Raincloud

I’ve been thinking about this idea for the last couple of weeks since I went through our plastic bag drawer and saw all the different shades of storm coloured bags I’ve been collecting with our veggies from the Prahran markets.  They reminded me of the sky out our window of late, and I thought I’d bring some of it inside with me…..

I love the shadows that appear on our walls each evening when I turn on the lights!

This work grew from a slide of an artists work I saw in a lecture during second year fine arts at Massey – A series of  transient installations that used empty spaces in un-leased shops and abandoned buildings.  The artist had covered entire walls and or ceiling space with plastic bags to form a whole new texture surface – Almost like a skin or membrane that moved and rustled as the viewer moved through the space.

I love the idea of giving value to something that is usually seen as disposable, trash to be discarded without a thought – I wanted to turn them into something beautiful and bright.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to track down the name of the artist from the slides – My lecture books are somewhere in a box in our storage unit in Wellington (And were usually sadly lacking of any actual useful notes)  – This is when I really regret how bad I am with remembering names… One of the reasons I never took art history!  Frustrating as I can remember the slides, which lecture they were from, even the room it was held in and the people sitting next to me during that class.

…. If my description somehow rings any bells at all to anyone, I would so love to hear from you  – It’s driving me nuts that I can’t give credit to the original work that got me thinking down this track!

Plastic bags are actually a really interesting medium to work with – In my trawl through the internetz looking for reference to said artists work I did come across this beautiful installation put up by Luzinterruptus outside the The Prado Museum in Madrid …The description in english is down at the bottom of the page

I also found a piece by Joanna Langford entitled The Whisper Lands which was created for the Auckland 2009 Art fair. It  incorporates suspended clusters of interlinked white plastic clouds from the ceiling, and fans to make the work ‘breathe’ – I’ve seen some of her work when she displayed at Enjoy Gallery in Wellington a couple of years ago, but this is the first time I’ve come across her clouds.

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Catalogue

So I was clearing out cupboards and drawers in our kitchen the other day – the apartment in Melbourne we are living in came fully furnished, but with all sorts of random things jammed in the very small amount of storage space given over to the kitchen – So, after being here for a year (well, on and off !) I have finally got around to moving some of the things we really aren’t gonna need… like all those ugly old china tea cups *no, not nice ones that you would actually use for tea!*

In the process I had to sort through useful and not useful.  It reminded me a bit of an art project I did at Massey about cataloging  my life a couple of years ago.  And got me to thinking some of the things in these drawers and cupboards might also make interesting pictures. …. So are the first couple :

…They are actually the same size and tints – I used the same paint mixes on them both, but have photographed at diff. times of the day as i’m too impatient to wait to put them up when they are done!

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Massey University Fine Arts work

These are a few pieces from my second year in fine arts at Massey in Wellington – can’t for the life of me find any of my earlier work, I suspect it was stored on some unlabelled cd chucked in a box in our storage unit, ah well!

Give and Take – Photographic cutouts, mounting pins, deep set white glassless frames.

Contextual studio “Sex, Politics and Religion” 3.0…. This is the outcome of the first semester of contextual studio,  looking at compromise and change related to pregnancy and the role of responsibility and lifestyle choice.  What I personally had to give up, but what I also gained. Working through a kind of loss, and coming to terms with my new role to be.

Nurture – Sculpting wax, candle wick.   Sculpture class 2.1 second assignment ‘The Body’.

The above are two works from a contextual studio brief entitled ‘Remake 3.1’ – We were put into collaborative groupings of two to three people and the goal was to remake each of our last semesters work as one new combined work – our collaborative work is entitled ‘The Pink Response’, and these works are two of my personal responses within this brief.

Domestic flowers – Rubber gloves, Sanitary napkins, Dish brush, Kitchen sponge, Acrylic paint, Fake pearls and Birth control pills.

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