Peter Callesen’s Perplexing Papercuts!

Just came across these and I liked them. I wish I had Peter’s patience…

This tower of Babel is one of Callesen’s smaller ones and its still 182cm high…impressive…

Walls of Unwritten Words

I’m thinking of casting feathers in porcelain as part my next piece for uni, possibly why these fallen feathers drew me to Callesen in the first place. Glad I found him. Enjoy

Tomorrow I will be scouring my local park for goose feathers, looking like a tramp and possibly contracting Salmonella – oh how I love Sundays!

Explorers. An exhibition in a box.

I’ve been lucky enough to be involved two of Vibe Creative’s recent shows, it’s such a good feeling actually having work up where people will see it! Uttsav Patel runs Vibe with Gemma Marsh, two Visual Arts students at Bournville campus of our humble Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. Wordy, bleugh, sorry.

Bournville is worth having a look at, especially at this time of year – there’s the Cadbury’s factory shop for cheap chocs, beautiful old shopping streets, the oldest house in Birmingham and an adorable little green with a Christmas crafts shop (cheap and really well made gifts, mother Hodge is definitely getting some sparkly things from there this year!) This little village is a teeny tiny gem just outside of Selly Oak, Birmingham.

Anyway Utts is a neighbour and dear old friend of mine, and he popped over to pick and choose some work for future shows and found these five prints which I’d done a month or so ago, wasn’t too proud of so hadn’t left my room yet and liked them. Nice!

They’re stills from the film below, just snapped, photoshopped and printed. Then I used some rather hazardous screen cleaner called Actisol to rub them onto textured paper. Actisol’s pretty nasty stuff – we picked it up from a dodgy industrial site a couple of years ago for at home printing – you have to breathe out of the window, close your eyes and rub the images together with a spoon. Dodgy much…? Then you have to make sure not to be near any of the work until it dries, so I put mine in the hallway. My poor poor housemates.

Here’s the film, 1961 New Zealand. My little mother herself.

And here’s Vibe’s fantastic little construction – each exhibition features this ‘box’ which is made of several different flats and can be transformed into all sorts of shapes and sizes, and which will eventually be  travelling exhibition space when it’s waterproofed!

“Explorers” is an audio-visual experience featuring work by myself Chloe Hodge, Gemma Marsh and Claire Pollard which was produced by exploring different areas, stories and histories.

Take a torch, step into the darkness and explore.

Sneaky peek inside the box…

If you like my little film piece, prints or any of the work in the show, a little “like” is always encouraging. Just sayin’…

Art Therapy: Martin Smith’s atmospheric films cure a colossal champagne hangover.

So after an evening doing my +1 duty (or drinking the free champagne bar bone dry) at the ECCA awards to support the wonderful wonderful Collective Studios (have a peek, they should have won) I decided in my possibly-still-drunk-madness to go and see some art! And, although I slightly died on the train home, it was a rather good day and the perfect distraction from the golden bubbles still swishing around in my brain.

First stop: Baker Street to see Martin A Smith’s Written On Silence – sound, film and photography swirling around a little white cube shop space. As I walked in I was greeted with a whisper and left to drift about the dimly lit rooms, slowly and uninterrupted – a therapeutic and calming experience that made me forget that my head was in a vice and my legs seemed to have seasickness. Perfect!

It’s small and simple, but immersive and atmospheric all the same. It proves that you don’t need ten projectors and a huge space to make a beautiful installation, which is always very comforting to an art student.

It is only on for three days, finishing today, but Smith’s work is both understated and  captivating so worth a look. Here’s a couple of clips – the first, Roses In December featured in Written on Silence. It seems a little chintzy and wrong on a computer screen but as an installation it’s very eerie, very different. The second, Ballet Mecanique is Fernand Leger‘s surrealist film from the 1920s which Smith has written and added a new soundtrack to.

“There are sounds and images that resonate, that remind you of something, even if they have no personal connection to you.
People buy family photograph albums of people that they do not know.
Old postcards remind you of holidays even though they are of places that you have never seen.
Super 8 film seems to capture the essence of childhood.
Sounds can evoke an atmosphere of places that you do not know.
What is it in these images that can create such a strong emotion?
Is it purely nostalgia?
Is it seeking a connection to the past?
Is it a longing for memories that you do not have?
Roses In December takes these sounds and images and creates an installation of universal, and yet very personal, memories.”

“Composer and sound artist whose work is concerned with the creation of atmosphere rather than of form, melody or rhythm, of creating an environment through subtle and harmonious changes rather than through force.”