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Showing posts from February, 2012

Finding A Way In

Sunday was blessed with sunshine so I had to feel the fear and do it anyway. The fear of being caught. (I'm not a thrill-junkie but trespass is relevant to what I am doing in relation to exploring trans-gender.) It took ten minutes to ride out to the big development outside town but then an hour figuring out how to evade security which was parked up in vans at both ways I'd figured out I could get in (using google earth satellite maps). At one point I retreated up a bank and through some brambles pursued by a van after stumbling onto a road to a quarry and into the view of men in a van - and found myself in a field beside a garden centre with a dog training class in progress. I never would have believed so many people spend a Sunday afternoon attending dog training classes. I don't like confrontation so I was scared of being questioned and told to piss off and don't come back by 'authority figures' but resumed attempts to get in and eventually just fronte

2:26

Long exposure burning

German and American photographers Hans-Christian Schink & Chris McCaw were independently making long exposure black and white landscapes at the same time. Despite the shared subject both were actually motivated by different reasons and came up with quite different results.

Demolition & construction in the snow

The site of the missile guidance systems factory at the bottom of the road which is being re-developed into housing is handy when conditions are too bad to motorcycle out of town. Even so, with the combined effects of wind-chill and the hole in my boot letting in slush it was soon hard to maintain concentration.  The Sony W380 (which is small enough to shoot through the gaps in the perimeter fencing) has a subtly indented shutter button which can hardly be felt at the best of times but with raw fingers it was  a case of frame the shot then look to see if my finger was in pressing in the right spot on the camera's top edge.  How people work at anything demanding in extreme conditions, I don't know.  After an hour I was ready to go look at wood.

Wood # 2

Wood

The prospect of putting some prints on the wall of a gallery has caused me to (over?) analyse the presumably straightforward step of framing and presenting work.  I had misunderstood what 'big' meant and last week's work on an idea for a scaffolding structure with a ten foot wide PVC banner tied to it turns out to have been a bit too big.  By about eight feet. I am now getting carried away with the idea of making my own 'rudimentary' frames, smaller and simpler - I came across a small length of scaffolding today - it weighed a ton.  And a trip to B&Q this afternoon to look at all the trade woods they have in stock was something I've been looking forward to for the last couple of days.  So when people at work asked yesterday if I was doing anything exciting this weekend I could answer 'Yes, looking at some wood.'  And not be totally boring for once. I found out a little from watching a few vids on Youtube how to actually make a frame and may or ma

Horses in the snow

Scaffold

Richard A, the curator of the Tenderpixel show which I might have some prints accepted for, suggested 'BIG' prints would be interesting.  I'm not sure how big he meant but now I'm thinking of printing on PVC banners, - with re-inforced stitching along the edges and with brass eyelets - maybe ten feet wide by six feet high, attached with ties to frames made of scaffolding tubes positioned against the gallery walls. I'm getting up to speed on scaffolding. The idea is to assemble four poles together (with double brackets) and base plates - and a bunch of plastic ties to attach the big images.

Y e l l o w n e s s

My interest in supermarket branded value range packaging is such that when Morrisons, my local store, changed their cereal boxes last week I reacted with open mouthed shock.  It was quite disorientating and as much as anything I wondered 'why hadn't I been consulted?'.  Or at least forewarned of this seismic change that had been coming.  Don't they know I am an interested party?  It was their utilitarian cornflakes box that first caught my eye and now it is far less innocuous and sort of trying to blend in as a just another regular product, rather than highlighting it's difference, the cheapo alternative. The design upgrade includes an illustration - with red chunks of rubble representing toasted flakes of corn, toppling into a bowl made of raspberry jelly - a fail despite the ineptness presumably meant to indicate cheap 'n cheerful .  I converted to their cornflakes recently so I will soon be one of the few people to have any of the Yellow Edition - surely a

P i n k n e s s

The 'beast from the east' was how the cold weather front that moved to the UK was described on the news the other night.  And forecasts are for -12 C with six inches of snow in central England this evening.  It's a little frosty outside, nothing too bad, but the hype seems to have psychologically impaired my ability to judge the conditions objectively and I feel as if I might not survive the weekend despite being dressed for the arctic in my own home. When I was upstairs earlier I was drawn to a super-feminine dress that I adore which never got put away from the last dressing-up shoot.  It's pink, it's satin and it has an elaborate folding - it is hyper feminine.  And like a radical change in the weather it's an equally dramatic announcement and gets my full attention with its accentuation on difference and on change.