Volume 13 started off with sculptor Atsuo Okamoto: he agreed to fill in a page of the sketchbook and pass it on to another artist; I agreed to keep a small section of the artwork “Volume of Lives” with me until I die. Anything’s fair game in the world of artistic collaborations!
Orie Inoue: Is she a fashion designer? Is she an animator? Is she an illustrator?
You decide... (but probably it's all of the above and more!)
Battling a department that produces endless human figures, Ami now also has to work out how best to deal with an almost empty sketchbook…
Currently sending postcards to herself and contemplating a project involving invisible things, Eri was last seen planning how to use a smell as her contribution to the sketchbook.
On a sunny but cold Sunday, we travelled to Moriya to find out more about the Arcus project.
We had a look around the buildings and then a chat with the programme director. After that we met artist in residence Goh Ideta who was kind enough to spend time showing us his portfolio and talking about his works.
His profile on the Arcus website sums his work up pretty succinctly
Works with experimental devices that utilizes light, shadow, and space to understand “perception,”“sensation,” and “existence.”
or you can check out his website here, but I get the feeling these are works you have to spend time inside to really do them any justice.
Googling for “artist led projects, tokyo” eventually led me to Kandada. Their website is in Japanese (of course!), but armed with their English language map and this blog entry giving an interesting snippet of background information, I went to have a look.
First up, I really liked the show they had on (Hong-Goo Kang ‘s Road to Eouido), but then I’m probably a bit partial to journey projects at the moment…
Secondly, completely getting into the spirit of passing the sketchbooks on to other artists (!), the director volunteered staff member Ueno Masao to participate on Kandada’s behalf.
Welcome aboard Masao!
I’d got to the point where I was resigned to having lost the 8 sketchbooks I shipped over for dispersal in Japan.
Due to arrive in my first week here (ie over 2 months ago) they eventually turned up this week, looking like they’d been sat on by a sumo wrestler or something.
I’m not sure what customs thought they were going to find, but I hope they weren’t too disappointed…
Still, that now means that rather than the 4 sketchbooks I thought I’d have to make do with, I now have 12 in total and things are going full steam ahead to invite people to participate. That means lots of visits to galleries and project spaces looking for… well, I’m not sure what, but I know it when I see it!
Volume 21 gets posted to Kyushu where the first page might have something to do with clay, something to do with computers or something to do with something completely different…
Surrounded by artists’ books of all shapes, sizes and types, Pepper’s Project not only agreed to take part in the project, but also completed their page there and then!
This week I was due to meet up with a friend in Kyoto on Saturday, but I altered my plans so I could meet up with momentarium Markuz Wernli Saitô.
This involved arriving a day early and spending the night in a youth hostel… and then oversleeping the next morning, trekking back to the station, faffing around trying to find a locker big enough for my bags, trekking to a different station and then arriving at Kamo Obashi Bridge 10 minutes after the scheduled bridge-sit was supposed to end.
Fortunately there was something of a crowd there and so I was still able to meet Markuz to invite him to take part in the project.
Hopefully I will make it back to Kyoto next week to properly take part in one of the activities.
Last week I entered the strange, strange world of Megumi Ishibashi.
This is a world where large, contorted, fibre-glass figures leave flight trails that arch across the sky or
struggle to escape from the arse-holes of technicoloured fish.
We built a new language and then we talked about studio spaces, art outside the gallery and residencies.
It was fun; I gave her a sketchbook.
I hope she likes it…
On September 23rd I visited Ono Garou for the first time.
It was in the basement of this dilapidated apartment block in Ginza that we came across Junichi Saito and a masterfully executed presentation of a single piece of sculpture in an awkward corner under the stairs. Pure theatre, excellent!
And so Volume 7 has been left in the (white cotton-gloved) hands of Saito-san, ready to begin its journey…
Yesterday I completed page 2a and so today I posted Volume 2 to the next artists: Karin and Reuben at Springhill Institute.
A few pages from Volume 0 compiled at the Peer-to-Peer Sketchbooks launch party.
A few images from the launch of the the Peer-to-Peer Sketchbooks project.
[photos by Nikki Pugh, Makoto Shindo and Karin Kihlberg]
Working with Springhill Institute I will develop a creative strategy for investigating an artistic landscape. This will initially involve the design and hand production of a series of books of ‘blank pages’ to which artists will be invited to contribute a fragment of their current work. Each participant will then be asked to pass the book on to an artist of their choice for completion of the next page. In this way, the process of gathering these contributions will result in a sort of highly subjective cartography that maps out the current terrain of specific individuals and also the links between a progression of artists.
The journey of each book will be logged here and it is hoped that the final contributor to each volume will then return the book to me.
In the first instance I will make 26 books each with 26 blank pages. In addition to starting trails here in the UK, I will also take several books with me when I go to Japan in September. Here they will act as a means to develop existing relationships and also to initiate new ones.
To signify the start of the collation process, we hosted a one-night event at Springhill Institute in which artists were invited to leave their mark on blank pages that will then be compiled to form the first volume.
Peer-to-Peer Sketchbooks is funded by Springhill Institute through the Springhill Project support, 2006.
