Feeding the birds

This weekend, a handsome new bird feeder arrived on my doorstep; within the next day or two, it'll be mounted to hang from the big old tree in my front garden. The bellbirds, kereru, wax-eyes, tuis and I will be able to enjoy breakfast in each others' company - perch to porch - each morning.

If birds could write thank you letters, I have no doubt there'd be a stuffed mailbox for the kind and clever person who hand-crafted this safe-haven for our feathered friends. It's beautifully made; the wood (cedar, manuka, macrocarpa) will silver over time and the copper flashings will tarnish as they're exposed to our salt-laden harbour-side weather; this feeder's built to last.  

A small green visitor (spot the cicada?)

I'm in contented nesting mode at the moment; after several years of accelerated adventure, learning and transition, it's good to be settling back into a quietly considered rhythm. What pleasure to be able to plunge my hands daily into the rich, fertile soil of home. House, studio and garden are getting a good deal of much-needed attention; since returning from my last big trip, I've laid the grounds for a new body of work and when I haven't been in the studio, I've been outside digging up and re-planting a section of my garden that seems to me to have been waiting for this kind of time and dedicated affection. 

Every now and then it strikes me that I'm in the slightly surprising company of clarity, ease and balance. Dare I believe this might even become a sustainable pattern?  

Speaking of balance, my much-anticipated spirit vials (the 'bubble' components used to make builders' levels and to provide a level axis on navigation instruments, cameras, etc... ) arrived from the US. Yay. I was relieved to find them waiting on my front doorstep when I returned from Wellington a week or so ago. I'm incorporating these fragile glass vials in a series of paintings and sculptural pieces for my exhibition at The Arthouse in Christchurch in August. The vials (as object and metaphor) are integral to what's been a life-long exploration into the methods and modes of relationship we play out in our lives. This new work addresses the various imperatives of solitude, one-on-one companionship, family, small group dynamics and, too, communal, collaborative exchange. (I'll say more about all this as the process unfolds.)

As I write, it occurs to me that certain things - whether bird feeder, spirit vial, opportunity, challenge, departure or meeting - certain things come along at precisely the right time. 

Going back to birds for one more moment... They make me think warmly of my father. My childhood home in Johannesburg was named Izinyoni (Zulu word meaning 'home of birds) and feeding birds is a ritual my dear pa - now living in the UK - has been faithful to for as long as I can remember. He advocates that we have much to learn from birds, that nature is nurture. 

 

Compost

How often do we encounter loss and love back-to-back; death and life, back-to-back; the sacred and the profane, back-to-back; equilibrium and turbulence, back-to-back; grumble and gratitude, back-to-back? 

On a grand scale as well as in our ordinary, everyday lives, the extremes of our human reality jostle for attention and take up sometimes uncomfortable residence beside each other.

Christina Bryer's fragile porcelain form shares the Antarctic ocean floor with a Nemertine (ribbon worm) - photo: Shawn Harper

The subject of polarities is a vast one that could quickly lead to the exploration of many corners and layers of both our individual and communal existence. The reason I bring it up is because there's evidence of this paradoxical 'back-to-back-ness' everywhere one looks at the moment and it seems to be happening as insistently on a personal level as on a local, regional, national and global one. There are junctions and disjunctions, congruencies and disparities, fractures and healing opportunities at just about every turn. 

As has been the case since the beginning of time, light and dark are in the throes of emphatically announcing their different potentials to the world. 

Take yesterday, for example - in the States, the exemplary (and - charmingly - domestic-as-oatmeal) Obama family was shown bonding delightedly with their new puppy; at the same time, Barack's head must have been dogged by ongoing issues of concern for the people of Afghanistan and Iran. Beyond the comforting domain of family, his nation's top sixteen banks are under question and under scrutiny; safety and threat, back-to-back.

In Zimbabwe, where Mugabe continues his despotic reign of terror, small acts of kindness are lifelines to hope; survival, a daily triumph. In Fiji, one man's hunger for power has led to violence and chaos - and the world is protesting, 'this is not okay.' In South Africa, Jacob Zuma (bigamist, alleged rapist, a man with blatantly questionable morals and ethics) looks likely to become the country's new president... and even as pre-election tensions rise, people around the world are being inspired to take positive action towards the ever-increasing tragedy of South African children orphaned by the HIV/Aids crisis. 

