the june fox

MOB at Australian Centre for Photography

2009-09-20T19:59:00.003+10:00

MOB - single screen view
4 channel video + surround sound
© Cicada 2006

The single-screen version of something I did with Ben Frost + Nick Ritar in 2006 is currently showing at ACP in Sydney. At the time of making we described MOB as:

Moving through and drawing from studies concerned with organic motion... the swarming tendencies of various species (humans included)... viral + emergent behaviors... crowd theory... resonant intelligence within a swarm of many parts...

The work is experienced as an installation with four-channel projection and surround sound. A study of organic motion, swarming behaviors and sound, MOB creates an abstracted environment populated with individual organisms of motion and sound. Within this environment the audience experiences the unfolding of a textural world, which builds up to the point where individuality is neutered and an abstracted crowd organism is formed.

The source audio for this piece was recorded by Ben in a small Icelandic church - a childrens' choir singing "i am lost / you are lost / we are lost".

The source video was created from footage of 500 tiny fish swimming around a custom-made tank while being wrangled by us all with audio and light triggers.

MOB - installation view
4 channel video + surround sound
© Cicada 2006

Showing Off: Bathurst Regional Art Gallery

2009-07-15T13:24:00.003+10:00

Showing Off: Bathurst Regional Art Gallery

7 August - 20 September 2009
A new media exhibition curated by Daniel Kojta

Featuring work by: Keith Armstrong, Ella Barclay, Kirsten Bradley, Cash Brown, Ben Denham, Leah Heiss, Soda_Jerk, Janice Kuczkowski, Alexandra Gillespie & Somaya Langley, Sofie Loizou, Jordana Maisie, Peter Newman, David O'Donoghue, Jasper Streit & Rene Christen and Justene Williams.

My contribution to this exhibition is a Cardboard Planetarium. I think this exhibition's going to be interesting - lots of good work, though how it will all fit into BRAG I'm not quite sure...

Opening 6pm Friday 7 August. Come on down.

misty morning

2009-06-27T13:13:00.004+10:00

Taking off down the road in the truck, early one misty morning with Michelle. Escaping new motherhood for an hour to capture the webs that shine in the morning mist of winter.

The silence was deafening - broken only by drips of dew, bird calls and the gurgle of Campbells Creek. Wet grass, dark trunks clad in lichen, no horizon. The sun weakly burning a hole through from the other side.

Camera full, I went home to feed my little one, with the mist still in my hair.

Microclimates Workshop 2008

2008-11-09T18:19:00.006+11:00

Urban Art Podders in action

The lovely folks at Carclew Arts in Adelaide asked me to do this workshop as the first happening of their new Urban Art Pod, an initiative that takes a bunch of emerging artists / designers and the like and trains them up in the wonderfully sticky monster that is Public Art.

Urban Art Pod: One end of the washing line...

So in October 2008 I spent one fine day with the newly initiated Urban Art Podders thinking, making and baking ideas around the equally sticky concept of ephemeral street art, which in this instance I took to mean street art that is particularly fragile, possibly organic, somewhat crafty and generally not long for this world...

Urban Art Pod: installing clay eggs + sausages on drain/BBQ

This workshop was based apon a similar one that Nick + I did in New Plymouth, New Zealand in 2007 - called, similarly, Microclimates - which was part of the Taranaki Youth Festival there and tied in with our contribution to The Govett-Brewster's show at the time, New Nature...

Urban Art Pod: Happy Birthday...

In short, the Microclimates 2008 workshop panned out as follows: after a slideshow and a discussion about ephemeral work intended for, and/or placed in a public context, the Urban Art Podders were set loose on a large pile of materials ranging from garlic chive seedlings through to spare doll parts, LED throwies, miniature people and string, and were told to have a think and a play. We situated the resulting pieces in an area of downtown Adelaide known as 'Art Alley' that afternoon... the point of the workshop was to loosen up basic assumptions of how Art and Artists can interface with public space, by trying stuff out and thinking about the results (as slap-dash as they may have been)...

Great results and a great crew of creative types. Wishing all within the Urban Art Pod all the best in their coming 18 months of loosely directed lunacy... and yay for Carclew Arts for founding such a great initiative.

- Links to a range of artists' discussed at workshop
- Photos of Microclimates workshop

- Other workshops

Urban Art Pod: Careful...

Life to chicken, death to vacuum

2008-09-05T18:04:00.008+10:00

The City of Sydney is currently doing its very best to revitalize the city's laneways with artish type things. Derivative of Melbourne's 'Laneways Commissions'? Unashamedly! Good 'ol Sydney - not afraid to say 'hey that works good - we want that too'... path of least resistance and all that - I'm all for it.

So City of Sydney put out this thing called 'By George' which was, cunningly, a plow to get Artist Run Initiatives in Sydney to think up projects for the laneways running off George St. And among the fine folk who got a commission was Reef Knot , a loose conglomeration of folks who used to run the Knot Gallery in Hibernian House and continue to put together quite amazing tho frequently poorly documented projects for galleries, councils, festivals and the like on the eastern seaboard (note my lack of links to examples of their fine work).

So, in short, having been gathered together by Reef Knot, a bunch of us are making things for an unwieldy yet wonderful installation slated to go in Angel Place. Entitled 'The Sky is Falling', it is a sorta magical place where the heavens are descending and all matter of stuff is falling out of the sky... but in a non-theatening, childlike, strictly NON-Armageddon type way... yeah? got it? Its going to be beeeyoutiful. Lots of things + sounds suspended from hot-air balloons with sky painted on them. Opening start of October and up for 4 months or so, I believe.

During a slightly tipsy conversation with Michelle McKosker from the Reef Knot core I was trying to figure out what would fall from the sky, so to speak, if I was thinking like a 5 year old. My choices were 1) space, and 2) chicken little.

Chicken Little, you may recall from the picture book, ran around telling everyone the sky was falling, when infact he had been the victim of a gravity-fed acorn assault, until his mummy explained what was what. Somehow 'don't shoot the messenger' got in there and I ended up proposing a (comical, non-threatening) dead Chicken Little, shot through with an arrow...

The whole representation of the vacuum of space was a bit harder, but eventually I sorted it out. A vacuum... with... stars on it...

So The Messenger shouldn't be a problem - I got some advice from my crafty sister-inlaw, and she showed me the way on idiot-proof chicken patterns (I am not much of a sewer - yet). The vacuum situation is more fraught...

Over 10 years ago I inherited a (very) elderly vacuum that looked pretty much exactly like Marvin the Martian of Looney Tunes fame... turns out that this groovy model was produced in 1952 by Hoover, under the Constellation label. Due to its superior grooviness, Hoover have just re-issued it, actually, tho not in Australia...

Marvin (since he came into my keeping) has vacuumed his way thru 10 years of sharehouses, warehouses and venues, and still works, mostly. He would be perfect for the starring role as the Vacuum of Spaaaceee (said in a deep, prophetic voice), but this would involve removing his guts, and rendering him ornamental... is it worth it? I am still trying to decide...

Ergas, Ergo: Exhibition photos

2008-09-05T17:34:00.004+10:00

Ergas, Ergo: Silvershot
Curated by Glenn Barkley
Recent acquisitions from the Ergas Collection.

Silvershot Gallery
Melbourne Australia July 16 - August 16 2008

Solar Powered Cardboard Planetarium (in this instance, more fluro-powered than solar...)
Created as part of the About, above project, 2008.

Upcoming exhibition in Melbourne

2008-07-16T17:31:00.007+10:00

Coming up (actually, it's on NOW) in Melbourne... an exhibition of the Ergas Collection at Silvershot, featuring one of my Cardboard Planetaria! And lots of other damn fine work by young, hot-to-trot and on-the-up Aussie artists...

The opening is sorta a mid-stream affair, being on the 31st July - Silvershot is somewhere in Flinders Lane... *sigh* ... I can smell the tapas from here at Milkwood...

Video: Solar-Powered Cardboard Planetaria

2008-06-03T22:16:00.005+10:00

Solar-Powered Cardboard Planetaria: Video documentation: 3 mins

Filmed in Sydney, Australia: February 2008

A little bit of video documentation from the February 2008 outing in Sydney... thanks to Mr Nick for filming, thanks to Jack for his truck and thanks to the little kid in the green shirt, and his stick.

- Full screen video here
- About, above project overview here

Cardboard Planetarium at Sydney Observatory

2008-05-29T10:37:00.007+10:00

Solar-powered cardboard planetarium - Sydney Observatory, July '08
Cardboard, pinholes, sunlight, rivets, string. 230cm x 200cm 230cm. Edition 3/6
© Kirsten Bradley 2008

Roll up, roll up, Sydneysiders! In honor of their 150th Anniversary celebrations, Sydney Observatory has commissioned one of my Solar-Powered Cardboard Planetaria as part of the general festivities on Observatory Hill.

A chance to contemplate the night sky of 1858, from the comfort of a Solar-Powered Cardboard Planetarium... in the auspicious surrounds of the Sydney Observatory gardens, atop Observatory Hill. Bring a picnic. Bring your friends. And bring a kid, if you can find, borrow or hire one...

The Observatory grounds will be open from 10am-4pm each day of the June Long Weekend (7th-9th June 2008) and, in addition to the Solar-Powered Cardboard Planetarium, I believe you will be able to view the Sun through filtered telescopes set up on the grounds, see inside bits of the Observatory that you usually cannot, do other stuff and generally take in the gobsmacking view of Sydney harbor, while contemplating the firmament above from your picnic rug and intermittently toasting the universe.

** correction - due to rain being the enemy of cardboard, the Planetarium will now be on show during the Festival of the Stars in July, and thence after, for as long as it lasts **

- More on Solar-Powered Cardboard Planetaria: participatory sculture of the About, abov e project:

About, above is a project that considers the plausibility of making natural systems out of cardboard. Drawing on our enduring fascination with the night sky and the space beyond, About, above prods the viewer with gentle questions. The project explores ideas regarding our emotive reactions to natural systems, and investigate our relationship with natural pattern- recognition and our capacity for wonder, in the face of disbelief.
Full project overview

Roots 02

2008-05-18T17:36:00.003+10:00

Potato

Pitchers Sage

Aster

Corn

don't know - two of 'em

Honey Locust

Roots 01

2008-05-18T16:35:00.003+10:00

Koeleria cristata - June Grass

Zea Mays - Corn

Three species of bluestem or beard grasses - Andropogon furcatus , A. scoparius, A. nutans

Smilacina stellata - false Solomon's seal

I have finally heard back from the botanical gardens in Sydney and it seems that things are as i suspected... herbariums do not, as a general rule, collect and preserve the root systems of a plant as part of the collecton/preservation process attributed to a species. To get the dirt (ha) on root systems, one needs to hit up the soil scientists. Or the crop specialists. The botanists seem to be mostly concerned with the bit of the plant that pokes out above the earth...

And all this despite at least 50%, usually more, of a plant exists beneath the earth, not above it... all those stories of tree roots that stretch across fields, or under and across suburbs, in search of that leaky pipe. Thru my other life at Milkwood, I'm now fairly worded up on just how scarce good information on root systems and soil biology and all things sub-terranian are. It's surprising. Yes, there's pockets of great info out there, but in comparison to other biological sciences and areas of research, the stuff under our feet is a complete and utter mystery.

I tend to suspect that a portion of blame lies with the 'green revolution' (ie the post-WWII age of chemical fertilizer) for this... and, as Dr Elaine Ingham has pointed out constantly throughout her career as a maverick soil scientist, there is no such thing as academic research without funding. And guess where 99.9999% of funding for all research pertaining to plants and soil and crops come from? yup. And so, apart from some luminary beacons in the dark such as the Soil Food Web Institute, if you want to research soil and plant roots, you better dig deep, and deeper than deep.

Also the soil and health website has, I rekon, the best resource list on all things beneath the crust...

The Birds Path (after Herschel)

2008-04-29T15:32:00.009+10:00

About above (part 2) - installation view
a camera obscura starmap, installed in a darkened room... the luminous image is created from a pinhole-and-screen version of William Herschel's 17th Century depiction of the Milky Way

detail - with direct sunlight in late afternoon

detail - showing the park and trees outside the gallery window (image has been rotated 180º so you can see the park more clearly)

Some photos from the exhibition... all went well - good feedback, good attendance. I am happy with this little project.

The camera obscura effect created by the installation was something that I thought would be immediately recognisable to everyone that entered the darkened space - but not so, it seems... many people thought it was just light, which moved and got blurry sometimes (that 'blurriness' was the tiny upside-down pictures of trucks and buses passing by outside on Chalmers St).

I really liked how, on a rainy day, the whole effect was this soft, blue light, with little flashes of colour (people passing by in brightly-colored raincoats). And on a sunny day, in the late afternoon, the setting sun created a brilliant array of points of light, a mosaic of tiny pictures of the actual sun setting behind the fig trees of Prince Alfred Park.

myself and Fiona Hall inspecting the camera obscura for quite some time on a rainy afternoon...

I even managed to drag Fiona Hall along to see it and give me some feedback - we spent a couple of hours inside the installation, chatting and watching... Fi had a lot of thoughts to offer (as usual), which was fabulous - we discussed that fine line between over-explaining a work, and providing sufficient information so that the audience would have a sense of 'what it was all about'.

What I love about Fiona's work is how her objects reel you in with their seductive qualities, and while you're examining it you start getting the actual point of the thing (which isn't just what it looks like and in made of)... yes yes, i know that's part of 'art making 101', but still - that balance between the beguiling surface and the layers underneath it is something that I think is very relevant, especially in this world that we live in, right now.

Artist talk time, on the last day of the exhibition - we turned the lights off once everyone was inside and I spoke about the work in the darkness with the starmap glowing happily - the most eerie artists' talk I have ever done...

detail - (cloudy day)

So. The exhibition. 3 weeks of showing and an artist talk later, it's all done and dusted and currently being mulched at some cardboard recycling plant in southern Sydney. But permutations of the project seem to be putting out feelers - the Ergas Collection are featuring one of my solar-powered cardboard planetariums in a show in Melbourne in July. And it also looks likely that I'll be making some more for Sydney Observatory's 150th anniversary in June this year... so we shall see where where these cardboard universes take me...

Photos of the installed exhibition are here - and the cache of photos for About, above as a project in its entirety can be found here.

detail - bus parked outside (image has been rotated 180º so you can make out the bus more clearly)

view of Firstdraft Gallery 3, as seen from the street outside

view of street outside gallery, as seen from the west-facing window which contained the camera obscura... this was the view that made up the tiny pictures

detail - showing the park and trees outside the gallery window (image has been rotated 180º so you can see the park more clearly)

About, above: Exhibition at Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney

2008-04-19T13:44:00.000+10:00

The Birds Path (after Herschel) - detail
Cardboard, pinholes, sunlight, rear-projection screen, blacked-out room. Dimensions variable. Edition 1/1
© Kirsten Bradley 2008

Gallery 3
Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney Australia
2-19 April 2008

Kirsten Bradley

Artist talk: Saturday 19 April 2008, 4.30pm

This exhibition, the second aspect of Bradley's About, above project is an installation which further explores aspects of natural history, astronomy, geocentricism and the plausibility of constructing a natural system out of cardboard. The installation is in the form of a blacked-out room, which is completely dark except for a sprawl of tiny points of light, which stretch across one wall of the gallery.

