Made for the Fields of View screening to celebrate A.L. Rees's posthumous book.
This is a composite view of Convoys Wharf in Deptford, constructed from a number of sequences captured at various focal lengths and angles of view on 29 July 2021 between 11.17 and 11.44am. The camera was positioned on the opposite side of the River Thames, 355 metres due northwest of Convoys Wharf, on the furthest extent of the Thames path, from Maritime Quay, 322 metres from Masthouse Terrace Pier. The weather was sunny, with occasional cloud and wind from the west at 25 kph, the temperature was 22 degrees Celsius.
On songs on my new cassette/download album All Living Can Anyone Be Here.
It’s bound to fail, this impossible landscape
In Landscape Theory (2008) Kenneth R. Olwig writes in response to a roundtable conversation about representations of landscape. In the section titled ‘The “Actual Landscape,” or Actual Landscapes?’, he observes that there is a “consistent tendency to refer to “the landscape” in the singular…”, which is notable given that the roundtable suggests that “…landscape has a variety of meanings.” He goes on to suggest that “…landscape is notable for having a double identity…” it is, he suggests, following Yi-Fu Tuan, a “…‘diaphor’, because it combines at least ‘two disimilar appearances or ideas’” which introduces a tension that “…derives from the fact that landscape means both ‘domain’ and ‘scenery’”. ‘Domain’ in this context is understood as “…a place, region, or country, or land inhabited by people and it thus belongs to the discourse of politics, economics, community, society, and what i would call the art of place making”, while ‘scenery’ “…belongs to the discourse of the aesthetics of space.” According to Tuan, he reports, “…the diaphoric meaning of landscape… lies not in one image (concretely known) pointing to another, but rather in both - equally important - imaginatively synthesized”. Olwig goes on to suggest that these two meanings are expressed in Dr. Johnson’s 1755 dictionary: “(1) ‘A region; the prospect of a country’; (2) ‘A picture, representing an extent of space, with the various objects in it.’”
The song ‘And On The Heath’ exists within this “tensive meaning”.
Olwig continues his philological investigation of landscape by discussing the word 'prospect' as used in the first part of Dr Johnson’s definition, which he claims is “…actually ‘an extensive view’ with no particular reference to the practice of making pictures. The use of the term ‘prospect’ to refer to ‘a sketch or picture of a scene’ is in fact minor, and now ‘archaic.’ This suggests that artistic representation was not central to the constitution of landscape…” and that “…what one sees in prospect is a pre-given place that has been constituted through social activity in the course of making history.”
we can’t observe the boundless heath, all we do is point to things
In 1993 social anthropologist Tim Ingold, in ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, coined the term ‘taskscape’, to mark an attention to space being constituted as place through activity which takes, or perhaps makes, place. In tandem with Olwig’s suggestions, these approaches to landscape would mark a shift from a visual artistic representation that places objects in space but lacks the representation of activity which might distinguish what makes the place. Ingold was particularly concerned with the spatial and temporal dimensions of the landscape in human activity as evinced in Pieter Bruegel’s famous painting 'The Harvesters'.
In any attempt at landscape representation that engages with temporality in the form of duration and narrative as an inherent part of its media form, such as a film or music, human and non-human activity might become integral to the way place is characterised; in song pointing to and describing it, would, in itself represent an impossibility, a ‘visualisation’ which would put it out of place and out of time. From the position of the individual making the representation the place is only ever a subjective construction, it can’t stand in for the supposed objectivity of the map's geometric projection, or the fixity of the Euclidean perspectival view.
In ‘The Plains’ by Gerald Murnane, the landscape of the plains grows quite incomprehensible, as though familiarity engenders more a remove from it. The landscape is avoided by its filmmaker protagonist, always only ever viewed obliquely, from an angle. It speaks of the impossibility of connection with landscape, it’s bound to fail, representation becomes a distancing, an uninhabitable landscape.
back on the heath, I try to write, the sense of site, invoke the place, the here and now and back in time, in 88 or 73 or 99
It is within this as an impossible ‘constituted place’ that the song ‘And on the Heath’ attempts to construct a landscape representation from the position of an eccentric relation to the place, space and the time, in relation to the non-centrality of the individuality of the writer to the heath of Blackheath.
and on the heath, sirens, police, crows, ducks, and geese
It makes its attempts at visual description, not from impressions captured en plein air as might be the case with landscape painting, but of the landscape as abstracted, oblique views, such as those of Murnane's plainsfolk, as seen in photos and videos I had captured on the heath, as well as from other associated sources.
