Hubert Duprat's Insect Art

French artist Hubert Duprat makes sculptures that also make themselves, utilising structural elements of the natural world: crystals in rhomboid formations placed in patterns that emulate or display their natural form; and these below: caddis fly larvae, which create protective cases from their environments. In this instance, Duprat has supplied them with gold and pearls. This makes me go all Attenborough. 

'They are like the wings of the Divas.'

OK, so the week is over and this epic project I've been doing is also sadly over. Zoë Josephine Payne and I worked hard to create the Wing-Shop Work-Shop at Redbridge Drama Centre as part of Nigel and Louise's Festival of Adventure. We were one of several performances for 9 - 11 year olds from schools in the local area. The other installations included flying babies, Ingrid Bergman being cutting with a hack saw from the screen of Casablanca and a bus created entirely from words, to tremendous affect.

The show culminates in a speak-easy which is then raided by the 'Art Police,' one of whom is a man dressed as a police hound. As such, these photos seem to be from all over the place, but they are in fact, just from this one performance.

Instead of The Sacred Sunday Extracts, I thought I would link them by comments made by the children who took part in our workshop to, in seven minutes, create their very own 'wings' for their feet. Some are unexpected, some are profound - all are hilarious. Thanks to everyone involved!

ME: 'So now we're going to create our very own wings in order to help our feet to fly.'

10-YEAR-OLD-WITH-FOLDED-ARMS: 'Real flying or imaginary flying?'

ZOE: 'Both...?'

ZOE: 'So now we're going to create our very own wings in order to help our feet to fly.'

CURIOUSLY-SPIRITUAL-INDIAN-GIRL: 'But how do we fly without the wind?'

LATER ON...

SEER GIRL [NOW CUTTING OUT WINGS]: 'They are like the wings of the Divas. They are very beautiful.'

TWO BOYS ARE FITTING THEIR 'WINGS' INTO THE BACK OF THEIR TRAINERS.

BOY 1: 'These are cool - they're like fashion.'

BOY 2: 'Fashion first!!'

ME: 'Has anyone here ever flown before?'

BOY-WHO-WILL-GROW-UP-TO-BE-A-COMEDIAN: 'Yeah! I jumped off my bunk bed and flew down and cracked my head open and died and went down to Hell!'

ME: 'Really?'

COMEDIAN BOY [PAUSES, THEN WAVES ARMS DISMISSIVELY]: 'Nah, not really.'

ALL CHILDREN ARE CUTTING OUT WINGS.

PRECOCIOUS BOY: 'We're going to be like Hermes in his wings except when we take off we're all going to fall down and die.'

ME: 'No, you're not going to die - you're going to fly!'

PB: 'Nah - it's going to be like in Final Destination.'

ME: 'Final Destination? How old are you?'

PB [PROUDLY, AT SPEED]: 'Eleven-I'm-the-oldest-in-my-class.'

SMALL-QUIET-BOY-CUTTING-OUT-NEXT-TO-PB: 'I'm thirty-four.'

STRANGELY NERDY KID ENTERING WORKSHOP: 'That party was SICK - they had lemonade!'

BAUHAUS WHOREHOUSE

Recently I have become actively aware of my quiet, ardent love for the Bauhaus aesthetic.

It's just so good. I want to be with it all the time. I would pay for it to stay with me.

But instead I will share it with you.

How great are these?:

please wait, your dream is currently pending.

This week various official bodies have unveiled statements about youth unemployment. I'm not going to get too specific here, but the 1 million figure has been bandied around a lot. Which makes me feel very grateful for my job. It could however make you feel pretty shit if you are one of the 'Lost Generation' of sixteen to twenty-five year-olds in the UK either without a job or without any distinct career opportunities. There's all this internship scheme shit going round again as with the Labour Government - which apparently was a success to some degree, but I was never aware of it's practical existence or affects - but, for now, the forecast looks pretty bleak.

If you are lucky enough to be a young person with a job that you do not hate or even like - congratulations. I am genuinely jealous of you. Perhaps this job you even consider a career? Maybe one day I too will be getting paid more than pittance or drinks vouchers for writing and illustration.

Especially if you are a creative person you do not need to be told that getting paid for what you love doing is already hard. Now it is particularly hard. If you don't want to feel alone in this feeling then I recommend THIS.

Recently I have been feeling particularly disillusioned with everything. Perhaps I should give up my dreams and become an accountant or something and let my ideas dissipate off into the shitty little wood-paneled office I'd work in with an undertone of bitter passive aggression. But perhaps this is what your twenties are for, right? Wandering around the Earth without anything weighing on your shoulders. Going traveling, not having responsibilities and so on ... This idea seems almost as romantic as the portrait of dying Marat. Only less blood stained. Maybe shitty jobs and numerous sexual encounters with strangers is the way to happiness. (Maybe it is also the way to great writing ... ??)

A while a go I went to a theatre festival in Prague. There, a very well respected and successful scenographer talked about her career (and also a collaboration with Take That). Her concluding statement on making it in The Arts was, 'Yeah - keep trying ... and be lucky.' Which is probably the best advice you can give, unless you know someone who's uncle works for someone blah blah blah. Alexander McQueen was on the dole for two years after graduating from Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, putting on his own shows in abandoned warehouses and churches, his mum making sandwiches for the models (do models actually eat at all?) before becoming famous for his provocative fashion ideas and very very successful. He just kept trying and was lucky, I suppose.

