CELERY

Road marking, Balmain

What is particularly striking here is the clean break of the lines.
Normally these kinds of lines bend, before they break.
These lines travel fast, or normally when we look at them we are travelling fast, faster than walking, certainly. Generally we don’t notice them unless we are driving or being driven.
Double lines too demand close attention. You are forbidden particularly from crossing two lines.
When you make a mistake, at school, it is particularly galling to have mistakes doubly underlined. Two lines rub in the mistake.
Double lines take and hold the eye.

They have certainty and authority.

Double lines travel in a straight line or they bend. They are flexible, rubbery, like the road, compatible with the way cars turn according to shapes delivered by steering.
Road markings generally, provide the score for the driver, not to interpret, but to follow, as if interpretation and safety are unrelated.
For these reasons the image above is quite troubling. These lines do not bend, they break. They are suddenly fresh, like celery.. This is blanched celery snapped like celery can do at the wrong part of the stalk when you want to eat it. These white lines have a celery length to them, in relation to their width.

We don’t want fresh white lines that break. The car won’t deliver a turn with a sharp corner.

Because the lines are quite compact, they can be taken in at a glance. Because the lines function so poorly as road markings, they qualify as art or at least they are sitting art’s test in the hope of qualifying.

Too flat to qualify as a sculpture, it’s quite like a painting though.

Also, this corner has an intimate pedestrian quality which dispels driver territorial marking. This foreignness enhances the scope for wider interpretation.

Celery

More long bow

We see the things that take our eye. Our eye is trained by our interests and taste.

Derailed train on tv

Fish markets, Pyrmont

The things we see have common themes, with no purpose, no deeper intention.

Balmain corner indication.

These observed items emerge without invitation and find themselves In a family.

Fourfold 2019

That something concrete emerges from that family is not surprising, but no too big account should be made of it.

The Crossing

The Crossing was made in 2016.

I had been struggling to find a way of crossing the cultural divide between my culture and Indigenous culture. I couldn’t do it. The gap was too wide so I decided to build a crossing. Because of the scale of the task, it had to be strong and heavy enough to survive outside, and wide enough to reach to the other side.

This is where The Crossing was made. February, 2016

When The Crossing was installed at Sculpture by The Sea, it was installed at Tamarama, where high seas rolled it over. It was subsequently moved to higher ground, (sand), to where the water had never been and it was rolled over again.

The Crossing rolled by the high seas. November, 2016

The sculpture was subsequently brought to Wamboin.

The Crossing installed at Wamboin May, 2020

The Crossing after rain. August 2020

That The Crossing has found a purpose as a consequence of last night’s rain cannot be read as having a greater purpose.

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.

It wasn’t so much we needed a crossing but some water to cross, perhaps.

PlInth rendered secondary!

First Coming

This work is well represented on this website. It may mean I like it or it’s a good one. Each image brings a different representation of the work.
The palette (sic), is still to be removed here. What was a pristine plinth has a supporting role now, no longer a starring one.
Sculptures can be photographed from different angles, distances and lights. Different atmospheres though is a Wamboin phenomenon.

Back misted.

Is the plinth the right shape? The right height?
Time will tell. Time will say. Time never lies.

The consideration of the plinth as an autonomous object, without the sculpture has been waived, but I am sure that once having put its hand up, will do so again down the Wamboin track.

Getting a word In

Very hard to get a word in egdeways, in conversation sometimes.

No time either to formulate an argument. When you get the edgeways word in, it’s sometimes half baked. Something to say is something best written. If there are no readers, listeners, at least the words have been delivered front on, without being squeezed out edgeways.

It’s possible that youth, excitement, conversation and progress go hand in hand. At 68, conversation is something best pursued alone, to produce a worthwhile argument.

Social distancing is perfect.

Dear reader

Dear blog reader,

This blog and I, enjoy some readership. You are not so numerous that at any one time you are most likely the only reader.

Its not a one to one, but almost as good with one to none, with my speaking and your being interested, annoyed, curious, aroused very silently.
It is the privilege of the blogger who can reflect without interruption. The reader is not required to feign interest if they are not interested. They are able to leave at any time. It is a convenient non-relationship.
You the reader though IS able to respond, should you be tempted. Your immaculate silence is optional.
It is a new feature of the blog that readers can like a post, please don’t, or they can make a comment. As the ‘blogger’, I am able to approve the ‘publication’ or not of the comment, should it be rude or advertorial.
To this day I have received 2 comments both of which were approved by me, but have not been published.
It’s a work in progress.

