for me to look at shadows is because they are transitory, they change and transform, like life and like the mandalas. But unlike the mandalas, shadows are projections of something else. What does this mean? I am also looking at destruction (hence the blender).

Maybe I am looking at the contrast between the ready made and the home made and that is why I want to destroy plastic ready made things and build things that take a while to build. But what do I want to build, and what do I want to destroy? I am lost.

I still want to do something that takes time and effort and then learn to let it go. But does this require destruction? I think I want to destroy it because if I don't then it will always be there and I will get attached to it. What is this it even?

I was watching this BBC series called “Human planet” and in one of the episodes a tribe builds a house up on a tree. This takes ages and everyone helps to build it. By the time it is finished they have the most epic view over the forest, and although they have to climb up about 40 meters up and down every day they seem to think that it is worth it. This is why I look at other cultures, you could say less developed ones, but only in technology. I think they are much more developed than us in the way that they appreciate small things they achieve with their sweat and hard work and community help. I want to learn how to appreciate these small things and not be afraid to work hard for them.

All of us look for meaning in life, and this is my way of looking for it. This is why in my work I look at our obsession with buying and owning things that will never bring us happiness. This might be why I want to destroy these plastic toys. Don't teach your children to love objects. Teach them to love what is already there or what they can produce. We are able to do so much more than we do and yet we just sit and get given everything without even working to hard

And here I go again. I should be talking about art and what inspires me, but this is a subject that I feel so strongly about that I can't help but dwell on my thoughts. And yes, maybe I am a bit of a hippie. So what?
I think I should stop for today, because I feel like hoping on a plane and going to live in the jungle and that doesn't seem possible. I guess I'll just do art about it instead.

Korowai Tree House: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wGNr3bb5xw

I can say that I sway

Why do you leave for so long?
I am not saying that I am forever sad, but sometimes it comes, and it lingers smoothly under my skin.
I don't even know who you are, but I miss you.

I am not saying that my body is hollow, but some connections have not been sparkled.

I can say that I flow and that I sway. But in my dances I swirld and swirl and swirl. I don't want to stop. And all air is dark around me. Moist.
The air is thick but I swirl and swirl and swirl.
I don't want to stop, the air could get thicker.Stop me.But you won't. No one will. Stop me from swirling around. Because I will do it forever. Swirling in moist thick air.

I will be so kind I will even

aaah pixelation. how I love you

You look and you don't see

We had a wax workshop in uni a few months ago where I tryed cutting out magazine images and moulding wax around both sides of the paper untill they were about 1 cm thick. I was trying to show how we look at things but never see the whole picture, we never scratch the whole surface, be it a person, a situation, problems around the world, wars, what sorrounds us.

I didn't really think much about them the next few months. The other day I was clearing up some stuff in my studio and I brought theese sculptures (or whatever definition could be more suitable) home. Because of the lack of surface space on my desk and shelves I put them up against the window. I did this at night so all the light was coming from inside the house.

The next day there was light from outside (this tends to happen during the day) and you could see the image from the opposite side of the paper through the side of the paper that you were looking at.

This really worked with the message I was trying to get out because it shows how there is more to what we see than the surface.

So now I want to do something with this and create some new sculptures, but I don't know how or what images to use, or if I should use text. Maybe the good thing about them is that I didn't know I was doing them and I should just leave it at that. But I can't so I need to try and see what happens

Maybe what I really like about them is the surprise element. hmmm, what to do with this now?

Mona Hatoum

Found an artist called Mona Hatoum a few days ago whilst doing research. She transforms the familiar object into something foreign and threatening, using hair and skin, metal, textiles and soap, home objects and mass produced objects.
She was born in Beirut, daughter of palestinian parents and has been living in London since 1975.

She caught my attention because I think my work relates to hers in the way she uses familiar objects and mass produced things to point out the fragility of the individual. There is the obvious difference in the scale of her work and the way she transforms theese objects into something which provoques an uneasy feeling to the viewer.

Regardless of my opinion, her work is really unique and it is well worth going to her exhibition at the White Chapel Gallery in London (I think it is from the 25th of February until the 2nd of April).

It Lies

Shape shifting skin
And his mouth is made of clouds

Watch,
See the light dancing
Upon the fields of her flesh

Dances of all
Dances of nothing

Salute the sun
It lies between her thighs

Mandalas

The last few months have been quite intense for me. Actually, the last year or so has been quite intense. Everything is constantly changing and I used to find that hard to deal with.

I am only going on about this because it relates to my project, this is not one of those my life is so hard poor me kind of posts. Life is hard, deal with it.
Anyway, I remebered watching Seven Years in Tibet when I was younger and I always had the image of the Tibetan Monks building this sand mandala, that took them ages to build and then just got destroyed.
So now that my life is so full of changes and surrealism I decided to try and make a few sand mandalas to exercise my patience and ability to let go.

What fascinates me about them is that they are made in such detail that they can take weeks to build. They are made with ground up rocks, or coloured sand and are traditionally a ritual to simbolize the buddhist belief in the transitory nature of material life.
They are made using small funnels and scrapers or an istrument called chakpur (metal tubes with grated surface that vibrate and the vibration makes the sand flow) and are built from the centre onwards.
The ritual is complex, consisting of various phases: purification, centering, orientation, construction, absorption and destruction.

The destruction bit fascinates me. To a lot of people it doesnt make sense, why would you build something that takes you ages and then get rid of it? It is about embracing change and what you build has taught you something, so the physical evidence of it is not needed.

Above is a picture of my first mandala. Only took me 5 hours to make, using a spoon, a card and glitter (I couldnt find any sand, so it seemed like a good substitue. I hate glitter and it was all over me, but one has to sacrifice oneself sometimes). Next time, better tools.

And also there is a film of me destroyng it, which took about 5 minutes. Felt good.

By the way

By the way, there will be a lot of spelling mistakes so deal with it.
I still say words like basil and pasty wrong and some words are just written in misterious ways to me, so be patient because I have to be.

AND

the time of my posts is wrong. I dont really write posts at 5 o'clock in the morning unless I had a very good (or bad) night out and this was not the case.

Glad that is clear.

Indigenous Crap

This is a photo of a costume I made as part of my practise.

The idea behind this project was that in the west we now worship material life more than we worship any god. Objects have become our new idols

I decided to make a costume out of things I purchased in the pound shop. Most of it is slowly desintegrating and falling apart, showing how transient material life is.
After I finished the costume I performed a "tribal" dance and filmed it. Lots of bits fell on the floor and the costume made very interesting noises but I am still working on the films, so maybe i'll ulpoad them at some later point in time.

So basically I spent a lot of time doing something that worships the ready-made

Number one, twothousand and eleven

So it begins...