Sky

Wamboin sky 22.4.20

Sometimes the sky is so far away, you don’t recognise it. It’s far but close, insinuates itself. It has meaning but you have no language to decipher it, no ancient language, only new stuff, make believe to cover ignorance.
It’s more beautiful than I can contemplate. Not too beautiful. I don’t hide from it as I might have done before.
This sky is not made from what it is. It is not what I know it to be. That is a ruse. This sky is furrowed earth, mottled milk. It is stroking, tender, endless love.
It is essentially a sunny day and this blue is textured, bleeding. The sky has veins.
God was useful to help explain how scale is so capable.
Being that we are looking up at it, this is an underbelly. It is vast and private at the same time. Big intimacy.
A blue sky is not a distant thing. Flat blue is friendly and space less. This sky shows how far back the screen is, to remind us how big the room. I would normally call out to test the acoustics but I think my voice may not cut the mustard today.

No heed

I pay no heed to the miracles around me as I plough the land with my thinking. If I am bailed up by something bigger, then, I am reduced.

Engraved wood.

A Bridge too far

You can make a crossing elegantly, employing the materials at hand. A nick at either end of the banana locks onto the bowls giving voice to the banana’s natural arch.

Breakfast Bridge 21.4.20

pm Bridge

The pine logs lacked the banana’s elegance but employed a similar locking with the trees that the bowls provided for the banana.

pm Bridge

.

I have no regard for the pine logs. They are tainted by my wider views. I go about my day putting the landscape into shape according to my fixations.
I keep an open mind despite those comsiderations. Their day may come tomorrow.

The rake

I couldn’t find the rake but it was there in front of me the whole time. It had more of the elegance to the earlier banana.

Clarification

One week after the three log bridge was put in place, a trip to Sydney made clear the need for clarification and simplification. The found rake had been trying to communicate.
The gnarly knobs were trimmed off to invite seating and the resulting cleaner horizontal line sits better in the landscape.

The devil

We had the pines pushed over. They were unwelcome, having grown from pine cones that had rolled in from next door.

They’d been put in a pile for burning but then burning seemed excessive so they were sifted out and left in a pile for me to interpret.

I cut the roots off them and trimmed the branches off. I would find somewhere for the poles. The root bowls would be trucked up the hill to be used to limit erosion.

These are matter of fact tasks. The farmer is not obliged to interpret actions taken. Actions are purpose driven.

The pine tree grows and the ground beneath it is sterilised, so that no life can grow under its canopy. The pine tree pushes other life forms away, whether from shyness, or determination to overwhelm, or from being driven to become part of a single species forest, to make a family.

Their green is beguiling. Our European eyes glaze over in pine’s company. We are taken away from where we are and where we now belong. The pines will go.

Pictures help to tell a story. This story has one such aid. At the end of the day, I hoisted the decapitated root bowl into the sky to subject it to the opposite to its comfort zone.

To where the sun shines.

Flayed Bowl

The rabbit

There’s a lot of sculptural activity outside of sculpture. Winter’s solace arrived today. Iron bark from Armidale surely can’t be sustainable, but those anxieties are luxuries for the time being.

The delivery here has been successfully executed. The tilted tray is an inevitable expression of that success. The scale of it in relation to my body size, the ‘tilt’ which is so stability averse, why is the clean emptiness so fulfilling? These aspects cannot be described more successfully than being ‘sculptural’.

Can we reasonably ascribe such a term to sculpture also, without offending sculpture’s scope?

Hopefully, yes we can. We may discuss sculpture simultaneously with its sculptural aspects and not inhibit its relevance.

To put it in a nutshell though, it is the verticality of the suspended hanging plate that establishes such a lasting relationship with the ground, fleeting as it is, was.

The Rabbit

One

One log. One fire. One shed. One life.
Let’s not get complicated.

Who needs to fall under the spell of a multi-logged fire. Jagged dancing flames and red caverns you can walk through in your imagination.

No thanks. Just the one log for now.

One log. One fire. One shed. One life is more than enough.

i like a blanket rule. No discussion shall be entered into. Life is simple. One. One. One. One.

The fireplace is not tv. It’s not a screen. There is no alternative life offered here. This is the middle of nothing. This is a no escape options fire tonight.