This sprawl of glowing points resolves into a pattern based upon a 17th century illustration of the Milky Way, as recorded by William Herschel.

Upon closer inspection each glowing pinpoint of light is, in fact, a tiny camera obscura of the street outside the gallery. As trucks, buses and people pass by, the entire room pulses and darkens with a thousand tiny upside-down images of vehicles, or people, passing through the pinpoints of light. As the sun sets behind the park across the street, the installation becomes a thousand points of direct sunlight, wreathed by tree branches, as the sun sets behind the large Morton Bay Fig trees in the park.

This double optical illusion, which causes the viewer, at first, to doubt their own vision, has been realized through the simplest of means. Large sheets of cardboard, placed against the inside of the gallery window, have been punched with many pinholes, in the arrangement of Herschel's depiction of the Milky Way.

Over this pinhole starmap has been placed a large rear-projection screen, so that it sits up against the cardboard, with the screen only an inch away from the pinholes. The screen becomes the surface on which light coming through the window, and then through the pinholes in the cardboard, creates the phenomenon which is known as camera obscura - an upside down picture of the world outside the pinhole.

The arrangement of many, many pinholes creates many, many camera obscuras on the screen, and creates the overall effect of being two things at once within the darkened gallery space: at once it is both a starmap for glowing points of light, and a mosaic image of the world outside, made up of thousands of tiny images. The resultant work fluxes and moves with the life on the street, glows with the setting of the sun, and, from dusk onwards, ceases to exist until sunrise the next day.

Exhibition room sheet
Exhibition photos

Back to About, above project overview

- process diary for About, above research and outcomes
- photos of About, above research and outcomes

This exhibition was the cumulation of Kirsten's time as artist in residence at Firstdraft Gallery, and was also made possible in part by a grant received from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council and facilitated by Experimenta, in the form of the 2008 Media Art Mentorship.

The Birds Path (after Herschel) - photo of installation
Cardboard, pinholes, sunlight, rear-projection screen, blacked-out room. Dimensions variable. Edition 1/1
© Kirsten Bradley 2008

The Birds Path (after Herschel) - detail, rotated 180º to show park and street outside
Cardboard, pinholes, sunlight, rear-projection screen, blacked-out room. Dimensions variable. Edition 1/1
© Kirsten Bradley 2008

The Birds Path (after Herschel) - photo of installation, showing viewers inside gallery
Cardboard, pinholes, sunlight, rear-projection screen, blacked-out room. Dimensions variable. Edition 1/1
© Kirsten Bradley 2008

The artist would like to thank the Directors of Firstdraft for being such a sterling crew, Fiona Hall for her encouragement and mentorship, Nick Ritar for being himself, Jack Barton for his truck, Michelle McKosker for her enthusiasim, and Sofie Loizou for her floor and her friendship. Thanks also to John Power for his ongoing discussion and to Experimenta for facilitating the Fiona Hall mentorship.

This project has been made possible by Firstdraft Gallery through their Emerging Artist-in-residence program, and by EXPERIMENTA through their Media Art Mentorship program. Firstdraft is supported by NSW Ministry for the Arts and the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

EXPERIMENTA 's Media Art Mentorship project has been assisted by the Australian Government’s Young and Emerging Artists Initiative through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. EXPERIMENTA gratefully acknowledges the assistance of CraftSouth to the EXPERIMENTA Media Art Mentorship Program.

Upcoming exhibition at Firstdraft

2008-04-15T16:51:00.007+10:00

solar-powered planetarium, Hyde Park, Sydney, 22nd February 2008

About, above: Exhibition

Kirsten Bradley

Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney
2-19 April 2008

Artist talk: Saturday 19 April, 4.30pm

About, above is a project that considers the plausibility of making natural systems out of cardboard. Drawing on our enduring fascination with the night sky and the space beyond, About, above prods the viewer with gentle questions. The project explores ideas regarding our emotive reactions to natural systems, and investigate our relationship with natural pattern- recognition and our capacity for wonder, in the face of disbelief.

A project in two parts, About, above invites the viewer into a world of lo-fi nature through participatory sculpture and installation. A suite of solar-powered cardboard planetariums in the streets of Sydney, and a camera obscura universe at Firstdraft Gallery both draw in part on early texts and representations of the night sky, as well as ideas of pattern, navigation, simulation, geocentricism and the peculiar nature of light.

About, above aims to consider how we choose to navigate through our worlds, and how we choose what it is that we see.

Documentation and process of About, above can be found here.

About, above room sheet: click each page to enlarge

All in the pinhole

2008-04-14T16:40:00.001+10:00

Installation view of my pinhole starmap at Firstdraft, prior to it being covered with a screen in order to create the camera obscura...

Camera obscura is something that I am rather in love with, and I have been ever since I made Forgetting you is like breathing water and the Ever Rotating Sky series, back in Banff last June... I do feel that this fundamentally simple yet gawkingly special technique is something that I could spend many years coming to know.

The second part of About, above is therefore a little marriage between the solar-powered-planetarium theme and camera obscura... in the form of an installation in the front gallery of Firstdraft in Sydney.

all in the name of exploring simplicity as an emotional experience, of considering light as a revered substance, and playing with patterns and tessellations and multiple images in order to create a small piece of contemplation... and, of course, the chance to create a cardboard grotto...

Gallery 3, all blacked out with cardboard - there are big windows behind said cardboard at center and at right. The starmap is holes in MDF, attached the window at the center of the image. All this needs is a rear-projection screen over the mdf (on a frame, which creates the necessary cavity between pinhole and screen), the lights turned out, and we're rolling -

my MDF-and-pinhole version of William Herschel's 1785 depiction of the Milky Way (prior to screen palcementover the top). There is an exterior window (west facing across Chalmers St) directly behind the MDF. The camera obscura starmap that is created will measure 2.5m wide by 1.5m high.

Depictions of the path

2008-04-13T08:51:00.007+10:00

The Lund Observatory illustration of the Milky Way, completed in 1956. The original work is 2m wide. Click image for a larger view - it's absolutely scrumptious.

More Milky Way-ness. Like the Orrery, depictions of the sky above have been something we have really tried hard to encompass. And so I must mention a couple of especially endearing representations...

The Lund map of the Milky way (in which you can see the Emu dark cloud constellation quite well) is actually an illustration, even though it looks very much like a photograph. Professor Knut Lundmark, in 1955 or something, had a team of astronomers sit down for what must have been quite some time and accurately map and depict the Milky way for all posterity.

Apparently, upon completion of the grand task, the brighter stars had to be 'mussed up' somewhat and made a little more fuzzy. Though painstakingly accurate in their relative brightness to the rest of the illustration, the closer stars just didn't look right... too pointy and sharp. And so, the astronomers pulled out the 19th century version of the Gaussian blur and made everything a little more misty... less accurate, but more believable...

The shape of the Milky Way as deduced from star counts by William Herschel in 1785; the Solar System was assumed near center.

My other favorite depiction of the Milky Way is by William Herschel. When I first saw this I assumed it was from way back, maybe the 13th or 14th century... but no, William made this one in 1785. It is a diagram he made while attempting to count the stars in the Milky way. You may notice that all the stars are all of a rather even amplitude of brightness... it would seem that William had the opposite problem to Professor Lund and his team...

The Bird's Path

2008-04-12T20:45:00.004+10:00

The Milky Way, as depicted by Goldbach, C. F. (Christoph Friedrich), 1763-1811, from somewhere in the northern hemisphere...

The Milky Way is dear to the hearts of many throughout history, including me, always, but especially now. Known as the Bird's Path in the Baltic, the Path of Straw in parts of Africa and Asia, and the Silver River System in Japanese, the Milky Way has, understandably, played a very important role in the Mythologies of our species.

A couple of years ago, I was in Outback Australia, at night. A core group of us were camping together at an abandoned camel-train camp next to a dry creekbed, south of Alice Springs. We were getting to know each other because we were planning to make a theater piece together - Ngapartji Ngapartji.

The main actor/co-writer of the piece, Trevor Jamieson - a young man from the Spinefex mob, suddenly stood up from the campfire and asked if we wanted to see the Emu in the Milky way? Um, sure... (I was expecting a constellation which required, like most of the European constellations, a fair bit of grace and imagination in order to make an image out of 5 disparate stars)... and so we plodded off into the desert night, away from the campfire... and looked up.

The Emu constellation Trevor showed us stretched across the entire sky, from south to north, and was completely, instantly, recognizable, once we knew how to look. The Emu's head rests on the Southern Cross, and its feathers and its body stretch across the sky, right overhead, down to its clawed feet on the northern horizon.

Now for the clincher that had me in tears; it was an anti-constellation. It was the darkness that made the outline of the Emu, not the light. The Emu was made up of the voids within the Milky way, from its beak to its tail... to see it, you looked past the stars, past all that twinkly brightness, into the darkness beyond. And that was where the Emu was.

A constellation like the Emu is what is known in Western archeoastronomy as a dark cloud constellation - I've found a couple of references to cultures that encompass them within their astronomy.. mostly Indigenous Australian nations, cultures from Peru (where the sky is very clear) and some Pacific cultures where they pull the sky past them while traveling.

The idea of shapes and entities made up of voids... of light's role being that of a surrounding boundary, not the substance of the entity... mmm.

Fiona Hall: Force Field (all over, red rover)

2008-03-08T15:39:00.004+11:00

Castles in the air of the cavedwellers (detail)
Fiona Hall - 2007-08 - resin

And now, everything is in its place, or in its case. The show is open, and the experience of setting up the show is at an end. The book has been launched, the opening has been had.

And so the worlds that hang from the brains of Castles in the Air of the Cave Dwellers are lazily rotating on their strings, to the breath and the airflow of passing crowds, who either stop and stare fascinatedly, or brush past in search of something else to look at.

*sigh*...

On the up side of things, however, I managed to worm my way into the interview that Fiona did with the Australian yesterday... I so like it when people call me a 'young Sydney Artist'... it makes me want to wear shorts and get tipsy and ignore my Business Activity Statement...

I've stashed all the documentation photos of the install process of Fiona Hall: Force Field here.

Castles in the air of the cavedwellers (detail)
Fiona Hall - 2007-07 - resin

Mourning Chorus (detail)
Fiona Hall - 2007-08 - resin, plastic, vinyl, electronics, vitrine

Mourning Chorus (detail)
Fiona Hall - 2007-08 - resin, plastic, vinyl, electronics, vitrine

Paradisus terrestris (detail)
Fiona Hall - 1990-2005 - aluminium, tin

Cell culture (detail)
Fiona Hall - 2001-02 - glass beads, silver wire, tupperware, vitrine

Mourning Chorus (detail)
Fiona Hall - 2007-08 - resin, plastic, vinyl, electronics, vitrine

Amnesiac's Cartography (Narrow Road, Deep Chasm) - detail
Fiona Hall - 2007 - resin

Castles in the air of the cavedwellers (detail)
Fiona Hall - 2007-07 - resin

Castles in the air of the cavedwellers (detail)
Fiona Hall - 2007-07 - resin

When my boat comes in (detail)
Fiona Hall - 2002 - present - gouache on banknote

When my boat comes in (detail)
Fiona Hall - 2002 - present - gouache on banknote

Anatomy, sardines and forest

2008-03-04T19:51:00.000+11:00

Mourning Chorus - extinct fauna of Aotearoa, and grease.

Fiona Hall infront of one of the Paradisus terrestris series

Breeding Ground - 2007 - camo beehives of terrains and plant species throughout the world

Morality Dolls - the seven deadly sins - they jiggle when you pull the string...

Detail of Words

Today the head of the installation team at the MCA, Tony, said to me "this is the most intricate install that we've ever done... no, seriously..." so that's why I'm pooped. Thought there must be a reason.

Today I unpacked a variety of extinct New Zealand birds beaks (attached to the bottles of cleaning products), laid out 94 botanically rendered paintings of 94 leaves on 94 clusters of bank notes (some of the banknotes being from 1864, by the way), and also helped unpack 7 large-scale human brains with insect nests (cast in resin) hanging off them.

Fiona is holding up admirably in the face of an overwhelming number of tasks, all of which must be done by tomorrow afternoon. Both the work with the brains/insect nests and the work with the bird's beaks arrived today from the fellow who cast them, so, on top of installing a very major show, Fiona was also sighting a bunch of major new works for the very first time... two days before her opening... jeez. I would be packing it entirely...

Counting the wings, not the feathers

2008-03-02T16:18:00.002+11:00

Seeing Red

Titmouse Tidbit

homecoming

Packrat

Peril in the Petunias

Burrowing Owl

Illustration from 'The Big Golden Book of Biology'

Illustration from 'The Big Golden Book of Biology' (there's a platypus in there!)

pfwhoooo

Beetle Battle

Communal Crappies

Illustration from 'The Big Golden Book of Biology'

Ladybugs Hibernating

Charles Harper, illustrator - 1922-2007. "I don't count all the feathers, I just count the number of wings"... what a quote. Symmetry and simplicity. I very much like his work. Yes, the symmetries are setup and very stylized, but i like how he gets his point across about the re-occuring patterns within nature... and of course the works are just a pleasure to the eye. I've parked a heap of his illustrations here. Richard Scarry, eat yr heart out. This is what children's book illustrations should all be like.

Boxes and birds nests

2008-03-01T20:47:00.002+11:00

Give a dog a bone - seedpods carved from sunlight soap, with their recently completed DIY ikea shelving made of the most interesting cardboard boxes we could find.

Give a dog a bone - Fiona building the cardboard empire

Tender - biologically-exact assorted species of birds nests constructed from US dollar bills... on the table and ready to hang in their brand-new cases, built for the occasion

Scar tissue - objects knitted from VHS video tape... still in their boxes. I quite like them in their boxes...

Give a dog a bone - closeup of banksia pod carved from sunlight soap

Getting to handle and help install (yes, with gloves on) artworks that you've loved for years is a special experience. I am actually a little sad once the work is fully installed. Now it is perfect, just in the right place. Now it is untouchable. Now it doesn't need my help anymore. Now it stops being something i can touch and smell and understand, and becomes the exhibit. And I cease to be part of it's life, and become just another viewer.

Weird stuff. I'll try not to sound too glowing about all this. But holding a Fiona Hall birds nest made from American dollar bills (a Queensland Lyrebird's nest, to be precise) in my own two hands is a little like holding a dear friend's newborn. It's really quite lovely. If a little daunting.

But this is the experience I'm lucky enough to be in the middle of, until this coming Thursday, when Fiona's major retrospective show Fiona Hall: Force Field opens at the MCA here in Sydney. Every day we've been wrangling soap carved from banksia pods, nests made from legal tender and sardine tins containing genitals and sprouting trees all into their rightful places within floors 1 and 2 of the MCA. Along the way, I've been learning a heap about the works ... all of which is making my brain boil with ideas and projects and, most useful of all perhaps, gaining insight into Fiona's process and concerns. The lady is both a trojan and a treasure. She's great fun, and mad as a cut snake.