CItiesstriveonstress

Stress hurts the individual, endangers the health of them. Bad for those with whom those individuals come into contact. Everyone gets stressed. Contagious, like other stuff.
For the city though, it can’t get enough, stress. Like petrol, makes the individual rev. A bunch of revheads can make an organisation sing, make a city sing.
Stress empowers striving, reaching, pushing to attain the impossible dream.
Actually, we’re coming to the end of this 200 year experiment. It’s too hard. Achievements don’t stick for long. The sparkle tarnishes fast.
Everything in town is a tip in waiting.
Stressjustmakesamess.

Three

Three trees

Three black wattles have died young. Wattles’ lives have varying lengths. They die or survive for unknown reasons.
Their waving here is young and full of the promise of a future life which turns out was a lie.
They wave and the sky provides an accompaniment as if the clouds were life’s vapours.

They died together, went down as one, companions more in their death than their life.
Three conjures significance as if a story is embedded. Even without knowledge of religion, the scene has a biblical resonance. ‘They gave their lives for us.’

The three trees make a unit. There is a compelling unity. They separate themselves from the landscape, when the rule of the landscape is that nothing can be separated from the whole. No one thing shall be idolised is the rule here, at Wamboin, here in Australia, here in the world and yet?

Wamboin postcard a new take

Photos kindly provided here show a different take on Wamboin.

Detail of The Interior 1990. Photo: Anne Murray

Detail The Interior 1990. Photo: Anne Murray

The blurred middle

Plug half full

An inverted plug in the basin at Wamboin speaks of a plug half full and half empty.

We live in a shed here at Wamboin. To keep warm we have built in an insulated, heatable corner with bed, couch, tv and computer.

This has become the indisputable’inside’. Building it made what was previously inside more like outside, without the the wind and rain. We now call this place we cook and spend most of our time ‘midside’. ‘Midside’ is a very particular place, both inside and outside.

We have coined a companion word, (like ‘frile’, I expect, which was already coined*), which also describes this space, which is the ‘midterior’. Being that these between spaces are being widely cultivated by architects, this word ‘midterior’ would be well employed if it has not been coined.

The world was a simpler place when it could be divided between interior and exterior. The ‘interior’, ‘inside’, had provided protection from predators and a ‘wild’ nature. The exterior was a place to which one escaped and was also naturally more at risk.

Now danger and safety are indiscriminate about where they manifest their natures.

The plug was used to hold water from going away, it is here poised, hesitant, wondering about its purpose.

Language is becoming quite leaky. The basin is a leaking vessel.

• See earlier blog, ‘The Frile’.

Plinth

The form work

Having abandoned the plinth, as we were required to do, as serious sculptors, it is with some trepidation and anxiety too, to make a plinth to better show a work.

Formwork filled

It is only a workmanlike task after all, nothing to dwell upon, or take to heart. There is no scope for a more complicated relationship. It is material. To be placed in order, one step following another, no more than walking.

Like making a cake, or a bed, the satisfaction of stepping back to be able to declare the job done. It is not a shame to smother a sculpture on it, for which it was designed.
It is not.

Mattress of concrete

The Fountain

The 2020 Fountain

It’s hard to come up with a fountain.
Duchamp took the fountain past water.
It was the race to the last full stop and Duchamp seemed to have won. But could water find scope in a new sentence?

Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ describes the absent urine, the water going in, rather than coming out. You could only imagine it though. There was room for just the one stream, It’s the idea of water, yellow. Romanesque. Bigger suddenly with the imagined participant standing nearby. You almost have to stand back, avert your eyes.

Not trying to make a fountain helps. Drilling into a steel plate seems innocuous, while installing a shelf in the tool shed. When the drill breaks through into the ground though, and finds the water pipe with twenty acres available, that’s something to which one takes notice.

That water should be now coming out of the ground, someone pissing from the grave, seemingly, it can’t be ignored, dismissed as merely astonishing or funny.

This happened today, immediately after watching a documentary on the Louis 14th’s fountains at Versailles.

The above photo shows a moment in the life of the fountain. A video may have brought more of the liveliness of the fountain, but video is not available in this blog format.

Wamboin postcard

Blood in the gully

and

Unknown sculpture. C.1987 Retrieved 2020

Sydney postcard

July sky

Sydney’s like London, a carbon copy when carbon was ok.
Yes. It does have a different climate, and sky. We always imagined the distance and difference vast, but no. It’s the same mismatch of pre-industrial, industrial and and post-industrial buildings separated by roads and parks and people dressed for town. It’s got the same emissions. Values are shared and also under investigation.
So flying’s off the radar, which is great. Go to Sydney and you go to London by default. Go to Sydney, go to most cities, to achieve a similar if not the same result.

Travel promises to deliver difference, exoticism. It worked well for the travel industry, but badly for the climate.

If you want to try for something different, don’t make so much money!

