User:Anna John again

How and Why?

1. I painted twenty separate pieces of paper with vermillion gouache and scanned each of the paintings into the computer using a hi-resolution flatbed photo scanner. Through trial and error, I have found that the higher the quality of the scanner, the more sensitive it is to the varying light and opacity of the painted paper and its textural qualities. When these subtleties are edited together in the sequence, an illusion of movement is created from differing intensities and elements within this ongoing single frame of colour. I have been long interested in the early experimental films of Len Lye and Harry Smith in their approach to treating film and light as material itself, and developing their techniques outside of narrative or content, purely exploring the abstract and also films inseparability from rhythm and time. I also desired to blur the line between digital and analogue, in the labour intensive analogue technique of manually preparing the material to be processed and re-articulated digitally.

2.

The slowly rotating object both drags and resists the small contact microphone object which can in effect create a rhythm of its own - as the contact mic scrapes and bounces off the object in this push and pull relationship it holds with the spinning ceramic cone. As the mic travels the same trajectory against/along the objects surface,the amplified sound plays out in a loop. Thus the sculpture becomes a rhythmical sound object, amplifying the surface of the cone, timing out its pirouettes. This object was inspired by an internet hoax that was played out by two Belgians who produced a short Youtube clip in 2006 proclaiming they had developed the technology to make audible the sound embedded in ceramic pots from Ancient Rome. A year later the video was confirmed to be an April Fools day prank, although I was quite captivated by the idea of the vibrations of an object being translated into sound, drawing relationships between surface and aural textures. The looping and rhythmic element came as a pleasant surprise, enabled only in the final assemblage and activation of the sculpture, quite particular to its arrangement in the space and at its moment of install. This aspect of chance and circumstance gave the sculpture, despite its concrete components and construction, a air of temporality, which reverberated nicely with all of its other characteristics.

3.

The clay component of the sculpture, the bull, was originally made for a collaborative project with a painter, however it was not appropriate at the time for that particular work and was put in storage for two years. The object resurfaced at the end of my first year in the Masters course as I had been working intensively with some images of Pablo Picasso's ceramic work, which I had been photocopying and using as material in some sculptural works of my own. This particular object differed from the images as it was not a direct represenation of any particular object, but contained loose references to the work of Picasso. Naturally, it's form resonated with aspects of the subject matter Picasso was quite fixated on, namely the bull and lesser, the Minotaur - and I thought it interesting to re-articulate some of his motifs, alongside some of the aforementioned images which I had adhered to various object and surfaces. All of these works in combination with one another explore the possibilities of reproduction and representation, the echoes of modernism and art history, and particular trajectories in the history of ceramics and art history - where art and craft brush up against one another for a brief moment.

What:

1.

It is a video loop. The loop itself is just a couple of seconds, however the short loop has been repeated in this edit such that the video runs for three minutes and twenty-two seconds precisely. The video comprises of single shots, which span .02 of second. Each shot is a scan of a single piece of paper that has been painted a particular colour, and in the instance in question, the colour is vermillion. Each piece of paper that has been scanned has been painted with gouache, with varying amounts of water added and taken from the palette; this random flow of the colour from piece to piece can be detected in the fast succession of frames in the video. Differing densities of colour and brushstroke give the video a sense of movement, as does the white border down the side of each scan. The movement appears to wash over the screen, as the border seems to vibrate.

2.

It is a kinetic sculpture. Three main components are involved. The first is the wooden structure which comprises of a found potters hand-building turntable or wheel, that basically involves a rotating square platform mounted on three legs. This object has been attached to a thick circular piece of wood, which has been painted black. At the base of the axis of the platform, a small motor has been attached. The axle of the motor, when powered up, forces the platform to spin in an anti-clockwise direction. Atop the platform sits a roughly built, conically shaped ceramic object. It turns with the platforms motion. Suspended from the ceiling, above the rotating object, is a contact microphone with a domestic sewing needle soldered to it. Its positioned so that it scrapes along the surface of the ceramic object. The contact microphone is plugged into a small 15 watt amplifier which is mounted on the top of the gallery wall, out of sight – although the line of the microphone lead alludes to its presence, as does the sound of the scraping and bouncing of the needle along the objects surface. This line is also reflected in the wiring that is attached to the aforementioned motor, which lies along the surface of the gallery to the nearest available power outlet.

3.

It is a sculpture that stands at approximately 163 cm high. The two materials used are scrap metal and raku clay. Its basic structure could be described as a supportive stand and an object. The supportive stand is made entirely of scrap metal; its base a flat, rectangular metal plate of about 25x45cm, and extending up from its base two legs which rise up into the clay object at their ends. The legs are different shapes but both made from metal rods. The ‘back’ leg is a singular rod that is approximately 6cm in diameter. The front leg is an A-shaped combination of lengths, beginning as two separate entities from the base plate, meeting inside the sculpture at the top. The crossbar connects the two separate rods at a height of 45cm. The mean height of the legs would be around 148 cm high. The ceramic object at the top is an interpretation of a bull, with openings where its legs would be, it has a short tail, and a small perforation beneath the tail, and finally its head resembles a net-like drape or hood, which is adorned by a flat disc at the peak of the net-like rendition of its head. The body is rough and mostly white in its glaze with burn marks and some small cracks, and the head is a oxidised surface that moves through glassy shades of red, blue, silver and a dull gold.