muswellphil

Compilation video of my studio lunch event. I like the flip from high definition with sound to the grainy and silent film shot from a static video camera appearing like a very low quality security tape.

Ready to read book 1 for our WMC book group. Difficult for me to hear the words "read Norman Mailer" without automatically adding "or get a new tailor", having obsessively listened to Lloyd Cole and the Commotions Rattlenakes album when I was last a student.

I set out to be Among the Trees at the Hayward Gallery, but ended up among the mushrooms at Somerset House's Mushrooms: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi. Work above Cy Twombly, Amanda Corbett, Alex Morrison and Hamish Pearch. The sculpted mushrooms growing out of paper stacks and burnt bread has me thinking about my regenerative project with bread and bringing some mushroom element to this.

This is the game performance part of my lunch event. I had a stationary video camera recording throughout the lunch... it's an old camera and the sound recording is not working. The camera was not aligned particularly for the game and I've transferred to digital by filming TV playback with my phone. So overall there is a low tech, CCTV look about the film. What are the participants doing? Are they responding to each other, or is there some other driver of their actions - as there is no sound how do we tell? Perhaps it was choreographed.

Thank you Vanessa for filming.

Kehinde Wiley: Yellow Wallpaper just opened at Willam Morris Gallery. Fantastic atmosphere at the opening last night. The models are all local women from East London who were just invited by the artist to sit for portraits, and they were all there last night - there was just a huge community buzz about the exhibition and it felt like a real privilege to be there. The paintings have an amazing luminosity to them and are lit so that they look like stained glass windows with the light appearing to eminate from behind. The Morris wallpaper which forms a flat background for each portrait develops its own wild three dimensional life when it encounters the women and reaches across, over and round them. Yellow Wallpaper is a reference to a short story, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilmore, an early American feminist literary work dealing with societies attitudes to mental health.

The second exhibition was Steve McQueen at Tate Modern. This is a retrospective of work since 1999 and includes 12 films so it's quite a time commitment to get through. I liked Static - the Statue of Liberty filmed close up from a helicopter that made it seem that Liberty was fleeing against a moving background. Charlotte was almost unwatchable a the artists finger probes Charlotte Rampling's eye in extreme close-up. I was shaken to the extreme by the film of South African gold mine Western Deep and I'm tucking that away for my reflections on sourdough and mining. Ashes (pictured) is engrossing to watch as two workers construct a tomb and a memorial plaque is engraved as the story is told of Ashes, a boy who McQueen had met and filmed years ago - I've only just realised that the screen was two sided with the other showing Ashes full of life... need to go back.

I wanted to see just how fragile (and explosive) my bread had become. I feels wrong to be so deliberately destructive, but it's all part of exploring this material, dealing with the unexpected and finding something new.

Received a message from a friend in another class that shares our studio. Seems my bread has gone rogue and I've got some urban, or root decay. The bread shatters to the touch and brittle shards of it cover the studio floor.

More work with the studio bread. Still experimenting... my forest or city is now inverted and is a cave roof with stalactites, a tuberous root system, or maybe still a city, but from the realms of science fiction. The dough continues to ferment, living in the studio, producing base material for more construction (or maybe even destruction... see next post)

Experimenting with sourdough bread as a medium. The dough is proved in the studio and made with a natural leaven than now lives there. What does sourdough bread suggest to you? What does in mean to ferment dough in the studio? Why make bread by hand?