low edge of cloud, shallow depth of field, forms rectangular, metallic sky, green underneath, and seen between, oblique squinting, ochre sunlight, dull glow diffuse, overcast
As I try to write the sense of place I include a bricolage of eccentric subjective personal and cultural associations, the temporal expressed as a kind of memorial association with the past, a ‘view’ that extends from the immediate present experience of place through imagined and historical resonance.
rain falls in grey far away
The song started to take shape in January 2020, when I went for a walk to Blackheath, 2 miles from my house. This is not the settlement, the ‘village’ of Blackheath, but the large open space of the heath itself. Already by describing my own activity I’m constructing a ‘taskscape’, the tasks of walking and listening are taking, and here, making place. I was listening to Syd Barrett’s solo album ‘Barrett’ on my earphones, the songs are evocative of a sense of London that largely no longer exists, the grey whimsy of a mid-week afternoon where nothing happens, set in rambling Victorian terrace houses. This particular overcast and drizzly afternoon as viewed across the expanse of the heath, was strongly evocative of this sense, and the phrase from Barrett’s song ‘Baby Lemonade’.
the heater’s on, the windows are thin, I’m trying hard to keep this warmth in…
This line from The Go-Betweens song ‘Quiet Heart’ on their 1988 album 16 Lovers Lane, reminded me very much of my own return to London in the mid-nineties after living in Australia for some years. The band had themselves returned to Australia after several years living in London when they recorded the song, and the line captures the sense of living in draughty cold houses, that of the mundane exotic.
smile with us, in the morning, the best music, we play it all for you
A car bombs past with music blaring from an open window, ‘Keep on Running’ by The Spencer Davis Group, speeding doppler, the effect of the memory makes me think of pop music radio, Radio One, in the seventies, its jingles became part of the soundtrack of the imagined place.
These all speak of an imaginary sense of a past London, within my living memory, again one that doesn’t exist any more, but up on Blackheath, maybe because as a large expanse it's slow to change, as ‘empty’ land, as a heath that’s existed for centuries, and this collage of memory sensations becomes accommodated into the place.
The heath is criss-crossed by roads, main roads, side roads, a hub for traffic from a number of places, local traffic on the side roads intersects with the traffic travelling between Central London and the South Coast on the main road.
again the same car, driving more slowly, and other traffic, moves toward camera, before indicating, taking left turn, stationary cars, pedestrians
“Blackheath, London.
A for sale sign in a hedge and a parked Mini in view. A blue Volvo estate car comes into view and the camera follows this car along the road. Open village green with park benches. The same car going the other direction. Children on the green. Surrounding buildings. Again we see the same car driving more slowly. Other traffic. Volvo moving toward camera before indicating and taking left turn. Stationary cars and pedestrians. Car comes into view up a hill and driver can be seen behind the steering wheel. Car goes down hill and up hill again.”
The process of composing the recorded song consisted firstly of constructing the instrumental track. For this I used a method I first used on ’Sickness Country’ on the Abstract Vectoral Landscapes album.
It's also developed on a few of the tracks on All Living Can Anyone Be Here. I play through a series of juxtaposed slow guitar figures, triggered as loops in Ableton Live. Initially I improvise the lyrics from the various fragments outlined above, which after a few attempts coalesce into some kind of lyric. The final vocal recording is processed live using autotune and slow phasing effects which gives it a haunting quality as it floats across the ground of the backing track.
The song was written and recorded in January 2020. I tried to re-record it for All Living Can Anyone Be Here in part because I wanted to change some of the lyric and for the production sound to be more in keeping with the rest of the album, however I was never quite satisfied with the re-recorded versions and decided to use the original. While the song predates the others on the album, as it was made before the coronavirus themes that infect some of the record, it is concerned with similar ambient poetics of place and time, and sets the scene formally for the approach I would take for the new songs, and as such seemed to be a good choice as album opener.