In my own small home town of Dunedin, the Rugby Stadium issue (I want to whisper and shout about it at the same time, gross absurdity that it is) has brought out the very best and worst in people. The lack of insight demonstrated by the deluded folk driving the pro-stadium madness has drawn us out of our complacency and onto the streets to protest. The sense of a community united is more palpable today than it's been in ages - or so it feels to me. 

  

Every day, we are witness to (and by proxy, participants in?) acts of brutality and courage, cowardice and compassion, greed and generosity, despair and promise. I'm not sure what it is I'm trying to say here; certainly I had no idea this was what I'd write today, nor where I'd end up. 

I started with a question, and it looks as though I'm finishing with one. I ask it of myself, of course - ought not we to be our own first port of call? - and put it out to you, too. What is being asked of us in these times?   

Tracking

I'm posting this image for Jan in the UK. Jan recently pointed me in the direction of Wegener's Jigsaw by Clare Dudman (thank you, Jan) and while I don't yet have a copy of this intriguing, Greenland-based book in hand, something about it - together with the timbre and ethos of Easter - lead me to re-contemplate this painting.   

I hope your weekend's been warm in the middle and soft around the edges. 

Tracking I - Gesso, acrylic, ink & pencil on a plywood crate lid - 2006

Leather banana

I've just spent an enthralling six days up in Wellington working on a collaborative project with jeweler, Kate Alterio.  Metal + flame = sure-fire delight. At some stage, I'll write up a bit more about our shared process, but for now would like to introduce you to my thirteen-year-old leather banana.

I'm absurdly fond of this object; it first accompanied me to my George Street studio way back in 1996. It was supposed to be lunch, but you know how it goes; one gets immersed in work and forgets about one's stomach; the banana ends up languishing amongst pastels and paints till it's long past eating. Days become weeks, weeks become months and months become years. Thirteen, in this case - almost as many years as I've been living in Dunedin. I quickly became intrigued by the daily metamorphosis taking place in this once green, then yellow, then brown, increasingly reptilian-looking piece of fruit. 

This same - as yet, unnamed - banana has moved with me to three different work spaces. It currently has pride of place on one of my studio work shelves where it lives cheek-by-jowl with various other bits and pieces I've collected over the years - precious things like Katherine's porcelain vessels, metal and wooden type face, spirit levels and rusty old bolts, a ship's lamp and quay-side detritus. 

Pablo Neruda has written extensively on the value of the overlooked object. Here's a favourite excerpt from his piece Towards an Impure Poetry -

'It is well, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coalbins, barrels and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter’s tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all harassed lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things – all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

In them one meets the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substances, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artefacts, inside and out.

Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it...' 

Snap Frozen

This is a transcript from Sunday night's Pecha Kucha presentation - a little long as a blog entry, but a welcome opportunity for me to synthesize certain aspects of a rich and significant period of my life. 

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It has been my joy and privilege to travel to Antarctica twice in the past three years. As a place - and as a metaphor - the continent and its community have altered me and my way of being in the world. Antarctica epitomizes the back-to-back existence of constancy and change, devastation and transformation. The landscape draws and re-draws itself, an echo perhaps of the processes we are called on to practice and refine in our lives.

   

Last year, during my second season on the ice, I took along an unusual assortment of 'props for projects.' Along with the expected things like notebooks, camera and pencils, I packed a flotilla of 97 gessoed and painted paper boats and, too, thirteen high-fired porcelain bell vessels (the latter made by Cape Town artist, Katherine Glenday.). When gently struck with a soft-headed tympanum-type stick, these vessels emit a range of resonant bell-like tones. My scientist collaborator friend, Sam, and I played and recorded these instruments in as many research sites and weather conditions as time and imagination allowed, the intention being to incorporate these recordings as sound tracks in a series of short art and ArtScience films...  

A collection of porcelain sculptures also accompanied us down to the ice. South African artist Christina Bryer was inspired to create this series of exquisitely fragile forms when she encountered the structural and mathematical complexity of the microscopic aquatic organisms - Foraminifera - that Sam and his fellow researchers have been studying in Explorers Cove waters for the past quarter of a century. 

 

It struck me recently that I have a penchant for things that begin with the letter P - people, place, paper, punctuation, paint, pastels, protists, prime numbers, poetry, pattern, portals, poppies, pistachios - and, of course, passion itself. By the time I get to the end of this conversation, hopefully there will be a portrait of the White Continent that is more than bare bones.

With the sea ice like polished glass in places, it is necessary to wear crampons when out walking. These occasionally 'sproing' off one's boots and land in oddly configured shapes on the blue.

