If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
Kurt Vonnegut
A carpenter was commissioned to build some boxes for a SPCA cat shelter. This is what he did. He did not even bother to pretend to do a half decent job. Continue reading “digital carpentry” »
As exam dates starts to show up on the best-before-dates on the perishables, the educational pressure cooker is heating up. Some are dropping out of some courses, some hang in there by the skin of their teeth, some stay under the comfy duvet. The wheat from the chaff, possibly, or maybe just bad judgement under strain. Doing things in media courses can be pretty stressful – there is a lot of lugging heavy equipment around, and with no hierarchy democracy is prevalent in every bit of production. Design by committee. And we all know that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Useful for certain places and certain tasks, but not a versatile, aesthetically pleasing object. Continue reading “Do I still have it?” »
I used to do pottery.
In fact, I used to be a potter. A full year full time course in Derry, learning from the eminent renaissance man, Brian McGee, and I worked for a while as a production thrower. We build and fired electric, gas, raku and wood kilns, nearly blew up the building, made a mess of glazes; getting our heads around molecular calculations, triaxial blends and the fundamentals: the periodic table and the building-blocks of the planet. Everything under your feet.
Continue reading “pottery. art, craft and atomic weight” »
Today, blue is probably the most popular colour around.
We assosiate good things with it, it represents all sorts of positive things: air, sea, freshness, calm, and a few not so; feeling blue, blue monday. At least in this day and age, blue get a good deal of attention. But it was not always so- Continue reading “The colour blue – the devil, the virgin and the red dyers’ bribes” »
Going to my sisters place is fraught with danger. She’s got a large basket with newspapers, economic tidings and interior magazines. It’s the latter that contains pitfalls.
On one hand, I like to flick through others’ creativity; other ways to treat three dimensions. Bear in mind that all these magazines are worked over the same formula, and are – these days – endless pages of whitewashed walls, empty spaces and the the odd chique madonna & child, in a seemingly random combination.
Do not be fooled. The casualness is bollocks. And the fact that all the delightfully manipulated photos are taken at some unspecified holiday-lunch-time, with pale light filtered through casual fabrics the owners “picked up” in Marrakesh. Continue reading “Perfume for my x-mas tree, salt for my hair” »