It’s bound to fail this impossible landscape It’s over there always the past out of place and out of time we can’t observe the boundless heath all we do is point to things for all we see the camera phone might as well be in selfie mode the heater’s on the windows are thin I’m trying hard to to keep this warmth in smile with us in the morning the best music we play it all for you again the same car driving more slowly and other traffic moves toward camera before indicating taking left turn stationary cars pedestrians all grey up on the black heath low edge of cloud shallow depth of field forms rectangles metallic sky green underneath and seen between oblique squinting ochre sunlight dull glow diffuse overcast and on the heath sirens, police crows, ducks, and geese a Tuesday in the afternoon up on the heath early winter crisp and chill mounds in circles bus rattles past sirens and geese crows and police mind how you go raven or crow light on a branch skeletal tree on Whitefield Mound birch, fir and gorse camera pan speeding van rain falls in grey far away back on the heath I try to write the sense of site invoke the place the here and now and back in time in '88 or '73 or '99 It’s bound to fail this impossible landscape It’s over there always the past out of place and out of time we can’t observe the boundless heath all we do is point to things for all we see the camera phone might as well be in selfie mode
In which I write about the songs on the subsongs album, in order, song by subsong.
The denial of food and drink to a traveller would have been a rare occurrence. The breaching of that code of hospitality brought an uncanny revenge on the women of Allt Beithe township on the coast south of Tarbert. The day was in July, 'a blazing hot summer's day', and a man came down the hill to a house in which the women only were. He stood at the door and said: 'I've been walking since yesterday morning. I've had nothing to eat and nothing to drink. Give me a drink of milk.' The head woman of the house replied: 'We can't give you anything. Go to the burn and take a drink out of that.' - 'Yes'he said, 'is that so?' He stepped into the house and put his hand under his oxter where there was a small leather pouch, and he pulled a hazel twig out of the pouch and began stabbing at the thatch of the ceiling with it. And all the time he was doing that the women could not stop dancing, and he carried on without stopping until they all fell down exhausted. He put the twig back into the little pouch, and he said to them: 'The next time a man comes to this house for a drink of milk, you'll give itto him.' With that, he 'disappeared over to Skipness'. His name was MacFarlane, and he belonged to that family in Tarbert which was distinguished by its reputation for sorcery.
Kintyre, the Hidden Past, Angus Martin, The Grimsay Press, 1984
Traditionally the dominant land use in the area is sheep grazing on the rough open hill-land.Increasingly, due to the favourably high rainfall and low land prices, commercial tiorestation hasspread and covers more than 50% of the project area. The woodland is densely planted conifer, whichrestricts physical access to some areas.
The Knapdale area is underlain by metamorphic rocks of the Dalradian Supergroup, a Late Precambrian to possible Cambrian shelf-sediment and turbidite assemblage. This succession accumulated during the progressive rifting and deepening of extensional basins. The older Appin Group rocks, which do not outcrop in the Kintyre Peninsula, comprise quartzite-shale-limestone sequences laid down in a shallow-water shelf environment. A suite of metabasic sills (formerly termed ‘epidiorite’) is intercalated within the upper Argyll Group metasedimentary succession in the south Knapdale area. These rocks are predominantly dark, fine grained and massive, although both foliated and coarse-grained varieties are found locally. The sills, which vary in thickness from 0.5 to 250m, are mostly concordant but are frequently disrupted bylater, north-west faulting. In areas of relatively shallow dip they occupy broad, elevated areas withgood exposure.
Gold mineralisation in the Dalradian rocks of Knapdale-Kintyre, south-west Highlands, Scotland, A. G. Gunn, M. H. Shaw, K. E. Rollin and M. T. Styles, British Geological Survey, Department of Trade and Industry, 1996
Following a visit to Kintyre in Scotland, I was interested in new approaches to writing landscape which might consider it in materialist rather than romantic terms. It seemed to me that all or any of the aspects of a landscape contribute to its constitution. In human terms this particular area of Scotland is marked by waves of migration bringing with them different agricultural, fishing, religious, and cultural practices, languages, and so on. In particular the Irish, the Gaelic language, travellers, the ‘Coasters’ who withdrew from society and lived by the coast, but also, the sheep, the goats, rabbits and other wildlife.
Landscape as a form is conventionally marked by human occupation and activity, becoming a record of that activity, framing views of the place, making some claim to it. Landscape frequently describes its human history, while the romanticism of the awe-inspiring, the sublime, offers a way for human contemplation to contain what is beyond itself, but is ultimately, like ‘nature', inevitably a human invention. But of course it’s not just a human or even animal space, it’s geological, it’s as old as the hills, the mountains, the valleys, the lakes, beyond the timespan of human lifetimes and cultures.