I think this looks like being the first major stint of the mentorship that I'm doing with Fiona over the next six months or so... during the lead-up to her exhibition, I'm acting as an assistant of sorts. Fortunately Fiona is incredibly prolific so this retrospective involves installing heaps of intricate works, which means I have plenty to do, and am not just either shadowing the artist or standing around trying to look official in a jaunty scarf.

So, despite having now spent two weeks straight here in Sydney town without as much as a sniff of the country air of home, I am, in a different way, spending my days working with seed pods and seedlings. It's just that they're made of soap. and sardine tins.

About, above: Day 2

2008-02-24T15:42:00.005+11:00

Belmore Park, 9am

looking up and into the planetarium - you can see the stars!

curiosity got the better of them
Belmore Park, 11.20am

Belmore Park, 11am

Belmore Park, 11.01am

matching shorts
Belmore Park, 9am

kids just ran straight towards it, and got it immediately... they didn't need to read no tag...
Belmore Park, 11.30am

Belmore Park, 11.30am

Camera obscuras of the leafy canopy above, seen from inside the planetarium
Belmore Park, 3.30pm

Three cardboard planetariums, installed throughout the Sydney CBD. You are welcome to duck inside, and to stand for a moment (or as long as you like) inside a solar-powered simulation of the night sky.

These cardboard universes, created with pinholes, contain a starchart accurate to 12 Midnight on Friday 22nd Feb, 2008. A solar-powered simulation of what is hidden, about and above, on a nightly basis... full project description.

Day 2 was so very different from Day 1... I had made this planetarium just over double the size of the ones I installed on Day 1, and the scale of this one turned out to be an ideal balance between largesse and seclusion.

The crowds passing through Belmore Park (which is next to Central Station in Sydney, so quite a busy thoroughfare) were much more inclined to segue from the path and interact with this planetarium, it seemed... lots of people and kids running over to it, ducking under and staying in there for ages. We even had a line-up a couple of times...

This planetarium was an experience that people could easily share with each other, which is what I had hoped would happen. Being more than twice as wide as the Day 1 planetariums, this one fitted about 3 adults or 5 kids comfortably inside at once... which made for some great moments... lots of little kids being lifted up to see the stars, then put back down, then crying to be lifted up again and see more stars...

Although I'm new at object-street-art (if that's what it is...?...), it is already clear to me that there is a fine line between an object which invites both curiosity and interaction, and an object that invites curiosity only... the Day 1 planetariums were, for the most part, on the 'curiosity only' side of that line... people did occasionally duck inside to investigate, but it wasn't an immediate reaction. Clearly, small weird cardboard things that hang from trees are there to be photographed infront of. However, slightly larger weird cardboard things that hang from trees are there to be fully investigated, explored, enjoyed and shared.

So it's the excitement of one's first fridge-sized box all over again. Only the box is impregnated with the night sky. And it's hanging from a tree.

Stacks of photos from the day here.
Thanks to Kat Spat and her homeboy Kurt for adding to the documentation. Thanks to Nick for being a legend. Thanks to Jack for his truck. Thanks to Sydney for being the wonderfully curious and twisted town that it is.

About, above: Day 1

2008-02-22T18:48:00.002+11:00

Cardboard Planetarium, Macquarie Place, 7am

Macquarie Place, 9.20am

Hyde Park, 10.30am

Inside the Planetarium, 10.35am

Macquarie Place, 10.50am

Hyde Park, 8.15am

About, above: Locations

2008-02-21T09:10:00.005+11:00

fliers for the event - made from scraps of genuine planetariums!

About, above: Part 1
solar-powered cardboard planetariums.
Friday 22nd - Saturday 23rd February, 2008

Viewing welcome at the following locations:

Friday 22nd onwards, starting at sunrise:
Hyde Park (nr Park St)
Macquarie Place (nr Customs House)

Saturay 23rd onwards, starting at sunrise:
Belmore Park (nr Central Station)

Three cardboard planetariums installed throughout the Sydney CBD , rain, hail or shine. You are welcome to duck inside, and to stand for a moment (or as long as you like) inside a solar-powered simulation of the night sky. Full project description.

The planetariums are both delicate and temporary. Being installed, as they are, in public spaces, it is hard to say how they will fare and how long they will last. If you cannot find the planetarium that you have come to visit, it is possible that it has been re-purposed, or transplanted by someone... try visiting one of the other planetariums on the map.

Enjoy! Comments and feedback very welcome.

View Larger Map

About, above: INVITATION to Part 1.

2008-02-19T07:56:00.004+11:00

Cardboard planetarium - first outing.

Please be advised that on Friday 22nd + Saturday 23rd February, 2008, there will be three Cardboard Planetariums installed throughout the Sydney CBD, rain, hail or shine. You are very much invited. Details of exact locations will be advised on this website on Thursday 21st Feb.

The splendor of the night sky has been a source of wonder, discovery and agitation for our species throughout human history. The observation of the heavens has defined religions, revolutionized scientific thought, guided navigators, and inspired countless mythologies. It has been said that 'they who cannot see the night sky, cannot see...'

In most urban environments, and cities in particular, light pollution renders the night sky down to a few of the brightest stars and planets, obscuring the majority of what has been so essential to our species' development. Perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps the stimulus of stargazing is not essential to a happy life. But just in case...

The Cardboard Planetariums will be found throughout the city, hanging in space, rotating lazily around their central hanging axis. You are welcome to duck inside, and to stand for a moment (or as long as you like) inside a solar-powered simulation of the night sky.

These cardboard universes, created with pinholes, contain a starchart accurate to 12 Midnight on Friday 22nd Feb, 2008. A solar-powered simulation of what is hidden, about and above, on a nightly basis.

About, above is a project in two parts, created by Kirsten Bradley during her time as Artist-in-Residence at Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney. Part 1 is the installation and documentation of Cardboard Planetariums throughout the Sydney CBD in mid-February 2008. Part 2 is an installation at First Draft Gallery in April, 2008.

About, above looks at pattern recognition and simulation, how we view 'nature', and what constitutes 'the natural' at this point in western thought. In a world out of balance, About, above also touches on points of Geocentricism, and asks how, as an urbanised culture, have we chosen to see as we do, for all this time.

This project has been made possible by Firstdraft Gallery through their Emerging Artist-in-residence program, and by EXPERIMENTA through their Media Art Mentorship program.

Firstdraft is supported by NSW Ministry for the Arts and the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. EXPERIMENTA 's Media Art Mentorship project has been assisted by the Australian Government’s Young and Emerging Artists Initiative through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. EXPERIMENTA gratefully acknowledges the assistance of CraftSouth to the EXPERIMENTA Media Art Mentorship Program.

my arm hurts

2008-02-08T17:12:00.000+11:00

my first two small cardboard spheres... hard-won little cardboard worlds that they are...

I have now two small planetariums mostly finished, after much, much, much cutting of cardboard circles, and the makings of a third planetarium, which will be double in size.

As sore as my arm currently is, I must say there is no substitute for hard labour to familiarize oneself with the particulars of creation. I could now make 2v geodesic domes (that's the name of the particular geodesic structures I've been making) in my sleep, with my sore hand tied behind my back. Which is just as well, cause until you get your head around the construction of geodesic structures, they're really confusing.

Thank crikey for a couple of essential online resources - particularly this fab 'how to make a cardboard dome for your classroom' page, and this excellent dome calculator, which helped me get all the lengths right.

Next innings, it's all about mapping accurate starmaps onto the domes. Which will be sweet confusion all over again, but at least i dont have to cut out anymore cardboard circles.

Planetarium Library

2008-02-07T16:10:00.000+11:00

Reading list of all things helpful when trying to come to terms with object-making, geocentricism, the psychological role of nature in our history, and the aesthetics of rare experience...

Nature Design: From Inspiration to Innovation
by Barry Bergdoll (Contributor), Dario Gamboni (Contributor), Philip Ursprung (Contributor), Museum für Gestaltung Zürich (Editor), Angeli Sachs (Editor)
One of the *most useful* catalogs of natural patterning's influences on design that I've come across - lots of art nouveau examples as well.

Forests: The Shadow of Civilization
by Robert Pogue Harrison
Some really good thoughts on early Christianity's relationship to the concept and actuality of the forest and the open night sky of the plains.

Landscape And Memory
by Simon SchamaA bit of a classic in the genre of 'landscape, and you'. Seriously interesting.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost
by Rebecca SolnitI keep coming back to this text. It is full of anecdotes, deliciously told, which feed into my projects and jack into that part of my brain that is unconcerned with everyday life. Yum.

The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History.
by David Freedburg
Very useful regarding the birth of heliocentric astronomy (versus the 'everything revolves around us' theory, as outlined here). The rest is probably good too, I just haven't read the rest yet...

Fiona Hall
by Julie Ewington
Yes well the woman is also my mentor currently, but this book is just exquisite - very good overview of her work, with all its intricacies and political implications.

pulling the sky past you...

2008-02-04T15:31:00.000+11:00

a sea chart or stickchart of some of the Marshall Islands, showing the islands as the nodes (made of cowrie shells) , the swells as curved lines, and the currents as straight lines. This chart would have been used to teach navigation on shore

another stickchart of some of the Marshall Islands, this time made by a German dude as part of an exhibit... you can see that the cowries on the chart correspond (indeed, are actually linked with string) with a conventional map of the Marshall Islands on the wall behind... for the purposes of over-explanation...

detail of chart outlining the relationship with swell and islands, again as a navigational tool... if you're at a point where the swells are behaving like (f), you are therefore able to calculate your relative position to the island...

another stickchart, again showing islands as cowries, curved lines as island-refracted swells, and straight lines as currents

and another stickchart of the Marshalls... when I first saw these, I was a bit suspicious that they all had a boat outlined in them... me and my pea-sized brain... a boat is a refraction is a leaf is a swell-line...

Micronesian navigation is something I'm looking at because it seemed to be a very intricate and yet a very pliable form of navigation... a set of strategies for dealing with travel on highways constantly in flux - i.e. the ocean passages between the myriad of islands that is the Polynesian triangle...

The anecdote that nudged me in this direction was from my very wonderful friend, Annemarie Kohn, who mentioned to me the Micronesian navigational concept of a navigator or traveler remaining stationary in their canoe while 'pulling the sky past you', when traveling at sea. Apart from being an overwhelmingly romantic moment of magical realism, this concept really got to me.

It turns out that the Etak or Hatag system only employs this stationary/contingent system of navigation as a device, as a way of thinking about distance when traveling from one island to another... you, the navigator of the boat, are stationary in the universe, and by having intrinsic knowledge of the ocean, currents and placement of the stars and islands which you have learnt since you were young, you can twist, turn and push the universe around and past you, until your destination island shows up.

However... still within this system; if you figure out that your boat has gone off course, the universe becomes stationary and you become the moving object, until such a time as you have regained a sense of where you are in the system... at which point, you become stationary again, and continue to pull the sky past you...

There are so many deliciously un-European aspects to Polynesian navigation that it is truly stunning... and it makes my brain purrrrrr.

In sort-of but not-really complete contrast, all this has made me remember a reference to a passage by Rebecca Solnit in her seminal book A field guide to getting lost:

Malcolm... brought up the Wintu in north-central California, who don't use the words 'left' and 'right' to describe their own bodies but use the cardinal directions. I was enraptured by this description of a language and behind it a cultural imagination in which the self only exists in reference to the rest of the world, no you without mountains, without sun, without sky. As Dorothy Lee wrote, "When the Wintu goes up the river, the hills are to the west, the river to the east; and a mosquito bites him on the west arm. When he returns, the hills are still to the west, but, when he scratches his mosquito bite, he scratches his east arm." ... In Wintu, its the world that's stable, yourself that's contingent, there's nothing apart from its surroundings.

I've gathered the links I've found on micronesian navigation here...

what's happening at the Marshall Islands these days... US missile testing

immutable

2008-02-03T19:13:00.001+11:00

Moon in an eccentric orbit with epicycles - Andreas Cellarius (c. 1596-1650)... the orbits of the moon around the earth - rather convoluted to allow for the intricacies of sustaining geocentricism

The shift in perception from an earth-centered universe towards a universe where we, the earth, revolved around something else, is a somewhat hairy patch within astronomical history...

I'm still sorting it all out for myself, but the basics are as follows: until the early 1600's, it was accepted in Europe that the earth was the centre of the universe. All the planets (which the sun counted as one of), the moon and 'the rest of the stars' were all lodged within spheres of crystal, which rotated around the earth. The moon was wedged in the closest crystal sphere, followd by the planets in a slightly larger (and therefore, further away) crystal sphere, followed by all the rest of the stars, which were locked into a single third sphere which rotated around the whole lot.

Planetary orbits around the earth - Andreas Cellarius (c. 1596-1650)

The heavens were immutable and permanent, the rotation and motion of the stars regular and un-ceasing. For the heavens were perfect and unchangeable, as god had made them that way.

Until upstarts like Copernicus and Galileo came along and buggered everything up, by offering (and proving via observation) plausible alternatives to this system. And then in 1604 there was a supernova - (the death of a star - the star gets MUCH brighter for a couple of days and then phuts out completely) which added to the grief of the situation, because this particular star wasn't visible to the naked eye prior to going supernova, so all of a sudden there was this really bright star for three days, which then disappeared... and this didn't fit in with the bit about all things being immutable and unchanging, obviously...

A depiction of the Copernican system - Andreas Cellarius (c. 1596-1650)... an alternative, heliocentric model. It took a while to catch on.

The thing that's tickling me at the moment is the lengths to which pre-1600 astronomers had to go to make all the motions of the heavens fit in with the geocentric idea (which was pretty much everything)... and the resulting charts and maps... great stuff...

I often wonder if the position we've put ourselves in, as western society, doesn't seem to indicate that we still think everything revolves around us... however these days we don't need illustrated charts to prove ourselves as the centre of the universe.. we have so many other ways... and we certainly don't need the church to tell us that we are the reason for creation, now that we've got... well, the ability to satisfy our every want, i guess...

Which brings me back to the night sky. Within a city, in the middle bit, the heavens and the general universe at large could be mutable or immutable or whatever they damn well please... it wouldn't make a jot of difference - you can't see it anyway, and it's not of any concern to you. Which makes me wonder about ways of seeing, and the perception of the world beyond the tops of the skyscrapers.. is there anything there? Maybe not. Or maybe only when the Goodyear blimp goes past does a pocket of the sky temporarily exist... and then fall back in on itself and revert to a blankness, with no relevance or meaning to us...

Goldbach, C. F. (Christoph Friedrich), 1763-1811... I take it Christoph wasn't in the city when he sketched this one.

No that there's much to see in the sky above Sydney today... look up and you'll get a big fat raindrop in your eye... which, by the way, the very fabulous artist Joan Fontcuberta used as constellations onetime (raindrops, that is - with insects and dirt) in photographs of a windscreen...

single-serve universe

2008-01-25T15:56:00.000+11:00

cardboard planetarium - draft of single size

they will hang. From tree branches in parks and also, somehow, in laneways. The light will come though, and the universe will rotate on its single string...

universe for one...

slice

2008-01-24T20:05:00.000+11:00

planetarium facets in progress - model test

It is always best to finish off an idea before moving on. I don't want any un-requited projects haunting me when i get old, following me around the house and nipping at my old-lady slippers.

