The Ephemeral

For certain contemporary artists, the famous dictum of the Roman philosopher Seneca "Vita brevis, are longa "(Life is short, art is long), is applicable.Their works deal with transience and decay, themes that underscore the provisional nature organic, ephemeral, fugitive materials with which they choose to work is varied and inventive, from the evanescence of perfume to the extremity of gunpowder.They use these materials to draw attention to the transience of earthly pleasures and the inevitable decay of all things.If it is popular to work with organic ephemeral materials today like fruits, vegetables, animals, fire and chemical elements,sugar, salt, wax, ice,spice, chocolate,fat, rice, meat, honey, herbs, bread and flour.A work of art made from organic materials addresses a range of ideas about time, chance, growth, decay, ethics, commerce, consumption and conservation issues.

One of Tom Friedman's memorable works is his three quarter size self portrait "Untitled" made entirely from white sugar which crumbles slightly during display, causing a white penumbra to form around the figure's feet. The crystalline nature of sugar is an ironic allusion to the crystalline nature of white marble, the material used by classical sculptors for heroic male nudes.

Tom Friedman "Untitled" 1999

Many artists from the Far East use animals and insects in their work."One Dollar" by Yukinori Yanagi, consists of a US Dollar bill sculpted in coloured sand, held inside clear plastic boxes.When the work goes on show, a colony of live ants is introduced to the boxed and for the duration of the exhibition they tunnel through the sand, gradually destroying the image.The ant's tireless labour undermines the symbol of American might, power and money.When the image has virtually disappeared, Yanagi releases the ants outdoors.

Yukinori Yanagi ,One Dollar, 1999

However, when an artist uses ephemeral materials, in most cases, they do not intend for the artwork to last for a long period of time, which is due to the very nature of the materials used. This conflicts with the commercial aims of the art market, in which the artwork’s longevity is required. Perhaps this is because often it is the pristine appearance of a contemporary artwork, in which a higher value is associated with. In this case, the artwork’s level of “newness” is often valued above all else. This can explain why there is an assumption with contemporary artworks to preserve them, unless the artist explicitly tells them not to. The respect of the intentions of the artist should be the primary goal with ephemeral contemporary artworks, especially considering that some works are only meant to exist in a particular place and time. However, often it is the economic reality, which gets in the way of respecting the temporal nature of the artwork, or a perceived obligation to the future to preserve these artworks, as examples of ephemeral art of the Twentieth and Twenty- First century.

Memories

Tender, ephemeral memories do disappear if not revived and preserved and art is possibly the most potent vehicle to deal with collective and personal memories in a direct and physical manner.Art offers an opportunity to reflect on major facts of our lives both ordinary and extraordinary:love and death,sexuality and spirituality, the innocence of youth and the wisdom and experience of old age.

Childhood memories have been the springboard for many artists.
Antonio Sosa was born in the 1950s , a little village in Andalusia ,beside the river Guadalquivir .He uses natural material that are found locally such as the river sand as well as recycling the toys of his childhood to create moulds of things that were important to him.The moulds lie open like empty pods indicating that something has been removed.

Antonio Sosa "Seeds on the Right Bank of River Guadalquivir" 1992-1993

Ricky Swallow , an Australian artist living and working in Los Angeles found that geographical distance from his homeland caused him to turn his attention to the conditions and traditions he was brought up in.With his sculptural work  Killing Time, Swallow has delved into his own past as the son of a San Remo fisherman. Killing Time is a life-size table (based on his family's own kitchen table). Upon its surface is strewn a morass of sea life, representations of the marine creatures Swallow himself caught and killed as a youth.
In this regard it is a highly personal work, one imbued with a strange nostalgia. With its deliberately dramatic lighting, the tableaux resembles a Dutch still-life painting.

Found Objects

Many of today's sculptors feel that the world is too full of things and that they do not wish to add to the clutter.Instead they choose to recycle the mass of material encountered in daily life, bestowing new life on things that others have discarded or abandoned.Working with reprocessed rubbish often points to the voracious and endless cycles of production, consumption and rejection in the world today.Artists compulsively accumulate material of every kind ranging from plastic bags to soft toys and discarded rubber tyres and recycled plastic bottle crates.

