Thoughts about Clay


















This weekend is Animate the World again at the Barbican Centre. I'm going to be leading workshops in clay, the handling and modelling of which doesn't come naturally to me, so I've been working hard to get to grips with it.
Below is 'Fun in a Bakery Shop', the first clay animation, made by Edwin S. Porter in 1902.







I've been looking at Mio Mao by Francesco Misseri which was first made in 1979 and has been revivied and continued by the Misseri Studios, it can be seen on Milkshake on Channel 5 and Youtube. I hadn't realised that Misseri also worked in paper (QuaqQuao) and sand (A.E.I.O.U) with similarly elegant results. The work is extraordinarily skilled and of course looks effortless, never becoming crumpled and jaded. This is not something that can be said about my work(!) but I can very much relate to his fluid approach to the animation which has the feel of a recording of an encounter between person and the material with nothing else remaining.



I also came across The Amazing Mr Bickford, a video for Frank Zappa by Bruce Bickford in 1987. I managed to see an excerpt and pretty amazing it looks too. I'd very much like to see more and I'll hunt around for a DVD of it. I'd like to lean towards showing films using metamorphosis, to try and provide a tiny counterpoint to the Wallace and Gromit effect.

Print Triennial in Finland

This is a sneak preview of a printmaking project that I have been working on with three other artists. All four of us work were at one time European Pepinieres printmakers- in-residence at the Jyväskylän Graffiikan Paja in Finland. Anna Ruth has organised a lovely project in which we are all starting a small edition and sending one to each artist and so on, until everyone has intervened on each print, The twelve prints will be shown for the first time at the print triennial in Jyväskylä in June 2009.













This is a butterfly print that I made on Joy Gerrard's first image. It has gone to Anna Ruth in Finland and will visit Veronique La Perriere in Canada. I wonder what it will look like when it flies home to Finland again?

Can you spot the difference?

The top photo is from yesterday and the bottom one from an earlier posting.


































Yes, Poppy has been growing bigger but also I've painted the walls. Slowly it's turning into a studio again, though we are having some fun in there first.