This song was an attempt then to integrate the human in the form of elements of the myths and stories, which had been formed within and by this place, with the geophysical descriptions, and to invoke them on equal semiotic terms. While the song restricts itself mainly to the mythical and geophysical, it might offer a proposition which suggests a continuum of description so as to not discriminate against or privilege any aspect of what makes up ‘landscape’, and perhaps could be applied to any other represented form or subject.
Some of the geological names were particularly delicious to sing "the metamorphic rocks... the turbidite assemblage", set in a backing track of sustained guitar drone loops.
The day we visit the beach at Porth
Ceiriad on the Llyn Peninsula in North Wales, where in 1973 BS Johnson shot the film Fat Man on a Beach,
it is misty and raining a fine drizzle. We clamber down a slightly
treacherous path to the beach, and as sea spray adds to the dampness within minutes we are soaked. A small
group of intrepid surfers are the only people to find the conditions
agreeable.
Having visited a place it's easy to traverse its landscape on Google Earth.
Recently I found this version of my video Land Gauge. Land Gauge has appeared in various forms and contexts. It first appeared in January 2007 as Direct Language 4.0 on my original Direct Language videoblog. That version used the sound as recorded with the image although the whole thing is slowed down. In 2008 I made a version for One Minute Volume 2 where it is accompanied by 60/60 a sound piece made when I was at art college in 1981, which was also on the Snatch 3 compilation. For this version I sped the original 60/60 up so that it would fit within the 60 second parameter of the project. Later that year it was in the Transcentric show, where it was projected on a small raised platform screen on the floor so that one looked down onto it, replicating the original point of view, as a silent 4 minute loop. This version was made while preparing the video for Transcentric and compiles several parts of the original sequence, into a kind of extended mix as a continuous 10 minute video, it too is silent.
This video reworks photographs, super 8 film, sound and anecdotal text from a series of bush and outback locations across Australia during the 1990s. It takes the form of extracts from an imagined first person journal, layered over extruded experiments with composition and movement constructing a synthetic shifting landscape. Moving through discrete but related sections, the abstracted view shifts vertically through 90 degrees between the closeness of the local, the ground, and the claustrophobia of the distant colonizing horizon. As it travels east from the South Australian desert, through bush, tablelands and rocky range, the video becomes a subjective essayistic meditation, in absentia, on being in the landscape, the problem of attempting to reproduce these landscapes and the uncertainty of their representation. At its inconclusion we arrive on K'gari (Fraser Island off the coast of Queensland) where we reach the edge of the known world, a space being made in an open future.
This is an extended version of an essay originally written for the catalogue for the exhibition To Look and To Look by Raul Gomez Valverde.
Spring: abstraction The spring of the twentieth century: high times for modernism, colour and abstraction. This abstraction wants us to think of the sublime while standing in awe in front of a painting, in the presence of ‘pure’ abstraction, as though in common with other non-pictorial forms like, let’s say, music, abstraction has the means to elicit a direct response, bypassing language. Is there not though a semiotics of colour and shape just as there is of music? Can abstraction reallyresist the organising imperative of language inscribed as it is within a cultural context and the history of the abstract in that context, in culture?
As new and radical pure colour and abstraction might have seemed in the future-heading motor-driven early twentieth century, one of its exemplars in Rothko’s practice was informed as much by age-old mythopoeia, symbols, rituals and like Greek tragedy, driven more to redemption, intending to fill a supposed modern spiritual emptiness.
Away from such neo-religious impulses we find a more secular form of abstraction: first in Malevich, then Mondrian and the De Stijl group where essentials of pure form, line, shape and colour in design were ends in themselves, not just beyond the pictorial but through to the other side of abstracted representation. Malevich’s Suprematism was a grammar based on fundamental geometric semiotics, in particular the square and the circle, suggesting that such abstraction could lead to “a fourth dimension or a Fourth Way beyond the three to which our ordinary senses have access” (Mel Gooding, Abstract Art, Tate Gallery Publishing, 2001). For Mondrian the non-pictorial was the only way to move beyond the tragic into the world of the synthetic and the un-natural; eschewing the metaphysics of Malevich’s bold colours his work became self-sufficient, painted surfaces appearing to stretch far beyond their borders as though skilfully cut from a landscape. In fact the painting was the landscape. This was considered by De Stijl to be a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order, pure abstraction and the reduction to the essentials of form and colour became metaphysical.
