the continuing adventures of the lower bar collective

It's been a pretty fun year for the LBC - the last three months have been particularly busy - well, relatively-speaking.

Since performing at the Auckland Fringe festival early in the year, we performed for the first time in Tauranga at Major Toms in August.

Then in September we returned to the Audio Foundation in Auckland... roughly 13 months since our debut performance. Was very nice indeed to have Paul Smith (aka Spool, aka Reverbaphon, aka Peace Myth) perform on the same bill - a Scottish architect who makes "off-kilter, non idiomatic music and experimental film. Within the experimental electronica scene he has toured throughout the UK and played alongside artists such as Kieren Hebden (Four Tet), Robin Rimbaud (Scanner), Christopher Horne (Christ / Boards of Canada), Robin Guthrie (Cocteu Twins), Noah Lennox and Josh Dibb (Animal Collective), James Leyland Kirby (VVM) and collaborated with Matt Wand (Stockhausen and Walkman) at the Edinburgh fringe festival."

This month (October) we are scheduled to play in Tauranga again, at Zeus Gallery (kind of coincidentally on the opening night of the Tauranga Arts Festival - we're unofficial). As usual I'll be supplying the imagery for the video projection and controlling that for the performance.

Also this month, we have done a 'Sonic Postcard' for a project running on Audio Foundation's radio station. The Sonic Postcard features a live recording of the Major Toms performance, plus sounds recorded on the Mount beach and a poem I wrote for the purpose. Our postcard will air this Saturday (October 5) here.

Below are images from our Major Toms performance (top two) and the Audio Foundation (bottom).

faith and media

A few weeks ago, I finished reading Bob Briner's book Roaring Lambs. It's been on my 'to read' list since I first became aware of it some 15 years ago. It was published in 1993 and can be considered a seminal work in regard to Christian cultural engagement, one which encouraged Christians to leave the citadel and become involved in the 'secular' world of cultural production. I feel the book is of its time; it still has some things to say, I think, but it left me feeling uneasy, blinking at some of the rhetoric, and examining how my own thinking has changed over the years.

I drafted this piece a number of weeks ago, but let it sit. I'm not a big fan of critiquing what other people believe. And in Briner's case, he made a significant contribution to Christian cultural development, so I feel a little reticent about a critique here too. My last critique was spring-boarded by something that Madeleine L'Engle wrote about chaos, and I felt a bit guilty, because overall her book Walking on Water is beautiful. On the other hand, I believe that Christian writing and thinking on culture is now rich enough to bear critique. And anyway, this stuff is worth discussing... who knows, maybe in a couple of years I'll have changed my mind about some things, or maybe not.  It's all ultimately borne out of a personal process of sorting through culture, theology, orthodoxy, personal experience and personal inclinations. There's no stasis in that process.

In Roaring Lambs, Brimar's thesis is framed around the concept of a battle for the hearts and minds of the (American) population. He paints a vision of Christians infiltrating the worlds of film, TV, music, art etc - making an incursion, having a deliberate agenda and strategy to influence the media towards Christian values (whatever those might be defined as). Thus, although he wonderfully steers Christians away from the negativity and (he says) pointlessness of boycotts and continual complaining, he still adheres to the idea that Christians are somehow under siege; that we are in some kind of cultural battle.

But if this is a 'conflict', then what is the 'other side' doing? I'm sure there may be lobby groups and interested parties (who have ideas that differ from Christian values) who are hoping to influence media towards communicating certain notions, but on the whole, the industry is not like that. I don't think that it's naive to say that, on the whole, the media industry is simply creating product and material to provide to the individual. We could categorise this material in three ways. At 'top' level, producers are aiming to create 'art' - that is, material that seeks to express and investigate the human condition. Also at 'top' level is the idea of providing material that might expand a viewer's understanding of the world. Next level 'down', producers are seeking to create 'entertainment' - that is, material simply for the viewer's enjoyment and diversion - material that will accentuate certain emotions in the viewer in accordance with the viewer's wishes. Then on the next level down again, producers are simply creating 'content' - that is, material to feed the media machine - doesn't really matter what - just push it through and get it out there - better to have something on the screen than nothing. In reality, these levels are not firm categories - a lot of material will exhibit the characteristics of more than one.

