Knots

Finishing each tie with a knot. Two km of string. 

Corseted, bound, connected, stitched. The trees became the bodies.

 Throughout the Day, depending on temperature and humidity, the strings tighten across the spans or slump down into soft hanging bundles, charting the ay through their movements. These soft forms below became taut and tight just two hours later.

Exhibition Opening

It was great to have friends join us on Saturday to see the work.

Kenesis

The quality of the work I enjoy the most is the fact that it is constantly moving. The site specific work is responsive to the environment. Not only the wind but to the temperature and moisture levels as well. Both Tam and I enjoyed the fact that work seemed to dialogue back to us. The lines form a visual and auditory experience for what is happening at a particular moment in time. The kenetic energy of the work engages the viewer in an increased sense of awareness of the landscape.

The first morning we discovered the lines drooping we were concerned that we hadn't tensioned the knots enough. Our hearts were deflated yet we decided to continue with our work and return to tie the loose threads again later.

Yet by 10am the lines had retracted to a tensioned position again. 

instead of being a fault in the work it became an added bonus because it meant that all of the threaded ties move. Not just the plastic tape which flutters in the wind the builders line also changes position throughout the day.

Light in the landscape

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the work is the play of light. 

The work is constantly in a state of flux.

It feels indulgent to muse over the part of the work that excites me most.

the fact that it reflects the Wabi Sabi principle of impermanency because 

of it's capacity to refract light. The action of the environment is a point of connection for me. As artists we have acted upon the environment. Our intervention has been a way to play with the actual viewing of the landscape.

In effect our artwork is an action in the environment. And in turn the environment is acting upon the work.

In the late afternoon gaps in the tape on the branches closer to the 

pathway above the work, provided opportunities for the light to be withheld 

in sections. Casting shadows with warm hues they appeared like abstract 

stripes/patterns in the landscape.

Layering and texture in themselves create a dialogue in the landscape. Yet the play of light is an entirely different order of intervention.

Installing day eight

Trusting and working with the process of making art is always interesting, and maybe more so when collaborating. The work has moved through multiple iterations over the last seven days. But in doing so, it has come to a new place of its own. 

The space has been wrapped and teased out. We have tied 2000m of string in neat double knots around tree trunks. We have wrapped long eucalypt limbs with careful threaded glowing colour,  Wrapped elements have been added in to the site and then taken away. Everyday we have worked for seven or more hours on an aspect of the work. Not everything works and parts we have spent many hours on have been discarded as the whole dictates its needs. The work evolves, and seems to need to take on its own life.

It is great when the parts that work for us, also work for other people passing by. This front section has become a colour field play ground.

The work is becoming immersive, which is making it interesting. 

Tomorrow is the final day for installation, a day to approach it with fresh eyes.

Friendship ties

This afternoon two separate friends came by to help. It was a great support to Tamsin and I to have others engage in our work. 

Both Roya and Rose had offered help and today they joined us on the picnic rugs wrapping and and tying branches we had selected from the site. It was lovely to enjoy the dappled afternoon light and the conversations that arose. It was a first time meeting for Roya, Rose and Tamsin, I was the common link having made connections with them all in this last year, my first living in Sydney. What was only apparent to me as the conversations unfolded, was the link between us culturally which seemed to have some parallel. Both Tamsin and Roya were of Persian decent and Rose and I are of Irish decent. Just like the parallel threaded lines the working party sat working in tandem the Irish set at the rear in this picture and the Persian set at the front.

All coincidence perhaps, yet an amusing connection to what seemed like the random offer of help from kind friends. Even the fact that they arrived to help at the same time of day seemed to have some ordered alignment that happened of it's own accord.

  Roya's masterful branch, clearly a speedster she was a woman on a mission - a threading machine

  Rose with her magic wand, an intricate work of craftsmanship that was carefully tied with multiple knots 

Tamsin tying off ends

Three visitors

From left to right:  Bilal, Jihhad and Charlie

We had three visitors to the site today. 

Jihhad, Charlie and Bilal were hanging out

in the park when they spotted us working

on the installation. Charlie thought the work

 looked retro and Jihhad said it looked like

 a safety barrier. Bilal also liked it and thought

 it looked great. I asked Bilal if he enjoyed  doing any 

art and he told me that sport was his thing,

- not art. That made me think how good it 

was to have created interest in someone who normally 

might not have that much involvement with  art.