Antarctica is alive with stories. In the image above, one of Christina's porcelain pieces alludes to a legend that tells of a rare, snow-white petrel that flies both Arctic and Antarctic skies. Skuas (tenacious, and - I think - largely misunderstood survivors) prey on these petrels and will devour everything but the bone that spans their shoulders and defines their wings. When all is said and done, what's left of the petrel drifts to the ground like fallen angels' wings. It's a gruesome, but somehow tender image.

 

When salt, oxygen and ice get together, the collaborative artistry they demonstrate is extraordinary. Above, alphabet soup....

and here, an elaborately filagree-d lattice formed as a result of subtle changes in temperature in the ice's internal and external structures; this small beauty found snap-frozen above the algal mats in Lake Hoare. 

From above, to below the ice (my thanks to Shawn Harper for the following two images)... divers enter a surreal, dreamlike space where forms become quasi-weightless and silence reigns even more supreme than it does in the world above. Research divers (Sam Bowser, Henry Kaiser, Steve Clabeusch, Cecil Chin and Shawn Harper) set my flotilla of boats adrift in this mysterious 'other' place, then filmed them voyaging in communal groups as well as 'going solo.' The implied metaphors are self-explanatory.  

 

Photograph - Shawn Harper

Sam, Shawn and Henry also took Katherine and Christina's porcelain forms beneath the ice, 80 feet down to the cold ocean floor. Transported upwards by way of trapped bubbles, they - the vessels and boats - drifted in slow motion up to the ice ceiling.

When I was in the US last month, Sam and I teamed up our exceptionally generous and gifted videographer friend, Mary Lynn Price and embarked on learning a raft of film-editing skills required for further work with the glorious film footage captured on these dives. 

Photograph - Shawn Harper

Each day, walking around our camp, or on the way out to the dive sites, we would pass things tragic, triumphant, amusing, magnicent... the 'skin map' shown here is the pelt of a mummified seal estimated to be around six hundred years old.   

And every once in a while, an ice rabbit - 

The following 'belly button of the Canada Glacier' made me think of our Moeraki boulders - each landscape, an archive of hidden secrets, neither one in any hurry to deliver itself of its charge, till suddenly - or so it seems - there they are; rocks/blueprints no longer sheltered but exposed to the dazzling reality of the outside world. 

Portals always get me wondering - this one, a 'closed opening' on the carcass of a crashed plane near Pegasus airfield. No one died in the accident. Somewhat absurdly, a man named Dave from Dunedin had scratched an 'I was here' announcement into the plane's tail rudder.

Sometimes, in the solitude of that vast wilderness space, the ice conspired to keep one company. . .

Victoria Finlay wrote (in Colour - Travels through the paintbox), "I had thought, when I set out on my travels... that I would somehow find, in the original stories of colours, something pure. It was a naive Garden of Eden moment, and of course I forgot about the rainbow serpent that had to be there in order to make it a real paradise."

I have always been moved by surfaces weathering. This fondness extends as much to things decaying as it does to the aging human face. I'm inclined to think that evidence of weather equals the truth of the story.

Aah, man and the environment. Never a more fragile, urgent relationship than now. How often resistance and compliance go hand-in-hand; it's a process that calls for pause...

 

... which brings me to my conclusion. This last photograph was taken in McMurdo base, not long before I left the continent for the final time. I was lured outside by a strange and haunting sound. The wind had come up and for some reason had set the small town's communication network humming. I hadn't heard harmonics quite like this before - neither will I hear them again. It occurred to me that for the briefest yet immeasurable moment, the elements and our well-intentioned, but oh-so-clumsy human presence had met throat-to-throat and were harmonizing.  

I slept like a child that night, the continent's lullaby in my ears.

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Let this be my quiet, true note of thanks.

Pecha Kucha & the Stadium

Dunedin is abuzz with things edgy and experimental this March. The Film Festival has drawn to a close and the Fringe Festival kicked in. Programmes are readily available in the city's cafes, cinemas, galleries, the library, etc... There are loads of exciting productions, exhibitions, plays and happenings to look forward to.    

I'm to be one of twelve presenters participating in the city's inaugural Pecha Kucha event at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery at 8.00PM on Sunday (29 March). 

This will definitely require leaving my shy llama at home and calling on my inner lion. It should be fun, though: if you're in town, it would be great if you could come along. So, saying, there's one big frustration and it's this: our really - really - important Stop The Stadium meeting is taking place in the Town Hall from 7.00PM on, on the same night. Eek. How to be in two places at one time? I'll certainly be at the STS gathering for as long as is possible that evening and do hope as many folk as possible will be turn up in protest of the appallingly corrupt, immoral carry-on that's defined the whole stadium process from woe to go. (Or no go, as we're all hoping... ). Those at the forefront of the resistance movement have been such stoics.     