I'm not saying this makes media somehow morally neutral - morals and values are communicated in and through all these types of material, but I am saying that the motives of its producers are not, by and large, the intentional propagation of a particular moral agenda. In other words, the material is not intentionally 'evangelistic'.* They are simply producing material out of their own experience and personalities, and out of (and for) the cultural milieu in which they find themselves, catering for the desires of the audience.

We, as Christians, can envisage the whole thing as some kind of battle, but the imagined 'other side' (ie those in the secular world who don't embrace the Christian faith) do not. They are, by and large, just getting on with doing their jobs.

The problem, for me, is that a fixed motivating agenda always seems to create art or media that comes across as somehow not genuine. When the agenda (no matter what that agenda may be) is the creator's primary motive, the art of storytelling, the nuances of reality, and believability, almost always seem to suffer. The medium begins to function simply as bait on the hook. I'm sure Brimer would agree with me on this to a degree - he would argue for the highest quality material. But nonetheless, still this nagging thought that if an art or media is primarily agenda-driven, at some point it will reveal itself as disingenuous, the viewer will smell a rat, see it for what it perhaps really is - propaganda - and turn off.

In my art (or whatever creative output I'm involved with) I want any 'Christian content' to be utterly natural. If elements of the Christian faith are sitting in the subtext of the piece, they are there simply because they form part of the personality of the artist. My beliefs will inevitably inform the way I see the world (everyone has worldview). I hope that the viewer finds the subtext compelling or even attractive (of course I do - all artists do), but have I created the piece with the aim of converting the viewer to a message that I've intentionally woven into the subtext? No. I know from early, well-intentioned, experience that when I've tried to do that, the artistry always suffered and the piece always came out somehow dishonest.

So, should Christians be involved in the arts and media? Of course, why not? Everybody else is. But I don't think we should envisage ourselves as some kind of special agent infiltrating enemy territory - as if we are involved in some kind of cultural 'jihad'. Being involved in the media and arts should be a question of innate personal passion rather than agenda. It's about telling honest stories. For the Christian, their honest story will inevitably touch on aspects of the Christian faith (implicitly or explicitly). But be aware that as soon as art has the aim of converting or influencing everyone towards the artist's beliefs (whatever those beliefs happen to be), it runs the risk of being perceived as what it most likely is - not art but propaganda.

Salt and light have no agenda; their efficacy, any benefit that the world may obtain from them, comes through simply being what they are. Art and media by Christians should be art and media created by real people who have a natural inclination towards creating art and media (an inclination, shall we say, which would be there whether they were Christians or not), being truthful about how life is and their experience of it, operating out of their talents and abilities, honestly being involved as everyday members of society. Investigate human existence and let faith weave itself naturally through your investigation and life as it is wont to do, but don't envisage it as a tasty morsel to wrap around a hook.    

       


* The massive exception to this is, of course, advertising.

truth, art, ugliness, cosmos and chaos

I'm currently reading 'Walking on Water' by Madeleine L'Engle and I took exception to a beautifully rendered and attractive idea that she expresses early in her book. Perhaps the rest of the book will explore the nuances and paradoxes a little more, but the proposal she makes at the outset, I think, needs discussion.

... all art is cosmos, cosmos found within chaos. At least all Christian art (by which I mean all true art...) is cosmos in chaos. There's some modern art, in all disciplines, which is not; some artists look at the world around them and see chaos, and instead of discovering cosmos, they reproduce chaos, on canvas, in music, in words. As far as I can see, the reproduction of chaos is neither art, nor is it Christian. 

But is she right? We agree and disagree. There was a tendency in Christian art theory of the 20th century to set up a dualism between chaos/ugliness and truth/Christian/beauty. A key mover in this was H.R. Rookmaaker. The title of his famous work sort of sums it up: "Modern Art and the Death of a Culture". Historically speaking, it's a reactionary movement (as many cultural, philosophical and artistic movements are). Faced with an influx of modern art which dealt with the unsettling, the confrontational, the unattractive and the chaotic, Christian thinkers responded with an art theory that set truth and beauty in opposition to the nihilistic tendencies of 20th century culture.

