Saturday 23 November 2013

VERYDARKVERYPOWERFUL

Di solito non tento di esprimermi cosi, e sono passati gli anni che io scrivessi una miscela di lingue. Ma la persona veccia emerge nei tempi duri. Ora come ora come mi sento non ha tanta importanza, perche passera. Ma oggi e stato un giorno duro. Simon no l'ha avuto facile per niente e Io mi sento senza speranza. Questo invoco non e indirizzato ad alcuno in particolare, ma piuttosto e semplicemente un espressione umana di una persona che si sente sola, con la conoscenza che il domani non sara per niente piu facile, non per essa e meno per Simon. Dio non ci abbandoni.

Monday 18 November 2013

Friday 9 August 2013

Monday 8 July 2013

Friday 5 July 2013

COUNTUP

Simon did not get the good news we were hoping for - Art for once  seems to shut up. Like everything else... Only faith whispers...

1stVS3rd

Im finding writing an artist statement a dread. Not just because my work has been fluctuating in the media it manifests in but even on a concept level. This might be perhaps that on a personal level there is similar fluctuations and turmoils.

I realised that my statement was written in the first person and the obvious change the reader experiences if whatever content that may be was written about the artist by someone else. It becomes more professional and somehow more trustworthy. 

I agree that this is true. However it troubles me a bit, not  in the sense that i oppose it or want to fight the personal point of view corner, but for me it creates another detachment from what i think i know about my work and what it actually is. Perhaps this is needed and what makes ones work more mature.

I am first week in the Robert Callender Residency for Young Artists 2nd part. Working at Sea Loft. Niall Stevenson is currently in Japan doing his 1st part of the residency. The Japanese Artist working here as well is Kaori Matsumura and she is great to work with. 




Last night i tested my piece, where for this residency I am taking my work 8. a step forward and am aiming to make the work steal any source of light that illuminates it from outside to be illuminated solely from within. The element of pressure is still going to be present as it is important that the element of latching is maintained. However it is taking a step back this time as the whole work will have another tangent that is illuminated in a similar manner, however its latching on the building is aided only by gravity. 

This work will be adapted and takes its inspiration form a staircase in Summerhall. I like the fact that it will not be presented in a conventional gallery space. It reacts well with the history of the building and its return to Art. - An analogy to the fact that the founder of the college, William Dick have given his first lectures about this subject in the Art School because there was no proper place established.

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Today is real life again. Where does art begin and where does it interact/stop/merge/infuse/transform/stayconstant? with the real life. Getting the first CT Scan results to see if treatment for Squamous Cell Carcinoma in the gums has worked. Simon MacFadyen is a great person and very dear to me. I pray and hope the results are good.  

Tuesday 2 July 2013

INWRITING

Looking at artist’s work of the last 3 – 4 years, anyone may feel bemused at the idea that some of these pieces are one person’s work. As from 2009 there is an evident and deliberate distancing from painting as the work starts posing different kinds of experiential requirements on the viewer. Installation and sculpture, especially a particular interest in curved surfaces leads the artist to consider ‘the site’. The definition of this term, or ‘ the site specific’ is not a static one – yes the work Tixref considers the physical space where it exists, unfolds and being posed upon. Although such relation is perceived in subsequent pieces, each work seems less dependable on the direct physical site it is shown in, but starts to comment on satellite sites such as the works http://, cyclical and 77. Having participated in diverse calls, projects, and collaborations the medium of the artist tends to change depending on what suits best a concept to be communicated. Despite such changes, a metaphysical enquiry on the repercussions of the human act seems to ripple in most of his work. In the latest works Stratum and Residuum, the artist explores the direct relationships between what something is and what it looks like – an element present in Robert Callender’s  works. Being Artist in Residence at Sea Loft and so close to Callender’s work Calleja chooses to tackle his series 1.2.4.8.16. This is a series of temporary interventions that involve glass and wood. Each intervention heightens a different aspect of the work through: its applied pressure, its visibility, its temporal existence, its latching relation to the site. How this series will evolve, in its perception or affectation by the viewer will unfold in future explorations.

Thursday 27 June 2013

RESIDUUM|31.4934cm2


Residuum 31.4934cm2
2013
pencil and eraser on paper






This is a stain that informed the Intervention at CASO, already described in a previous post. The intervention was concluded by erasing all the applied paint marks to hide the paint stained ground in the allocated site. It was an idea to tease out, in dirtying of the ground, (by the application of paint) in order to make it look clean (hiding the existing stains by new painted stains morphing to the approximate ground area)

I felt the need to translate this process into another one - that of drawing. I wanted to see how to comment in the language of drawing on the stain itself. This is a desaturated image of the original stain, and all removal of subtle colour just emphasises that the sole subject of interest here is this particular, accidental stain.

For the drawing:
  •  I did not want to express any of my marks on this image so i traced the main subject to be as accurate as possible to the original. 
  • The original being - a printed full scale 1:1 print to the actual size of the stain in CASO
  • And the drawing started


I was interested in the concept of where this piece was going more than the actual drawing itself. I tried to make a realistic drawing of the stain as possible not to show off any skill of drawing but to drain the drawing of any personal impression or interpretation. For this matter anyone else who can copy in pencil could have done this bit for me. 



At a few stages earlier than the above image, the subject of this work got more clear to me and how could I re interpret the stain using the process of drawing itself (i.e. the application of marks with pencil and the erasing of the same marks with a rubber). I decided to take back the stain to its basic existence i.e. paint. Usually paint is quantified by its coverage area. On any tin it would tell you what is the surface area covered by its content volume. The most accurate way I could calculate this was using the digital image of the stain and get a count of the white pixels that form the stain and work out a sum using direct proportion.





Sum 

(area of stain) =

Area of drawing = l x b (29cm x 21.5) = 623.5cm2
the total amount of pixels in original image of this same area amounts to 8696075 pixels

Selected pixels of stain (last image above) = 439244 pixels

623.5cm2 x 439244 / 8696075 = 31.49336154529486 cm2

31.4934cm2 = actual surface area of stain.

square root of 31.49336154529486 cm2 = 5.61189464845 cm



An area of 5.6 cm by 5.6 cm is erased from the drawing.












Monday 17 June 2013