But if we look at a Mondrian painting today do we see universal spiritual harmony? Is our emptiness banished in the presence of a Rothko? Or are these more likely to be seen as signs along the road of twentieth century art history, no less impressive for it but offering little redemption for the contemporary soul? What is the use of abstraction?
Summer: landscape
Landscape, of course, is not the natural world but an idealised, pictorial version of nature. The word comes from the Dutch word landschap, from land (directly equivalent to the English word land) and the suffix -schap, corresponding to the English suffix -ship. The word was brought into English when Dutch artists were on the verge of becoming masters of the landscape genre.
In the early nineteenth century Marylebone Park in London was renamed The Regent's Park and John Nash landscaped a huge circular area for the Prince Regent with a lake and a canal. From the terraces of the new royal residence the vista appeared to be that of a country park. The Regent’s Park is an idealised, pictorial version of nature, a representation, a construction following the practice established in the eighteenth century (most famously through the work of the likes of 'Capability' Brown) of remodelling the great estate parks of the English gentry to resemble a tidied up version of nature. The Regent’s Park is an artwork sharing the aims of landscape painting, its romantic appeal to the sublime and human reconciliation with nature.
For structural filmmakers like Chris Welsby and William Raban in the 1970s, questions about how landscape images were produced and the relationship of the viewer and maker to those images became more important than any lingering romantic reconciliation with nature. The form of the films would be determined by the systems of nature, forces in the natural environment. In Welsby’s work the wind, the course of a stream, the position of the sun, played as much a direct role in factors such as the direction or movement of the camera, duration of shot and the overall structure or shape of a film, as any of the direct actions of the filmmaker. In the photochemical moving image practice, landscape representation shrugged off its historical metaphysical imperative and became existential, as much a model of time as space. In Raban’s film Colours of This Time the change in the colour of the natural light of a park from sunrise to sunset is captured continuously, exaggerated by using time-lapse, with an open shutter compressing the day into 3 minutes.
Autumn: colour Photography does not represent or reproduce an image of the natural world but constructs an idealised pictorial version of it, the simulacrum of photo-realism has come to be considered to contain the most verisimilitude as an image of the world. Photographic realism itself is based on a set of assumptions around Euclidean perspective, idealisations of what the world should look like developed from painting. Cinema, being predominantly lens-based and photochemical, inherited this as an early example of remediation, not the least in landscape images. Now we find that the most prized goal of digital moving imaging is definition and resolution, its zenith being to equal and then to surpass film and cinema in appearing more real than real climbing to dizzy heights of super-realism. Whether photo-realistic or synthetic, the aim is for it to be highly pictorially representational and of course in High Definition. How did this happen when computational imaging has such vast potential for sophisticated and complex interpretation of visual input? The essence of digital imaging is not the indexical trace but information processing and so pictorial imaging is but one of many possible options (For a more thorough discussion of the relationship between cinema, digital imaging, graphism and pictorialism see The Virtual Life of Film, D. N. Rodowick, Harvard University Press, 2007, pp.102 – 105.).
Some artists however have worked with abstraction within digital moving image to highly original effect, like the Austrian duo reMI or Dutch artist Bas van Koolwijk, but while the joyous, delinquently noisy and jarring effect of their work is of a different nature to, let’s say, Rothko, they also work pretty much purely on the level of affect as an immediate response to dynamic abstraction. But digital media, with information processing at its very core, also has the potential to work at conceptual and cognitive levels.
Philip Sanderson’s videoFleshtones, while ostensibly concerned with an integral relationship between colour and musical tonality produced an interesting side issue. The piece used pixellated pornography among its source material to provide its eponymous colour palette. The presence of porn survived in the key words Sanderson used on YouTube, resulting in a vastly greater number of hits than one might usually expect for an experimental video work. This as abstraction is as far away from the visual affect/effect of pornography as one can imagine, however much the tonal values and variations might remain, to the search engines it’s still pornography, perhaps much as it might be to visual recognition software; this may be non-figurative abstraction but there representation remains at the level of metadata.
Susan Collins’sFenlandia and Glenlandia projects abstract through process into non-idealised pictorial representations of landscape A webcam transmitted images from a fixed view of a rural location via the internet, harvesting pixels by the second, each generated image accumulated from top to bottom, left to right in coloured horizontal bands throughout the day. The resulting slowly changing images are like pixellated digital pointillism, representations of several hours of a view in one continuously changing image. Already we can see how the paradigms might have changed from conventional pictorialism when we can talk of multi-temporality and an image that changes continuously but isn’t a moving image in the cinematic spectacular sense.