And as a believer, you know my heart responds to that idea. The Christian faith is about bringing light to darkness, truth to lies, beauty to ugliness, life to death, existence to non-existence, meaning to meaninglessness. And as an 'artist', my heart responds to the idea of making cosmos out of chaos - and I think, mainly speaking, my artistic intentions are along those lines.

But art should tell all three sides of the story.

I'll state my thesis: chaos and ugliness are not the opposite of truth. Therefore an art which describes chaos and ugliness is not inherently untruthful and not inherently anti-Christian. And it is certainly not inherently 'non-art'.

If one were to describe the world around us - or the world inside us - as it currently stands - one would need to make reference to chaos and ugliness. All this is subjective, of course, but an honest look at things will reveal that the universe (and our experience of the universe) is a dark, cold place (both literally and metaphorically). Nihilism is understandable. Chaos is a fitting representation of an aspect of our existence. Sometimes ugliness is the best way to describe a situation. So chaos and ugliness are true.

I'm not sure which artists L'Engle had in mind when she attempted to argue for the existence of a non-art, but let's say Jackson Pollock, for example, is not inherently untrue and not inherently anti-Christian just because he utilises and represents chaos. A picture in a World Press Photo exhibition of a corpse with its face missing is not untrue and not inherently anti-Christian just because it's ugly. Like it or not, there is an accuracy here about the way the world is and about our experience of the world.

The most common and widely engaged artform in our society is music, so let's look there for a moment. One of the finest and most accurate representations of the 21st century western human condition is the creative output of Radiohead (and the work of Thom Yorke in general). I've read books and essays written by Christians that attempt to imbue this music with Christian 'truthiness' - almost as if they are trying to impose redemption on it to make it true and admissible. There's no need. It is what it is. A fine and accurate portrayal. The music of Burial is another body of work that I think falls in that category. There is dissonance, things set off kilter, static. This stuff is true.

So that's, I think, where the notion of the dualism between chaos/ugliness and truth/Christian/beauty in the realm of art falls down.

All that being said, back to my statement of earlier: art should tell all three sides of the story. Let's look at them. And, as we're used to dualisms - at least we used to be - back in the 20th century - let's begin with the obvious two...

- The universe is a dark, cold place. If we are to accurately describe the world, as I've argued above, we're going to need to describe it as dark and cold. And there are artists who do this with astonishing and unsettling accuracy. So much so that I often choose not to look. It's true.

- The world is sunshine and flowers. Narnia is set to rights. The sun glitters off a placid ocean as you and your loved one sprint across a wide-open field. You cry with love and joy the first time you see your newborn child. Is it true? Some strands of art and human expression would seem to say not. But I'm here to tell you it is. It's true.

If both these aspects of the universe are true, then there will be somewhere where they come into contact... the third side of the story.

- The reality of human existence. Allow me to mention Radiohead and Burial again in an attempt to describe what I mean... amongst the darkness, distraction, paranoia and unbalance, strains of melody and snippets of beauty float to the surface and dissipate. The third side of the story is that the universe and the world is a dark, sunshine, cold, floral place, and we encounter ugliness and chaos here, and snatch hold of beauty and security there.

Personally I find this middle space the most interesting one - it's where tension and paradox is found.

To be true, art should tell all three sides of the story. Given the vast areas that each side of the story represents, I think it is unreasonable to expect any one artist to accurately explore and represent all three sides. But art, as a whole, can. Art can, and should, explore chaos. Art can, and should, explore cosmos. And art can, and should, explore the space where the two collide.

stations of the cross 2013

Stations of the Cross time again. This year I did a video for Station 14: Jesus is laid in the Tomb. Stylistically, I followed on from the work I've been doing with the Lower Bar Collective and, in fact, used an LBC track (Northern Lights) as the music.

