Wrapped Sketchbook

This one is an old sketchbook/journal that I kept during the period just after I split up with my ex. Given the personal nature of the contents I like the idea that it would be really easy to open it up and look inside but in doing so you’d be breaking the ‘art object’.

The idea was inspired in part by a comment made by the marvellous Saskia Takens Milne about Carousel, an installation I made for the recent Unrealised Projects event at the Milton Keynes Gallery. The installation consisted of the slides my mother kept over the two or three years when my sister and I were born which were projected out of focus on a white screen. The concept of Carousel was mainly about memory but I guess there was also a tension around the idea of voyeurism and Saskia commented that there was something interesting in that you could, if you wished, lean over and focus the lens.

And another thanks to Saskia for taking the photos!

VOID VOID VOID VOID

From the 1^st to the 30^th of June 2011 I will be taking part in the SIM Residency in Reykjavik. During that time I plan to use this blog as a place to document the work I am making as I produce it, as well as to encourage other bloggers (yourselves) to leave comments, make suggestions and send links, images, writing and any other sorts of ephemera that they feel might be of interest to me and this little community.

So why have I started this blog?

Well I suppose first and foremost in my mind is that, for one month, I will be physically cut off from the cabal of friends, artists, writers and other creative types who support my practice through the giving of advice and support (both moral and practical). My first intention is to use this space as a place to explore what that interaction means to me and as such I encourage you, the select few, to leave comment and so on.

Secondly I plan to keep a journal, a sketchbook and a note book while I am staying in Reykjavik. At the end of the month I plan to lock them up or away in some form or another. Maybe by getting a book binder to seal them up or by burying them in soft peat, or maybe I’ll give them to some gnarled old sea captain who is leaving for the Arctic? This blog will act as a balance to this, rather inward looking project. But more about this later

Welcome, make yourself at home (but don’t put your feet on the coffee table, that’s very rude)

Paul