The Party

On Saturday, AnTobar held their Christmas party. A marvelous affair with local musicians and great food, generous discounts off their shop stock and a talk by me. What more could anyone ask for. A few friends came along - Miriam, Maggie, Jane and Lizzie came over to the island and we stayed the night in Dervaig. There was a Race Night in the Dervaig Village Hall that we were sad to miss but you can't be in two places at the same time. Here is a summary for anyone that is interested and couldn't make it to the talk.


I thought it would be good to take each piece in turn and mention what was in my head when I made it, what is in my head now as I reflect on it - a sort of pit-stop tour of my state of mind.

The Engagement
The first figure. All the figures in the exhibition are moving in a direction. But she is pulling against the hand of the running man and turning round to the door. To the gallery visitor. She wants to engage with you.
For me, all art is about the anticipated engagement. ..While working on a piece, I am anticipating an engagement with you and preparing for a dialogue. We have all heard the expression, for a piece of my work to become art, it must be experienced. For me, it is more than that: for a piece of work to become art it most be made to be experienced.

And the dialogue I am preparing for is between me the artist and you the perceptive observer. I am using a traditional form of grammar for this dialogue – the grammar of sculpture. But I want to add something to this – a new language, new words. I use the string like words. These string words carry the encoded meaning. But what meaning can be embedded in a piece of string? It could be colour. The colour red for stop, for danger, for love, green for go, for the environment, yellow for happiness, blue for stability and peace. But these meanings are only shared within our culture. For example, if you went to Korea then the colour pink would be used for stability. And there are other meanings, more like associations that I hope some of us share: The sand, the sand on your feet the string under the sand, childhood memories, nostalgia, the fishing industry, fears for the fishing industry, fears for the environment, the salt water, the beach, the sand, childhood memories of looking for buried treasure.

I think that the most wonderful about making art is that it allows us to have dialogue with people we might not otherwise meet and to have these dialohues across normally exclusive time zones. This dialogue is between the artist at the time of making the piece and the observer at the time of perceiving the piece. These two time zones can be merged together in one piece of art. So, I can go to the Rothko exhibition now, for example, and engage with Rothko at the time he painted the panels.

The next two pieces also deal with time.

Kairos
In Olympia about the 4century B.C there was a sculpture and it was written about by writers of the time because it was so beautiful. It is of a young man, possibly the youngest child of Zeus, on tip toe, running, he has a razor in one hand. He has a lock of hair on his forehead and he is bald at the back. He represents opportunity, the crucial moment, the special time. Seize his forelock as he approaches because he cannot be grasped from behind. His name is Kairos. This string woman is my Kairos. She is running for everyone who is prepared to grasp the opportunity. Perhaps she is running for the person in crisis – the person looking for a life changing experience - the traveller across continents. But she is also running for the person who is not in any obvious crisis but who is sinply living their lives - for me, perhaps, getting a letter offering me the opportunity to try for an exhibition in AnTobar. not sure if I am ready for a solo exhibition. Not sure if it is the right time.But knowing if I let this chance go by I will never get it again. Knowing that this is a special opportunity. I did seixe the opportunity and I am glad that I did. Artists need to be able to identify these significant moments and act on them. We all need to.

The Hour
In common Greek the word for beautiful came from the word for hour. Beauty was "being of one's hour" Perhaps that was because they thought that a woman had a specific hour when she was most beautiful. Or perhaps it was because they thought that a woman could be beautiful whatever her age as long as she was "of her hour". I like to think that it is this. I think I am beautiful because of my age. The traditional sculptors may have preferred young girls, thinking that was when a woman was most beautiful, but I think a woman can be beautiful at any time. I think all women are beautiful and I like the way they look as they get older, I like the way the hips are, the chest is longer the legs are thinner or thicker or whatever. I use myself as primary model because I want to show this in my work. Beauty is important to me. I want to create beauty. For this, I use the string material in the same way as I would use oil paints. There is not much difference between the pigments suspended in oil and the pigments trapped in the oil of plastic. Also, you need to apply the same discipline with colour. Some colours, yellow or red or orange, can be strong. When you stand back, to look, they have warped a shape. You have to be aware of their strengths and exploit them. Also I like to think that the string is similar to brushstrokes, just as you may enjoy looking at a brush stroke repeated again and again in a painting, so the same string appear again and again in the sculptures ( a thin green one 0.5m long ) and become for me like a brushstroke, Like when you look at a van Gogh painting and see the same stroke repeated again and a again It is like that.