The video utilised footage from the estuary near our house which I shot on my GoPro - the camera suspended from a leash that I dangled from a boardwalk over the water. I wanted to use the biblical immersion/baptism/burial metaphor. To that end, I grabbed appropriate scripture fragments from throughout the Bible and recombined them into a kind of poem. I then overlaid these lines on the underwater footage.

Here it is now...

at fringe auckland

Creatively, of late, my energy has been focused on and consumed by working as a member of the Lower Bar Collective - providing the (video) visuals and graphic design for our post-rock based project.

Recently we performed at the Fringe festival in Auckland, firstly at the Whammy Bar (22/2/13), and secondly (pictured above) in the old silos at Auckland's SiloPark (1-3/3/13). At the SiloPark we did seven performances in three days. We got quite a lot of positive feedback from strangers - which is always encouraging and makes the creative process feel that much more worthwhile. Personally, for us as a collective, the silo performances provided a space for something that was extremely creatively exciting. Good times.

Aside from graphic design (for posters, a lathe-cut 12" EP and CDs), my contribution was ten videos to accompany the ten pieces composed by the other guys. These videos were a mixture of things consisting of archival footage, original photography/artwork, original footage (shot on my GoPro camera) and randomised video noise generated by a video synthesizer. For the performances, we used two projectors - one projecting onto the wall just above the musicians, and the other projecting right up into the ceiling space of the silo.

A further contribution was the use of snippets of several of my poems, played as sound samples at various times throughout the performance.

The photos above show the band performing the piece 'Infinitesima' (accompanied by an underwater video shot on the GoPro) and the projection onto the silo ceiling for the piece 'Ends in Tears' (accompanied by photographs from my Safe Little World piece 'Pride & Refuse').

More performances to come, I'm sure.  

ralph and me

I had my first real encounter with visual art when I was in my second year of university. When I say "real", I mean of the type that does what art - ideally - will do... send a pang through your gut, flip your soul and set up a buzz at the back of your head. It'll make you feel sick with the best kind of longing. It was at an exhibition* at the Auckland Art Gallery. For this viewer, it was a stroke of curatorial genius as piece after piece revealed itself and stuck deep.

Amongst this revelatory collection, I rounded a corner and there was 'Black Phoenix' (I always remember the title as 'Burnt Phoenix') - a gritty, real, monolith of a piece, the singed wooden prow of a full-sized boat fastened to the wall - a pathway of charcoaled timbers leading towards it. I embraced it as my favourite work of art, and it remains so today. I memorised the artist's name, Ralph Hotere.

Around another corner, and he hits me again. This time it's with 'Black Water' - a collaboration with Bill Culbert. "In the beginning, the earth was without form and void, and the Spirit hovered over the face of the deep." Black Phoenix notwithstanding, Hotere's particular genius manifested itself in part by the use of glossy black - a fruitful, verdant, reflective black. It was the loam out of which all life sprung at creation, and a surface on which you often catch a reflection of yourself. It this case, the glossy black was on an expanse of corrugated iron throwing back the light of multiple neon tubes springing from its surface, standing like sentinels.

In my third year at university, I purchased the book, 'Out the Black Window', and set about writing an essay for my stage 3 New Zealand Literature paper on Hotere's collaborative use of poetry in his art. The essay was well received. It was my first proper success at university and it had such an impact on me that I considered launching onto a path of becoming a career art writer. The idea still sounds attractive.

My brother, a photographer, was working at a Parnell cafe at the time and had struck up a rapport with the photographer Marti Friedlander. Among the stories that get repeated about Friedlander, one of the common ones is about her access to Hotere. Hotere was famously shy, if not reclusive, but he let Friedlander in and she captured the man on film. Over thirty years later, these are still the most significant photos of Hotere.

Somehow (my brother passed it on I think), Marti ended up reading my essay on Ralph. She endorsed the idea of me pursuing an art writing career. This was all very well, but my heart and ambition was absorbed at this time with a different pursuit - I was clothing myself in the full intention of becoming a great New Zealand poet.