So the forests need to wait a week or two before being allowed to cloud my vision entirely. I need to make that planetarium first.

About 6 months ago, a Canadian artist, Shaunna Dunn, mentioned the phrase 'cardboard constellations' in my presence. The phrase stuck to me. And that turned into an idea for a cardboard planetarium, that could just sit, alone, in a laneway or a street.

the cutting room floor... many boxes met their death here today...

A cardboard dome, punched with pinholes. The sunshine comes through the pinholes, and becomes the stars. In this little dark cardboard place. It's a moments visual silence in the middle of the city. Stargazing as you would on a mountain top, but not. You're in some noisy laneway. In the daytime. But the stars are there too. Powered by the sun. A simplified simulation of what we can no longer see, where most of us live...

So. Cardboard is me. I am cardboard. And paper binders. And starcharts of the sydney sky in summer.

permanent curvature of the spine from 12 hours cutting corrugated cardboard with stanley knife in an un-ergonomic position

About, above: project overview

2008-01-18T12:55:00.009+11:00

Solar-powered cardboard planetarium - Hyde Park, Sydney, February '08
Cardboard, pinholes, sunlight, rivets, string. 90cm x 80cm x 90cm. Edition 1/6
© Kirsten Bradley 2008

About, above is a project that considers the plausibility of making natural systems out of cardboard. Drawing on our enduring fascination with the night sky and the space beyond, About, above prods the viewer with gentle questions. The project explores ideas regarding our emotive reactions to natural systems, and investigate our relationship with natural pattern- recognition and our capacity for wonder, in the face of disbelief.

A project in two parts, About, above invites the viewer into a world of lo-fi nature through participatory sculpture and installation. The first aspect of the project are solar-powered cardboard planetaria, which are designed to be installed in parks and other public spaces within a city. The second aspect of the project is an installation in the form of a room or chamber containing a camera obscura starmap, which is 'powered' by exterior sunlight, and allows the viewer to experience both a glowing starchart and a mosaic version of the world outside the chamber, simultaneously.

Both aspects of this project draw in part on early texts and representations of the night sky, as well as ideas of pattern, navigation, simulation, geocentricism and the peculiar nature of light. The project aims to be a playful, welcoming and interactive opportunity for urban astronomy, in a simple and endearing form. About, above aims to consider how we choose to navigate through our worlds, and how we choose what it is that we see.

So far, About, above has had the following outcomes:

- 2008/02: Unsolicited Public Art: streets and parks of Sydney
- 2008/04: Exhibition: Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney
- 2008/07: Public Sculpture: Sydney Observatory 150th Anniversary
- 2008/07: Exhibition: Silvershot, Melbourne

- process diary for About, above project

- video of About, above project
- photos of About, above project

The Birds Path (after Herschel) - detail of installation
Cardboard, pinholes, sunlight, rear-projection screen, blacked-out room. Dimensions variable. Edition 1/1
© Kirsten Bradley 2008

Solar-powered cardboard planetarium - Belmore Park, Sydney, February '08
Cardboard, pinholes, sunlight, rivets, string. 230cm x 200cm 230cm. Edition 1/6
© Kirsten Bradley 2008

cardboard-edness

2008-01-11T18:00:00.000+11:00

Tai Snaith - of style mutual

Sam3 - parking packaging

Sam3 - parking packaging - DIY pattern

Eduardo Vea - via box doodle project

no*visibles - box populi

lasercut street goodness via flickr - ok it might be plywood but I'd like to think it's cardboard

el fin del mundo mirando al techo

cardboard clouds - from flickr

ghostpatrol - overtimepeoplewillrecognise

Sam3 again - cardboard man reclining

curly goodness - found on flickr here

I love the tenacity of cardboard... always accessible, always democratic, always there for you. Cardboard is my friend. Until it goes slimy. And then it's mulch waiting to grow into something else.

forwards to backwards

2008-01-10T11:47:00.000+11:00

Installation view of Saltmilk and other wonders at IASKA back on '05... my first foray with the actual as opposed to the purely projected

I have, so far in my practice, not had to confront the practicalities of nailing the object. Through a lens, the object is always just your own version of a dream, anyways. The only time I've ever actually used objects (if i'm going to be correct about this) - I put them thru a series of lenses, which created the final imagery... the object becoming incidental, put there as a form of proof, rather than a necessity.

a twig, backlit by a slide projector, going thru a plastic lens... which flipped the image and resulted in a distorted stand of tree-ish projections which moved in the breeze as the room was quite drafty...

Now, however, for my forests, objects are needed. And they have to be absolutely exquisite and exactly right in their actuality, not just in their recorded form. And I am now realising how much I have to learn to take this project from concept through to something that actually stacks up. I have to make tiny forests of trees. They need to be robust enough to survive in an underwater installation in a harbor. This will not be easy. Arg.

Fortunately, I am hoping that my concerns can be off-set slightly by my new mentor, who I'm having my first meeting this this arvo. The further I go forwards with this project, the more I realise that Fiona Hall might just be sent down from heaven for my own wiley purposes... at the very least, she may be able to offer some advice on taking model making from much-loved concept thru to, well... a forest that doesn't look crap.

my lens-trees.. made of dried weeds from the back of the old basketball court in Kellerberrin

I have accepted that I may need to make a great deal of awful models before I arrive somewhere useful with this forest thing... so I have begun, and I will endure. But there's many ways to skin this particular cat, so I'm trying to keep in mind that my abstract forest doesn't need to flow completely from my hands... it will be a process of modeling alfoil and wire, collecting twigs and somehow assembling something that can be molded and cast later on down the track, to result in the final objects... a fluid forest of metallic trees that bend in the ocean current.

Anyway. It is interesting to embark on tree-making and realise that the shape of a tree, in my head at least, comes from my time making Saltmilk at Kellerberrin - I did a residency there at IASKA in 2005. And the trees I met out on this deserted saltlake, they embody the quintessential tree to me. And knowing this, I can now forcibly 'branch out' (heh..) into other tree-like forms, having identified my baseline...

saltmilk. an amazing place. that's caked salt on the ground, and these are the trees i mean...

The trees at saltmilk were long-dead. They still ruled the lake, though... they were black texta against the sky and the salt. And I spent a *lot* of time beneath them, wading around in the sulfurous salty slush that was that strange place... I was trying to make an animation that did justice the the yawning sky above saltmilk... and it worked.. kinda... here 'tis.

So as a result i spent the other night making trees out of tinfoil which all looked like they were from that place... not intentionally... but i needed to start modeling trees so i could get the first few hundred disasters out of the way... and now i have. Started, that is.

my first tree. it's a start.

What makes a tree

2008-01-07T17:43:00.000+11:00

lichen with grand intentions, on a rock in Broger's Creek, near Kiama

it's quite a question. I was sure that I knew. But now, now that I'm trying to actually shape them, to abstractedly make a 'tree-like' thing (or several), I find that perhaps I didn't know quite enough. I mean, I can make a tree easily enough that conforms to the basic laws of organic patterning, but my trees need to flow - to bend in a liquid breeze as if they were in the airy wind.

a sea sponge whose footing-rock got thrown up on the beach at the Boneyard, near Kiama

An underwater forest. Made of terrestrial-like trees, which behave in the ocean current in a way reminiscent of a strong wind in a stand of tall trees.

So not only form is needed here, but solidity and strain and buoyancy and pressure and flow, all together, in the correct amounts. To re-produce nuances of the terrestrial within the land of aqua profunda. Hmmm. Start with form.

more lichen - same patch

sea sponge washed up at The Boneyard - disconnected from it's rock footing

a small stand

pared-back sponge

The beginnings of a new project...

2008-01-07T14:58:00.000+11:00

*sigh* - it is so exquisite to be back in a studio again... surrounded by grubby white walls, traffic noise, inadequate ventilation and detritus...

Today is the first day of my studio residency at First Draft Gallery in Sydney. It's your basic blank box/partition out the back of the gallery. A table, a cupboard full of other people's left-over junk, three chairs (two with no backs), a floor sprinkled with cigarette butts and ex-cockroaches, and a single overhead fluro. Paradise.

This new project involves two basic components as i see it. Studio time, here in my little box, and mentorship time, with Fiona Hall (in Adelaide, Sydney, wherever). My plan is to be in Sydney every second week for the next three months, until the end of March, at which point two things will happen. Number one is that Fiona will have a major retrospective exhibition at the MCA here in Sydney, and number two is that I will have a (slightly less illustrious) exhibition here at First Draft Gallery. So I'm working and making and learning and thinking towards dual outcomes... and I am stoked.

I have been fermenting ideas for this project for the past 6 months... there were kernels of ideas sortof knocking against my skull while at the Banff residency, due to all that wonderful cross-fire from my fellow artists there. The idea of diorama as unsettling device. Nature on a tiny, cultivated scale as an ironic landscape. Cardboard constellations. Fun with miniature worlds...

So. I'm all setup here with my wireless modem, teacups, teapots, 4 types of tea, fruit and nuts, and a small stash of dried-out seasponge and some barnacles. And a couple of delicious books... a Fiona Hall monograph, Dancing Up Country - the art of Dorothy Napangardi, Nature Design and the most wonderful All my Friends are made of Paper... and, at all times, I'm keeping Forests - the shadow of civilization close to my chest cause it's really special and is a bit of a guiding light at the moment for me...

The passing of a Matriach

2007-11-28T09:25:00.000+11:00

Doris Hine: 1910 - 2007

Raised in the Blue Mountains - ran her own beauty salon in Manly in the 30's - saw the smoke rising in Sydney Harbour after the subs sank the battleship in the 40's - married her wartime penpal who played the accordian - settled in the Blue Mountains - raised the best daughter ever (i.e. my Mum) and two sons besides - stewed rasberries with increasing regularity - drove a datsun - always gave us hankies for Christmas - and now on to her next adventure...

Fiona Hall Mentorship: project overview

2007-11-18T15:30:00.002+11:00

When my boat comes in (detail)
Fiona Hall - 2002 - present - gouache on banknotes
© Fiona Hall 2002

Kirsten was one of four young Australian artists to be awarded a 2007 Media Arts Mentorship, a grant from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council intended to promote interaction between young artists and established practitioners. The mentorship will be facilitated by Experimenta Media Arts.

Throughout 2008, Kirsten will work under the mentorship of esteemed Australian visual artist Fiona Hall. Hall's practice ranges from photography to object-making and, most recently, video, and reveals ongoing, deep-seated concerns with humanity's relationship with nature. These concerns have resulted in aesthetically exquisite, often deeply unsettling artworks, which both question and explore the legacies of imperialism, colonialism and capitalism upon our relationship with nature, and our relationships with each other.

Thus far, the mentorship has consisted of Kirsten acting as artists assistant on Fiona's major retrospective exhibition Force Field at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the City Gallery, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand in 2008.

The mentorship has also resulted in an ongoing conversation between Kirsten and Fiona regarding making work that intersects with nature in various ways, and the eating of rice balls and the drinking of tea, while rambling for hours on topics such as the lichen genus.

- process diary of Fiona Hall Mentorship activities and goings-on
- photos to do with the Mentorship

press coverage:
Magic under the surface - article in the Australian - 7/3/2008
Media Art Mentorship - press release from Australia Council - 21/9/07

Kirsten + Fiona inspecting Kirsten's installation The Birds Path (after Herschel) at Firstdraft Gallery, part of the About, above project.

Canopies and Aprons

2007-11-15T17:24:00.000+11:00

The doilies have finally found a home... even tho the moss versions didn't work out so well, there is life in the ol' handicrafts yet... they're coming with me to Peats Ridge Festival to be made into a work called 'Canopy'... "a shady place dripping with time spent, and time past. Canopy is assembled from hundreds of handicrafts, collected over the last 50 years - a complex and tessellated pattern of shadows and stitches, from the hands of your forebears to you..."

And, not to be left out, my vast and much-loved collection (well, some of them - the skirt-only ones) of Aprons will also be making an appearance at the festival as 'Pinny Prayer Flags'... "strings of Prayer Flags made from vintage aprons, collected from across Australia. Over one hundred much-loved specimens, ranging from the exquisite to the downright worrying. A catalog of many, many kitchens, finally free in the breeze of Glenworth Valley..."

So, a small foray into un-adulterated nana technology - no lights, no buttons, no silicon chips, no power-plugs. Just an accumulation of small craft projects - in the case of the doilies; scraps of time as spent by hundreds of women over god knows how long...

In the case of the aprons; multiple, multiple sewing-class projects as completed by disgruntled 13-year olds over the last 50 years... ah the romance...

I wonder if they would all approve...

a girl's hillside is her castle...

2007-11-09T18:54:00.001+11:00

as opposed to a girl's house. For i haven't one. Maybe by next winter...

This past month has seen much activity and not a great deal of art. I convened a Permaculture course in Sydney. I crashed and wrote-off my truck on the way home (and three others besides). I accepted an artist-in-residence position at First Draft Gallery for the first three months of next year, so that I can do my mentorship project properly.

I went to Byron Bay to help a friend do his thesis performance. It was a long train journey there and back. I am considering recanting on never taking an domestic flight ever again.

I made compost. We finally got a light to read by. I canceled projects because I felt so scattered after the car crash. I kept my head above water using Sofie's immaculate podcast as therapy.

I un-canceled projects because people told me to. I fought off the black dog a fair bit. I've still got a stick in my hand right now. Grrrr. Get back, you nasty hound, you.

On the upside of things, I am dreaming in underwater dioramas and periwinkle trails. I'm looking forward to a summer break - to think, to swim, and to make. Particularly looking forward to some dedicated underwater diorama experiments...

Birds in the laneways

2007-10-08T15:32:00.000+10:00

I forgot to mention that tomorrow night (tuesday 8th), i'm doing projections for the opening of the Sydney Laneways project - which supposedly marks the 'revitalisation of Sydney's laneways'...

At any rate - there will be drinks and music in Albion Place tomorrow night from 6 till 8pm. Albion Place is off George St, near the cinemas. This will also be the opening of Albion Place's 'window boxes' - sortof lightbox-shaped but not necessarily lightbox constructions along the laneway. The inaugural exhibition in these new thingamys is curated by the very wonderful Knot Gallery tribe.

I made the projections for this event from some of the animations I was working on during my time on the Imaginary Places residency at Banff. They are sort of static video states with only the wind to power them. I like the intermittent motion of them, and the clean lines of the silhouettes. Sun, grass, birds and wind.. can't beat 'em.

Ever Rotating Sky: project overview

2007-10-01T18:44:00.002+10:00

Day 1 - detail of timelapse video
cardboard, pinholes, sunlight, paper screen
©2007 Kirsten Bradley

Ever Rotating Sky is the first suite in a series of works which attempt to grapple a tiny bit with perceptions of the ‘natural world’, landscape and ‘the grand view’ within our culture. What do we perceive as natural? How is that changing? In a world out of balance, it is perhaps within the membranes between the organic and the simulated forms of ‘nature’ that answers to important questions lie.

The Ever Rotating Sky series was created while on residency at the Banff Centre, Canada, in 2007. The series exists as a number of single-channel videos, and a series of small prints.

