Working with passion: Atsuo Okamoto and Eleanor Vonne Brown

Passion is infectious!

 

 Atsuo Okamoto has got a  "Forest" at the Chelsea College of Art parade ground - a stunning display of his stone carvings. 

“Stone keeps huge memories inside, since the planet came into existence. I feel that stone is the most romantic and intellectual object on the earth.” 

I ran into him a few times at Chelsea foundry recently. He is happy to talk and he is curious. As a result, I have already been to Camberwell foundry with a few new ideas, that I feel so... hm...  passionate about.

 Eleanor Vonne Brown runs X Marks the Bökship, which is a publishing project space for independent publishers. She gave us a talk about publishing, editioning, projects, fairs, etc. I did not realize how much was out there!
Revolver Publishing
Print Matters Interest Group
Byam Shaw Library of Art
 etc.
So refreshing to listen to somebody dripping with knowledge and joy about what they do! Bags of inspiration!

Alicia Bock: prints for Japan.

 

There are some beautiful beautiful limited edition prints by Alicia Bock. Proceeds will be donated to Red Cross relief efforts in Japan.

If there is cinematic poetry...

"Music articulates forms which language cannot set forth" - Susanne Langer (from G. L. Hagberg Art as Language. Wittgenstein, Meaning and Aesthetic Theory)

"Music articulates forms which language cannot set forth" - Susanne Langer (from G. L. Hagberg Art as Language. Wittgenstein, Meaning and Aesthetic Theory)

If there is cinematic poetry, this must be it. Do watch it to the end, if you have not seen it before. And get yourself a copy of the film - Spirited Away.

This must be the most beautiful scene from any film. Chihiro boards this train. It's a spirits' train - she is in the spirit land, trying to rescue her parents. The train only runs one way. It travels through the vast spaces of water. The music is sublime. So atmospheric.
I have travelled once on the slow train in winter across Lithuania. And this is how it felt. The land was vast and white; the stops seemed all in the middle of nowhere; the people were silent, pensative and carried baskets and old cases. I could almost hear that music!






PS. Apparently the magnificent soundtrack to this magnificent film is by Joe Hisaishi - one more name to add to my favorite Japanese artists, alongside Araki Takako, Yohei Nishimura and - of course - Hayao Miyazaki.

ESSAY. Yakimono. David Maisel.

Library of Dust is a haunting series of images by David Maisel, who photographed a collection of corroding copper canisters containing the cremated remains ("cremains") of patients at the Oregon State Insane Asylum from 1883 to 1971. The canisters are beautiful. The topic is disturbing. The abandoned remains have reacted with the copper to create colourful deformations on the canisters that often appear to be bubbling over. Bubbling over with death, neglect, the effects of mental illness, yes, but at the same with the spirit of individuals who have finally come to embody beauty. The asylum itself is decaying when Maisel first visits, and the photographs depict large slices of peeling pain and tiles curving free of the floor, a reflection of the previous disorder. These photographs will lead to pensiveness and quiet wonder. The visual poetry is beautiful, bewildering and bewitching.

Yakimono - a Japanese word for ceramics - literally means "firied" (yaki) "things" (mono). That explains everything!

ESSAY. Biblioclasm. Araki Takako.

Look what I have found! Araki Takako!

Araki Takako is an internationally acclaimed ceramic artist, particularly well-known for the "Bible" series on which she has been working for more than twenty years. Araki is an atheist, but her father was a Zen priest. The prolonged and painful death of her brother, a faithful Christian, from tuberculosis, focused her doubts on the value of religion. She sees the bible as both a symbol of Western culture and a symbol of the vanity of Christian belief. Her obsessive metaphorical work sparked by her brother's death serves as an eulogy on the powerlessness of faith. The brittle decaying Bibles are composed of layers of thin fragile clay sheets which she has silk-screened with text. Their decaying fragility contains its own message that ultimately the Word is ephemeral. Araki devoted herself to the family profession of flower arranging until 1952 when she began to study painting. From 1960 to 1961 she studied sculpting in New York before returning to Japan where she studied in different pottery centres. Her reputation for sculptural ceramics was established in 1979 when she received the grand prize at the Japan Ceramics Exhibition.

I find her work very powerful. That same feeling I get when looking at Oscar Munioz videos. She produces a statement without being aggressive.
There is stillness and a meditative quality in Araki's ceramics.

Yohei Nishimura: fired books

I have been to the National Arts Library at V&A recently. I have got this essay to write and V&A offers access to the most fantastic collection. For free. AND your are allowed to photograph.

So - I was sitting there, getting slowly depressed for I was finding nothing relevant to my work. This is when I came across Yohei Nishimura. V&A has one of his fired books in their collection.

''The open & closed book: contemporary book arts'
Yohei Nishimura
Published by Yohei Nishimura
Tokyo, Japan, 1993
Height 17 cm x width 11 cm x depth 5 cm

This work by Yohei Nishimura is one of a series of bookworks that are the result of the artist's experiments of working on various objects by firing them in a kiln, 'At a certain point, I tried to fire books coated with clay as I believed that was the only way to keep forms of paper without turning them to ashes. Then I found a curious fact that not only a part of the book coated with clay, but also a part without, still conserves a form'. In this case the artist has fired a copy of a catalogue of an exhibition held at the V&A entitled 'The open & closed book' (1979). The original work is shrunk, the wrappers are a stark white and the pages are fused together.



Well. I thought it was the most beautiful piece of bookworks. Fragile. Tactile. Simple. The book is gone. Infomation is wiped out. Just the shape remains. Somehow it resembles the air of Rachel Whitread work. The ghost of a book.

Yohei Nishimura has given me onto some ideas for the future. Let's hope I get access to the ceramics studio!