Paul Granjon is a wonderful, machine making man."I am interested in the co-evolution of humans and machines.I build robots and other machines for shows in performances, galleries, festivals and television."And this - the antigravitational vehicle for cats video
He makes songs using his handmade 40cm long 'Zitare', here they are. Have a listen to them! I especially like 'La chanson du cherry pie song'
"I saw Furman in a dream... I sketched the creature in my diary in the morning: a 6 foot furry thing with no arms and furry legs, delivering karate kicks in the air. A few weeks later, I decided to build the creature."
Imagine if we all made the thing we see in our dreams? Mr Granjon's immediacy is great, if only we all shared it.
Rafaël Rozendaal is an artist who works with the internet. The majority of his work is not physical, it can all be attached to an email. And it's funny too. Here are my favorites:
Her work is mostly computerised collage, and I love her appreciation of color. This piece is the start of a new project based on memory and time. everything she churns out is admired by me!
'Tiny' is sung in my head all day sometimes.I'm So TinyI'm so tinyit would take a million steps to reach youi'm so shinyi feel crappyi'm so tinyi'm so tinyi'm so tinymy crap is the size of a grain of ricenot so shinyi feel crappyi'm so tinyi'm so tinyi'm so tinyI keep falling into a cigarette hole?i 'm so shinyi feel crappy
Lucy BarfootLadle Moulds 2009Glues, Watercolor ink, water, wireMy colours are sickly and my matter is sweet. I want to satisfy. I want to fulfil the materiality of objects, allowing them to talk. What is it to sense the texture, shape, and the smell? The viewer forms a unique relationship, which I have no control over.The letting go and holding onto control has a powerful effect on my work. The process of gathering objects is something I 'have to do', similar to my compulsion to repeat actions. My practice is obsessive and process-led. I am physically absorbed into a daze of making.Images:1. View from the door - I wanted people to enter the space, get close to the sculpture. I worked on the lighting to create a semi-lit, eerie feel. The Crypt is such a haunting place, I thought I could dull-down my bright sculpture to fit the space better - but once people got close, the piece was more vivid.2. Detail of ladle moulds with light shining through. Reminded me of stained glass windows. The color was different from behind.3. Me in the sculpture. Hello!
I am always inspired by process. This combined with an 'absence of artist' is what compels me to make art. One of my favorite artists is Tim Knowles. I wrote a chapter about him in my dissertation (titled 'Absent Artists and Performing Materials')"Tim Knowles is plotting the winds. His artwork relies on the force of nature to create his artwork. In his Tree Drawings, different species of trees are creating marks on paper from the pens tied to them due to the movement of the wind. ‘Weeping Willow on Circular Panel’ (2005) uses one hundred pens and draws on a five-meter circular MDF disk, which is separated into ten segments after the completion of the drawing. ‘Four Panel Weeping Willow’ is also separated: four segments drawn from fifty pens attached to the weeping willow tree."Throughout all my years of admiring what Tim does, I have never tried a tree drawing myself. A couple of weeks ago Lucy, Orlagh and I had a go at it. We tried two methods - one is making a big pen out of a massive tree branch, and the second was to hold the paper up against a pen-holding branch and let the tree draw.I realise that tree drawings take a lot of patience - especially if you're holding the paper up for the tree. once i get myself a big box or an easel, I'll get some proper drawings doneThere's more information specifically on his Tree Drawings here. As well as Tree Drawings, Tim also created Vehicle Motion Drawings, Postal Works and Balloon Drawings, amongst other projects.
Yesterday, my friend Holly and I set up a stall at the Walcot Street Market in Bath. It was a beautiful day, and our first time selling on a stall together. It worked really well, we think our illustration and artwork is not too similar to drown each other, and not too different either. The work contrasts and compliments each other.
We aquired stand-things from a lovely lady called Rachel. She had 2 great tables, tablecloths, card stands, boxes to lean prints on and a trestle to hold more prints. As this was my first market stall, it was great to be lent everything we'd need, otherwise the cost of all that would have outweighed the profit. I may have to look into getting some of this equipment if I choose to persue selling at stalls. We also put up some beautiful bunting which my nan made for me, and pegged some greeting-cards to the front of the table.
The location was pretty good, not excellent though. the hussle and bussle of Bath was at the end of the road, and all the passers by were just doing that - passing by. Our stall did catch some peoples eye, but we were not pitched in the main market area, which could have made it more successful, but who knows. We're planning on trying out another market in Bath soon, we're trying to find the one which suits our work best, has the right people attending it, and is the most successful
.Holly's website is HERE and she keeps a lovely blog on blogspot HERE. The 'Walcot Street market' is also called the 'Bath flea market' and HERE is a link to more info about it for sellers
I have been prolific today. I was in the studio till 8pm, inspired, I kept finding more things to do and I'm only home now because I'm hungry for fish and chips mmm. A Friday night treat from Bishopston Fish Bar!Today, I have: caught up on last night's Big Brother with my neighbour Mia, taken home all the crockery from my studio and put it all in my dishwasher, recycled, taken rubbish to the dump (I'm the 'head housekeeper' of the studio you see), done a layer of papier mache on the balloons ready for the Big Lebowski festival tonight at The Lanes, Bristol, put up a wall in the studio, painted that wall, watched 4 episodes of the L word whilst doing most of the above, made a friend a birthday present collage, bound my birthday blind-drawing papers, wrote this blog, started my glue molds,So these 'glue molds', they are for my my exhibition: 'Surface/Space/Time' at The Crypt Gallery, London (26th Aug - 9th Sept) which is curated by and also showing the work of Sam Clift who is a nice chap that I went to uni with.I have been meaning to get on with starting the glue molds for months. I created some whilst at uni, and made this small quilt with them:The idea I have for the exhibition is very similar, but with edited colors and on a much larger scale. The patchwork is made by filling big spoons with a mix of PVA, water and ink. They take AGES to dry, and the final stage sewing the patches together (but i'm thinking about spray-mount??)Today I started working out the quantities of glue to water I need to make the perfect mixture for the molds. I have five plastic cups, 1-5, 1 has 30 parts water to 70 parts glue, 2= 40:60, 3= 50:50, 4= 60:40, 5= 70:30 I need the mold to be the perfectly supple, and not brittle. I have poured the liquids into 5 different ladels, and I'll wait (about a week?) to see which mixture makes the perfect consistency of mold. Process! It's been a long time since I focussed on process. It's where my heart lies with my art, and it felt really good to get into this again today.