With this work I wanted to find a way to chart the passing of a day, whilst layering into such a record other charts, other natural systems. I did this by setting up a camera obscura in my studio, but rather than having one, single pinhole to reveal the world outside, I had many. I based my pattern of pinholes on a starchart of the night sky for Banff in summer, and so my studio window became a planetarium of sorts. The outside world was revealed through an array of tiny upside-down pictures of the Mountains and valley outside my studio.

As individual camera obscuras, each image charted the passing of a day outside. As a collective mass of blending worlds of Mountains and sky, my studio window charted both time and space. Time in the form of the circadian rhythm of the solar day, and space in the form of a starmap of the sky above, represented by tiny pictures. Over the course of a day, the light from this mass of constellations ebbed and waned - the sun and clouds outside became tiny stars surrounded by nebula, and rain on the window refracted the pinhole pictures to a blur, only to snap back into focus as the sun came out, and dried the raindrops.

A camera within my studio recorded the effect of this camera obscura continuously over the course of each day, at a rate of one picture every 20 seconds. These individual pictures were then collated into timelapses. The resulting series of Ever Rotating Sky is four video works, one for each full day (dawn until dusk) recorded using this method.

Outcomes for Ever Rotating Sky include:

Exhibition
Trio - Other Gallery, Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada June 2007

Exhibition
Studied Natures - Westspace, Melbourne, August 2007

- process diary for Ever Rotating Sky (Banff residency)
- photos for Ever Rotating Sky

- video excerpt: Forgetting you is like breathing water (day 4) - 2'09

Forgetting you is like breathing water (day 4) - detail of timelapse video
cardboard, pinholes, sunlight, paper screen
©2007 Kirsten Bradley

Day 2 - detail of timelapse video
cardboard, pinholes, sunlight, paper screen
©2007 Kirsten Bradley

Land Ships - a bibliography

2007-09-08T13:07:00.000+10:00

On landscape / perception / space / histories of the natural / ways of seeing

A collation of the texts i have read these past 12 months that have been particularly helpful, and things i am yet to read but am looking forward to. Any further suggestions that seem relevant would be very welcome....

Andrews, Malcolm - Landscape and Western Art - good stuff on the early side of things - a good overview, i thought.

Baudrillard, Jean - Simulacra and Simulation - the map is the territory.

Berger, John - Ways of Seeing - pretty important text, i think, despite the passing of years... he has such a sweet way of writing.

De Vries, Herman - Chance and Change - a very individual approach to landscape.

Goldsworthy, Andy - Hand to Earth - his best text in my opinion - less big colour plates, more process - an overview of his concerns 1976-1990.

Jenks, Charles - The Garden of Cosmic Specultation - trippy as this sounds, I found the text quite good, even if it is a bit of an ode to Jenks' departed wife.

Kastner, Jeffery and Wallis, Brian - Land and Environmental Art - a pretty good overview of the usual suspects - i drooled over this when i first found it - it still holds up tho, I feel.

R. Klanten, S. Ehmann, N. Bourquin ed. - Into the Nature… Of Creatures And Wilderness - published in 2006, i found this interesting in terms of what art within this realm was being hearalded as interesting... some lovely bits, some yawns

Solnit, Rebecca - A field guide to getting lost - essays on solitude and different versions of lost.

Solnit, Rebecca - Wanderlust - a history of walking - walking within western culture, and how it has related to, and sometimes governed, our perception of the natural world.

Solnit, Rebecca - River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West - contains some great stuff on the sociological history of American landscape in its depiction.

Solnit, Rebecca - As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art - some very good essays in here on different perceptions of landscape.

Thoreau, Henry David - Walden - Ye Olde but still very much referenced so a bit of a goer. Describes in plain language an experience of attempting to live within the cycles of nature with minimal enhancement.

On the waiting list:

Berger, John - Selected Essays of John Berger
Berger, John - About looking
Tuan, Yi-Fu - Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience
Casey, Edward - Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape
Barringer, Tim and Wilton, Andrew - American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820-1880
Dreikausen, Margret - Aerial Perception: The Earth As Seen from Aircraft and Spacecraft and Its Influence on Contemporary Art
Schama, Simon - Landscape And Memory
Harrison, Robert Pogue - Forests: The Shadow of Civilization
Bachelard, Gaston - The Poetics of Space
Fisher, Phillip - Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences

The land-ship and the eye of the pin

2007-09-05T17:02:00.000+10:00

Tomorrow I'm giving an artist talk at Westspace as part of the last week of my Studied Natures exhibition. Below is what could be my talk, but i think I will take its essence and chat with whoever comes along....

The land-ship and the eye of the pin

When do we begin to look? Or does the landscape enter the bloodstream with the milk? - Ronald Blythe

We get the word landscape from the Dutch landschap - which loosely comes from the Basque term landa - meaning labored earth, and the Dutch schap - meaning ship. So: Land-ship...

I sort of stumbled upon the cult of landscape in western art. Of course I was aware that it was there, in theory, but I thought of it as a rather static practice - something with a long history which had slowly ground to a halt, to rest.

I grew up by the ocean in an area of NSW with no shortage of grand views and picturesque scenes, and family holidays involved traveling throughout Australia, away from the people and the cities, walking and camping in as untouched environments as could be managed within the school-holiday timeframe. So by the time I moved to Sydney to study music at 18, I was full to the brim of wilderness and ever-changing ocean vistas, and I went and got as urban as I could possibly manage. I sat in lounge rooms, computer labs and recording studios for four years and I ignored the sky.

However. A few years into my art practice, I was plunked in a little highway town called Kellerberrin, in the Western Australian wheat-country. Very flat. Very loud road-trains roaring by late at night. Very big sky. I was there as part of the IASKA residency program, and I was there to make a new-media work about Kellerberrin. Having spent the last three years making interactive installations and audiovisual performances within cities, I thought my work and concerns were all about space and community and how we transact with each other - how we negotiate the city and the evolving (or possibly devolving) role that public space has within the minds of an inner-city population. How we decide where we're allowed to be within the built environment.

But while in Kellerberrin I realized something pretty important to what I thought were my concerns. For me, cities were not actually about the people. And my work wasn't about people. It was about the actual spaces, about the whole organism created by the buildings and the people and the cars and the pigeons and the advertising and the rubbish. The layering of it all. It was about the city as a prism. And it was about landscape in its widest definition. I was aware at this point that I needed to do some serious research. I needed to get a sense of the sociological histories regarding place and landscape and the 'ways of seeing' that put so many different types of lenses over our mind's eye... but at least I knew which way I was pointed, and I stopped trying to be a community-based artist.

I do not pretend to know all that much about the history of landscape and how we, as westerners, see what we see, and much less about landscape and Australian indigenous knowledge, or how certain Maori songs map the open ocean like navigational charts. However I do know that while I was studying music, I had the privilege to learn from Sylvia Entcheva, a noted and incredible Bulgarian vocalist who had immigrated to Australia, and who for several years coached me in traditional Bulgarian singing and technique.

The different regions of Bulgaria have very different melodic structure and style within their vocal music. I learned that in certain parts of the country some songs, like laments, were used in order to warn partisans who were far off in the hills and who couldn’t be communicated with by any other means. This made me think of the high, nasal tones of those polyphonic songs, bouncing off and snaking around the dark mountains to the ears of the distant menfolk. It made me think that, perhaps, some laments were found to be more effective as communication in dire times than others. And it was these laments, these particular combinations of timbre and harmony, which had became subsequently valued for such purposes. Because they literally belonged within that landscape - belonged to it and traversed it, whereas other songs could not...

Landscape and our relationship to it. Us as animals, us as society. Us as a concept. Self as a concept. Self as defined by an attitude that, many anthropologists note, seems to have reared its head as part of the earthquake that was the industrial revolution. The idea of the individual, master of all he surveys, or the contemplative artist, considering the world from a favorable prospect. Victoria Finlay notes in her excellent book on the western history of image making, Colour, that pre 17th century, the depiction of nature was a rather messy business involving unstable and un-portable paints and pigments, and was therefore much confined to the artists studio. Which, of course, made for a very subjective depiction of nature and landscape in general.

As technology improved with such inventions as the mass-produced watercolor set, and more stable and portable paints that allowed the artist to actually get to the landscapes they were depicting, so too did their depictions of nature and landscape morph into a new way of seeing. And this seeing, though self-referential and constantly beset on all sides and packed to the brim by tradition, imperialism, available technology, manifest destiny and the ideology of each decade, continues to reflect back to us what our evolving cultures have chosen to see - ever since we began to look.

The concepts of nature and landscape and wilderness at this point in history are as ambiguous as they are problematic - there is a growing number of writers attempting to grapple with what is variously called 'new nature', 'next nature' and pretty much anything which encompasses the emergence and convergence of nature and human impact. Nature as a concept is a bit battered at the moment, for related reasons. How can one attempt to describe our relationship to nature when nature itself has been pronounced no longer definable? Or maybe it never was, but there used to be, in times past, so much more of it about that we didn't notice this problem.

So all this was quite boggling to me and not even the merest teensy tip of the iceberg that are these concerns. And so, being boggled and swayed and utterly unsure how to intersect with all this reading and history on how my species got along with its surroundings, I decided to come back to first principles as I saw them.

Sunlight. The passing of a day. The weather. All those things intrinsic and seemingly immutable to our world give or take the considerable flux of humanity’s impact. How could I work with some of these things? How could I work towards a relationship with light that allowed me to explore basic natural rhythms? Landscape seemed too big a bite to chew on just yet.

I started here. I haven't got very far past here. But I love it here. I think it's useful.

So I started working with the light on my studio windows, and I started experimenting with different layers of patterning that were perhaps felt and recognized on a fundamental level. Our species' ability to read the patterning of nature has been as important as everything else combined (opposable thumbs, bipedalism, tool making, plastic cheese) to our evolution and endurance as a species. I wanted to explore layering patterns together and to see, through recording the passing of time, what rhythms I got back.

I mapped out the night sky on my windows as pinholes in cardboard. A pinhole star map. It took ages. I planned to do a time-lapse of the afternoon light pouring through the windows, through the pinholes, onto a paper screen set back from the window. To watch as these points of light rotated with the angle of the afternoon sun. A window-shaped planetarium, powered in light and movement by the sun, and the rotation of the earth.

The result of this experiment was partly what I expected, but with an extra, and formidable, aspect. The distance of the paper screen from the pinholes on the window caused a camera obscura to form. Each pinhole became an aperture, projecting as many tiny images of the outside view as there were pinholes onto the screen. And the resulting time-lapse of this phenomenon, of my planetarium composed of thousands of small pictures, revealed not just the motion and intensity of the sunlight through the pinholes. It also recorded the trees, the mountains and the clouds which passed by in miniature - thousands of small pictures, thousands of small worlds. The passing clouds became nebula, streaming from each sun in each pinhole. The light was in constant flux as the day passed, creating an ever-changing universe of tiny worlds that were by turns bright, dark, sharp and indistinct. Rainstorms came through; further distorting the apertures, as the raindrops on the window were larger than the pinholes they passed in front of. I got my rhythms. And I got new questions to add to my old ones. I sat in the dark room, watching the paper screen in front of my window, watching the outside world in multiple miniatures, arranged into the pattern of the night sky that I knew. I cried a bit. Felt a bit bemused by what it all meant.

Later, talking to Claire Conroy, an Australian artist working with pinhole photography (and whom, incidentally, has also done time at IASKA, where I clarified my concerns a little), she had this to say about light, the universe, and everything - "I love the simplicity of the camera obscura. It’s kind of like light whispering to humans. Telling us that as complicated as we make it by capturing it, storing it, projecting it etc, that its beauty and brilliance is simple and has always been there, presenting images to us. It is the source."

My explorations into landscape so far have taught me one thing primarily. One thing that I thought I knew, but that I am re-learning. And it is that I see nature and landscape in a very certain way. A way of seeing partly given to me by my society, by my ancestors, by my place in the world, by the fact that I'm living now, in a comfortable existence unfettered by the extremes of the human condition. I'm not starving and I'm not sick. I have a bed in an insulated house. I have never hunted for a meal. I have never used my feet to traverse large tracts of country, continuously, for days because I needed to. But these things aside, I hope I can continue to learn how to look, and continue to learn how trace the patterns in the landscapes I encounter.

It seems sometimes that our viewpoints are so entirely clouded by experience (or lack of) and weirdly compacted perception that everything is pretty much a simulation of itself and Baudrillard was right. The map is the territory. The real is not. Wilderness is, at best, a romantic and redundant notion, no longer applicable to this planet. However, I'm beginning to think that it is at this point that our notions of place and nature really matter, because, to come back to natural patterning, it is these codified and intertwining systems that say the most important things about, well, everything. Granted, we as a species have made sure there is much less patterning to perceive nowadays, through the way we have impacted, eaten out, concreted over, cut down and otherwise altered so many ecosystems and places, but that doesn’t mean that there are no patterns left.

How the weather works, how it is changing, why it is changing. How various parts of the landscape, before we flattened, subdivided, trashed, and replanted tracts of it, could be read like a topographical calendar. A calendar that revealed what was coming next in the 200-year cycle of that place. So perhaps, in the history of landscape depiction, we have inadvertently created a somewhat tinted record of this planet as we found it (or parts of it) and also a record of how we changed it. A record which, for all its discrepancies and allowances for perception, taste, fashion and strange ideas, almost accidentally reveals fundamental aspects of our natural world which are very important to keep track of...

So that’s my plan. If nothing else, I will continue to keep track of certain natural patterns, certain relationships, and figure out ways to explain them to myself. Perhaps by re-codifying what seems apparent within nature and landscape, I can begin to learn to see a bit clearer. And perhaps the results that I collate can be useful in some way….

a potted history of the orrery

2007-08-23T20:00:00.000+10:00

Gilkerson's orrery - circa early 1800's

Apart from being a gorgeously wonky word, I am extremely pleased to have figured out what an orrery is. I'm currently poking around into the history of astronomy and planetariums in particular, cooking up a few ideas for projects. I sortof stumbled across this orrery word and have now become endeared to it on all levels, the most prominent of which being because it is the correct name for Aughra's observatory thing in The Dark Crystal. A film I was mighty attached to as a child and still recall an embarrassingly large amount about. Apart from, I recently discovered, the correct name for Aughra's place.

Aughra's orrery in her chrysalis on the hilltop - prior to being smashed up by the baddies

An orrery is essentially an anatomically correct physical model of the solar system. Sun in the centre, celestial bodies whirling around it, with their satellites and moons whirling around them. Anatomically correct unless you include scale, of course - that little detail being rather a hinderance as everything is so incredibly far away from each other. Scale is also not strictly observed, it seems, when it comes to the relative size of planets to each other. But every other detail is meant to be correct, in order to facilitate old men in long beards to ponder on the universe in times past, when the orrery was the prime instrument for figuring out various planetary things.

There are orrerys that just focus on the earth and its relationship to the sun and moon, with the other two closer planets to the sun thrown in for luck at reduced sizes. An incredibly cool device for actually seeing how the earth's shadow relates to the moon from the comfort of one's oak desk. I am tickled by some of the orrerys I found just for their endearing clunky-ness... their little brass cogs and planets on wires, standing up straight and true, ready to be observed, pondered, and mastered by the might of man.

