sketches
preserved on board
waiting for future
evolution

sketches
preserved on board
waiting for future
evolution

sketches
preserved on board
waiting for future
evolution

sketches
preserved on board
waiting for future
evolution

Paul Klee
Theo Moorman
and Anselm Kiefer.

If they got together for a jam session
with a weaving loom that is...

This might be the result.

Paul Klee is in the
...transparent children's-block sky

......Theo Moorman is in the
.........wooly strands of the atmosphere

...........and Anselm Kiefer is alone
................in a gently ascending dome.

Paul Klee is in the
...transparent children's-block buildings

.....Theo Moorman is overlaid
........in the wooly stranded fields

..........and Anselm Kiefer is in the
.............pockets of negative space
................back beyond the receding distance..

A painted line of rice paper turns into a two dimensional plane in this fragile Reconstruction

How to picture a place, any place,
that is 1000 years removed from my present?

At one end of
the long steep valley
that contains Lake Zurich is
the wide open plain
of the city of Zurich.
At the other end are the Alps.

About a third of the way down the lake valley,
above the town of Kusnacht,
about 3km up the steep valley slope,
sits Ruin Welp.

Archaeological evidence shows
that the site has been inhabited since
the central European Bronze Age (3000BC).
Abandoned and not altered since
the high middle ages (1100AD) when
settlement moved down to the side of the lake at Kusnacht.

1000 years abandoned, yet very near to thriving human activity.
In another millennium where will Ruin Welp be?

The passing of 1000 years has
obscured its presence beneath
the forests of central Switzerland.
Steady erosion of ordered building blocks
a process that is well underway.
The remains of Ruin Welp
maintain their presence
affected only by
the natural passing of time
with neither happy nor sad intent.

Apocalyptic? Well the abandonment would suggest so.
Utopic? Well the current serenity of the site and the fact that it has not been entirely lost to human knowledge insists that there is some kind of enduring presence.

the creative process; the emergence of change.
It is about half formed ideas that surface and submerge, bubbling up out of the continuous flow of the barely conscious.
They are born of the accumulation of day to day life, traditional ways of thinking, ordinary processes and learned canon.
These 12 sided polyhedrons are emerging from the miasma.
Almost, but not quite fully formed they cause turbulence as they disturb the otherwise orderly flow.
These might have been composer Arnold Schoenberg’s dreams just at singularity where he left behind the harmonies and melodies of traditional European composers and oved into a realm of
Twelve equivalent musical tones that would eventually solidify into a new atonal canon.
As a young composer in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century he must have been surrounded, fascinated, overwhelmed by, the sheer weight of the musical history and tradition swirling about him.
It is not the details of the musical canon, but the game-changing shift.
It is the threshold between what-was-before and what-was-to-come; the emergence of an incomplete, yet completely new idea that is surfacing in Schoenberg’s Dreams.

Mythical.
The view of
sun soaked
open valleys,
calm waters

So surprising
when one
actually comes
upon it.

Doris McCarthy
meets
Eva Hesse

Go figure?!?

Like rust rings and water spots, the inks delineate the temporary markings of the dried grasses and the human stories alike.

The ink-stamping encloses the Victorian era story, making it an historical object to be preserved on the wall.

In that summer of 1881-2 a band of Sioux Indians lived in the flats just below the village and in the spring they moved farther south. They hunted and trapped and tried to live on the proceeds of their sales of furs but their passion for gambling kept them pretty poor.

"There are three tents of Indians camped here and I can go down sometimes to see what they have so that I can make trades with them. Once or twice I had quite a pow-wow with them. One of them would get his tom-tom and begin beating a tune tum, tum, tum, tum and keep right on and then suddenly he would start yelling hee yah, hee hah then jump up and down and dance around the fire like a turkey cock with all his feathers on his head; then I would jump up and follow him, hee-hawing all the time.
Once Jim Hill and I nearly killed them with laughing. He and I danced the highland fling, he on one side of the fire and I on the other. The Indians rolled over and laughed fit to split their sides and said Misishin (good)"

From a self published area history book, Beneath the Long Grass a letter written by Alex Reid, 1884.

The westward view
from Calgary Alberta.

A ubiquitous view
burned like a brand
into the Calgarian identity.

Clearly announcing
the rising barometer
the warming west wind.

The imposition of
human pattern-finding
on the natural world,
sometimes
an abstraction in art,
sometimes
a weather prediction.

I recall a line... "and the steely Russian skies,
go on forever." (A.Stewart)

Alberta's steely spring skies; they go forever to the east,
but they are most definitely stopped with impassibility, to the west

The middle ground,
attainable pathway to the horizon.

Foregrounding
so close as to defy focus,
all surrounding with sensation.

So soggy, cold and smelling of decay.

The pristine sterility of winter is gone,
and when it the thaws enough to smell it,
its got to be on its way back to life.

April in Alberta- Installed

This is the installation view of
April in Alberta as exhibited in the
ACAD Admin Area Exhibition Sept 2011 to Nov 2012.