- 10:44 PM
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Maria and the little people, Salt flats, Bolivia
Burma awareness march, London
Bad Andy not confessing, Peru
2009 & 2010
- 10:12 PM
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These are Ethel and Harriet soy wax china teacup candles made by my talented 'sister in law' Hannah. I've one burning now and they glow beautifully and give off the loveliest soft scent. They've just become available on Foxes and she sells at the Grey Lynn Kraft Bomb too. Spent the afternoon taking some pictures of them for her.
- 9:39 PM
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First pic is a New Zealand treehouse, The Redwoods, in Warkworth. And the last one is amazing, a mirrored glass cube. I imagine it's incredible apart from the birds that keep flying into it.
I remember the feeling I'd get, when I would clamber up onto our roof and sit looking out over the trees, the neighbours, the street. It felt strange and free, viewing everything from that perspective.
- 3:14 PM
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I discovered the Pecha Kucha format of presentations on Wednesday night, featuring speakers from the Photography Festival currently running in Auckland. Each speaker shows 20 slides for 20 seconds and speaks at the same time. A simple concept but a good one, the speakers are forced to get to the rub of it all, strip it all back and present in short, succinct lots.
Roberta Thornley's work clicked with me. She didn't hold her ideas too lofty, in one image her motivation was to simply make visual the feeling of wearing socks on wet grass. For another project she admitted to a need to make things 'glow with light'. She imposed boundaries to her project; her jungle-like backyard the backdrop to her images, and set about staging photo shoots with inflatable paddling pools and stacked chairs. The pictures were beautiful. Her exhibition work (titled 'Tomorrow' at the Tim Melville Gallery) also glows. She obviously adores light and her subjects, whether a bunch of bananas or a beautiful youth, bask in it and are luminous.
When Peter Madden spoke, or rather recited his poetry to a presentation of the most spellbinding collages (his), I experienced the pure lust of art. I want his work. I haven't seen them up close yet - tomorrow at Michael Lett Gallery - but they are incredible, intricate and sort of violent somehow. 'An Exploding Crystal Cave Freezes Time (telegraphing polymorphic rainbows into the mouths of the mute)' is the name of his exhibition. How could you not love it?
'I'm not a photographer standing on the edge of the world,' Madden has said. 'In my work, I'm cutting into a body of knowledge, poetically releasing the images.'
Also, Andy had a dream last night that we were buying glass handbags from Stephen Malkmus.
- 10:55 PM
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We gather things together, hunt them out like magpies, drag them into our rooms and then we sit amongst them, looking about ourselves, happy and feeling well represented.
"Skulling white wine while searching for the perfect cottage to rent in turkey (the lycian coast) on a sunday afternoon. getting drunker and more languid and happy I stretched my arms and neck and looked upward to my bookcase where I see my favourite books and other crap that makes me happy and i feel blessed all over again. what a life". 2008
Some of my things:
- 7:50 PM
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Philip Clairmont, Fireplace, 1970.
The Fletcher Trust Collection
Since I've arrived back home in New Zealand, and supposedly for 'good', I'm attempting to educate myself on our arts and literature culture, I am embarrassed to say I know next to nothing of it, a few Katherine Mansfield books from school, a couple of well known artists and several photographers. But I am pretty much starting from scratch. It's like Educating Rita but without a besotted tutor to help.
I've just finished Martin Edmond's 'The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont' which is part straight biography (the second half of the book) and part personal documentary on the researching of the book. It must be difficult to write an intimate biography and still keep a respectful distance, to the subject and to the interviewees. It must be harder still when the book is about a man who took his own life. Edmond is a sensitive researcher and he reveals the often awkward, worrying, meaningful and lonely moments he spends on the road, interviewing and tracking down Clairmont's family and contemporaries. The biography part introduced me to a New Zealand I didn't know about, the beginnings of the dealer art galleries in NZ, the posse of artists in the late 60's, some of them heavily into experimenting with drugs, the art schools but most of all it has made me desperate to see some of Clairmont's work, they are apparently difficult, beautiful, vivid, mysterious, nightmarish.
"Clairmont, having relayed his essence as a series of images into the mirror world of painting, from where they look back at us in their multifarious attitudes, exciting pity and terror, had, finally, to go himself into eternity, the actual psyche, the real body, had no alternative but to follow where the mind had already gone...into the painting". Martin Edmond 'The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont'.
I am now reading 'Wrestling with the Angel; a life of Janet Frame' by Michael King and loving it. On the reading list, 'The Skinny Louie Book' by Fiona Farrell, James K. Baxter Poems, 'The End of the Golden Weather' by Bruce Mason, 'Where Your Left Hand Rest' by Fiona Kidman, 'The Goose Bath' by Janet Frame. Further suggestions welcomed.
- 5:39 PM
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It is the business of a poet, I think, to be destitute as well as honest. He may have money; but he should recognise that it is dirt. He may have prestige; but let him hate it and wear it like an old filthy coat. Then he may be able to stay awake a little better. Love will not harm him, though. It will slice him open like a fish, and hang him by the heels, and let the sun into his private bag of dreams and idiot ambitions. He will think he is dying when he is just beginning to wake up (‘Writing and Existence’, 18). James K. Baxter
- 5:31 PM
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