Most of the material that the artists collect for recycling is found within a close radius of their studio although some collect similar materials from disparate parts of the world and exhibit them together revealing how depressingly uniform many aspects of our modern world have become. A handful of artists choose to live on site while collecting their hoards and recreate the work anew making site specific installations.Most of the items collected are man made but a handful of artists such as Lauren Berkowitz and Simryn Gill use natural materials that are subject to entropy and decay.

Lauren Berkowitz's installation using red chillies

Jac Leirner creates mixed media sculptures and installations using commonplace objects, collections of which have been fastidiously hoarded by the artist for years at a time. Her compulsive accumulation commonly focuses on items deemed insignificant or lacking value: plastic shopping bags, cigarette boxes, airline boarding passes and airsickness bags—all of which are designed to be disposed of after their use. Leirner’s works are deft and pragmatic representations of the continual exchange of ideas, information, money, and commercial commodities between nations and individuals.

Leirner’s ideas are inherently Duchampian in her usage of banal materials, yet she breaks from the Dadaist model by infusing the objects with a sense of culture and history. These items are no longer generic and mass-produced, but recontextualized as relics of Leirner’s own journeys. While Duchamp often eschewed the original function and context of his objects, for Leirner the items’ original symbolism is vital and marks— both visually and temporally—the artist’s autobiographical experience.

While personal, Leirner’s choice of material also reflects common experiences and possessions: her cigarette pack is like yours, as are the collections of business cards and shopping bags. Critics have often described her work as “poetic” due to the nostalgic nature of the collections, as well as the whimsical and romantic notion of travel that is evoked. 

 Ma

Jac Leiner's sculpture using Marlboro cigarette packs collected from cigarettes she had used over 3 years

S Some sculptors work in the manner of a social historian or investigative reporter, sorting through agglomerations of objects in order to re-establish new and imaginative arrangements which often have a distinct narrative content.Others work in a more formal manner highlighting basic sculptural issues such as density, mass,colour ,scale, balance.There are varied and nuanced approaches to accumulation stacking,heaping,layering, taping, hanging.Arrangements can be scattered and chaotic or coolly organized in a grid formation.

Using found objects to preserve memories:To create the installation Number 80, Leonardo Drew collected over four hundred common objects— toys, furniture, appliances, and household wares—from thrift stores, junkyards, and off the street. With a large group of interns and staff, he cast each object in paper, removing the original object once the paper cast was created. They are hollow, nearly weightless forms that echo the original objects from which they were made more than they replicate them. Instead of presenting the ongoing and transformed life of discarded objects, the installation takes us beyond the life of the object itself and portrays the ethereal essence of things that once existed.

Leonardo Drew's cast paper found objects

Tutorial with artist David Kefford

I had a hour long conversation  with successful artist/sculptor David Kefford. I could relate to his work and process since I often like to work with found objects as a material.David has a multidisciplinary practice and uses drawings, videography and found objects.

David wished to know about my current work to provide him with an overview of my work in brief.

Me

1.I like to work in multiple disciplines with drawing as the core of my practice-papercuts, printmaking and turning  2D into 3D objects in some cases.I describe my work as having a delicate,intricate, visually aesthetically beautiful form with a thought provoking ,sometimes disturbing/unsettling content.I like to work in projects and make work in series dwelling inside them for months and once a certain project is completed I quickly move onto the next.I see my work as a journey to learn more about myself and to discover more about the world around me.

2.The mediums I use are fragile/organic.I use paper,clay,found objects, shadows, sounds....

3.I have a nomadic/itinerant  existence relocating every few years to a new city or country, not knowing where I will go next.I am inspired by my surroundings ,the different cultures I encounter as well as my childhood memories.My themes are ephemeral as well and deal with human associations such as memories/loss/change/transformations.I communicate my ideas using narratives and the storytelling format .

4.Why I am pursing my MA?I am a self taught artist and my educational qualification is MBA . I have worked for several years in the corporate sector as a financial analyst.I have been a practicing artist for the last 8 years and wanted to remove the tag of "self taught artist" because it made me feel inadequate.I want to teach art at some point and the degree is important to me.The course is very comprehensive and is helping me a great deal to expand and deepen  my art practice through engagement with  other artists  and also by the means of research, discourses, discussions and debates, reflections.

5.where do I work and does my physical location hinder my growth?I work in my studio but also gather natural or discarded objects during walks or man made objects while meandering in malls , flea markets or hardware stores which I also consider work.I  sometimes work outdoors or in a cafe to break the monotony.The location (Muscat a remote place) does not hinder me in any way because people are very connected in the age of internet and social media and geographical distances are increasingly reducing.While there are fewer opportunities in a provincial town/small city, it has its own advantages like lesser competition than say London or New York. I believe if  an artist's work is strong it will eventually go places and be viewed by an international audience, irrespective of where he/she is physically located.

