Vessels in Progress 4

Vessels huddle 1

Collecting, sourcing, trying out bottles and leaf. Sadly the nearby leaf supplier's aluminium is just not as good - the mail order leaf is more reflective and bonds to old glass better - Handover's aluminium looks plasticy - like the bottles have been shrink wrapped.


So the collection of bottles grows, but looks quite messy as I try out bits of leaf and stick around various images. Recently gave myself some studio time to think and be with the bottles, to think everything through and move it all on. The exhibition I'm heading for is a specific quite small gallery window, so the bottles will probably be lined up quite regularly, but I took what I have and put them all together - a dress rehearsal I'd call it - or an iteration in design terms. 

Anthony Gormley. Field 

http://www.visitsthelens.com/xsdbimgs/Field_jw.JPG
(accessed 11th April 2011)

I quickly saw something when the bottles are all grouped and huddled together. It animates them in a different way to arrange them within their own space. It speaks a little of the Anthony Gormley piece Field - a multitude of individual creatures in a crowd.


There's something about the way huddling the bottles together emphasis their shoulders which I find eloquent - eloquent of exactly what I am as yet unsure. It's the way they refer to each other. They create conversations and narratives amongst themselves. There is more play of reflections, and yet each stands out and can be read and seen.


I have also been considering and trying out various images and portraits to use - readable and usable and functional for tricky use, and also saying what I want to convey. I have been browsing my archive of images to match ideas. A growing idea has grown from this  - to vary positive and negative images in the bottles - but more, I have just given myself a very big challenge of using all the properties I am creating with the materials to make each bottle show individually both the positive and negative image, which will merge in and out of each other. If I can imagine it, it must be possible.


There is so much meaning to me in this idea - it moves the Vessels deeper into layers of ambiguity, and employs all the ways I think and visualise in positive and negative. In time I will write more deeply about this. I am dreaming bottles and mirrors and negative faces.


So at the moment the Vessels look awful - patched with leaf trials to scrape off - mixed with stuck on images and bits of sellotape to try, but it is all getting there.


I travelled to the other side of London today to pick up two old bottles from a lady from Gumtree - I'm so glad I did - it turns out she forages for rubbish in open spaces, picking out new and old rubbish from heaths which had been farmland, and distributing interesting finds to interested parties. I am delighted to add such provenance to my exhibition - each bottle has its own mute story, it's own part in domestic and industrial history.


Although giving myself a bigger task already, I have already committed to my idea, suggested by the huddle of bottles. I am not going to stop at the current Gallery of Wonder exhibition, and however many finished pieces I can make by then. I am going to continue, and make perhaps hundreds and thousands of the Vessels, to see them all together - to see them grow.

Ai Weiwei Sunflower Seeds

http://www.designboom.com/cms/images/erica/---newsunflower/sunflower02.jpg (accessed 11th April 2011)


There are of course references in a host of individual items to works such as the the beleaguered Ai Weiwei's sunflower seeds, but Vessels will be more individually visible, perhaps lined up at points, or in clusters.
I had hoped to get round to selling some Vessels, but now I'll be keeping them, adding to them, hopefully showing them, for years. 
                             

Vessels huddle 2

11th April 2011