I had just completed a fairly angst-ridden, long (booklet length) piece called 'The Birth Place' and somehow hatched the idea that Ralph Hotere might like to read it. I thought he might like its grand themes of birth, death and rebirth, perhaps to feel a kinship in our artforms (you know, of course, that I really hoped that one day a line or two of mine would appear in one of his paintings). There was way too much catharsis in the poem for it to be literarily excellent - it was mostly a splurge - but what did I know? I was 23.

As a favour, Marti gave me Ralph's address (she is absolved, she did it on the strength of one essay, she never read my poetry). I crafted a letter, dropped names (as I have here), pinned it to a copy of my booklet, placed the whole lot in an envelop and sent it with a sense of excited trepidation.   

I never heard back from Ralph. His silence, if he ever got the booklet, was probably the best favour he could have done me. I hope he threw it out. I hope he didn't pop it in a shoebox with an assortment of other ephemera received from sickly admiring fans. I hope it isn't found when someone goes through his papers now that he is gone. Perhaps he turned it into ashes - he always was a great proponent of fire - in his hands the burning of that poem would have become art - a fitting, the best and most wonderful end.

* My memory tells me it was at the exhibition 'Toi Toi Toi'. This exhibition was utterly remarkable, but researching the facts reveals that my mind has created a mythology about it being my first real encounter with visual art and the first place I encountered Hotere's work. Chronology reveals that it wasn't (on either count). But I like the mythologised version better.  

sailing

I recently purchased a GoPro Hero2 camera. Mainly these are designed for adventure / extreme sports but their extreme wide angle lens, waterproofing and HD video make them interesting for art projects. I decided I needed one initially for the Lower Bar Collective project I'm working on. Underwater / seascape footage would work well with experimental / ambient / post-rock.

Yesterday (Waitangi Day here in New Zealand) I went out sailing with my father-in-law and took the camera with me to dangle off the side of the yacht. Between shooting these abstract / textural images, I also shot a more standard clip recording the sailing experience.

The music is 'From the Dust... We Ran to Greet the Dawn' by Hammock.

gretchen albrecht

In the absence of Christianity, Art would be my religion. It fills much of the criteria - a high regard for the creative spark, the concept of deeper meaning, the notion of the individual placed in beautiful paradox alongside the idea of audience/community, the embracing of mystery, the belief that life is more than calculated science. Of course there are forms of art (as there should be) that critique each of these notions, but art as an encompassing ocean - the world of art - is often inseparable from these elements. Art is a seeking, searching, a questing for meaning, explanation and significance sort of thing that jump-starts and touches on desire. It fiercely flies in the face of the possibility that we are merely primates governed by chemicals and electrical impulses.

Like most of western culture, art has long had a relationship with Christianity. Around the world there is inevitably some reference to religion in the history of art. Because of this history, and because it deals with most of the same existential questions of religion, the terminology and references intermingle. I often experience the snugness of theology and art - and discover experiences of equal weight within the context of a sermon as in an art gallery.

Today I went to church. I went to an art gallery. I don't want to over-sentimentalise this. I don't want to beatify a simple experience of seeing brush strokes on canvas or falsely elevate the ideas of the artist. On Sundays, I go to a church (with a sermon, worship and other Christians) that meets in a rugby clubroom where stale beer is sticky underfoot and provides the dominant aroma. I believe in a spirituality that is at once sacred and rarefied while being simultaneously in touch with body odour and this banal place in which we find ourselves. I am comfortable to say that I came away from the art gallery today with a similar (or perhaps an identical) feeling as I have when I come away from a good sermon, without suggesting that art galleries are set apart as the holy of holies or that the artist is our new priest. But sometimes they certainly function that way.

That's as far as this line of reasoning will go for now. My ardour for that [spiritual/emotional] experience can overwhelm the simplicity of the original experience itself. I don't want to let my desire for meaning to eclipse the event itself. So now let me strip it back.

Gretchen Albrecht is one of New Zealand's foremost abstract artists, and today I went and heard her speak about her paintings. Like most visual artists, she was uncomfortable at first with the idea of standing in front of an audience, but she warmed to it. Eloquent and utterly in touch with her own artistic concept and practice, she was able to speak about the work with the familiarity of the creator but also with the detachment of someone viewing an object that is an entity in its own right. As she spoke, the content, ideas and meaning which you had suspected where woven into the fabric of the painting began to emerge.

