Last night a good group of people joined us as we screened The Making of Utopia (2006) by Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen which portrays four utopian communities in Australia: Bodhi Farm, Dharmananda, Equilibrium and Moora Moora and explores utopian vision and communal reality. This was followed by an informal discussion about Amphis, Wysing’s communal structure currently under construction and made entirely from discarded and found materials.  The evening was introduced by our new Curator Lotte Juul Petersen who joins us from Denmark. 

check out this website:  http://www.ubu.com/

Just a quick ‘Blog’ reminder that I will be in Portsmouth this week installing my work at the Natural History Museum, Butterfly House and the gallery space at Aspex for the forthcoming sculpture show One Thing Against Another.

If you fancy a trip to the south coast for the opening event this Saturday it would be great to see you!  Please visit the Aspex website to find out more information.  www.aspex.org.uk  There is also a v.good offer to go by coach from London (leaving outside the London Eye).  Booking in advance recommended.  All details on their website.

Both Katherine Hymers and Sarah Evans took the risk of presenting and then talking about their work in a semi - public setting - one artist had created a piece in a short space of time and in a completely new space - Wysing’s window room project space - the other artist had edited and reedited a piece but felt unsure about presenting it as a finalized work to a public or semi-public audience.  To undertake that scrutiny and potential critique of an audience is extremely brave and i hope it felt as rewarding as it did for that said audience.  The evening was among friends but it still felt a rigorous enough process for the artists to feel justified and proud of themselves for taking those steps.

 I enjoyed every minute of the films that were presented and really enjoyed the fact that people new to Wysing felt they too could contribute to a discussion and say just how they felt in reaction to a piece or a presentation.   As a space too i felt the window room had enough informality to be friendly and unintimidating but enough challenge as both a space for art and as a serious place to present and host a discussion on their practice. 

I will keep the vision of the falling snow and the gently swinging figure - in a secret forest somewhere - with me despite the current summer sun.

The Wysing evenings whether organised informally or formally are going from strength to strength and a real testament to the developing community of artists who are not only prepared to share their work but also to step out of their comfort zone and both organise things for themselves but also to host and present themselves to a wider audience - something not all artists are prepared to do.  The more the merrier.

Thank you.

Katherine Hymers has taken it upon herself to organise a social evening at Wysing for on site artists, our newest residents Folke & Martin - our AMPHIS volunteers and of course our guests and supporters.  As Sarah Evans is exhibiting in the Window Room - the artists newest project space Katherine also invited Sarah to talk a little about her work so this is now taking place over the civilised time of 430pm with tea - also in our Window Room space.  After tea Katherine will present her short films and Wysing staff and artists will prepare a BBQ as a welcome to Folke & martin and to bring people on site together as the Summer begins in earnest - we also have two new staff members Lotte  and Annie to welcome and make feel at home !

Dont forget to bring your bbq contribution - bring a dish - a bit like the Dinnerluck and LunchLuck we held very successfully in Wysing’s Mill Road space in Romsey Town last Summer in Cambridge.

As a way of introducing Sarah’s new work, ‘Northern Light’, which is now showing in the window room, I would like to share some thoughts that arose during some of the conversations we’ve had over the past few months….

Firstly, I suppose I was interested in how Sarah might use the space to make as well as show work. I was aware that Sarah had spent a number of days in the Margaret Harvey Gallery in Hertfordshire, creating an installation, for her solo show, making the work in situ…..Sitting in her studio I recall talking about the difficulties that come with this approach…making private work in a public space. The differences between losing oneself in the process of making that occurs in the studio, following an idea and an aesthetic for the pleasure of doing so, but also the danger of becoming too precious about the work before it is even seen. Also, the difficulty in carving out a chunk of time in the week to give oneself the time and space to focus, to make, to spend time with the work.

