Julieduffy’s Weblog

For the source project I started off by looking at an essay that Fred Sandback had written about his issues with sculpture. He had been given the advice to simple make a line with a ball of string. With this as inspiration I began making work using string as my basic material. I am interested in minimalism and this has been something I have been trying to work with, with the string. I had been trying to think of a way to create some order to the work I was making and began to look into the Fibonacci sequence. This is a sequence of numbers which can carry on until infinity by adding the last two numbers of the sequence together-

11 2 3 5 8 13 21…

I plan to investigate the Fibonacci sequence further by trying to produce a body of work which relates to each other through Fibonacci. I am unsure as to what exactly I will make but I hope to work through this by simply making and seeing what happens as a result.

Sitting/swaying event for rock suspension

In the centre of the hanging rocks Stelarc himself hangs, can see where the hooks are dug into him stretching his skin! Definetly a case of mind over matter to be able to carry out something which must be extremely painful. Something of an endurance test.

He is probably best known for his development in the movement of mail art but it is beleived that his death had been another and his last performance. On January 13th 1995 Ray Johnstons body was found drowned in the Sag Harbour Cove, Long Island. The reason for his death being considered to in fact be a performance was that when the police went to his appartment all of work had been turned to face the wall except from two pictures of himself, and left on the table in the centre of the room was the word Redrum written on it.

At our art and theory lesson there was a lot of talk about performance art. Ive never done any kind of performace before but I really enjoyed this lecture, a lot of it I guess did have a kind of shock factor to it but I couldnt help but find it really interesting the way some people were able to completly put themselves out there something I dont quite think I have the guts to do yet. But heres some of the artist that caught my eye.

Well the installation I had in mind didnt exactly work out, was meant to be two walls connected to each other coming out at an angle to the room but didnt have the best quality of wood so it kept splitting when I tried to screw it together. I only had three days in the white room to install everything so i was running out of time so had to come to a compromise. The work has had to change constantly with various time constraints and material issues. In the end the work kind of became a response to the room with the material restrictions that I had, was still able to do the sound piece where I recorded the room then played back the sounds of the room within the installtion, there was some quite interesting things happening with this but I would have liked to have played around with it a bit more and maybe of had different sounds coming from different areas of the room. Overall its not what i had intended but I am still quite happy with what I have done and think ive learnt alot from the first installation ive tried to install.

been looking at Bruce Naumans corridor works, the work is made up of long narrow corridor with two monitors on top of each other at the end of the corridoe, one monitor records the entrance to the corridor and the other shows a closed circuit tape recording to the corridor. I thought this was a really interesting way to incorporate the viewer in to the work and has been something I have interested in trying to do myself. With our sound based project I wanted to mimic the viewers sound in the claustrophic environment to make it seem lke the sound is coming at them.

For this project Ive kind of been looking at installation work and incorporating that with sound. Im working in the white room and im making a room  within a room with only my body width as the amount of distance to pass around the room.

 I want the room to have a kind of claustrophobic feel, and i hope to inhance this with the sound by some way playing back the noises in the room but coming from within the sculpture, im going to play around with this maybe try layering the sounds, not sure whether to have a loud constant noise or various differnt noises played at differnet parts of the room.

The sculpture of the room im making out of yarn, i want to make it really tight but i think there will be some movement which could be quite interesting. It also may not totally cover what is inside creating the noises so the viewer may get some sense as to what is going on.

With the sculpture in the middle of the room I like the idea of it appearing like a wall of noise, i think im trying to create a sound interaction.

Well last week we had a film screening adn what I saw I have seen nothing like before. ‘ The Holy Mountain’ directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky is from what i gathered about a group of people who each represent one of the planets and a thief are trying to get to the holy mountain which connects heaven and earth so that they can become immortal. its hard to really explain what the immagery was like and about but I would definetly say it was worth seeing. i did think some of the set designs were really quite interesting and almost beautiful to look at.

One of the things that i could see that the film had clearly influenced was the mighty boosh. Their charcter Rudi is very much like the alchemist from the holy mountain who is played by Jodorowsky himself.

As i said though definetly worth seeing whether you love it or hate it.

 For my project nature as culture I began by looking into trees which seemed quite an obvious start. i was interested in the drawings that i had made and wanted to take them further. Thinking about the cultural side of the project and how to connect the two things. I went to Tayside recycal centre and came accross the school desk and chair.

The old school desk and chair made me think about when I was school and how everyone would write into the desk leaving their name or various other mentions. I wanted to recreate this feel but with my own drawings.

One of the tutors mentioned silverpoint to me which I had never heard of before. its a very old form of drawing that rembrandt had used where you drw with silver. I thought this would be quite an interesting thing to use. It took a lot of prepartion before I could even start using the silverpoint, The wood has to be prepared with 5 coats of gesso which is made from rabbit skin glue and whitening, this built up a coat so I was able to draw iwth the silver. Silverpoint is perminent so was a bit nervess about using it at first.

 i had my crit with the tutors arthur and norman. I was really pleased with how it went, they were interested in what I was doing and the idea of drawing on objects. from the feedback I got from the tutors i want to work on desk and chair making it look more aged, I wasnt so keen on how white it looked, a bit too clean and pretty, theres a way of treatingthe gesso so that it will crack so i may try this and maybe drawing over it, I want it to look more like its original state old and beaten up.

we have a drawing week, and the workshop I have signed up for is based on drawing on panels of some sort which should hopefully tie in with what i have been doing for this project.

At our History and Theory lecture on Friday we got our first essay of the year. We were given a list of artists and one of their pieces and we were to choose one piece and write a critical assessment on the work, 1,200 words. we have got to discuss the work in depth and place it in tis historucal context, with proper referencing and to build up as wide a ranging bibliography as possible.

The work I have choosen is Kurt Schwitters ‘ Merzbau’