By way of a prologue to her talk, she spoke about revelations - large and small - and about the importance of these to her work. Discovering something - wherever that thing may be, in a pohutukawa leaf, in a european cathedral, in heart-rending loss - then bringing it into the art. She isolated this as a defining concept of her practice.

Then she addressed the large piece 'In a Shower of Gold' (two hemispheres of belgian canvas together measuring 2.5m high and 5m wide - a canvas so large that she built a sort of scaffolding over it during the painting process so that she could complete the wide arcs of paint across the centre of the semi-circle). Originally informed by the myth of Zeus coming to Danaë as a shower of gold, the divine encroaches on the pink red flesh in a burst of energy. Sexual? Yes. Spiritual? Yes. An artistic revelation? Yes.

She talks about another large piece inspired during a bike ride along Tamaki Drive to St Heliers with her friend, when the pohutukawas were in bloom. The red of the pohutukawa became a circular whirl or dance around the equalising horizontals of grey and green that were the colours of the leaf. Here she referenced two poems - one of which was by TS Eliot (who, by the way, as a side note to what Gretchen said, ultimately identifies the still point around which everything whirls as being the Word, Christ).

The most poignant moment came when she turned our attention to another large rectangular canvas - a large pink rose shape almost obliterated in black - a super black line and a pure white line described horizontally through the middle of her familiar oval motif. "I have to tell you," she says, "that in 2010 our daughter-in-law died very suddenly." Her son returned from a trip to the dairy to find his wife deceased upon their bed. The revelation of this autobiographical context travels up the back of your neck and over the top of your head in a spontaneous identification with the emotion. When Gretchen first heard this news, she had a painting of a pink rose form - a work in progress - on the floor of her studio. It was too bright and cheerful for the situation, she said, so she covered it in black paint, allowing the pink to show through in places, and put the dark black and bright white horizontal lines through the middle. Her meditation on death.

The first privilege is to see the paintings. The second is to encounter the artist. The third is to have the paintings elucidated. The fourth is to not have remained unmoved. And here I'm lifted beyond my own little world once again.

        

 

a place of its own

That Lower Bar Collective stuff I've been harping on about has a place of its own. On the new website you can see music videos, get updates - that kind of thing. Champion...

Here's the link now:

http://lowerbarcollective.tumblr.com/

Don't mention it. Oh, actually yes please do mention it - share the love, leave comments, like our posts - support us in the ways that your fingers, ears, eyes, voices, minds and generous hearts enable you to.

What's creativity without love?

lower bar strikes back - for the first time

Here's the info flier for the current creative project I'm involved with: the Lower Bar Collective... post-rock experimental music melded with visuals. The first performance is on July 13 in Auckland... (click it to see it bigger like)

lower bar collective

The latest Safe Little World project is creating video visuals as part of the music/creative collective known as the Lower Bar Collective. Other members include Mal Dunn (Colm), Rob Morgan and Matt Findlay. I'm currently cutting footage from an early 1970s kids' nutrition film into something suitable to play behind post-rock experimental music. Performances to be confirmed - first one in july in Auckland.

Station 2

This is the final station I did, Station 2: Jesus is made to carry the cross...

For this one I utilised a style I've been working with for a while now - structuring it as a cluster of small framed prints, and drawing on images from a library of photographs that I've taken over a 15 year period. In fact a couple of the images I used for this piece I also used for the station I did for the Cityside event nine years ago (although that one involved the images being looped on a television set rather than printed and framed).

For the St Luke's event, I used war images photographed off the screen from TV war documentary and news footage. I put the cluster in a slanted / slash shape to reflect the idea of strife and also the forward angle of a person carrying a heavy weight.

This was the most 'obscure' of the three pieces I did, so I included a supporting statement:

When Jesus carried the cross he took on his shoulders one of humankind’s most notorious weapons of execution. Politically, he was carrying the weight of the judgement of the world’s major super-power – the Roman Empire.