The Running Man
I think the material make-up of a piece of art is important. I’d like to talk now about how it all began. It was one Sunday and I was beach cleaning. I was looking for something exciting to make a sculpture. So I was looking through the seaweed and through the string looking for this special thing that I would use. I was thinking of maybe driftwood or metal or something. Then suddenly my perspective changed (like a "road to Damascus experience" ) I found myself not looking through the string, as I had een, but at it. The string was the material for the sculpture. I knew I would use the string. I made a small figure and then I made this running man. Although he was not made as part of this exhibition I have included him in the exhibition because of his significance as the first life-size figure. IN the finished piece, I want you to look at the material not just look through it.

If we take for example the Mona Lisa, few people dwell on the material makeup of the painting, they travel through the medium into a world where a beautiful woman with an enigmatic smile is looking at them and that’s good.

Likewise, when we watch a good thriller film, and maybe there is a woman in the bath or the shower and someone outside or in the shadow. We are not aware of the physical film or the textures of the image. We are not thinking about the shiny scissors cutting and splicing at the reel – we are more interested in the shiny big axe that’s about to smash through the bathroom door or the shadow of the knife on the shower curtain.

I don’t think that is the case with Charlotte’s film that is running Gallery two. Although there is an underlying narrative, we are invited to look at the surface of the film too. I was delighted to see Charlottes film when we were setting up the exhibition. I think she is doing, in film, something similar to what I am doing in sculpture. I want you to look at their makeup, not through it. I want to force attention onto the substrate

And that brings us onto the sound. A very similar thing happened with the sound as with the string. When I was planning the exhibition, I thought I would put the figures in context. I was aware that there weren’t any windows, no fresh air and it seemed that since they were of the sea and had been made by the sea that I would like some reference to that in the exhibition. I was thinking of maybe the sound of the waves. So I tried to record the waves and one morning about 4 o’clock ( because that’s when I tended to do it). I set out for the Lagoon, a beach close to where I live. But the wind picked up and by the time I got there I didn’t get a good recording so I headed back home. Just as I was coming up to my front door, I heard a noise that I had only listened through up until then, A sound I have listened through while I was trying to get my wave sound. It was the sound of the wind on the halyards and masts of the yachts on the Loch. I realised that was what I wanted and I recorded it and that is what you hear in the exhibition. I tried to make other recordings but I preferred this one made at the time that I heard it.
Then I put some music behind my sound. I chose a piece by John Cage who was an experimental musician who was active around the 1950s. He had been a source of inspiration to me when I had been making the visual piece but not for his music more for his philosophy. The piece was called the dream it had been made for piano but I found a recording by a great percussionist Justin Stolarik from New York. I think that it is a beautiful piece. It’s hard to describe but the quality of Justin’s notes and the spacing between the notes reminds me of the quality of the individual pieces of string and the spacing between them.

But "wait a minute" you might say. Doesn’t this expose a dilemma? One minute you’re classical and the next minute you’re experimental. You have to get off the fence. But I say "no!" I don’t have to. I am not living in the 1950s; I am not living in classical Greece. These artists and movements are my teachers. I need to take from them, and here is the challenge: I need to move forward with my art, produce my own.


Gigha
This all leads us on to another art movement that I find inspirational. In the mid 1960’s a group of young Italian artists began to produce art work that was using cheap inexpensive material. The movement became known as "arte povera" "poor art" not because they were poor but because any poor person could get involved – because of the nature of the material. I like this idea. Sometimes it can be messy, not here because your beaches are lovely and sandy but further south in Argyll sometimes on the beach it is so messy it’s like walking on a rubbish tip. At those times I feel as if I am scavenging on a rubbish tip like the other scavengers of the world. Except I have a nice warm house to go home to at the end of it. But we are all trying for the same thing – they are scavenging and struggling to stay alive because life is beautiful, and sometimes they are making art because art is beautiful. I am scavenging to make art because art is beautiful. This is why this exhibition is dedicated to the memory of my nephew Simon McKernan who used everything he could to stay alive because life is beautiful.