What has made the most impression on me so far, though, is how achingly human these constructions seem - both in complexity and scale - a burnished example of our species struggling to understand the universe...

On a less cloying note, it would appear from the research I've done that the Antikythera mechanism was, infact, an orrery of sorts. Previously I thought it was some sortof funky navigational system which simply figured out longitude. And the crew at the Long Now have an orrery, as well as their 10,000 year clock.

the sun tile at the center of Armagh Observatory's human orrery

Apparently it is common for the terms planetarium and orrery to get mixed - usually with the orrery being labelled a planetarium, which apparently it is not, due to its physical characteristics and the fact that its bits move. A planetarium is, officially, a theatre or room where heavenly bodies are displayed as either points of light or, earlier on, as painted stars. This display of the heavens may move by rotating the lights or whatever, but it is essentially an educational tool, rather than something that you actively use to predict stuff. I think this is the story. I wish I knew a planetarian to confirm this.

I had some vague plan to construct a series of little orrerys out of cardboard and balsa wood and attach them to walls or streets, powering them by a reliably dripping drain in a laneway somewheres, but methinks the level of tactility required to construct such a thing may well be beyond me. I think at this stage I will re-focus on more planetarium-esque concepts.

Lastly, some of the orrerys that i found: Gilkerson's, The Armagh Observatory's human orrery, the Long Now's orrery, David Rittenhouse's, Eise Ensigna's, and some non-attributed photos of orrerys 1 + 2.

a miscellaneous orrery found on flickr

Mentorship project with Fiona Hall

2007-08-22T20:09:00.000+10:00

I've just received word that I'm about to get to do a project with a big fat lifelong hero of mine... the wonderous Fiona Hall. I recently applied for Experimenta's new Media Art Mentorship scheme - basically you outline a project that you want to do within the realms of site-based and public art, and nominate an appropriate mentor to oversee your work, to give input and generally allow you to harass them on the finer points of artmaking...

I was unsure if Fiona would be into it as she is one very busy lady and constantly here, there and everywhere - however, while Nick was installing our piece for New Nature at the Govett-Brewster in May, he stayed at Rhana's farmhouse, along with Fiona. And the story goes that everyone would just creep off to bed at the end of the night, leaving Nick and Fiona going at it hammer and tongs, covering life the universe and everything.

So, heartened by this indirect bonding and knowing that she liked our work, and cause I cannot think of anyone I'd rather approach, I asked her to mentor me and she was nice enough to say yes. And I applied and was lucky enough to get the funding. So we're off and running! whoohoo.

I'll be doing this project part-time from October 2007 until the end of March 2008, researching and making a heap of site-based pieces in the streets of Sydney and Melbourne (and maybe Adelaide?). During this time I'll also be participating in a few of Fiona's projects, in a capacity yet to be defined - possibly as cook, cheerleader and observer, with small dashes of hands-on help and research. Who knows. Cannot wait.

Studied Natures - Exhibition

2007-08-10T09:40:00.002+10:00

51°10’ N, 115°34’ W - 6:31pm - 12th June 2007 (part of middle panel)

Studied Natures – Kirsten Bradley
16th August - 8th September 2007
Opening 16th August, 6pm

Westspace Gallery
Level 1, 15 - 19 Anthony Street
Melbourne, Australia

Studied Natures examines perceptions of nature and simulation through photography, timelapse animation and camera obscura. Ever Rotating Sky (51°10’ N, 115°34’ W) is the first suite in a series of works which attempt to grapple a tiny bit with perceptions of the ‘natural world’, landscape and ‘the grand view’ within our culture. Kirsten’s first solo exhibition is an installation comprising three single-channel digital animations, sound, and a suite of photographs. Sound: veðurathugan - Ben Frost [remixing Steinbrüchel]

Many thanks to the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, the Australia Council for the Arts, and the National Association for Visual Artists for their support.

video here of a similar work using same technique + parameters...

Room Sheet for exhibition:

Ever Rotating Sky (51°10’ N, 115°34’ W) is the first suite in a series of works which attempt to grapple a tiny bit with perceptions of the ‘natural world’, landscape and ‘the grand view’ within our culture. What do we perceive as natural? How is that changing? In a world out of balance, it is perhaps within the membranes between the organic and the simulated forms of ‘nature’ that answers to important questions lie.

Ever Rotating Sky (51°10’ N, 115°34’ W) chronicles the passing of three successive days in the Bow Valley of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Using an accurate star chart of the night sky for that season and place on earth, a star field of pinholes are transferred to a sheet of card, which is placed against a large, west-facing exterior window. The light from these pinholes, projected onto a paper screen inside the room, results in an array of camera obscura images of the outside mountain scene, arranged in the pattern of the constellations above.

Over the course of these three days, from dawn until dusk, the light upon the screen is recorded at a rate of one image every 20 seconds. These images have then been collated in series to create a unique time-lapse document in high definition digital video. Tiny, multiple and ever-changing views of rainstorms, mountains, cloudbanks and sunlight all merge over the course of the day to create an abstract universe. Ever Rotating Sky… aims to explore ways of approaching landscape and the circadian rhythms of the everyday, employing time, motion and what has always been there.

Utilizing simple, in-camera techniques, I wanted, with this piece, to consider aspects of nature and landscape, our relationship to it, and our perception of it – and where nature melds into a simulation of itself – and when we care (or notice) – and when we don’t. This piece therefore centres on looking at aspects of ‘real’ and simulated natures, and what constitutes which on a variety of levels, from perceptions of abstract ‘lifelike’ or ‘natural’ motion through to the theoretical boundaries of what constitutes the natural.

My intention is to sift through some of these questions in the form of work which addresses the murky boundaries between these two natures in new ways. Working primarily with the organic, I am seeking to explore perceptions of what constitutes natural motion, natural form, and natural vistas through animation and time-lapse. I want to construct views of parallel natures, by use of the natural, and see if they can exist independently as a ‘truthful’ nature, which not what it is, but which the eye and the heart see as an admittedly parallel, but nonetheless accepted, nature unto its self.

Kirsten Bradley’s work deals primarily with landscapes - urban, natural, sonic, constructed and imagined. Her current interests are centred in sociological histories of the landscape, and the murky waters between the organic and simulated within our perceptions of nature and wilderness. Working primarily as one-third of artist collective Cicada she has exhibited extensively throughout Australia and a little bit overseas including projects at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and the Govett-Brewster, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Ben Frost is a composer, a producer, an artist of sorts and could possibly be described by various other stupid titles. He was born in Melbourne Australia in 1980. He lives in Reykjavik Iceland, eats well, sleeps well, likes holding hands and is, generally speaking... happy.

Litter: project overview

2007-08-01T18:36:00.001+10:00

Litter

Forgetting you is like breathing water (excerpt)

2007-07-26T10:09:00.001+10:00

Click To Play

a little excerpt of one of my Banff residency works, posted to my new blip.tv page....

Medium: single channel digital video - camera obscura (window, pierced card, paper screen), high-definition stills collated into digital video timelapse, stereo sound.

Audio: VeÃ°urathugan - Ben Frost

Forgetting you is like breathing water chronicles the passing of a single day in the Bow Valley of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Using an accurate starchart of the night sky for that date and place on earth, a starfield of pinholes are transferred to a sheet of card, which is placed against a large, west-facing exterior window. The light from these pinholes, projected onto a paper screen inside the room, results in an array of camera obscura images of the outside mountain scene, arranged in the pattern of the constellations above.

Over the course of this day, from dawn until dusk, the light upon the screen is recorded at a rate of one image every 20 seconds. These images have then been collated in series to create a unique time-lapse document in high definition digital video. Tiny, multiple and ever-changing views of rainstorms, mountains, cloudbanks and sunlight all merge over the course of the day to create an abstract universe. This piece aims to provide a new way of approaching landscape and the everyday, through what has always been there

how to weave a web 101

2007-07-25T10:08:00.001+10:00

its all about spiders this week, and basic realisations that of course each species has a vastly different web, but it's not something i had spent a great deal of time on previously... i am currently in the process of figuring out how to replicate webs using half-remembered techniques taught to me by Shaunna at Banff with nebulous results..

in the meantime however, Samuel Zschokke is my new hero due to his extensive online resources dedicated to all things arachnid - including the basics of web-making and diagrams which outline the process of progress within each species' web-type...

a web-process diagram - each colour denotes a seprate stage in the making process

Aotearoa - a week off

2007-07-24T08:48:00.000+10:00

papercuts

2007-07-20T13:56:00.000+10:00

press shot - us gazing lovingly at litter

a couple of articles in the paper today on our New Zealand jaunt..
one on Litter - Taranaki Times
and one on Microclimates - Taranaki Times
both make me cringe a little to read - i always feel like such a galoot in interviews. Fortunately most of the strange misquotations are attributed to Nick, not me.

microclimates workshop

2007-07-06T08:51:00.003+10:00

microclimate by Nick, King St.

Nick and I have just finished off a workshop called Microclimates for the Taranaki Youth Festival in New Plymouth, Aotearoa New Zealand. It was a one day affair, with much making and getting mucky with moss, clay, LED lights, various tree-seedlings and various found objects, and much discussing of site-specific art in all its forms.

After a truncated explaination of cicada, we dived into a little overview of street art and site-specific installation which works with urban environments in transient ways... just that thing of working with what you've got, both in terms of available materials and the built environment, and simple ways of having fun and interacting with yr local block. We discussed community ownership of public space, how street art functions as an ongoing dialogue amoung residents of a site, and different ways of reclaiming space for periods of time... a couple of examples:

good ol' graffiti research lab

we only come out at night

richard the - particularly the parasite project

sam3 - particularly his crash trash animation

the infatiguable mark jenkins

unendingly inspirational wooster collective site, plus a good interview

Karolina Sobecka - wildlife project

and lastly, reverse graffiti

following this barrage of information, we all trekked down King St to decide on our chosen sites. then we got messy and made many things.

workshop materials

kathryn and tayla in process

a completed microclimate, ready for installation

Darelle installing one of her microclimates, Huatoki Lane

microclimate by Kathryn, King St.

another microclimate by Kathryn, Huatoki Lane

microclimate by Nick, Brougham St

the final climax of the workshop was bringing a posse of 25 people back at night following a talk by Rhana Devonport at the Govett-Brewster about New Nature, to explore the microclimates in their nocturnal habitats...

microclimate by Kathryn, King St

microclimate by Darelle, King St

microclimate by Kirsten, Huatoki Lane

microclimate by Nick, Huatoki Lane

treefern internals

2007-07-02T16:58:00.001+10:00

had an interview with the local New Plymouth paper (which? find out friday in the gardening section) today about litter, milkwood, permaculture and the nature of soil....

ex-treefern and its internals... now i understand.

scouring the streets of New Plymouth for places to situate our microclimates as part of tomorro's workshop - decided on one lane - King Street, behind the library.. plenty of scope, all contained, and some undercover areas so the participants can actually install works without getting saturated (it hasn't stopped raining since my arrival on thursday).

a lane off a lane - sodden but full of promise... microclimates afloat maybe?

following a yarn with sarah the jouro and scoping of streets, took off to Pukekura Park, a rather impressive botannical menagerie where the NZ dose of WOMAD is held every two years - a truly beautiful venue with many nooks and crannies - would love to be a part of it next time around...

me beneath a japanese maple... back to winter...

got ensconced in the fernery while taking shots for Ben, who may be doing a sound piece in there over summer. i hope so. it is an ethereal place, he would truly make it kick arse... saw one snail and revealed roots with flash photography in the tunnels.

tree roots traversing the clay roof of a tunnel (with flash)

workshop tomorro - currently brushing up on street art and site-specific funk in general, which of course has exploded into a higher universe since i was researching it, all of a couple of months ago... shall publish a comprehensive list after the workshop. but very good stuff. this planet of ours is going off, even while it fades.

Okato, Aotearoa

2007-07-01T16:50:00.001+10:00

a beautiful place to be beset by jetlag, and listen to the rain on the roof. re-entry is a strange process...
from my bedroom window, Otako

today nick + i gave an artist's talk at the Govett-Brewster gallery in New Plymouth... artists talks are great if nerve-wracking things - very clarifying, and if you get asked hard questions, things really start to tick within.

kirsten and nick talking about kirsten, nick and ben

I have finally seen litter in-situ, and am really pleased with it. so strange to have a work in a gallery, day after day after day, no change - a static but wonderful state to work with - so solid.

I am still missing Banff, and today particularly Amalie - in Tim + Rhana's home is a white tine that she would especially love i think

the bonny white tine, plaster, on Rhana's wall

so, so much water and rain here - treeferns everywhere - I cannot wait to do the workshop on tuesday and then get out into it.... oh yes - Microclimates workshop. Us making very small cultivated environments. with whoever shows up. come!

microclimates workshop

Vancouver outbound

2007-06-27T06:41:00.000+10:00

tramping around the city and surrounds, sad, sad, sad at leaving my Banff residency coccoon. Only one thing for it - a waterfall, a racoon-sighting mission, salt water and a ferry.

waterfall-tumbled sticks at yellow ears park

forest reflection at moment of raindrop impact

Vancouver - English Bay at 6am

rockface, English Bay

me too.

fare thee well

2007-06-24T06:03:00.000+10:00

me hiding in a wall to avoid detection so i can stay forever - personified in Shaunna Dunn's installation in her studio

the imaginary places residency is finally over and i am very sad. In the last week, as so often happens, everyone finally let down their guards, started to relax, and had the best time of their life type thing... so there was a big summer solstice party with eveyone dressed as mythological creatures, much packing of boxes, midnight walks, a flurry of website exchanges, offers of international accommodation and more than a few tears...

first sighting of snow - moose - first chipmunk - rum+esspresso - first snowball - much laughter - new friends - much rendering - much timelapse - midnight soccer - bruised knees - very unsuccessful moss cultivation - very successful pool games - camera obscuras - the sun - the clouds - the grass - the light.

while I'm here - a couple of particularly scrumptious artists that I discovered as a result of conversations here: Joan Fontcuberta (via Ramona): truth and its nebulous nature thru photography, Chris Drury: land art meets camera obscura, Chris Curreri (via Melissa): beautiful 16mm film loops with made with pinholed landscape contours, Mai Fujimoto: whispered photography and pressed and contained small things. And of course, all the Imaginary Places artists, who saturated me with crossfire and cross-references, as we all bounced off each other for seven weeks. I can see the results of this cross-pollenation in what I made, and i can see it in others work too.

Thanks imaginaries. come stay anytime.. all at once even...

Im off to the land of the long white cloud to make microclimates in New Plymouth.

Amalie's film titles, so lovingly iced but here semi-dismantled as they get packed up to go home to Saskatoon, Sasketchuan

Brushing up against the wild, Banff Springs Hotel

2007-06-21T00:05:00.000+10:00

mini banfferinas entertaining us outside our high tearoom

Susannah Wesley and Meredith Carruthers, ie Leisure Projects, produced a rather bizzare and wonderful little event at the worryingly opulent Banff Springs Hotel today. Corsages were worn, tea was served, biscuits nibbled, and then the entertainment appeared on the deck below. splendid. As it was my birthday, I was forced to drink a glass of champagne while watching it all scroll by.

