Jonathan Anderson

Jonathan Anderson - Coal Dust Mandala - seen here

I'm so pleased to find that Swansea based artist Jonathan Anderson has a new website. His work using coal dust continues as Coalodonia "...a subterranean nation...an internal, subconscious dark terrain. He mines for diamonds, but digs up coal." Peter Finnemore seen here.

The artist has utilised coal as a material in his work for the last two years; "Aware of the temptation to slip into cultural cliché, Anderson presents an ongoing poetic drift of marks and
symbols upon found objects including lining paper, cardboard, souvenir trinkets and bank-notes." Tim Davies seen here.

Dark and elegant in their simplicity, Jonathan Anderson's works continue to deepen the complex archetypes they conjour.

Jonathan Anderson - Dark Bulb - seen here

The Invisible Blanket - Louise Bird

Louise Bird - The Invisible Blanket - seen here

Louise Bird explores ideas about science and scientific philosophy through her artistic practice. She draws parallels between the actions of crochet and the continual creation of matter. She articulates science and mathematics through the processes of making and "...investigates the relationship between the invisibly small and the unimaginably huge."

Experimenting with unusual materials such as fishing line, Louise's pieces grow painstakingly slowly, sometimes taking up to a year to finish. She uses film and photography to animate and experiment further with her work. Here's a fantastic film made during an installation project in collaboration with Jacob Whittaker, Loopholes shown in The Tannery, Machynlleth in 2009.

The Invisible Blanket is currently coming into being....

Peter Finnemore - Glynn Vivian Gallery

Peter Finnemore - Birdwatcher - seen here

There is a show of recent acquisitions from Carmarthenshire artist, Peter Finnemore in Room 1 at the Glynn Vivian in Swansea. Birdwatcher is an installed film piece shown on five LED mini screens and they are also showing a series of projected short films.

A great bit of curation by the gallery, this show works in subtle tandem with the main exhibition, Willie Doherty's Buried, whilst also bringing a lightness of touch to difficult subject matter.

Willie Doherty - Buried

Willie Doherty - Buried - seen here

We spent Saturday in Swansea and made a visit to see the Willie Doherty exhibition at the Glynn Vivian Gallery. The show hosted the two video pieces Ghost Story (2007), first shown at the 52nd Venice Biennale, and Buried (2009), commissioned by and first shown at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh.

The work is relentlessly dark touching as it does on the artist's own experiences of the The Troubles in Northern Ireland and in particular his witnessing of Bloody Sunday from the window of his family home aged 12.

"Buried is a show about landscape and memory, about repression and resurgence and the difficulties inherent in representing contested and bitterly painful events in a post-conflict situation. It steps away from the simple accretion of historical events or factual detail, instead pursuing oblique and poetic routes toward a truth, not of the grand sweep of history but the intimate and painful price it exacts on the individual psyche." seen here

Both films are deeply effecting. Buried was made as a companion to Ghost Story and seems to focus the intensity of the events alluded to in Ghost Story. The high quality of the film making lends it an exquisite depth and clarity. It is beautiful and poetic, and at the same time dank and scrubby. There is a supernatural resonance in the aesthetic, a sense of expectation and narrative tension which is not, ultimately satisfied. The glimpses of detritus and residue within the wooded space we witness are ambiguously horrific.

Here is an excellent review of the show.

Inside the Birdhouse

Kathryn Campbell Dodd - Poem House

In 2005 I began making a piece of work called Inside the Birdhouse which was originally shown at The Fire and Iron Gallery in Surrey and consequently travelled as part of an Arts Council of Wales project to non-gallery venues in Wales - here's a link to the website for the project. I began by commissioning a doll's house which I painted and lettered and then used as the setting for a strange little stop motion film peopled by my mother's collection of owl figurines (my profile pic is a still from the film) and animated by strange objects inspired and drawn from Welsh Halloween customs. The video was then installed within a white birdhouse into which you have to peep to view the film.

Kathryn Campbell Dodd - Inside the Birdhouse (installed with Economic Values 1 & 2)

In Crafts magazine last month (December 2009) I saw a lovely article about Beatrice Baumgartner and her stop-motion film La Maison Oubliée which is also set within a doll's house. A really beautiful piece.

Beatrice Baumgartner - Crafts Magazine (December 2009)

Once We Were Birds

Tina Carr, Annemarie Schöne and Angharad Pearce Jones at Oriel Myrddin Gallery

We had S4C in Oriel Myrddin Gallery today filming our new exhibition, Once We Were Birds, for the TV show Wedi 3. The presenter is Angharad Pearce Jones, a prolific and highly skilled Welsh sculptor who mostly works in metal and moonlights on tele!

Once We Were Birds is predominately photographic with some video work, it documents the artists odyssey in the spring of 2009 to visit Roma communities in Hungary. The artists, Tina Carr and Annemarie Schöne brought a fabulous book about gypsies in Hungary into the gallery today too which contains the little folk story from which the exhibition is named; translated by Péter Szuhay, World is a ladder, which some go up, some go down: Pictures of gipsies in Hungary in the 20th Century. It's too lovely to edit, so here is the full text:

Once We Were Birds….then became what we are – the Gipsies. Each of us had wings at that time and did not have to earn our bread by begging and picking; we just flew with the other birds and ate what they were eating. In the fall, when – sudripe hi odjari – that is, the weather turned cold outside, we took wing with the other birds and headed for faraway Africa. When we were bored here, we flew there, when it was boring there, we flew further on, that’s how it was.

