in view

The new work I am slowly embarking on explores the similarities between deep ocean and deep space, in particular our relationship with these two extreme environments and the technology and structures we develop to help us understand them as places to be inhabited, even if only through imagination.

I am looking at observatories, aquarium, space station, telescopes etc. Observatories specially fascinate me, to avoid the pollution interfering with star gazing they are normally situated in remote locations, in isolated deserts or on the top of high mountains. Some of the images I have collected show these beautiful white spherical buildings looking down over stunning cloudscapes. This made me think of course about one particular painting, which the epitome of this type of landscape. And this is a little sketch I have done today. Surely, I do not need to mention the painting I am referring to…

pencil on paper, 10 x 13 cm

aquarium

Yesterday I was looking at images from the Aquarium in Donostia, in the Basque Country, I got fascinated by a single image of the aquarium in the 80′s. The colours in the original photograph are highly saturated ginving the concrete and austere structure of the space a sense of isolation and remoteness, like it could be a failed modernist plan or an abandoned bunker.

The empty fish tank appears like an iluminated window into nowhere and nothing. Nowadays aquariums try to make the public try and forget the physical boundary between them and the water. They have tunnels made of glass where your gaze is completely submerged into the constructed deep ocean and where sharks and turtles swim pass over your head, producing a sort of confused feeling of weightlessness. The windows into the water are huge, seamless transparent panels inviting to a unguarded reverie. But the aquarium of this image does not allow much daydreaming. There are no fishes swiming, the lights are on but there are no spectators. It makes me think it could be the window in a room, in a house, in a city that a very long time ago flooded unexpectedly and now forever remains unknown, buried in the sea bed. Or perhaps a sort of retro-futuristic structure, perhaps in another planet, looking out into an uninhabitable and liquid atmosphere…

I have made a little drawing of the aquarium. But I think next this image suggests a big scale drawing…

bedroom

pencil on paper, 8 x 10.5 cm

self-portraits

I’ve always enjoyed drawing self-portraits. When I first moved into the new studio I decided to draw one everyday first thing in the morning when getting to the studio. The idea was to do it quickly, without thinking, simply draw myself with whatever I happened to be wearing that day. I managed to follow this for only a week. But every now and then I still like to refresh my collection… I draw myself from memory or from my reflection in the window. I don’t know what is behind this impulse or need, when I feel a bit stuck or need to get some distraction from my main work, I find it almost soothing. I guess it’s a way of reassuring myself, fixing something that I can’t find, or maybe trying to lose something that is blocking. In a way I think drawing is a way to own the subject, rendering personal, almost like materializing a memory, drawing is remembering as well. But ‘to own’ can also mean ‘to agree’, ‘to confess’. So I maybe draw myself to admit something to myself, or maybe hoping that the drawing will concede and will lead me back to other work…

This is my last and my favourite from that first week at the studio…

Open Studio and Members Salon at ESA

Here are some of my images from last Saturday’s Salon and open studios at Patrick, part of the Come Find Us event. I tidied my studio up and put some of my most recent drawings in the wall, I had a pice ein the Members Salon which was hosted in the project space. I thought ESA did a great job at the layout of the works in the space, it look very inviting and it was a good selection of works as well. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the day, but I got really good feedback about my work and hopefully some new contacts that might come to fruitful conversations and exchanges. A group from the Contemporary Art Society came around and I got the chance to introduce them to my work, in which they seemed genuinely interested in. The day got busy in the afternoon and I was sad to have to leave early when it seem that the evening was at its best.

Patrick’s kitchen and common area






Some shots of the Salon


My work Mappa…



…and my studio.

Snap shots…

Yesterday I opened up my new studio at Patrick (East Street Arts) as part of their event Come Find Us. The day went very well and we even got visited by the Contemporary Art Society.

Here are a couple of snap shots of my work taken by Mark Jaffé.

You can see more of Mark’s photographs of yesterday’s event at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/markophotoproto/sets/72157628363581197/

Interiors

pencil on paper, 10 x 10 cm

pencil on paper, 4.5 x 6.5 cm

some drawings

These are some drawings that I have done but have not made it into my finished works (not yet anyhow). Perhaps because I consider them unfinished or not quite achieving what I hoped for. There are always drawings that slip through in the process and I am happy with these drawings even if they don’t feel quite complete.

Artist Book

Finally I have finished my artist book for the project Container Inside, that will take place at the exhibition INSIDE at Cidade da Cultura de Galicia in December.

The title is ELephants, Doilies and Polar Coordinates as it contains a selection of photographs, sketches and drawings form the last two years, it’s 52 pages and I have done the covers and the binding myself. All the photographs included are from my residency in Norway in 2010, and this is the first time I show them. It is a bit of an experiment so at the moment I have only produced 6 copies. Here are some images.

Ana’s eyes

For the new series of drawings that I am starting, my main character is Ana. Ana from The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973) and Ana from Raise Ravens (Carlos Saura, 1976), in both cases played by actress Ana Torrent.

She has very particular and powerful dark eyes, inquisitive and piercing but also vulnerable. I have been trying to capture her glance in drawing for the past three days and I have only got close in my last drawing. In this new work I am going to be looking back at the cinematic space again. I touched on this in my video work Figments of Home, where I constructed a video collage of interiors from different movie clips, I am currently still working on this video.

I am interested in the uninhabitability yet hospitability of the space of the film. Some of the movies I am looking at I have watched many many times and I feel I can almost walk around their scenes, somehow looking beyond what is in front of the camera. I am interested in the notion that, somehow, these films have become my second home. I revisit them constantly. In the video work I look at the spaces, in this new work I am interested in also exploring the characters.

For me the idea of home is more fiction than reality. I am uncertain as to any physical real place that can bear the significance we attribute to the idea of ‘home’. Home, if a mental construct, could it be a place where we have never been? a place where we did not come from?

There are many references in The Spirit of the Beehive to the artifice of cinema itself, to the ‘lie’ of cinema. Ana lives somewhere between a dry and bleak reality and her own fantasy world. This drawing is from a scene where Ana is at the village cinema. She is immersed in the movie, I am immersed in her gaze. I find myself in a space that is both very close and very far removed from hers.

pencil on paper, 17 x 12 cm