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Here's a bit about Pecha Kucha (NZ) as a general subject of interest -  

'Pecha Kucha is a unique presentation format started by Japanese architecture firm Klein Dytham Architechure in Tokyo in 2003 as a way of bringing designers, artists and creative people together to share their passion and ideas. The idea of Pecha Kucha is to keep presentations concise by only allowing presenters to show 20 images with 20 seconds per image. This equates to 6 minutes and 40 seconds per presentation. Pecha Kucha nights are now held in over 140 cities worldwide and have been established in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Nelson, Christchurch, and now Dunedin.'

Presenters at Dunedin Public Art Gallery - Sunday 29 March, 8.00PM

LUCA HEINS - Industrial Designer, Pecha Kucha NZ founder/Coordinator

GAVIN O'BRIEN - Designer, Lecturer at Otago, University Design dept

JANE VENIS - Sculptor, Polytecnic Design dept

SIMON KAAN - Artist

LYNE PRINGLE - Dancer, Bipeds Productions

FELICITY MOLLOY - Pointy Dog Dance (Akld)

PETER ENTWISLE - Historian, arts columnist

TIM HEATH - Architect, Eco Sanctuary

MARTIN KEAN - Design lecturer, publisher

TE RADAR - Comedian

SUDHIR DUPPATI - Artist

CLAIRE BEYNON - Artist

Supporters

This event is sponsored by the University of Otago, Emersons Beer and Aravin Wines. We would also like to thank the Dunedin Public Art Gallery for hosting the event.

Future Pecha Kucha events

If you or someone you know would be a good candidate for a Pecha Kucha Night presentation, please contact the Fringe Festival by emailing director@dunedinfringe.org.nz For more information and the full Festival programme go to: www.dunedinfringe.org.nz

Opening lines

"I often laughed in the middle of the night.

My bones whisper to my blood; my sleep deceives me.

This motion is larger than air; wider than water;

Fly, fly, spirit. A strange shape nestles in my nerves.

Whisper back to me, wit. I'm ready to be alive . . ."

(Straw for the Fire - from the notebooks of Theodore Roethke.)

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"When I was young and longed to write, I was much in love with Henry D. Thoreau. I loved the plain declarative sentences and flat statement of belief from which he built his work: 'Surely joy is the condition of life.' 'We must look a long time before we can see.' 'What is time but the stuff delay is made of?'" (The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, selected & edited by Lewis Hyde)

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"The book had no cover. While sleeker volumes cowered inside their jackets, this one lifted its ragged spine to the sun, a winter sun of thin beams and few hours. A sun that sank red disc of hosannahs." (Art and Lies, by Jeanette Winterson)

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"March 4. - This morning a bunch of sharp rays of light pierced my port as the sun rose over the icy stillness of the north. It was like a bundle of frosted silver wire, and it served well the purpose of an eye-opener. Sleep here is an inexpressible dream. It does not matter how difficult the work, or how great the anxiety, we sink easily into prolonged restful slumbers." (Through the first Antarctic night - 1900 - by Frederick A. Cook , from The Ends of the Earth, An anthology of the finest writing on the Arctic and Antarctic, edited by Francis Spufford.) 

 

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"A great deal can be learned from the study of children's drawings. It is not the actual forms they draw... but their approach to nature and their purpose in drawing which is so instructive..." (Life Drawing, by P.F. Millard 1946.)

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"I had thought, when I set out on my travels - when I first tumbled through that paintbox - that I would somehow find, in the original stories of colours, something pure. It was a naive Garden of Eden moment, and of course I forgot about the rainbow serpent that had to be there in order to make it a real paradise." (Colour - Travels through the paintbox, by Victoria Finlay.)

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"Every day you play with the light of the universe.

Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.

You are more than this white head that I hold rightly

as a bunch of flowers, every day between my hands."

(Selected Poems - Pablo Neruda.)

Global Snapshot in Words

It's something of a surprise to me to realize that we're already well into March. 