In addition to our entertainment, we were presented with small embossed booklets which included the Leisure Girls dressed in Hudson Bay coats looking arther 1940's as they pointed at mountains and such. the booklets also contained an assortment of bizzare tourisim shots taken within Banff over the centuries....

Mere + Suz point at stuff in Hudson Bay coats which they returned to the store after the shoot

the leisure ladies greeting their guests at Rundle Lounge, Banff Springs Hotel

Rona, Aleesa and Melissa enjoying their tea and view

the banfferinas begin! hurrah.

the leisure ladies surveying their handiwork

Matt and Rory blending right in

mini banfferinas in process

our table decorations - a suite of different wax mountain-climbing scenes with very small men

TRIO - exhibition at the Other Gallery, Banff Centre

2007-06-19T23:38:00.000+10:00

Claude, Sass and I had a small exhibition. it was wonderful.

flier - Claude Jones, me, Renato Sass.

forgetting you is like breathing water - screenshot

forgetting you is like breathing water - installation view

Renato Sass - Stankievech rock (Homeland) - rubbings, paper

Claude and Sass setting up, with Renato's knife piece in foreground

Renato Sass - no title - charcoal and magnifier - you could see a whole world in there...

Claude Jones - some of the lovely neo-nates

Sweetgrass Shadow Experiments: project overview

2007-06-19T14:37:00.007+10:00

Sweetgrass Shadow Experiments is a series of animations and single-channel video pieces that were the result of some explorations I undertook while on a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, in the Canadian Rockies, in the northern hemisphere summer 0f 2007.

At the time I arrived at Banff, I had just completed a year of research into the western history of landscape and the simulation of nature (and the nature of simulation). I had, during this past year, created a pile of site-specific animations at various locations around Melbourne, Australia.

At Banff, I struggled to make sense of my environment and how to work with it. This part of the Canadian Rockies is famed (rightfully so) for its intense natural beauty... everything was picture-postcard-perfect, from the wild strawberries in the grass to the snow-capped peaks which encircled the Arts Centre. I think I got a bit freaked out, in retrospect. I must have, because I covered over my studio windows with paper, which hid the million-dollar view of the Bow Valley in all its alpine glory.

My studio windows at Banff faced due West, and from midday until dusk my studio was flooded with direct sunlight, as the Sun curled around from the South until it went down between a cleft in the Bow Valley sometime around 10pm. I decided to work with first principles, until I got the hang of this alpine environment. So I worked with the sunlight coming into my studio, and the Sweetgrass and other grasses and bits that I collected from the pine forest, just below my studio.

The results of these experiments exist in single-channel video and stop-motion pieces. This material has also formed the basis for several public projection installations.

Outcomes for Sweetgrass Shadow Experiments include:

Shadowbox
a Public Projection for the City of Sydney, as part of the Laneways Projects 2007

Light Augmented
Site-specific projections for Electrofringe 2007

- process diary for Sweetgrass Shadow Experiments (Banff residency)
- photos for Sweetgrass Shadow Experiments (Banff residency)

- Birds Meadow - video
- Birds Bare - video
- Geometric Meadow - video

mountains in the sky

2007-06-18T22:58:00.000+10:00

Simon Clark's performance - a beautiful evening of three songs all about mountains and yearning and how not to get eaten by bears (and an encore about futility and surrendering to the worm) - I think the whole residency was there.. a georgeous evening -

the anticipating crowd on the landing at Vermilion Lakes

the entertainment arrives from across the lake

Simon Clark, deep in song about bears

Rundle and Sulphur Mountains setting the scene

and after the finale, departure

the most beautiful exit I've ever seen

'Imaginary Places' Open Studios

2007-06-17T13:34:00.000+10:00

a whole afternoon of letting the outside world in - a little traumatizing but a good thing to do - I've stashed the fotos from everyone's studios (or those I got to) here, but some of the wonders i witnessed:

charles stankievech - black and white (bits from an installation)

Claude Jones - adorable but worrying creatures

Melissa Levin - composite puzzles (vintage, cut from same die)

Marna Bunnell - hair textures

Dave and Jen - resin, paint and wallpaper goodness, happy together

Ramona Ramlochand and her beautiful reflections (and elk)

Rory MacDonald - whatever it is I love it. all of it.

Renato Sass - mapping the stars on his own terms

Ying-Yueh Chuang - ceramic aquatic

Angela Bouras-Somerset - raku rocks and silicone mice

Tiki Mulvhill - resin, topography and carparts

Barry Underwood - LED installations and slow exposures in the woods

my studio - with only the middle screen left on and a big flat screen TV. and chips.

ever rotating skies

2007-06-15T13:20:00.000+10:00

some of the timelapse frames - I've flipped them for sake of recognition of the landscapes, perhaps they will stay this way

heavens

2007-06-12T13:05:00.000+10:00

wanting to work with the sunlight as object as well as shadow - thought i would make up an accurate starmap of the night sky on the solstice here in Banff, punch the map with different guages of pins, and record the passage of direct sunlight through the holes onto screens mounted on the window frames - a rotating night sky fuelled by the rotating sun -

starmap - east panel for June 21st, 10pm MST - pre-hole punching

starmap - west panel for June 21st, 10pm MST mounted on window (no screen yet)

the light and landscape as projected through the pinholes and onto the screen on the window frame... camera obscura en-masse (you can see clouds outside within each image/lightpoint here)

and so I will take a timelapse from dawn till dusk each day for three days, and see what my little universe has to say... it's meant to be quite cloudy tho, so this may be rather subdued.

moss mobiles - install

2007-06-07T11:36:00.000+10:00

into the woods i went today with my soupy doilies, stretched and unstretched, looking for places to be.

the original intention of this work was to timelapse the growth of the moss mobiles as they went from skeletons to green, aboreal textures, suspended so far from origin, yet home at last...

however, time, unproven techniques and lack of cameras being of the essence here, I cannot currently really set up such a situation. esp. not with all the other sorts of situations I'm working on simultaneously. So - today i installed seven, and i will visit them each day and record their growth and general lives until my time here is up. I am not at all sure that all seven will make it through two weeks and not get munched by elk or re-purposed by someone for something... and I also don't know if the moss-soup concoction will result in moss mobiles..

i will pipe down, visit daily, observe, wait, and learn.

moss soup making

2007-06-07T10:29:00.000+10:00

or what to do on a rainy day....

just a sample of my new collection

ok so I have been collecting doilies for the past four weeks in anticipation of this experiment, which is singularly fantastic because I have always loathed doilies, while being paradoxically aware of the amount of effort inherent to even the dodgiest doilie's creation. i sortof see doilies and all that crochet-y handiwork as documents of time as spent by another generation (and this one)... while awaiting the next task, while emptying the mind of the last one, of late nights and cold days... they really do something to me on the level of time spent, compressed into a document, or a product, which is sortof non-essential, and not really valued once it is created (esp. by the next generation... like me..).

so. in this spirit, I've been collecting doilies while I've been at Banff with the intention of using them fo this moss design experiement. moss, like a doilie, grows slowly. is intricate. is simple yet difficult. intrigues me.
moss-collection location of choice

the moss thing. sofie sent me a link a while back about moss graffiti, via heavypetal. The ethic of this technique slots right into the sense of temporality and the organic that I've been toying around with of late. was thinking that i would like to do moss-ish things - moss against the sky - in the trees around here, as moss is such a big part of the ecosystem.. a primary groundcover, even. It comes in first, sets up on the bare rock and begins a much much larger cycle of growth, ending in the montane and alpine forests as seen around this place. hurrah for moss.
moss de-sticked, de-stoned and ready to blend..

so yes I went ahead and collected some moss from an open drain, and blended it within an inch of its life with buttermilk, sugar and water. I then selected seven sacrificial doilies and soaked them is the moss soup. I stretched some across embroidery frames, and left some as is, with the intention of tying them or situating them somewheres, somehow... an excellent day. my studio now smells slightly unsettling, however.. sortof moss/buttermilk cross, with a dash of soil....

moss and buttermilk - ready for souping

moss soup

the main unknown with this experiment - no actually it's all unknown - I don't even know if the recipie will work... is: how long does moss take to grow? I am here for another two and a bit weeks, and I am not at all sure that moss should be expected to grow to the point of covering my doilie-skeletons by this time... could not find this information anywhere, not even in the Mr Fletcher's moss growing guide ... hmmm.. fingers crossed.

some of the doilies post-moss-soup-soaking, stretched across frames, ready for their adventure in the woods.

sun shadow experiments pt.4

2007-06-06T12:40:00.001+10:00

this one is still in progress - I've taken DV footage, but not yet done the full timelapse at a rate of one frame per 15 seconds, like the previous three experiments. I wait for a sunshiny day...

the movement in this one is really encouraging though, and the birds truly seem to interact - i think there might be a few pieces out of this one....

bird shadows 02: air
DV still - install

DV still - approx 6pm

DV still - lower window view...

sun shadow experiments pt.3

2007-06-06T12:30:00.001+10:00

at this point in the week I had begun to miss the outside world, as i was inside my studio nursing my computer+camera in it's timelapse progress... i think that is what resulted in a whimsical meadow - that and listening to sofie's podcast night and day...

some great intermittent fade-ins and fade-outs due to small clouds passing over on this day - much loved...

bird shadows 01: meadow
DV still - installing/tweaking them pesky birds who would entangle....

animation still - approx 3pm

animation still - approx 6pm

animation still - approx 8.10pm

animation still - approx 8.12pm

DV still - solo bird from middle window

sun shadow experiments pt.2

2007-06-06T12:22:00.001+10:00

the second run through I was cottoning on to the fact that less was more in the grass department - so much compexity sortof cancelled itself out in the first one i think -

grass shadows 02 - the hemmingway:

animation still - approx 6pm

animation still - approx 8.15pm - crosswipe (next door building) coming in..

animation still - approx 8.45pm

animation still - approx 8.46pm

sun shadow experiments pt.1

2007-06-06T12:00:00.001+10:00

the sun on my studio windows here shows up suddenly at 2pm in the lower right-hand corner of my windows and rotates around, filling the windows, until it sets behind the building next door, creating a strange diagonal wipe as it disappears behind the angled roof.

decided to play with this as an entrance to sun shadow animation works which i have been plotting , but not tried, for a year or so now.... so - sheets of butcher's paper on the insides of my windows, grass from the hillsides of the Banff centre taped to the outside of my windows, and we begin. I found this process very hard see through to a point where it actually worked - the intricacy required does not come natural to me - and the results were quite different to what i expected. however, one i got into it, some lovely things occurred... i hope to do more if the sun pokes its head out again during my stay here...

so in a nutshell, a frame was taken every 15 seconds over a period of about 7 hours (2pm-9pm) - which resulted in capturing the passage of the sun and also the movement of the elements infront of the windows over a period of time - a sortof friendly-flickering effect... but quite unsettling too. there is something here that I shall pursue...

grass shadows 01:
animation still - approx 2.30pm

animation still - approx 6pm

animation still - approx 8.15pm

animation still - approx 8.45pm - only the ghost remains...

water and it's overly zealous form

2007-05-25T13:32:00.000+10:00

it is that thing that happens... you make a work in a certain way, using a certain set of thoughts, and it works. hurrah! You then, spurred on by this successful application of your dense and usually opaque thoughts, try to extend that process into a multi-pronged tool which can be weilded at will apon whatever material you choose. Cause the result implied what you wanted it to the first time. But the second time, and the third and the fourth, it doesn't. Or is it just a mutated version of that same result, and I can't see it? aarg.

I have been working with the Bow falls, just below my studio. I have been thinking alot about timelapse as a document, a document of compressed time - how we accept timelapse as 'true' if it is clearly continuous, but its truth is in the subject's smoothness of motion - jerky timelapse is not as believable. Ive also been thinking about the narratives implicit in long exposure photography, as opposed to a photo shot in a moment, an instant. Was looking at Bill Henson's stuff again, following a conversation with Kristine about night photography... the conditions of long exposure imbuing or imposing the role of movement into the frame... also thinking of Barry's work, discussing it with him over dinner - light and movement, or not. Foreground and rear ground.. hmm..

At any rate, I have been experimenting with applying the same thinking that got such a good result in Litter to the Bow Falls, with rather strange results - the motion of the water yeilds up a strange and slightly drunken succession of randomised stills - which remind me a bit of japanese paintings but look a bit treated and mistaken... but the movement and the essence is there - so I am stumped.

first BIG snow

2007-05-25T13:14:00.000+10:00

as in on the ground outside my window, on my balcony, on the bricks, in the trees, on my toungue ('I think the snow is quite polluted here, actually' - Simon). Everyone else was so nonchalant about it all I feared a conspiracy but thats what you get coming from the great south I expect.

The fir trees when seen from above (and below) look like the crystalline structure in the snowflakes I saw. How perfectly in conversation with the snow they are. I had a romantic crisis as I was overcome by the sheer snowiness of it all - 30 years of cumulated media, stories and movies embedded into the actual, really real thing, which was both apart from my expectations and completely muddled by them. I couldn't get those dodgy Frank Sinatra christmas songs about snow out of my head all morning - terrible, terrible.

Kyla + Cara's DIY Banff residency

2007-05-22T11:44:00.001+10:00

pussy willow (front)

for these first two weeks of my residency, fortuitous co-incidence has meant that my good sydney friends, the lovely Cara + Kyla have been shacking up at the Banff Centre, on their own little DIY residency, as my guests. Tonight they fly out to Montreal, where hopefully their rudimentary french and happy adaption skills will see them having the next stage of their globe-trotting adventure. I photographed a couple of the postcards they were making for friends yesterday, along with bits of their process diaries. Lovely stuff. The card below was my own personal souveneir, in honour of Mr Moose that we saw the other day. I hope Montreal treats them well and there are many cards yet to be coloured in...

the commemorative moose-sighting card

cara and kyla noodling away in my studio

process diary - ipod-ready Canadian Mountie

cara finishing off one...

pussy willow (back)

first snow

2007-05-22T03:44:00.000+10:00

snow is the ultimate edge detecting device....

Reflections - after Ramona

2007-05-19T14:18:00.000+10:00

lunch on the lake

Took a day off after two days of Artist talks in which all the artists on this residency presented 10 minutes of their work and floored me utterly... so much stuff.. so good... wow. will review highlights directly. First, however, a day off. Kyla and Cara, my lovely guests from Sydney-town who have been on a 'DIY residency' here at the Banff centre these past two weeks (they were just passing thru on their way to Montreal but got waylaid by cheap accom, free wireless, an amazing library and the sights of this area) went lake looking.

Following Ramona Ramlochand's artist talk on Wednesday we all had become quickly obsessed with the possibilities of reflection, and Lake Louise provided that in large amounts. Actually in small amounts since most of it is still frozen, but still, enough to get boggled at the fragments of worlds that appeared. Very interesting stuff - esp. with melting ice mushing perception even further...

I took five gazillion photos at this Lake - I think the collective urge to record the spectacle got to everyone there as soon as they arrived - much clicking going on left right and centre.

