It’s not often I completely balls up a piece, but today I did. I remember Mrs Williams, my teacher when I was about seven years old telling me how to make a mistake in a picture into something else. I tried that kind of thing but it just made it even shittier! So admitting defeat and not having an alternative to try the original idea again it was start afresh. Which worked out just fine. Now, I keep coming back to this point, the fact of a continuum, this small-work-every-day process, means that I need not worry or fret over a small amount of lost time. Yes I experienced a short bout of mild irritation, because if it hadn’t been for a failure of materials/equipment pretty much out of my control it was a good idea and I will pursue it again at some point with appropriate adjustments. So I learnt something and then had the joy of creating another piece, a piece which I wasn’t afraid to just add a last element to finish it off. If I had ballsed that up it would have been a shame, but same goes, the next piece would be fine.
I wasn’t so careful with the message on the envelope either! There I go casting aspersions on Schrödinger and I couldn’t even proof read my own envelope! The message is only 17 words and I managed to repeat one! I also nearly lost the artwork! I was busy in the studio preparing some paper with acrylic-painted areas for some drawings I am working on and used up all the available flat surfaces with drying pieces including the place I had put today’s artwork! Found it in the end though and feel it is quite interesting.
I had decided to use the headline earlier but events overtook me. I was going to write about the messages on the front of the envelope but, as you can see, I have photographed it upside down. Here it is before posting so you can read it:
Envelope of No264
So I was going to talk about all the things that needed to be taken into account in the set up of Schrödinger’s mind experiment. I was reckoning on pointing out flaws that if Schrödinger had heard would have irritated him, you know little nit-picking things like the size of the box and the amount of air in it and would the cat suffocate first and how had he calculated the amount of hydrocyanic acid? But of course my planning went to pot. The first flaw in my planning was that someone parked across the front of our house and blocked my car in. Usually it is just someone nipping to the Post Office and they are back in a few minutes. This person left it for about half an hour and went to their friend’s house. (I won’t recount the full story of her excuses for fear of stirring up my wrath). Then when I got to the studio I got into conversation with my neighbour and out of politeness ignored the alarm on my phone and another neighbour joined us and that led to some other discussion by which time it was time to get a late lunch. It was only when I got to the shop I remembered to look at my phone and discovered I was already 10 minutes late for a meeting with some friends! After that I bumped into someone else I’d not seen for ages and we chatted for a long while and…well, Bridport is a friendly place…by which time the afternoon had disappeared and I only had time to do my #Letter365. Even that I messed up a bit and stamped yesterday’s date on the back (altered and a new stamp added).
Then when I get back home and pop to the Post Office to post the piece I have to step over the police cordon to get to the box (you can see the tape at the top of the photo and you could say they have cordoned off my work!) Sadly the Post Office had been raided. Fortunately, although Andrea and Peter were slightly injured, they are OK and three men have been arrested. Seems like those men may not have thought things through properly either. Clearly I didn’t today, so who am I to nit pick over Schrödinger’s experiment and try to make witty comments about it?
Oh, and nobody noticed my deliberate/not-deliberate mistake yesterday!
Oh, and the piece inside? You’ll have to take my word for it it’s either really good or really bad or both at the same time depending the interpretation – but that’s another story!
Meanwhile. I am actually more interested in the water droplets hanging round the top of the post box:
Rainwater droplets round the post box within the police cordon
No263 glides gracefully towards the abyss of the post box
The piece inside may or may not have any connection to what is written on the envelope, though one thing is for sure none of the envelopes contain a live cat or any other sentient being. Neither has an albatross that has been in contact with this piece or its envelope nor has it been made intentionally wet by seawater from such a bird. It could be argued that there is no completed artwork inside until the envelope is opened! Did Schrödinger use a cat in his problem to shock or cause us to think in a different way? Have I put live artworks in these envelopes along with a small radioactive source and a vial of art poison (carefully shielded so the artwork cannot tamper with them)? After an hour will any of the artworks be dead? By the time the installation opens in March 2015 will all the pieces be dead? If so will they have died of natural causes, starved by my cruel confinement of them or poisoned by the experiment. Were they dead to begin with? How can we tell if the art is dead or just sleeping?