6.How do I like to engage with the audience?I make work to express myself but also  to show and share work not not only for my personal consumption.I like to draw the viewer in and provide an experience.My stories are often open ended, open to interpretation.I do not want to give away or disclose too much.

7.I have recently started to work more intuitively taking decisions that "feel right" at a certain moment.I am acutely aware that randomness would make my work more interesting so I try not to "see" the work in advance but leave it open to chance and gradually develop as I go along.I like to try new techniques, to take risks , to court the unknown and make my making hand "think" for itself.

I wanted to learn about David's work his working methodology and thought process.

David 's work engages, through simple actions and playful gestures, with human related objects and materials in a particular space and time. Much of his work is site-generated, contingent and fragile, which reflects his interest in the awkward and precarious status of his artistic persona and related objects used to stage an event. This has led him to construct a giant tumbling vortex of discarded clothes hangers suspended from a gallery ceiling, transform a collection of waste items into a series of temporary sculptural assemblages on a new housing developement and playfully arrange discarded garden equipment inside a dis-used poly-tunnel with an invited audience.

Kefford is interested in the intersection between the private making process and a public outcome and how these can potentially coalesce through a ‘live(d)’ experience. 

"Lean on Me" David Kefford 2013

"Lightweight or Emptiness" David Kefford 2013

David Kefford

1.David creates experiences for audiences.He does not consider himself the maker alone but the initiator of dialogue between the work and the audience.He likes to create a spatial experience.His work is often site specific .

2.He uses various mediums videography, sound, drawings, sculpture, installation, performance but it is all coming from one person so somewhere there is a connection.His work emerges from his unconscious mind and he hopes to figure out where it comes from, someday.

David believes the documentation of work creates a new body of work.For example a film or a photograph , book of a work can become a new piece of work(example Andy Goldsworthy) .

3.How does he fuse/ join work?David's work appears to be precarious, not sturdy and robust, on the verge of collapsing which lends a potency of pathos.He  instinctively sorts objects as they would fit together in terms of colour, texture or shape.He tries to join disjointed pieces using primitive methods or minimal intervention. On many occasions he allows the objects to balance themselves.

4. How does David find the objects.Does he actively seek them out?More often than not, the objects seek him out  and reach him during his landscape walks.For instance he was recently walking on a river bank and found objects washed up upon a riverbank.They were waste material which were no longer useful to anyone but he gave them a new lease of life by using them in his artwork.It was as though their existence was renewed or that they found a new avatar/identity .

5.How does David find a balance between the reclusive life of a maker and the public life of  an exhibiting artist?He strikes a balance by being focused in the studio and by networking with artist groups and networks of like minded people.

6.David also works on projects - artist led initiatives, commissions, residencies, curated group shows, solo exhibitions.

7.Which site would he recommend for listings of calls for artist residencies?

The website he recommended was :

http://www.transartists.org

8.How important is it to create work for an international audience ?
It is important that the work is relatable to a diverse set of people and a global audience and this can be possible if the artist deals with the human experience .For example even if a work highlights a social issue particular to a specific region, it can generate interest if it involves themes of love, loss, displacement, consumption,architecture,memory etc since everyone can relate to this....a too personal, self indulgent practice is something David is averse to.

Conclusion and Advice

David felt I am in a "good place" in my practice and I must continue to explore , make and showcase my work without worrying too much about having a very diverse practice.He would be interested to see my website and Task 3 when completed.

Sound Sculpture to record memories of a lost era

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-28563835

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/sound-and-vision/2013/08/listening-to-the-active-sounds-of-history-field-recording-and-museums.html

Memory is at the heart of much human activity. Memory drives us to collect, to record, to create documents –"information or evidence that serves as an official record" – that we then spend a lot of time and effort preserving. Some of these documents are strictly personal and kept as family heirlooms. Others end up being judged by someone else as having a broader significance, and end up being preserved in places like museums and libraries in order that they be made accessible to a wider audience. There are countless institutions around the world whose mission statements may not explicitly express it, but which are essentially dedicated to honoring the human desire to remember.

So why do we record sounds? Because we want to remember them.