That seems to me to be the best part about

 working on site to create an artwork. The fact that

the making of the work in place creates  

connections that would not otherwise exist. 

So that the art itself is the point of exchange and a facilitator 

of new dialogues and a chance to talk to someone who 

would otherwise have no reason to engage. 

We never would have met these enthusiastic and energetic

boys had we not intervened in the trees. I'm glad for the 

experience, as they made me feel privileged to be an artist. 

Strings... String theory... Painting in space

We have spent this last week experimenting. As this work is site specific, we are working in our installation site, a grove of casuarinas, in Willoughby, building, testing, unmaking, remaking. The work revolves around the dual ideas of wabisabi (see the first post) and connection points/points of exchange.

We find objects on site. We wrap, hang, bind and string these in the space. We stop and consider each object, each point. We have spent hours working with the space, we have strung hundreds of metres of string... And then unwound the work, to remake it the next day.

The collaboration between both Laine and I as artists is an interesting point of exchange. Our different aesthetics and points of view are coming together to make this work. We cross personal boundaries of space and ownership through the act of collaboration. 

The work itself is a point of exchange, made almost entirely of string. This demarkation of the space imposes borders. It creates an architecture within the space, becoming a field of vertical planes, walls and boundaries. 

Using string is interesting for us. As we work we make connections to ideas which interest us...

To physicists, who study energy and matter, a string is anything much longer than it is wide, and string theory describes the physical nature of the universe. String theory posits that the smallest constituents of the universe are not particles of matter but loops of energy as submicroscopic strings linked together. The smallest loops, zero-branes, are vibrating energy, generating matter. Together these make up the fabric of the universe. A sprawling cosmic fabric. Our DNA is a string and if it was stretched out like a string it would be a few meters long. 

The other wonderful thing that I am enjoying is that the work is becoming a kind of large scale colour field painting. It is reminding me of a fluorescent Agnes Martin painting in a pocket of Australian bush. I have been interested in painting away from the canvas and this is a fascinating way of painting in space.

Using string draws visual and physical connections in space, using string also represents so many other ideas.

 

Crossing borders

Moving objects between the artists. 

Choosing directions. Finding colours, materials. Playing with light. 

The pathway through is fascinating. 

Attention to the small markers along the way was part of the intention, and in the work at the final installation site all of these small marks, marks made by the trees, the landscape and marks made by us. 

All interact to make the work. We made working drawings and the work moves closer. 

We experiment with colour and the work moves closer. 

And always, we focus on the intention of wabisabi. 

Poles Apart

I have walked past this pole in Tamarama many times, yet had never examined its layered surface before today.

Instead of rushing past as I had always done, I began to document the markings which were the remains of years of sticky tape, adhesive backed paper and cracked paint. 

For me it had a Wabi Sabi beauty, the process of time and the deterioration that created a layering of texture akin to abstract paintings. Tracks where the tape had been removed and the dirt from the street had adhered, appeared as the deliberate strokes of an artist. Yet this was not a deliberate intention, it was random happening where both man and nature have intervened. 

Some of the more recent sections of tape were still attached. They flickered in the wind like a vibrational dance. Caressed by sun & wind they bore witness to the gentle process of deterioration.

Colours from the ink in the posters of the past were creating an interesting patina. As I was enjoying this,  I began to reflect on the concept of connection. It was obvious from my study of the pole that what I had long considered to be an inanimate object, was in fact animated by its the overlay of tape & paper that formed part of the evolution of its surface.

I thought of how it is possible to overlook or dismiss the layers present in others we connect with. Not necessarily deliberately but purely as a response to the bustle and pace of our everyday interactions - we so rarely get to connect to the many layers of human experience present. Like my continual passing of the pole, we fail to understand the cultural patina that affects behaviour created from upbringing, social conditioning and political and geographical differences.

The reflection of such, brought to my attention the fact that we can be poles apart in terms of our ability to find the points of connection. Yet such limits might be offset if we can slow down long enough to observe the beautiful overlays present in each person we meet. Such overlays can form the ties or common threads that bind us to our shared human experience.