You’ll have to look a the photo to grasp what I am on about and even then I doubt if you will. Frankly, the few people who look at this will probably not care what it’s about anyway.
I needed to go out and get some coffee so I delivered today’s piece by hand. Dee was at the Arts Centre and, in her usual reluctant way, agreed to take delivery of No261. It’s not the taking delivery she has a problem with, but the taking of her picture – there is no telling her! She had noticed recent Schrödinger’s cat references and suggested “Cat” as the name that he might have called it. She also noticed that today’s envelope was quite chunky – I don’t mean knobbly, just robust, substantial – which is true. Perhaps she is right about what Schrödinger called the cat?
As I walked out of the Arts Centre I noticed someone reading about this project and said, in passing, “that’s good. It’s mine” She called me back and we had a chat and she is a sculptor called Rachel and her friend Nick came back to the studio for a chat and i didn’t get the coffee. A little bit later I went out for the coffee and met someone else and had a chat and ended up not doing much work!
I’m not having a good day, struggling with the black dog, and I thought I could cut corners, save time and do any old rubbish. But, of course, I cannot. There may be a question about the quality or value of my work from and aesthetic standpoint but, I find, never from a moral one! Even after I had resigned myself to doing it properly I started bemoaning my choice of materials: “that will take longer”, “I wish I hadn’t chosen that”, “I have to take care now I’ve done that! and so on. But you know it was worth the effort. It would never have worked without doing it right and it would only have made me feel more depressed. And I got a moody picture too. As much as I love the London slang “moody” I don’t mean that. Nor is it in a bad temper. I just mean it’s a moody photo. Mind you it’s not so easy to read the bit about Schrödinger’s cat!
I do not know what it is in me that makes me create more work. After a long break when I managed not to write anything at all on the envelope in the way of annotations, today I write a note on the back. That means I feel obliged to include the photo of the back and write about it maybe. All I was doing was making a note to remind me what I wanted to write or say on this post. Normally I would just put a note on the blog in a draft which I could elaborate on later, but because I had to do a factory reset on my phone last weekend (the latest Android upgrade broke it!) I had not set up my WordPress blogs and couldn’t remember my log in details! Which has just made me think i could have done it on my tablet – but then I probably haven’t set the phone up to link to the tablet … and now i see that it’s Android that made all this extra work!
What I realised as I was creating today’s piece was that it had strong resonances to a strand of work that I did at college 45 years ago. I was approaching the same place from two directions but with a similar outcome in technique and look and feel. This has prompted me to have another poke around in that area – well I have already started – but to also revisit the technique. The interesting thing is that I had a very strong idea for today which I perhaps approached with the wrong medium, so found myself in different territory! Perhaps that one will happen tomorrow!
I actually meant the heading in the way of “this is a good piece of work” but I can understand that some may think it means “here is another mad person!”
Well, it was quite a difficult day where I ended up having to be flexible and doing things in a topsy-turvy way so I was unable to spend the long interrupted span of time at the studio I had planned. Despite this I managed to complete a large drawing and do some working pieces as well as this #Letter365 piece which turned out much better than I could have hoped.
It’s been a busy day. I met with friends to talk about my show and engaged with others about my work and went to the dentist (it’s quite a journey)and saw the beauty of soft, dramatic skies on the sea and did some work and did my #Letter365 and made dinner and went to the Film Society and that needs to be spoken of. The film was Museum Hours and I think that it would help you understand me and this project (among other things) if you watched it. It explores so many things about mundanity and specialness, the beauty of boredom, the wonder of humanity and the way that the small things hold the magic.
Screen grab from the Bridport Film Society website featuring “Museum Hours”
An unfolding artwork created a piece each day for a year