Affective Digital Histories: Recreating De-Industrialised Places, 1970s – Present explores the hidden and untold stories of the people who lived and worked in former industrial buildings at two locations in the East Midlands: Leicester's Cultural Quarter and Glossop, a mill town in North Derbyshire.

It hopes to gather sounds reflecting their industrial heritage to show how the areas have changed over time.The sounds of part of Leicester and Derbyshire are being collected to create a digital audio archive for future researchers.The aim is for people to explore and research history through sounds.

Composer and sound artist Dr Andrew Hill said the aim was to capture the sounds before they disappeared."Yes you can look at old photographs and old maps and that gives you someway of getting into the past, but through sound people can really immerse themselves in the environment," he said.

Sounds of a hosiery factory and a movie reel being rolled in a theatre brings back direct memories of a human habitat that has since then vanished.

 People with memories and recordings of old buses, parties, hosiery and shoe manufacturing machines have been encouraged to get involved in the project.

Large Scale Papercuts

I am looking at the works of four papercut artists who make largescale 2D works/ installations.Mia Pearlman and Nahoko Kojima make works is inspired by our natural environment and focus on challenging the form rather than the content, making the paper behave or perform in strange, unknown ways. Kara Walker and Bovey Lee  use simple traditional forms like silhouette paper cut portraiture or Chinese paper cutting tradition to depict world issues that are affecting us here and now.Kara Walker's work is political and delves into history-the American civil right movement,gender and racial discrimination and other kinds of prejudices prevalent in the world today .Bovey Lee is inspired by the imbalance between man and nature and  sustainability issues .

Mia Pearlman
Mia thinks of herself as a sculptor and she sculpts with paper.The work of this New York based papercut artist is dynamic, forceful, fluid and awe inspiring.Mia takes her inspiration from natural forms like typhoons, tornadoes, whirlwinds, moving clouds and since this world constantly transforms itself, her voluminous, three dimensional,installations echo this insubstantiality both in content and form.She wants to create natural forms that have a universality for an universal audience.She creates for visual pleasure and makes works that trancends language, culture and blurs the distinctions between contemporary art and crafts.Her process is very intuitive- drawing instinctively on paper and then cutting without planning and installing it in space very experientially.These installations illuminate another world that we do not live in , and her objective as an artist is to be in the middle of nature and the mystery of it all.She has created large mobile pieces that move with natural wind in a room or has created using  natural light sources.The audience interact with the pieces,and have a childlike response to the works -that of wonder and amazement .

Mia Pearlman, Pulse, 2010

works with natural light.The audience interact with the pieces,and have a childlike response to the works of wonder .

Bovey Lee
The papercut works of Chinese artist Bovey Lee are narrative-based and explore the tension between man and the environment in the context of power, sacrifice, and survival. Her very intricate narratives deal with technology , urbanization and consumption and are filled with paradox, tension, and conflict concerning urban and environmental issues.Her recent work is informed by man's precarious relationship with nature in the twenty-first century, i.e., what we do to the environment with our super machines and technologies and what nature does back to us in reaction. Before the final hand cutting process, she composes the images using the computer and software, prints these and uses them as a reference. The images are photographic translated into patterns of solid and void, while cutting free hand without any rulers or stencils.Her work is like drawing with a knife and is rooted in her study of traditional Chinese papercutting as a folk tradition and well as calligraphy. "Cutting paper is a visceral reaction and natural response to my affection for immediacy, detail, and subtlety. The physical and mental demand from cutting is extreme and thrilling, slows me down and allows me to think clearly and decisively.", she says.

Bovey Lee, Ironing Oceans , 2012

Kara Walker

American artist Kara Walker makes panoramic friezes of cut-paper silhouettes, usually black figures against a white wall, which address the history of American slavery and racism through violent and unsettling imagery. Walker has produced works in gouache paintings, video animation, shadow puppets, and video projections, as well as a large number of black-paper silhouettes, perhaps her most recognizable works to date.

Her nightmarish,grotesque yet fantastical images incorporate a cinematic feel and depict imagery that is violent, unsettling and confrontational. Walker uses images from historical textbooks to show how African American slaves were depicted during Antebellum South. Kara Walker says of her work"All of the bad vibes, the bad feelings, all of the nastiness, and all of the sort of vulgar associations with blackness, and the more base associations in this culture about Black Americans or Africans bubble up to the surface of my brain and spill out into this work.” 