One Log

A Monolog

Postcard from Wamboin easter sunday

Tower detail

Fire 2010

The Interior

Bowl 12 2011 and Me 1983

First Ciming

The long bow

This blog consists of speculations. I employ a long bow to approach subjects and the targets are therefore difficult to reach.
I am employing that long bow here.
Covert was made in 2006. When you make a work, you are guided by the ideas you have, the material, and your subconscious. You imagine you can steer a work with your intent, but mostly you have to let the work drive itself, in order to manifest any control of its parts.
Covert was made in response to an aspect of my life at that time which was hidden and manifest simultaneously.
Covert now exists inescapably in relation to Covid and prior (imagined) significances drop away.
Now, we are so transfixed by Covid, that Covid is everything and everywhere.
Covert advertises Covid.
Hidden and invisible, Covid has insinuated itself into every part of our life. We obey its instruction. It is irresistible.

Covert 2006

A work is made in the moment in which it was literally manufactured. Then it remakes itself as history sheds new light on it and is made again.
During Covid, I am happy not to make new work as old works around me are remade outside of my will and effort.
As the world changes, so does the work change.
A work can exist in darkness, to virtually not exist at all, and then suddenly be brought to life by a new light shed on it.

Covert 2006 - 2020

The long bow is employed for distant targets, possibly by equestrians? I might have used a different weapon or no weapon at all. I could have let the work sit there, in the patch on which it sits. I could have let thIs moment of light slip past, without acknowledgement. I always believed this work had some merit. I was doing something I hadn’t done before. There is a ‘sculptural’ aspect is this work that some of my works lack.

Covert 2006 - 2020

Time provides an opportunity to look at work from different angles. New angles emerge over time.
Long live the long bow.

Postcards from WamboiN 10.4.20

Deepening Crisis

The Crossing

Installation on The Arena

Star Bench 1987

PostcarDs from wamboin

Alluvial Change

The Interior and Flower

The Sea

The Interior

Self Portrait

Inside outside

Sometimes an image appears which is full enough to not require words to be added.

Wamboin April 2020

The new wOrld, for now.

New frontiers bring new sights and sounds, new silences and new absence. This photo shows Covid’s nemesis, repairing for the next conflict. This image is not a microorganism but a washing machine at the end of a washing cycle. There is no setting for latex gloves. The manufacturers of the washing machine lacked the foresight.

Recycling latex gloves

Making an idea

Thinking

Everybody’s thinking thinking. 

It’s the final frontier before panic locks in to make thinking, finally redundant. 

The racks may be empty at the supermarkets, but the information dealing with Covid is stacked to the ceiling. You can fill the trolley with it, no limits. 

The frontier between thinking and panic is rich. It is almost the most fertile place from which to draw to produce the best yields. 

We shouldn’t be grateful to find ourselves here, but we will take advantage as an option when pain and confusion are the other options available. 

Covid’s scope is big enough also to stifle creativity, just as the big moments in history removed the voices of those who lived through them. 

Is Covid too big to synthesise? 

We are now imagining, a longer lasting depression than the last, populations devastated, previous world wars as hiccups. 

We are only at the beginning, when we still imagined we had a voice. These are the good old days maybe. 

It’s, it’s. 

Day whatever. 

BC. AD. AC

Exhibition Notes

Mitch Cairns

Exhibition Notes Mitch Cairns at The Commercial March 2020

Tallies

If you can’t have the Olympics the next best thing Is Covid 19. It works in reverse though so the higher score you get, the worse you do. No score at all means you win. So, for dying you score a gold medal. New cases is worth silver. Infection is bronze. Strangely, Australia will probably achieve a similar position in this tally as in the Olympics, coming in behind the usual suspects, US, China, Europe.

Surprising improvers (?), so far are Japan and South Korea, with China after starting badly, making better progress downwards.

Naturally, you can’t make light of calamity. The British, whose sense of humour was improved by the setbacks of The Second World War were not able to build on that with subsequent disasters and their humour has been in steep decline.

Humour may be employed as a coping mechanism sometimes, but with Covid 19, there are no such escape hatches. You have to be deadly serious to survive. Day dreaming, joking is off the menu.