Despite Jesus’ actions on the cross, we have continued to devise weapons and tried to conquer each other.

War is where all of humanity’s worst traits come out, so it serves as a fitting metaphor for what was laid on him.

In carrying the cross, Jesus chose to carry our strife, hatred and suffering (past, present and future) and the pain we inflict on each other and inflicted on him.

Here's a mock-up of the piece - each photographic print is 6x4" (click to see it a little larger):

Station 12

The second station I did (and I'm actually posting these in reverse order) was Station 12: Jesus dies on the cross.

I did this station once before, for the Cityside Stations of the Cross exhibition in 2003 (but with a different piece)... I always feel like this is kind of the climax of the story that the stations tell (seeing as the resurrection isn't part of the traditional stations) so there's probably a bit of pressure on this station from an art perspective. Anyway, I went pretty subtle.

The style of the image is actually one that I'm working on extensively at the moment, so I utilised it for this piece. Essentially the method involves taking a human form, reducing it to lines (sort of a schematics of the exterior of the human body) then 'exploding' it, dragging points and lines out from the schematics to describe the path of particles flying outwards from the body. It has something to do with showing that the body is fragile - made up of particles and bound together by whoknowswhat.

In the figure of Jesus, I hope it demonstrates that he is human, making a sacrifice, the creative energy of the universe (the breath of God) exiting as his life is given up. I also consider the particles to be a representation of humankind's sin that attached itself to him in the sacrifice.

The working method is digital but once it was printed out onto art paper, I wanted to do a non-digital intervention. The original concept was to use wine as my water colour pigment. In the event, it turns out that merlot dries to a kind of violet colour. Quite a nice colour actually, but not very indicative of blood. So I added a red water colour pigment to the wine - which gave me the final result.

I had hoped that the smell of wine would persist on the piece - and it certainly did while it was wet, but after it dried the smell mostly disappeared. So I put the piece behind glass in the end seeing as there wasn't much chance of the wine smell being obvious anyway. The wine is still there in the process though and I think that's important.

When the piece was set up for the stations, it was framed in a light wooden box frame and lit with a votive candle on either side (click to see the image a little larger).

Station 14

This year St Luke's had a Stations of the Cross Easter art event... over the next few days I'll be documenting the three pieces I did for this.

A bit of background: The Stations of the Cross dates back to the pilgrim trail through Jerusalem (probably during the 1400s), in which the faithful would retrace the traditional route that Jesus took on his journey to death. The pilgrims would pause for reflection at significant sites. These 'stations' (usually 14 of them) were transplanted back to Europe and recreated in various forms and places so that the faithful could make the same observances without travelling to Jerusalem.

In Europe (and subsequently other parts of the world), these stations were given artistic representations. Historically, these exist as a fine example of Christian art.

I'm not sure of the contemporary history of utilising the stations globally, but in New Zealand the practice was reinvigorated in 1998 (and in subsequent years) by Mark Pierson at Cityside Baptist Church in Auckland. In this context, the stations became an annual and serious art happening that drew a certain amount of mainstream attention. Artists from the Cityside community were each given a station to interpret as they saw fit. Cityside's exhibition became an impressive and immersive experience, and the concept was picked up by other groups around New Zealand - perhaps most notably by Peter Majendie in Christchurch and Dave White in Hamilton.

On a smaller scale, the concept of the stations of the cross being used as an opportunity for artistic expression at Easter has been picked by Christian communities around the country, and has almost certainly played a part in contemporary Christianity rediscovering and more actively engaging in the visual arts.

Which brings us to a couple of consecutive Sundays in April 2012, and to St Luke's - a little church in Mount Maunganui that meets in rugby clubrooms.

Station 14: Jesus is laid in the tomb

I've been wanting do some model-making for a while now. It seems like a logical interpretation of my safe little world concept. So I seized the opportunity to do a fairly literal piece for Station 14.