I arrived home from the States this weekend and have been doing what my grandfather called 'rustling.' For Pa, rustling meant pottering in his own space: paying attention to things like the stone collection in his study, tidying his drawers or processing the paperwork on his desk. My homecoming has been about some of that to be sure, but there's been a deeper process at work, too. A wall came down in my house while I was away (by design, rather than by accident) so I've returned to a much-altered space. Building is always an interesting metaphor... how often do we find the events in our external world mirror those of our inner one - and vice versa? Suffice to say I'm in reflective mood, content to be back in the warm, if slightly chaotic, lap of home.

I've been more aware of rhythms and cycles than days and dates whilst traveling these past three or four weeks and have only just remembered that March is the month my Explorers Cove 'snapshot' (the criterion was that it be told in under 500 words) is to due to come out in UK-based magazine, * AnOther. I've just discovered it is in fact out there. It'll be published in hard copy, too, but this is the link to the online version. Hannah Lack is the editor for this special global project, something I was privileged to participate in at the end of last year whilst down in Antarctica. 

The introduction to the travel-oriented 'Document' edition reads as follows -    

'... This issue of AnOther Document - a literary magazine within a magazine - takes the spirit of travel and adventure as its theme, reaching out to writers and creatives across the world to explore, dream and discover. 

Musician Adam Green writes a European tour diary, anti-tourist Daniel Kalder discovers Paradise in Texas, we climb a mountain with Robert Facfarlane, journey back in time to 70s Marrakech with Yves Saint Laurent, meet the subway train-chasers with Paris Review editor Nathaniel Rich, and cult director John Waters shares some sights of Los Angeles you won't find on the tourist map. 

Finally, we bring together eight of the most exciting writers working around the world today to describe their view at exactly the same moment in time, capturing a Global Snapshot in Words.  What follows is a stimulating mix of truth and fiction, discussion and discovery...'   

I've posted this photograph before, but include it again here because it was taken at 1.00AM on 27 November 2008, the date and time that coincided with the ed's nominated hour for writing. Sam and I each composed a snapshot that night - he scribed his from his cot in the Jamesway: I sat out on the sea ice to write mine. 

The set of eight short stories (from Russia, Australia, South Africa, the UK, USA, Brazil, Germany and Antarctica) begin on page 27 of the mag. (you'll be offered the option of downloading the full issue as a pdf.). The preceding, more in-depth, articles are rich reading, too.  

* AnOther is a terrific, innovative magazine whose categories of coverage range through Literature, the Arts, Fashion, People, Projects...   

Three weeks - a precis in images

S(t)ill

Site, Ego, Hard, Car

Collaborative journey

Spirit levels - (un)level spirits

Shadow lands

Vacuum. Current. Flow

 Intuition and reason

Cold steel, warm wood

Overlooked surfaces

level heads

Straw for the fire

Electric light orchestra

US traffic lights make me smile and remind me of our NZ bra and shoe fences...  

The private life of lotuses

I didn't know till this morning that lotuses - specifically the Sacred Blue ones - are still able to germinate after 1300 years dormancy.

Something else I didn't know till the first time I visited the US three years ago is that Albany (which is where I am at the moment) is the capital city of New York State. I'm here to work on various projects with my scientist collaborator, Sam. Today, we dissected an approximately nineteen year-old lotus pod (a mere infant) that I harvested from a pond in a Cape Town park during the years my family still lived in South Africa. 

Sam shaved off enough of the outer husk to free two rather shriveled-looking seeds from their protective chambers: we placed these seeds onto an aluminum 'stub' and popped them into an hermetically-sealed 'sputter-coater' where a fine layer of gold was deposited onto their surfaces (a necessary process for most specimens designated for scrutiny by a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM).). Specimens need to be coated with gold because the surfaces of most biological materials are effectively transparent to the electron beam generated by the SEM. There are two detectors in the SEM chamber creating signals from electrons traveling off the gold-coated specimen. These are used to make up images. Without this coating of gold, the electron beam would penetrate deep within the specimen rather than imaging the surface. 

Lotus seeds being coated with gold in the sputter-coater

We spent a good few hours examining and recording the seeds' structure and surfaces via the eye and mechanism of this powerful instrument. I took half a dozen videos over the course of the afternoon and have been trying to upload one so you can see how exciting this method of observation can be... but, ah me - having not uploaded a video onto this blog for a wee while, I can't for the life of me remember how to do it. You'd think I'd know better having just been taught a whole raft of new film and video-related skills! (And why is this paragraph being underlined all of a sudden, I wonder?) Perhaps because it's late. I'm going to call it a day and give things another go tomorrow when I've had a good sleep.   

Meantime, here are a few stills showing the complex landscape of a very small lotus seed -