It must be in the National Psyche or perhaps it is just in the personal one that tallies hold the eye. The Olympic tallies are one. We love tables. Footie tables. Who is in the top eight. Who will take the wooden spoon.

I noticed today a second consecutive day is lower new cases for NSW and felt a sense of pride and triumph and hope for greater achievement.

Snakes and ladders upside down.

Watch this space. Have we ever watched a space so much?

This space takes the cake.

Mitch Cairns

Mitch Cairns

Waylaid S T O O P

The Commercial

11th March - 9th April, 2020

We have come to expect back lighting to draw the eye, whether it be I-phone, laptop, or screen of any dimension. We cannot now imagine power which is not powered and yet,

Mitch Cairns’ pictures glow. They radiate with light and life, and there is no cord in site.

How so?

Twentieth century art leapt out of the blocks, propelled from what came before it and what came with it. Picasso and Braque articulated a new way of seeing and representing the world.

That work was brought to a halt by the first world war, and the world has been shrinking from Cubism’s propositions ever since. The Cubist manifesto has been reduced to a ‘Cubist style’, in order to diminish its promise.

Despite some minor mid-twentieth century efforts to re-invigorate a cubist way of seeing, we have collectively backed away from its scope. It was too challenging and there was no way it could be appropriated for other purposes. We couldn’t find a way forward and so the world reverted to earlier ways of seeing.

Cubism, through this writer’s understanding, allows the artist to make a picture employing different views. The pictures can draw from one angle of a subject, or from many. They can draw from the lessons of history. They can employ ways of seeing induced by the sight and sound of machinery. They can take from African and New Guinea art and from Eastern and Aboriginal art. They can mine Freud.

From the explosion that was brought about by the birth of the twentieth century, Cubism provided the synthesis of the broken parts.

Cubism was a postcard from 1907 and, despite the pace of change since, mail is slow.

The new Cairns work, (just as earlier work does), provides the next chapter in ‘Cubism Revised’. Cubism employs an analytical approach, but a genuine synthesis can only be brokered intuitively.

Cairns here, strikes gold,

Hence the glow.

Frile

I would like to nominate a new word for the English language.

The word is ‘Frile’.

‘The Frile’ combines the frown and the smile. These two facial expressions are more commonly deployed separately. They signal opposite each other.

The frile makes those separate entities one.

The message delivered by friling is complex. In friling, one is amused but conditionally, warily. It may convey a certain anxiety or uncertainty as if trust may be at any moment suspended. The friler is not so easily persuaded as others might be. The frown is normally employed to distance oneself from a situation whereas the smile draws one in.

The friler may find themselves in no-mans-land caught between near and far.

Should the reader attempt a frile, they will notice more facial muscles are used than other expressions. It is quite tiring to maintain a frile. It is facially exhausting.

In friling, one quite quickly recalls previous friles and frilers. They might be relatives, friends or media personalities.

The English language is alive and can integrate new words where there is a demand for one. The way in which new words are introduced is not formalised. In this instance it is introduced here in my blog for possible inclusion. *

Please see ‘Frilie’, below.

Frilie

* On advice, I subsequently have checked and find that Frile is already listed in The Urban Dictionary and means, “A neutral expression. A facial expression that is somewhere between a frown and a smile.”

Screen Grab

Mostly, one is limited by what one finds, or what one has.

Refreshing therefore to find it up, when off, when the skylight is reflected on the screen as a movie already,

Except, only thing moving is time. There’s no immediate change to necessitate a movie. This lasts as long as daylight,

And as long as no-one uses the laptop.

It’s a screen saver.

Hop Irish

‘Hop Irish’ Paper napkin 20 cm x 20 cm

I’d like to play Hop Irish. I’ve not seen it played before.

I suppose it would be written in chalk, like the Scotch version. Each square would be foot-sized. The playing ring would need to be two metres in diameter.

If one can generalise about the Irish, which you can’t, but if you could, the task of the game would be to become confounded by it.

Numbering and layout suggests the player hops backwards. The starting point also, by being in the middle, is inaccessible.

The player’s skills therefore would lie not in the throwing of the marker as in the Scottish version, nor in the athleticism in the hopping, but in the general scrutiny and pondering.

The configuration is like a wishing well which encourages a ring of players who are able to collaborate in a communal wishing/wonder.

The game makes no division between winning and losing.