I collected materials from around the place: an unbelievably beautiful stone from the beach at Kaiaua on the Firth of Thames, a square of MDF board from the Seagull Store at the Thames dump, some chicken wire mesh, some two dollar shop poster paints, some newspaper, PVA, some dirt and some special model-making 'grass' from the model shop. The piece was further sparked by a little wooden life drawing posable model that I discovered by accident at AJ's Emporium. When wrapped in crepe bandage, the model became the body.

The final piece was interactive. The viewer was able place the figure into the tomb, feel the weight of the stone and then place it over the mouth of the tomb to seal it up.

Baseboard dimensions: 570 x 510mm

And here are some progress shots...

installation views

Well, the piece is now up at draw inc., in Hamilton. Some installation views and video...

safe little world: gallery installation at draw inc., hamilton, new zealand from andrew killick on Vimeo.

quote

another quote apropos to the safe little world thing:

"The work you do as an artist is really play, but it is play in the most serious sense. Like when a two-year-old discovers how to make a tower out of blocks. It is no halfhearted thing. You are materializing - taking something from the inside and putting it out into the world so you can be relieved of it."

Leslie Dick, faculty of CalArts, when asked “What is an artist?” in Seven Days in the Art World, by Sarah Thornton.

exhibition (at last)

an exhibition...

14 -21 November

draw inc. 35A Ward St

Hamilton, New Zealand

micronaut

Last weekend, while visiting the World Press Photo exhibition at the Tauranga Art Gallery, I unexpectedly encountered the work of New Zealand artist/illustrator Graham Percy. Big, bad, wide world, shrunk beautifully down, as I ascended the stairs to the upper gallery, into safe little world.

Then I wandered across the road into the city library to see if they had the book of the Percy exhibition. It's called 'A Micronaut in the Wide World'.

"A micronaut" says Gregory O'Brien in his introduction to the book, "is someone who dwells on or is moved by small things; he or she is a student of miniature objects or a traveller across minute spaces. Seated at his work table in his South London town-house, Graham Percy was a micronaut par excellence. His eyes would scan the objects, works of art, postcards and books in the room. He began with these, the smallest, most unassuming of things."

"As well as being an astute observer, Graham was scholarly in his attentions. If he were to sit down with the present book, I imagine one of the first things he would do is look up the word micronaut in his dictionary - to find it derived from naut (Greek), 'a sailor'. Micro- is easily sorted. If he searched further he would find the term was used by an American [toy] distributor in the 1970s for a range of science-fictional tin figurines..."

"Continuing to research the word 'micronaut', he might arrive at Friedrich Froebel, an nineteenth-century German educationalist best known as the inventor of the kindergarten. Froebel described the child as the archetypal micronaut - an explorer who should be left to make his or her own discoveries. Since Froebel's time, much has been written about the affinities that exist between the modern artist and child. Graham Percy's approach was very much that of the wonder-struck child... Weaving together imagined and observed realities, and inspired by intellectual as well as material accumulations - the books and bric-a-brac with which he surrounded himself - his 'micronautical' art embraced the wide world beyond the personal and private.'

Boom!

Percy's love for his little world was so complete that, when he died, his ashes were placed for safe-keeping inside a scale model of the Le Corbusier-inspired house in which he and his wife lived for 26 years. The model is kept within the real house. It is made of tin, wood and frosted glass. You can put a candle in the front section of the model house so that it lights up - to remind you of Percy working on his drawings late at night. O'Brien describes the model as the "last residence of a micronaut".

I'd never heard of a 'micronaut' before, but I want that title! For this micronaut, there is too much to get excited about when I connect all this with Safe Little World.

bret vs rod: the punch dance

VS



VS (the original)

Pledges

I'm raising capital for an exhibition project I'm working on at the moment. I'll be exhibiting a large piece (consisting of 23 individually framed images) at draw inc in Hamilton, NZ.

Good times! The pledge target is NZ$350 - which sort of covers the cost of framing.

So, if you'd like to be part of it, you can pledge. Pledgers get sweet Safe Little World items as a thank you.

Get amongst. Click the link below to check out the project and / or make a pledge:

www.pledgeme.co.nz/Crowd/Details/31