The Triumphal Procession of White Clouds Moving Upstream
April 17, 2012 § Leave a comment
what a good idea to just put up the enamel plaque of Stuart Mills’ great simultaneous poem as if screwed to the wall of this column of text and images. The poem first appeared as a postcard in 1968-9, and then in his book The Sea is Silent, before being made in metal in 2009
the glass bridge and the aeolean neon
April 3, 2012 § Leave a comment
A recent photograph of one of the seven sections of my glass bridge of the anyone poem crossing the stream at Healey Hall, Riding Mill, Northumberland. Grid Ref 583000. It was built in 1999. Taken from underneath, from the stream as it were, the text is of course reversed, but walking across holding the thin handrail, you encounter the panels in sequence like the pages of the book. I guess these are three children paused on the centre panel, watching the rushing water.
Not far away, Grid Reference 585001, and easy if you can read a map, is the first of my Aeolean Neons. It is run by solar panel and wind-power , stored in a battery and let out consistently to the blue neon, installed in this small stone building in the middle of open country. The text is John Clare’s I found the poems in the field and only wrote them down gently glowing at dusk over the open field. Built in 2004, the battery has just been replaced after eight years, but during that time, the neon has been working of its own accord, with no switch to be turned on. It is remarkable to to think it is working there while I sit here in Ireland, or elsewhere !
March 30, 2012 § Leave a comment
A fulsome Chicken of the Woods fungus hacked off an oak tree by Tessa and John Falvey in early June of 2011 lasted us for three or four days. We ate it as a sauté with eggs for breakfast, as strips to make a lasagne of sorts, and even grated it dry into a robust soup.There is a book to be written which might be entitled How Not to be A Vegetarian, about eating such things, for all their satisfaction and completeness, with no reference to ersatz cookery, or the ubiquitous quiche.
Toad in the Hole
March 29, 2012 § Leave a comment
toad in the hole with rosemary & onion sauce with mustard, for the crossing of the Irish Sea from Rosslare to Fishguard on March 10th 2012, to install Printed in Norfolk at Norwich University College of the Arts, from March 20th to April 21st 2012. A calm sea, with much sun.
The Swiss Cottage
March 8, 2012 § Leave a comment
The amazing folly or ferme ornée known as the Swiss Cottage by John Nash is just down the River Suir from here. Here the eminent Butler family would play at being peasants in the manner of Marie Antoinette, almost in sight of their big house in Cahir, County Tipperary. The Office of Public Works completely revamped the building with great care and precision over the last twenty years, after the local farmer who owned it had used it for cattle and tying up a horse in the nineteen eighties
G & G
March 8, 2012 § Leave a comment
Who could not be nostalgic for the innocence of Gilbert and George, the postcard sculptures, the mail-art pieces, the disheveled photo-works about drink like a cracked mirror? But did they begin to believe in their own gothic mythology too much, until they became merely late Victorian stand-ups? A couple of quotes from a recent interview may show how remote they may have become:
Sex is just sex.When you ask for a steak in a restaurant you don’t ask whether it’s a boy or a girl.
If you have a landscape painting in a museum, people glide past it, but if there was a little policeman on the horizon and a tramp in the foreground masturbating, then it becomes an amazingly interesting picture. !
February 24, 2012 § Leave a comment
In all the years of listening to Percy Grainger and his adaptions, I had never come across his version of John Dowland’s Now, oh now I needs must part, a truly gentle piece, played here by Piers Lane on a album called Rambles & Reflections. Remarkable, all the way until he throws the usual Percy fairground folklore at it. I love it, all the same. 02 Dowland_Grainger_ Now, oh now I needs must part
Un Espace de l’Art Concret
February 24, 2012 § Leave a comment
The fine porch of Daniel Buren installed at the Chateau de Mouans-Sartoux in the south of France some time ago, the home of l’Espace de l’Art Concret. I was there quite recently, but unfortunately the porch was not, but a lot of works from an intermittent and difficult to define collection, which extends in little spurts all over the place. I always thought it was a difficult one to be orthodox about, l’Art Concret, in spite of its utopic idealism, it is constantly shifting, and finally that is to be admired.
workfortheeyetodotoo 