today

from the garden this evening—black kale and the first broccoli for the season

Knitted mostly as a means of finding out how to make a non-pointy hat, after spotting someone wearing a similarly shaped item in the IGA supermarket one evening.

a work made recently for a seminar at the VCA. Thank you to Geoff for such patient collaboration! The idea being to make something like one of those figure/ground illusions where you might see a vase [the positive space], or you might see two facing profiles [the negative space] — they're apparently used for psychological testing.

I wanted to make "the space between me and someone else". We used a coil pot technique, which I neglected to research before-hand. The results were cathartic.


We made a second attempt in order to achieve something that would be recognisable as a human profile. I'm not sure the product requires refining. But further attempts are in the pipe-line.

Labels: thesis

I found this black she-oak fruit a few weeks ago on a walk home form the studio and it has sat on our kitchen table since then. The other morning I noticed that the seed capsules have opened. Not hard to propagate from seed, apparently, so maybe, in a few years, we could have she-oaks singing in our back yard on windy days.

My Christmas eve activities included rolling dolmades and preparing the stuffing for a lamb roast for lunch with the Orphans on Christmas day. I listened to an audio book of Plato's Republic while I was rolling, folding and stuffing. At this season of enforced and often uncomfortable togetherness, it seemed a luxury to be indulging in such productive and fruitful aloneness -

The Republic is something that I have been thinking I want to read, it is a representation of conversation as method, conversation as a means of instruction or learning, after all. Somehow though, I just don't think that we are meant to learn by reading slabs of text.

Labels: thesis

The inscription on the fountain reads:

Labels: field research, public amenities

The conversation I had with my friend H. on Sunday night about how the new practice of paying a "carbon offset" for travel or another kind of [green house gas producing] activity, paying to pollute (in the case of the coal industry), is similar to purchasing, from the Catholic Church, "indulgences" for sins committed instead performing penances — how dissatisfaction with this practice and the corruption generated in the church by this practice was a contributing factor for the Protestant Reformation in the 16th Century.

It is the sad hilarity of seeing one of those Greenfleet stickers on a car with the little tag of 'reducing my cars impact on the planet'. Is it possible to un-emit what you have emitted, in the same way that sin can be absolved through a little transaction, a little bit of penance?

I'm not the only one to think this, as a quick search on the World Wide Web will show. But I have been wondering, in the early mornings, how far this metaphor extends — how, in my mind, the line of thought extends to the problem of the economy, debit and credit, having replaced Christian morality, sin and repentance, as the dominant metaphor of our time. The economy has become the poetic structure of the world.

My saddest intuition is, I think, that this shift in our thinking is the result, directly or not, of the Protestant Reformation, and the subsequent secularization of our culture; and the most likely 'revolution' being a turning toward religiosity, and an emphasis on piety, rather than a process of bringing about a change, an alternative to the culture of credit and debit or heaven and hell.

Labels: field research