I have been working pretty hard on my 'Text Project' and needed some escape from that. I've chosen it to be mundane and repetitive, and I love that, but sometimes I do need to release some more creativity within some other format. And yesterday, this came through mono printing. I used my little roller, and a piece of acetate to ink up, it's so easy and mess-free. I used some sequins too, and got involved with drawing a lot of small squares, again - very repetitive, I can't get away from it! The little pictures are not hanging on a washing-line type of structure in my studio - I have always wanted a studio with things hanging from washing lines, and now I have it. I'm so lucky.
When: Friday 9th Oct to Thursday 15th of Oct From 10AM-5PM daily
We are building a two-man wind machine. Thousands of To-Do lists, collected from anonymous donors will be circulated in this machine, and participants will be trying to collect these flying lists. This is surrounded by an accumulation of grocery lists covering the walls from floor to ceiling.
The uncontrollable nature of wind is a metaphor for the chaotic and the unpredictable way that life is. The attempt to grab these lists parrots the way in which we struggle to maintain a sense of order – to discern a meaningful pattern in our lives.
The grocery lists raise questions about the disparate way in which we, in our society, live in such an atomised way. Disintegration of kinship and communities is reflected by how we eat; in small numbers or alone.
Here we have the Receipt Mountains. Barfoot and Duggan have acquired thousands of receipts, all from one person who has collected every receipt from every purchasee in their life. We're working with PVA and getting messy, scrunching it all up and creating a terrain. We're enjoying the process, and plan to fill a space with them, a whole floor of them.
"Hello I am Lucy Barfoot, I have a degree in Fine Art and it feels good. I live in Bristol and have done since graduating in 2008 with a Fine Art degree from the University of Creative Arts in Farnham, SurreyI create a large variety of work, but my love is within sculpture-installation. I enjoy making stuff from ready-made stuff; apples, syrup, lists, petals. I like to make tiny sculptures, sew little lines onto paper, make ink + PVA molds, and blind draw.The word 'quirky' is often used to describe my art - I'm not sure if I like that or not, but it fits. I combine process-led, repetitive actions with a satisfying, sensual aesthetic. I'm greatly attracted to objects, I feel a compulsion for things, and I listen to my intuition - this is my starting point.My work is mostly ephemeral and I like to mix the natural with the man-made."
I used to spend a lot of time on DeviantART, an online community for artists which provides a place for any artist to exhibit and discuss works. I used to upload all my art to there, since i was young till the first year of uni, and my gallery has culminated over 13,000 page-views. I'm heavily mentioning my website on there, so that the followers of my work can have a look, because for 13,000 people to see my current work would be really exciting. Anyway, My deviantart thingy is HERE if you want to have a look.
Happy April! My orchid has five flowers now, and 15 buds.Here's a very old picture of all my materials spread out. I want to re-do this, I still have the same old stuff, but never use it. I'm all pens and pencils and inks and scalpels.
Barfoot and Duggan in action! Lucy and I are using Trevor's reciepts (he has collected every reciept ever since he was 16) to create some kind of mountain. We're working out the aesthetics and concept continually, but getting close to the material - covering it with glue, pushing it around, into cracks and peaks.We're making small ones, well not really small - 4ft x 3ft mountains, and then taking them on location, on a sunny day, filling in the gaps to make one big mountain, then after lots of photographing and thinking, deconstructing it and bringing ithome.
I have such a big stock of collage images from magazines, I could make anything with them. I need to cut out more heads, hands, legs, body poses, trees and less square-shaped things and blocks of colors.
This Saturday I showed my apples in the window of Room 212, which is a tiny Art Gallery in Bishopston, on the Gloucester Road. Three in each window, close to the glass so that people could peer at them and wonder what they are. This great little place is usually brimming with paintings; i got a few funny looks. Here's my profile on the Room 212 website.Today i was at Fairfields Art Gallery in Basingstoke setting up 'Sense' to show as part of the 'Young Contemporaries 2008' show. The circle or apples look a bit ridiculous to be honest. It's tiny! There is no impact. The original circle of the 1,200 will be included in the catalogue, so there will be a history shown.
I went to the Supertoys exhibition at Arnolfini for the second time this Friday with my family. There is a workshop where you can take apart old toys and make them into hybrid new ones. Amazing. Crab-Girl is mine and Dino-Scull is my nephew Ben's.
Working on this triptych for my Mum's Christmas pressie. It's your usual seascape - she lives in a place called Lilliput, by the sea in Poole. I haven't properly painted in ages! It feels strange, but good.
So the first creative venture i went on since moving to Bristol was to paint a mural on someone’s garden wall. It felt great to be back into it, and I am so pleased with how it looks. I’m thinking that this may be the start of something - i would love to continue painting murals.
It’s not quite the ‘real’ stuff - as in the things i was doing during my degree, but that’s OK, it’s nice to be simple and just focus on aesthetics, which is a big focus of my work really.
There is more to come - i was taking a few pictures on my tripod, so i am thinking of making a little animation of the process.