Careless beautiful

Architrave snagged

The length of the architrave snagged by the trees held to the truck by one rope pulled at an angle just short of breaking, constitutes carelessness on the one hand and a rare conjunction on the other, worthy of recording here.

Snagged architrave

Finely drawn white arcs reach up to connect with a dark web of lines and deny their alignment with the truck. By being both no longer part of the truck and not entirely married to the tree, they become one autonomous object.

One does not expect to encounter a ray of light by day, in this location outside the light light shop at Queanbeyan, of all places.

Before I identified the reality of the dislodged load, that’s what it was, for maybe two seconds.

I am not ready to identify that which seeks to be illuminated. The rays do appear to reach through the tangled web though, which is promising. . .

Crows nest postCard

Hayberry Street

It’s not often you get dialogue between the road and a tree. Because of the presence of the tree (in the photo above), the road marking’s shape and length become pronounced. Because of those lines, the bends in the trunk curve more strikingly.
This conversation forms the gateway to my brother’s house. It is a portal.
‘Be ready’, it says.

Reinventing the peel

There is little point going over ground already covered. Some subjects have little scope for reflection or renewal..
Peeling a banana may be one of those subjects.
Having said that, I have noticed I think quite a lot about how I peel the banana which I would like to explore.
On the one hand (sic), I attempt to peel the banana perfectly. On the other, I try to peel the banana a new way every day.

We are modelled in our peeling technique by the monkey. They hold the banana in one hand and apply the ‘peel and rotate until peeled’ technique, which leaves the peel in a hilt over the hand.
This is deeply unsatisfying. Not only do we (temporarily) lose a hand in the process of eating the banana, but also, we are obliged to eat the banana as if it had a top and a bottom and a first and last bite.
The first bite though, is similar to the last. There is no first and last bite, when the first can easily be last and vice versa. The banana needs to have its nature represented accurately.

I peel the banana by cutting the stalk end with a knife. This reduces bruising the end of the banana. I peel down until the flesh of the banana is exposed and then I peel it back towards the normal eating end. This produces not a petal the monkey makes, but a double the length of the banana peel. This is then folded back again to make which it three times the banana’s length. This can be discarded easily, in one part.
Through this technique, I reveal the banana as fully three dimensionally realised.
Its shape is liberated from not having a beginning and an end. It can be now be eaten any which way.
The monkey technique does provide an inbuilt napkin to keep the fingers from becoming sticky. Sticky fingers though is preferable to subservience.

Getting to the truth involves removing the covers, to best reveal what is hidden by the covers. In the instance of peeling the banana, the intension is to maximise the pleasure of the eating.

Old post

This post may be new today but by tomorrow it will be old. It will be old for most of its life. It will sit in the middle of the rest of the posts. It will linger in the shadows without the benefit of the screen light the latest post enjoys.

This post is old-ready.

The usual blog reader tends to be time poor, with no time to linger, to savour. The form has limits. We cannot curl up with a blog as easily as we can curl up with a book. You never hear, ‘Let’s go for a scroll’.

This post functions as a lure, to entice readers into the back catalogue of posts.

Just like the dog, having chased the kangaroos into the dam is then pulled under the water to drown, so does this post entice the reader to scroll onto the murky waters of the past, to drown. (Just kidding).

While posts tend to sit in chronological order, the newest is afforded the best advantage with the implication being that earlier posts have already been read.

I am reminded of returning to Wamboin to find unread newspapers and how compelling and chock full of absorbing stories they are When they are ‘new’, there is the uncomfortable pressure of gulping them down, to be up to date.

The idea of the old post promotes the benefits and richness of looking backwards that our culture has mostly resisted.

I am so pleased to find you here.

Beauty’s frame

Just like a sculpture needs to be hidden, to make you want to look at it, so does beauty everywhere hide. Beauty that insists on being seen, is seen through and is invisible.
The woman at Kennards who rented me the plate lifter was male in gait and in her clothing and her face was dirty. Her voice was rough, in keeping with the expectations of customers. There it was though, plain as day, the face (and body)* of an angel. She was beautiful.

Just like leaves, trees and rocks in front of a sculpture conceal it, to make you want to look, so were these layers of clothes, gait, and demeanour, covers that provided a frame to show the beauty of this woman, this person.

An image of the aforesaid person who served me at Kennards may have been useful to illustrate this idea however, its absence allows us better to imagine her (them) and her (their) **beauty.

* You normally only hear of the face of the angel, as if an accompanying body will somehow diminish the angel status.

** I am only just beginning to transplant gender specific words for gender neutral words.

SplitTing

Can’t do without matches here. Matches deliver warmth and food.
Staying warm requires firewood being split. After a time everything has the capacity to split, even the redheads through the hourglass.

Split Redheads