Well, it wasn’t a golden life either, for the captive bird has a better one, as the silly “gadzso” , it’s keeper, pets it – “csiriklori, verebori” – and throws seed in the cage, every day. But the free bird gets its own food, at any price. In turn, it is free.

To make a long story short, when we were flying over fields parched by the sun, for many-many days, without food or drink, well, one night, or rather dusk when you can still see, we saw rich fields down under. Then the Gypsy-chief, I mean our bird-chief, waved with his wings to go down; we did so and started to pick the nice wheat grains.

As hours passed by, we happened to eat ourselves chuck-full after many days of “bokhalipe” (fast), so that we couldn’t possibly fly that night. So we stayed the night, then morning came and we ate again for we were hungry again. Then we couldn’t take wing again, and came the noon, and came the night and we were still there.

In the meantime, we kept getting fatter and fatter. By then, we couldn’t possibly fly up even if we wanted to. To be sure, we got accustomed to this new comfortable life, when there was no need to fly neither here, nor there, for men I mean birds could find everything in the place. Before long, we couldn’t even jump, let alone fly, only to pace slowly, leisurely.

Then fall came and the rich field started to wither, did not yield more and the rats and voles helped to pick up the remaining grains from the ground. There was nothing else to do than to get down to harvesting as we learned from the animals of the field. We scraped holes, lined them and filled them with what we still had, then covered them. Finally, we started to throw together twigs and straw so as to make a hovel for passing the winter in it. While working, our legs became thick; our wings degenerated and became arms. It was the end of our beautiful life, the end of flying from one world to the other. Why, we Walachian Gypsies – once “puro rom” – are birds even these days. If we pitch a tent in the valley, we long to be on the hilltop, if we stand on the peak, we wish to fly into the valley. Only now we have to get there on foot.

We live a life of laziness, scraping together penny by penny, for the simple reason that one day we all become birds once again.

Bartos, 1958.23-25

Nine Artists' Films

Jacob Whittaker - Tying Tone Arms - seen here

Tonight we went to see the screening of Nine Artists' Films at Theatr Mwldan in Cardigan, part of the 2010 Film Festival. Seven locally based artists, working with film showed a series of nine short films.

The show was really well attended and it's been a topic for conversation today. The filmmakers were invited onto the stage after the showing for a Q & A session with the audience, this really helped to give some context to the works.

Simon Whitehead's work Anemos was commissioned by the BBC. Sean Vicary's Sea of Glass was commissioned as a response to music in an audio-visual performance. Rueben Knutson made his film 1000 Days as the outcome of a residency in the haematology department of a hospital. Jacob Whittaker and Penny Jones' Taith Cranogwyn operated as a documentary. The other contributions were made as art films. One possibly needed this background to interpret the films in relation to each other; the different approaches made the dialogue between the selection a little problematic.

I am easily seduced by classy production, and in this vein I enjoyed Anemos, a visually rich film of a choreographed performance which personifies the element of the wind and the production of wind energy. The choreography was compelling and worked beautifully with the costume of grey-blue silk dress and coat, the rich lighting created narrative. Some of the small gestural hand movements in the piece were exquisite . Sean Vicary's Sea of Glass was similarly classy, a sophisticated stop motion piece animating out sized shells spinning against the Cardigan coastline.

My personal favourites were Jacob Whittaker's Three Vinyl which "...uses found (Hi-Fi and sound equipment) objects, and my aim is to use them, as much as is possible, in the state in which they are found. Basic repairs are made merely to achieve some sound, with any problems leading to their being discarded playing an important part of the composing process. With turntables (the artist) often intervenes further by tying the tone arm back in order to interrupt normal play. The work is then produced live without headphones or post-production, using randomly selected loops from often randomly selected records."

Of the three pieces I had seen Tying Tone Arms before, an aesthetically beautiful, slightly voyeuristic, nostalgic film of decks backed with the drones of stuck vinyl; cacophonous music that develops its own rhythms and tensions. The middle film Shaky uses a faulty record deck that shakes and shudders the needle across the vinyl making a bizarre visual effect as the tone arm vibrates alongside the boings, scratches and tremblings of the sound track. It has a peculiar tension and a curious sense of passive-aggression in the juddering malfunction of the machinery and the fate of the vinyl it reacts with.

I enjoyed Penny Jones' Rant, a silent short of the artist in various outfits and in various locations raging and ranting at the camera about unknown grievances. It is important to know that Penny is an older woman because it completely alters the contexts of the work. A young woman behaving in the same manner would convey completely different signifiers. It was uncomfortably comical and had resonances with the inflential Carmarthenshire filmmaker and photographer, Peter Finnemore.

Rowan O'Neill's Menyw a Ddaeth o Gatraeth / A Woman Came from Catterick had some lovely motifs within it, a nostalgic, symbol laden film utilising props and film techniques that took the piece into the realm of folk tale. "My Grandmother moved from the area close to Catterick in the mid 50s to settle in rural West Wales. In my Grandmother’s suitcase I keep the relics of a long forgotten strife…” Rowan references the militaristic contemporary and historic roots of Catterick with a repetitive sequence showing a soldier rhythmically cutting a huge pile of carrots with her Grandmother's kitchen knife - a beautiful but disturbing vignette.

Well done to Theatr Mwldan for the initiative, more please!


Left to right: Penny Jones, Jacob Whittaker, Simon Whitehead, Rueben Knutson, Sean Vicary, Ruth Jones, Rowan O'Neill