Maybe working outside the studio enables one to step outside of a comfort zone, to commit to a timeframe, to respond immediately to a space in a given timescale?….But also giving consideration to how the window room operates. Primarily it’s a social space, a shared space. I think it is fair to say that Sarah expressed an interest in using the space not only to make and show work, but also as an opportunity to consider the importance of contextualising the work.  The conversations and discussions that have come about through the use of the window room have never had a formal structure, yet these openings allow a chance to begin to articulate something of the work, for both artist and viewer, to find affinities and differences across practices.

So, having asked Sarah to ‘use’ the window room, I didn’t want to curate her work as such, but rather try to facilitate in a way that would be helpful to her being able to use the space…to be around if she needed a pair of hands, or in setting up a more formal way of us as a group of artists discussing her work in the window room, and her approach to the space. Therefore, ‘Northern Light’ is now showing in the window room, and we will have an informal get together, to which everyone is welcome, on Thursday 24 July at about 16:30pm. 

This pile of wood that has been in the gallery space for some weeks now is soon to be moved only a few yards away onto the top field at wysing and from waste made into a functioning usueable new space for our community and for the visiting public - an amphitheatre is taking shape - watch out for new images as they are posted up each week…

Here are some images of last nights talk on Transformation - thank you to David Kefford, Kaavous Clayton and Sara MacKillop for hosting and sharing details of their practice and their approach to this theme in their work.

I will be hosting an evening of discussion, this time on the subject of Transformation at Wysing this thursday evening.

I have invited artists Kaavous Clayton and Sara MacKillop to join me and to talk about their work in relation to the subject.

Why not come along and contribute what you think?

As soon as I looked at the first page of the book before the screening, I realised how wrong I had been to assume this film was going to be a spoof or a surreal reincarnation of many others made in Hollywood or Italy.

There must have been some long discussions about the fly page of the book which visually represents the concept for the film. To me the two colours of Blue and Red used for the design signifies peace and war in a much wider sense. Then there is the powerful symbol of the Eye of Providence which is also known as All Seeing Eye. Whichever meaning of the symbol we take, it eventually ends up telling us we are being watched and our destiny is decided. There is also a subtle close up of the symbol which shows only its bottom half, by which God becomes excluded?

The combination of this visual colour page and the very informative synopsis by Gerrie van Noord acted as the most helpful caption for the film, although there were so many symbols and codes for viewers to decipher. Like the two colours, most of what we saw on the screen had double meaning, and it seemed to me that on the surface there was a wealth of light references to many images that we all would recognise and reflect accordingly. To name a few, I could associate some of these frames with the 60’s and early 70’s films like Dracula, James Bond and of course a number of spaghetti Westerns. Beneath the surface, however, there were visual and verbal remarks on social class, pretentious intellectualism, racism, religeons and more. Krishna with his blue skin appeared in more than two guises to represent or symbolise divers figures.

Once we were engaged in the battlefield, the allusion to war and destiny, a Scandinavian Mythology, took us further to encounter other myths and legends - Prince Arjuna from Hindu and Warrior Hamza from Arabs of Middle East, and may be others I did not know. Valkyrie who oversees the fate of warriors in battle, guided the zombies to a corpse whose abdomen was opened, guts and gore falling out of the cavity, and the zombies got down to eating them ravenously. The scene was unusually long, as if there was a contest to find out which one of the people among the audience would be the first to vomit. My mind went to Iraq, South of Bagdad, some thirteen centuries ago. Hamza, a warrior was killed in the battle, and a woman called Hind walked to the battlefield to cut Hamza’s liver out and then chewed it and swallowed it in fulfilment of a vow. Hind’s father and brother had been killed by Hamza the warrior.

Shezad has shrouded so much myth, legend and history with gay and comic scenes or dialogues. The bitter truths occasionally comes out to above the threshold of our consciousness, forcing us to wipe the smile off our faces for a moment or two - and no character in the film did this better than Valkyrie, who was wearing Fascist style headgear, singing Wagner and leading us to death.

Abbas