Kara Walker, "Slavery! Slavery! presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or "Life at 'Ol' Virginny's Hole' (sketches from Plantation Life)" 1997

Nahoko Kojima 

Kojima is a Japanese artist ,known to create one-off designs that are never duplicated and often based on the forces of nature .These are three dimensional, sculptural works that float in space.Cloud Leopard, one hand-cut sheet of black paper, suspended from the ceiling in a manner that created a sculptural representation of the animal intertwined with narrative and hidden characters. It took 5 months to complete and the piece was very successful because of Kojima's pioneering technique, turning traditionally flat wall hung pieces into sculptures floating in exhibition halls.Regarding her process Kojima is quoted as having said:

“When I was a child I would lie down on my back on the grass and draw the underside of flowers. I think when we discover a hidden beauty, we leave our bodies and look on ourselves, the object and environment, all as one lovely epiphany.”

Nahoko Kojima, Cloud Leopard,2012

The beautiful and the unbeautiful:a juxtaposition

I researched the beautiful yet subversive works of three women artists and thought of "beautiful subversion" as a strategy employed by artists in contemporary art.I would want my work to be aesthetically beautiful in form and yet have a content that is thought provoking,even disturbing.I would want the viewer to be drawn to it and simultaneously repelled by it .They want to look away but are completely hypnotized.

 Anila Quayuum Agha (Pakistani artist based in USA) ,winner of the ArtPrize 2015 for her work "Intersections" realized that she could subvert the established order not by making aggressive work, but by reclaiming techniques traditionally ascribed to women. "In a sense, I'm trying to elevate this whole domesticated element of the thread and the needle, which has usually been used to denote women, putting craft into dialogue with fine artThe inspiration for the piece came to Agha on a recent trip to the mosques in Alhambra, Spain. While women were excluded from the mosques and required to pray at home during her upbringing in Pakistan, in Spain she was able to appreciate the beauty of the geometric motifs that decorate the holy temples, as well as think about the mosques as a place of cross-cultural dialogue in Moorish Spain. While the patterning of the piece might be familiar to viewers from Islamic cultures, Agha explained that she took them out of their context to spark a conversation about the ambiguities and contradictions within a multi-cultural exchange.The piece looks like the Kabba in Mecca and the artist wanted to create a sacred space where women could enter.

Anila Quayuum Agha "Intersections" 201

Anila Agha's work "My Forked Tongue" beautiful piece is comprised of English, Hindi and Urdu alphabets strung on metallic threads interspersed by glass beads. The letters are hand cut paper, uniform in size and waxed for luminosity. The letters from each language are hung in layers, arranged equidistantly from each other creating a seductive pattern in space. The shadows on the walls from the alphabets create new intermingled forms. When hung at different distances from the walls the created shadows change in size and scale, creating a dialogue about memory and history. This installation was the artist's way to aid the audience in contemplation of ideas regarding literacy, cultures and class systems. The craft and labour intensive nature of this piece, both in the making and the installing of the work brings additional points to ponder such as craft versus high art, gender roles and the physicality of the human presence. 

Anila Quayyum Agha "My Forked Tongue 2014

Like Anila Agha, Hayv Kehraman,is another artist from the Middle East  who has migrated to the U.S. Her stunningly beautiful paintings inspired by Japanese prints and Persian miniature painting tradition , highlight troubling and painful socio political issues like the atrocities of war and gender inequalities in her home country , Iraq.

Hayv Kehraman "Playing Cards"

Hayv Kehraman "Heads on Plate"

These works reminded me of Adele's song "Skyfall " so dark but you want to get drowned in it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HKoqNJtMTQ .

Kate Macdowell is inspired by human anatomy and biological drawings.She sculpts partially dissected frogs, decaying bodies with exposed skeletons, and viscera invaded by tentacles  or ants. But her medium – minimalist, translucent white porcelain – renders her viscerally disturbing subject matter graceful, even elegant.  In others, the permanence of the porcelain generates tension with the ephemeral forms it depicts – like insects, flowers and nocturnal creatures.

Kate Macdowell "The God of Change"

Kate Macdowell "Entangled"

Kate Macdowell "Solastagia"

Kate Macdowell "Canary"

http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/hayv_kahraman.htm?section_name=unveiled

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEPTJKLSpRo

http://www.richardsaltoun.com/artists/101-helen-chadwick/overview/

http://www.katemacdowell.com/