This advice keeps reoccurring when famous artists are questioned on how they became successful: despite everything, they just didn't give up. In fact, with all this shit going on, it's quite nice to have something solid to hang onto. And isn't that a fantastic merit of art? When all the world falls away you still have this special, personal way in which to decipher and deal with it. Maybe if the bankers were all part-time oil painters we might be someway closer to understanding WHAT THE HELL THEY DID WITH ALL OUR MONEY?!

Or something. Anyway, keep doing it. Don't let the bastards get you down, and all that shit.

LESS COMMON MORE SENSE

It seems funny that in a time when self-publishing sites such as Blogger, Tumblr and so on are ubiquitous, that getting published in a 'real' publication would have retained any of its appeal at all. If anything, the idea of it can seem cumbersome, slow and old fashioned, when I can just sit here in my underpants, type this, and be read by potentially anybody on the planet (don't forget that this is just a for-instance!). But on the other hand, it can make the intransigence, the solidity and history of words that are actually physically published more enticing, more special. Plus, of course, there is the feeling that someone else doesn't think your work it totally shit because they've stuck their neck out and put it in their magazine.

From the way I'm talking you might think I'd just been printed in The Paris Review. In actuality, it is much less grand, but still exiting. I've had a short story called Pig Boy Poetry published in a student magazine called Less Common More Sense. Basically, it's the uni mag for the six University of the Arts London colleges. It was published on 5th August (as you know, I've been camping for a week and a half!) and is available to be used as napkins or kindling from any UAL canteen. Man, I've hit it big.

My own sarcasm aside, I am actually quite proud of the story and the accompanying illustrations, which span a double page somewhere near the centre (does that make me the centre-fold fold-out??). And a big thanks to the lovely team who accepted it.

If you've got some spare time, give it a gander. If you have even less time, then you can breeze the illustrations below. The story is a kind of meditation about an Eastern European young man who works on a farm in the South of England, observing the cyclical nature of the crops, the animals and a jogger who runs past every day. He doesn't speak a word of English, so remains always distant. It doesn't seem so wanky when you read it.

(by the way - the camping was lovely.)

views of violence

I'm reading Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag at the mo. It's really good. You should totally get your read on with her. It seems to be one of those theoretical books that will only become more relevant the more numbed we become to increasingly frequent and disturbing images of violence. One frame of reference for her is the below photo taken by Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War, which was also around the time that photo journalism was entering the media (especially photos of wars). She questions the true 'objectivity' of the camera's lens, pointing out its many potential bias' and discrepancies. These discrepancies, specifically, are what can lead to misconceptions or reinventions of the truth, when applied or backed up by a photo. AKA a photo can say what you want depending on how you shoot it and what headline you stuff it under.

Falling Soldier, Robert Capa

While it may appear on every art/ journalism/ photography/ sociology course reading list, this is not one of those dry theory books that might just confuse the hell out of you and lead nowhere, except into the mind of a crazed loner (I'm thinking of Nietzsche and Sartre mostly - although I do adore some of their ideas!). Sontag, apparently, regards herself primarily as a novelist, rather than a theorist, despite her fame appearing contrary to this. Certainly her style of prose is alluring and beautiful - more in keeping with a novelist than a philosopher. However, her analyses are precise, cutting and very perceptive, and so far I have nodded my head towards the pages at everything I have read there.

A while ago, the Barbican gallery had a war journalism exhibition that displayed, among others, a great deal of Robert Capa's work. It was crazy to think, staring at prints of his D-Day photographs, that as the soldiers ran out of the sea from their boats, pointing their guns at the enemy, he ran in the opposite direction, to get the pictures. What a crazy dude!

The Casting, Omer Fast

Yet, among the other work in the exhibition was a film installation that really changed the way i feel about war journalism forever. It goes one step further than Capa and Sontag, and debates within itself the truth of war journalism in a televised form (although this is also mentioned by Sontag, actually).

It was a piece called The Casting by artist Omer Fast. It involved a double-sided screen suspended in a black room. On one side is a split screen where a story is enacted by actors who are standing still. The story cuts between two narratives that are narrated by a soldier. The soldier tells the stories of two traumatic days in his life: 1, the day he broke up with his girlfriend and 2, the day he accidentally shot a civilian in Iraq. The narratives are spliced together, yet make sense. It is only until you walk around the screen to see the artist interviewing the soldier in a studio, that you realise how easily you have been taken in. Here the cuts are inelegant and overt in their intent to deceive, the story clearly an invention of the artist, not the soldier. His two stories have become one and taken on an entirely new set of meanings.

This, combined with Sontag and Capa, have made me super skeptical about everything I see on the news or read in the paper. It is an old phrase that we 'shouldn't believe everything we see in the news', but maybe we have become complacent, even with that warming lurking in our heads. Check out this video and keep the skepticism alive, i say. It's an incredible, thought-provoking piece.

the redescovery of wonder

Artist Janet Echelman makes incredible sculptures from unlikely materials, employing unlikely, often traditional techniques and crafts from all over the world. The sculptures create a paradox of place and emotion, seeming light and ephemeral, modern and ancient, while remaining permanent and monumental. Another supreme Ted Talk. God I love them so.

Arabian Nights in Preparation

Inspired by a project I'm working on at the moment, here are a few brilliant ancient Arabic ground plans for palaces. I love them visually as well as in functionality. In fact, that's a big part of the appeal. It's all about symmetry, mate.

FACE TO FACE

PENCIL & PEN

sketching time.

Brixton Beatrice

the awkward bohemian

anxious woman looking down

white trash, so misunderstood

sitting, waiting, wishing

portrait of the actress as a young girl