We followed the lake looking with a cocktail in the very posh Chateau Lake Louise lounge, under the only slight pretence of my toasting Kyla and Cara's impending nuptiuals. The venue was resplendent with antler-wielding-wenches on the chandeliers, masterful views of the lake through picture windows and leather embossed coasters, three of which we promptly souveniered...

note antlers...

hotsprings and conclusions

2007-05-14T10:15:00.000+10:00

hot springs pool

Banff as a place was essentially founded as a fortuitous tourist town, with which to fund the trans-Canada railway. Thanks be to whatever that, while they were building the cross-continental railway, some of the workers found some sulphurous springs in a very pretty valley and bingo, Banff was born. ta daaa.

And then that grew into a national park and it was all very nice, tho how much of the park's foundation was to preserve the viability of tourism in the valley is an undiscussed point. A wildlife corridor runs up behind the original hot springs site. I have a bit of a problem with the term wildlife corridor - I always think that it infers that at each end of said corridor is a wildlife friendly wilderness of gargantuan proportions, and it is only the corridor that is rather thin... however, I'm learning that the wildlife corridors is North America are, infact, the main event for the wildlife within... so they're living in the hallway, so to speak. And the corridor is bookended with condos. I need to read up on this to see if I'm way off on this point, but that's my impression...

The northern/southern hemisphere thing is still doing things to my head. The moss is on the North side of the trees. The south walls are the sunny ones. I'll get there. Its only that what Im wanting to make here is so founded in natural parameters. I need to become intimate with the suns path for everything to work properly..

moss at base of drain below ceramics studio

moss is so big here - so big. it is its own environment. It couches everything beneath the trees and makes walking in the woods a slightly surreal and very sensual experience - every step is sofly padded - I keep on feeling like some sort of animal with big, soft paws.... which is no small feat in my hiking boots. It slows me down and makes me very respectful of what Im walking in, and on, and through....

I think moss is going to be a big part of what I do here - I guess it comes back to the "other" - that which we do not have... and the huge presence of water and how forgiving the landscape is here seems embodied in the moss - the landscape seems so severe above the treetops, and so sleepy below... but clearly waking up right now, coming into summer. little orchids everywhere.

thinking of combining the weaving ideas with moss and ending up with a woven frame, innoculated with moss, for some of the mountains... will decide where to try one tomorrow. I'm also keen to extend the ideas behind litter towards a more site-specific creation - so intending to do quite a few of those while I'm here - perhaps at bow falls?

bow falls from above - rapids really...

I have been realising how big an influence herman de vries has been - I picked up his Chance and Change at my very most favourite bookshop ever, Published Art last year, and I am so glad that I did... a very quiet but robust presence he is.... have particularly been thinking about his work documenting multiple moments in a stream... can find no images online but examples are in the book (which is in a box in australia.. sob..). I think that work is a big influence on litter, and will be on future works.... go herman, you lovely old geezer...

went for a walk yesterday up the sundance trail - the mose picturesque yet, I believe.. crazy. So.. empty! except for holidayers in blue plastic canoes, and walkers. And I saw two geese. But... I was expecting... more non-human inhabitants I suppose.. since the environment seems so capable of sustaining so very much. Think I need to explore a bit more.. I feel like I'm missing large chunks of the feel of this place... looking for a better understanding of how the rampant human aspect interacts with whats left of the rest....

bow river, looking downstream towards banff

first walk

2007-05-11T08:07:00.000+10:00

Banff Centre

2007-05-10T10:03:00.000+10:00

view from my studio, looking west

just to clarify, I am going to be at the Banff Centre for the following 7 weeks as part of the Imaginary Places residency, thanks to the Banff Centre and Ozco. While I'm here I'll be researching and making work around the perception of landscape and the space between the organic and simulated in nature. And it's really quite an optimum place to explore all that stuff, being in the middle of a National Park and all.

The setup is really quite grand and the facilities are pretty bloody impressive. My bedroom, a hotel-esque room in a central accommodation building, looks east, over Tunnel Mountain and up the Bow valley. My studio looks west, out over the river and the town of Banff proper. There is a dining hall, a olympic pool, a library, a television studio and a papermaking studio, to mention some of the bits. The centre itself funds all this with big conferences and the like, so there's always lots of people walking around with lanyards swinging from their necks and discussing superannuation with each other.

It is quite different from anywhere I've ever been.

sleepless in Vancouver

2007-05-10T09:31:00.000+10:00

parkland somewhere near Langley

landed sleepless and unsure in vancouver while the hometown hockey team lost to some other country, causing uproar in the airport. 24 hours on a plane is a long time. Was met by my permaculture-mad friends J+T, and whisked away to begin 2 days of hard-core assimilation. This involved a park, a lake, a river, a dog, a starbucks, a community garden, a treefarm, a grafting lesson, a cookup, a supermarket of quaking proportions, a wormfarm, a genuine canadian breakfast with hashbrowns but sadly no maple syrup for the bacon, a mountain, some crunchy old snow, a squirrel, lots of driving, lots of highways, byways and general 8-lane freeway complexity, and a walk along the waterfront at Gastown.

first impressions of Canada, and particularly the outer suburbs of Vancouver, centre around an obscene amount of rainfall and a general fecundity, juxtaposed completely with the "sametown" feel of each suburb, and laced with an emphasis on the mall over the corner store. Filter coffee overflows everywhere, is mandatory, is essential, is assumed. Alot of things look the same each place we go, the cars are all new and very big. The grass is very very green. Houses are very perfect. Tulips everywhere. I find it all a bit scary.

But the company I'm in is grand and I cannot wait to come back and explore without the veil of jetlag and culture-shock.. plans are forming for a camping trip, and there's other community gardens I'm super keen to check out. I would like to spend time in amoungst all of these contradictions that crash together quite comfortably in this city. I'm aware, however, that my focus needs to be up in the mountains eastways from here, so I'm going to clamp down and come back.

leafy peking duck

2007-04-29T17:38:00.000+10:00

litter - screenshot

so litter is finally nearly finished - the making part. As usual, we thought the shoot would take a day, two at the outside. It took over a week. Multiple days of Nick and I stripping little leaves off unnamed native plants, scrabbling our way up scree cliffs on the back block in search of materials, frantic solutions to strange problems (how to spray-glue dirt onto plyboard). and then, once assembled, lots and lots and lots of slight manipulations of the frame to create the animation. slow, tiny, incremental manipulations - to shift the frame's contents but not to change it utterly...

following the eventual shoot, on a farmhouse floor with questionable lighting - swatting the cat away at intervals - I am now not so sure what to think of the 'straight forward' animation approach, which i so favour over the whole intricate storyboard (how do you storyboard abstraction?) technique... it is such a question of trying to imagine the resultant effect of your incremental actions within the animating process, without trying to 'rule' the result - to allow for whatever result comes out to have space to breathe..

anyrate, many hundreds of frames later, we had something. and it is beautiful. I took the frames into Final cut and proceeded to tweak and add to the inherent motion and form that we had, while Nick wrote randomised scripts to create 'sets' of images that could then be imported in order to create some true chaos and random order. quite tricky, I thought. The results were pretty out there, but ultimately the piece popped up its head and now it is sitting on my harddrive, ready to go to sydney in a few days. We'll need a proper beefy computer to play it back in its full resolution form, and there aint none of those around here - my little laptop is already pretty grumpy after this last onslaught of editing.

So a day in Sydney on a friend's grunty computer, to set everything straight and check the entire clip for any problems - which means multiple stints of looking at 10 minutes of static-like video rather intently. Which is only just bareable because 1) we will defect to a feast of Peking Duck directly after this session, and 2) because the next day I fly out to Canada to begin my residency at Banff. So its the last day of school, in a sense. For myself anyway - from here on in, litter will be Nick's baby to nurse through production to installation in May at the Govett-Brewster. I feel for him - but, on the upside, this will be the simplest install that a cicada work has ever seen - by a factor of five million trillion... so it should be a comparatively pleasurable experience for him... fingers crossed...

raccoon international

2007-04-23T11:35:00.000+10:00

Ever since I read some godawful story at the age of five about a pet Raccoon and how it washed its sugarcube before eating it and henceforth dissolved its dinner, I've been a bit smitten with this animal. And finally, 24 years later, I am pleased to report that a meeting with a raccoon might well be nigh.

Next week I'm heading off to Banff, Canada, to undertake an Ozco residency at the Banff Centre for two months, as part of the Imaginary Places program. From the looks of it, Banff itself looks pretty imaginary in some respects, and the Centre where I'll be based looks also slightly mythical - a bit too picturesque - like its about to flip upside down and reveal the headquarters of ultimate evil on planet earth, nya ha ha and all of that...

But back to the Raccoon. From my enitial research, it would seem that raccoons are inhabitants of where I am going, but they don't really rate a mention on the 'fauna' sections of the various 'come to Banff' websites - a bit like Magpies perhaps - slightly too ubiquitous... so I can only live in hope. I shall, it seems, have to get my fill while over there, as the poor little blighters are not allowed into Australia under any circumstances, and are, in fact, in the EXTREME DANGER category on the Aussie exotic species introduction website I found. This said, according to this website we are, in this country, also in EXTREME DANGER should the Flamingo be successfully introduced. and also the Zebra. Infact, about the only things that rate a low invasion danger is the Giant Panda and the Kiwi. As in the bird.

So yes. Off to Canada for me. Sadly it seems that I'll therefore miss the bulk of the Kirwin olive harvest, and escape olive-induced RSI for another year... oh well.

leaf litter

2007-04-16T18:34:00.000+10:00

aside from figuring out how to build a house and harvest water and fence out marauding sheep and all that, I've been doing some press shots for Cicada's next work, litter, which Nick will be installing at the Govett Brewster Gallery in New Zealand for the show we're in there in May, New Nature...

litter is something that came out of last year's brainspace concerning pixelation and simulating the artificial by use of the organic and all that stuff which was whirling around my head in 2006. The work is, in short, a kind of leaf static - a visual white noise composed of many tiny organic elements, i.e. small leaves and seedpods and twigs - the idea being that from a distance the work is experienced as white noise/mushy static (both visual and aural), and as the piece is approached it clearly takes on a more organic form. Hopefully (and quite centrally), however, the piece will still display the same properties as you experience when you watch video static for too long - the mind seeks to make patterns out of chaos and you end up fascinated with the whorls and expanding shapes within the chaos - yr very own op art...

And Ben's sound should take the audience from the mundane to the intricately intimate with a soundworld which starts as white noise and ends up as, well, actually I haven't heard it yet, but perhaps something like what the forest floor might sound like if all the mulch and leaves were sentient...

The visual side of things will be created by stop-motion animation and a very large supply of small-sized organic materials, which I'll be gathering over the next few days in large quantities from the hills around milkwood, and up the back block in the conservation area. I would like to be able to include the latin names of all the organic components, but my knowledge does not yet extend that far. I still can't tell the difference between all (or any actually) of the eucalypts around here... or the grass... clearly the botanist in me is still yet to rise up.

herro...

2007-04-16T12:55:00.000+10:00

My fragmented past blogging moments amount to animata, which I was using during a brief interlude with post-graduate research last year, and saltmilk, which was an unfinished record of an artist-in-residence period I did in the West Australian wheatfields a while back. Now that Nick and i are setting up Milkwood.net, its occurring to me just how much I shouldn't really post there cause its rather laterally related to Milkwood's focus (at best)... and now that we're out the back on our little remote hilltop, the lack of communication is something I'm really struggling with... so... herro...

Animata experiments: project overview

2006-12-12T17:26:00.003+11:00

Collingwood weaving - screenshot
Stop-motion animation / site-specific installation
chainlink, grass, mallows
©2006 Kirsten Bradley

In 2006 I spent a quiet and quietly wonderful year doing part of a Master of Fine Arts at RMIT in Melbourne, within the animation department.

My gondolier for this regenerating year was my supervisor (and old housemate) John Power. We chatted much about the nature of nature, the history of landscape, animation in all its forms and 'the grand view'. JP was (and still is) a bristling collection of references, ideas and enthusiasm, in the loose shape of a scruffy, tall man with an uncanny knack for breakdancing (the poppin' and lockin' bits, anyway).

Over the course of this year I sort of re-generated from a burnt-out new media artist into someone who allowed themselves to work with twigs and bits of string, as well as a computer. It sounds like a little thing, but it was a big thing for me.

This project was also the first one that I kept an ongoing record of the process for, although I bounced between notepad and laptop and found a happy medium somewhere in between.

The outcome of all this research was a series of site-specific animations, and some stop-motion animations, all of which were exploring natural and unnatural motion, circadian rhythms and ways to intersect with the everyday, using animation and found objects.

I was planning to continue this work thru to large-scale site-specific animations, which took place over a year, or a lifetime... In the middle of this momentum, however, I moved to a remote farm for family reasons, and was confronted with the reality of 'the land', rather than the idea of it, or 'the land' in a daytrip format. Moving to the farm changed things, brought the far-away into my everyday, and for some reason, I stopped. But I will come back to this project one day soon.

- process diary for Animata experiments
- photos to do with Animata experiments

- Collingwood weaving - video
- Fire escape weaving - video
- Kitchen centipede - video

Fire escape weaving - screenshot (detail)
Stop-motion animation / site-specific installation
jute string, blutac
©2006 Kirsten Bradley

leaf pixelation 01

2006-10-30T20:24:00.001+11:00

1665 pixels/blutac spots/leaves, about three days at 6hrs a day - started off at 15 fps but aout halfway thru process dropped it down to 5 as I was afraid i was going to pack it in and not finish... quite labour intensive without the apparent change of the other anims I've done this year.

I processed a clip of Lisa Griffiths (from Loom) thru AfterEffects with this 'roman mosaic' effect (and levels) to achieve the pixelation - nick suggested just lowering the res instead so will try that next time - I then exported the frames as a Jpeg sequence and imported them into Pshop for the benefit of overlaying a grid of red lines (guides) - divided the screen up into portions 5x5 pix. this worked reasonably well - i started animating using a difference mask in order to define which pixels needed to be inverted, but this quickly fucked up as leaves began to fall - and it was alot quicker to do the 'does my 5x5 square look like your 5x5 square?' comparison rather than have to take off the difference mask all the time to see what it actually should be looking like - given my penchant for confusion, this was the best way to approach it all - pretty tiring tho -

regarding the result, I feel that straight figurative is not the way to go at all - it should be a leaf static which accentuates the forms of the individual pix/leaves - they sould be different species and different sizes- but bound together by some factor (colour?) - the beauty of the leaves should be paramount, altho it could work to have a glimpse of something figurative emerge from the static at some point... i think - or maybe it should only be shapes, vertical bars moving horizontally.. something like that... the base of the animation, which is fluttering without being figurative, is my favorite part - strongest by far -

i should remember tho that this in-studio experiment would look quite different from being out insitu, with sun, wind, crawlies etc.. would figurative work better in this stuation? or just be contrived and confusing to boot?

this technique of blutac on wall was not too bad, but the removal and re-application was probably a big time killer - plus the leaves, after the first day, started falling off a fair bit, and yr having to check which way around to put them back on - pins are definitely the go..

might investigate a big pinboard to attach to....