Collins’s and Sanderson’s art projects might be seen to bring concern with colour and abstraction into the world of information, leaving the affect behind and moving towards an art of data and information, asking questions about the relationship between the abstract and the pictorial.
Winter: information Generally speaking graphical information is represented in colour and abstract form. Information design ‘guru’ Edward Tufte, refers to information design as ‘cognitive art’(Envisioning Information, Edward R. Tufte, Graphics Press LLC, 1990, p.9.). His emphasis is on the clarity of reading “colour’s great dominion” and he writes of the diminishing returns involved in using too much colour, too much information. In his world colour is semantic and not naturalistic unless it’s used to distinguish information: to label (colour as noun), to measure (as quantity), to represent or imitate reality (as representation), and to enliven or decode (as beauty)(ibid. p.81.). Tufte’s idea of information design is based on utilitarian principles and the imperatives of communication, as such it is teleological and deterministic, unable to conceive of a graphical form that can be concerned with anything but the transmission of information. It is a formulation that limits the imagination of design and ultimately how design might imagine itself.
Spring: full cycle and change So how might abstraction be liberated from the competing imperatives of the informational on the one hand and the abstract affective on the other? How might the cognitive, the conceptual and the social qualities of information design drive an art practice that escapes a modernist preoccupation with the abstract idealisation of being? How can an open and generative form of address that employs moving image media, colour and abstraction, not for random effect and the immediacy of affect be forged as a continuous measure of the world without recourse to the purely pictorial? Can the abstraction of integral informational forms resist reduction to reflexive closed loop feedback while being simultaneously temporal and spatial? These are questions that arise from considerations around the Nature Colour Cycle, considerations that might entertain other questions about what visual art is for, if it is not to make us think about the way we see things, the way things are represented visually, the space between those two points and what this relationship means.
Can we conceive of information design that is abstract but doesn’t serve commerce or the information industry? Perhaps beyond modernism on one hand and the commercial infosphere on another, we can conceive of an abstraction of information that is relational, that speaks directly to the experience of space and the (re)-writing of place as a generative and iterative process, while investigating new possibilities in both perceptual and cognitive representation of what we might have once called landscape, through a hybrid of what we might once have called Fine Art and Information Design.
With Nature Colour CycleRaul Gomez Valverde has gone some way towards realising the possibilities of such a project. This chromatic animation is based on weather conditions and seasonal changes of The Regent's Park, the circular proportions are those of the original scene photographed in the park at solstices, equinoxes and moon phases throughout a year, transformed into a concentric colour wheel colour changes that graduate chronologically through the seasons. Projected on the floor in the gallery space in his exhibitionTo Look and to Look, Nature Colour Cycle forms a perfect circle: dark in the middle shading to lighter on the periphery, it might be said to resemble an eye and we might think of ourselves as being slowly drawn into a mildly hypnogagic state as we look, and to look is to be pulled into the pool of this singular staring pupil with its singular viewpoint. As a visualisation of an environment in which process over time reveals spatial patterns however, it repurposes abstraction beyond abstraction as a means to its own ends. In exhibition Nature Colour Cycle is clearly part of a larger system, surrounded as it is by a variety of descriptions and illustrations of the process and offered as one of a number of possible ways of presenting environment and landscape. By hybridising conventionally distinct disciplines this variety of visual information becomes an experimental art practice that is driven by form and process, but being specific in the context, object and subject of its investigation, it is not allowed to become subsumed by process, reduced only to abstraction or dominated by formalism, rather it suggests the potential for an open-ended process of exploration and interpretation.
To Look and To Look Del Sol St Art Gallery
Santander, Spain
10 January - 14 February 2009
If my blog writing has been a little skimpy the last few months it's because I've been incredibly busy with other things. Two of those things reach some kind of fruition in the next few weeks: two separate curatorial collaborations, both involve Australian artists.
Transcentric, an exhibition at Central St Martins's Lethaby Gallery, a collaboration with RMIT in Melbourne on the theme of the urban centre, opens next week on Monday 17 November.
Figuring Landscapes, a touring screening programme of Australian and UK moving image works on the theme of landscape, has its first public exhibition at ArtSway in the New Forest on Monday 24 November.
Click on the links for details - I'm too busy to write more!
