reunion

I spotted an old friend from last year:

paper figure

end of phase 1

After 4 weeks based at Joshibi, I have now left my rented room in Sagamiono with its views of the mountains and the vegetables on one side…

sagamiono view

…and the crazy firemen on the other.

firestation

This week I will stay at a friend’s house in the North of Tokyo and then on Friday I will start my travels: Kyoto, Kobe, Hyogo and Kumamoto.

All the everything is always punctuated by lots of food with friends, but this week I have also had a chance to start thinking about my own work as well as continuing to see some interesting exhibitions.

Let’s see what happens in phase 2…

[short interval]

Normal service will be resumed once the birthday celebrations have finished and I’ve stopped needing to use the laptop for editing ultrasound footage.

izakaya and…

Last night a friend took me to an izakaya.

The amazingly delicious food,

counter

subdued lighting,

table

and restrained atmosphere,

washing up

were followed by a quick game of pachinko:

pachinko

Welcome to Japan.

lump

Because she is

pregnant

this week I have mostly been smearing my friend with Vaseline and flicking stuff at her:

orientation

I’m in a different part of Sagamiono compared to where I was last year so this morning I went for a short walk to see what’s what.

I can now confirm that I live above a shop called Dog Style [ed:it’s a pet shop]; next to a fire station (calm down Cath!); and just around the corner from the Co-op (you still get carved up by trolleys in the aisles, but people will bow and apologise profusely whilst they’re doing it!)

Oh, and I’m not sure where it’s coming from, but somewhere close by plays the Westminster chimes over a loud speaker at noon each day. If I remember correctly, this is also what they use at Joshibi University to signal the start and finish of lunch, so I wonder if I’m going to start developing some sort of Pavlovian response to it…

Volume 0

A few pages from Volume 0 compiled at the Peer-to-Peer Sketchbooks launch party.

Peer-to-Peer Project Launch

A few images from the launch of the the Peer-to-Peer Sketchbooks project.

[photos by Nikki Pugh, Makoto Shindo and Karin Kihlberg]

that drawing thing

I’ve written and spoken several different times about the exchange visit to Joshibi, but there’s one bit that always seems to get overlooked: the two mornings I spent in the painting department.

One of the problems about writing about it 7 months later is that I deliberately did not keep any of my work - once again I wanted the emphasis to be more on the way I was working rather than what I produced.

The only documentation I have of that time is a handful of photographs - most of them quite blurry.

paintbrushes

Day 1: Looking

The first day was a really welcomed opportunity to just be in a new space and look. And then look some more.

It was great: everything from the paint splodges on the floor to the quick sketches of my hosts as they worked or chatted.

I taped one of my drawings of paint splodges to the floor next to the original. I wonder how long they both stayed there for?

Day 2: Collecting

On the second day I felt the need to gather things together a bit. I wasn’t sure, but I suspected this was going to be my last session in this space, so I wanted to collate stuff into a mini-project of sorts. So, that’s what I did: collate.

I spent a long time moving around the studio looking at the all the unfinished canvases on the easels. For each painting I found a line or a detail that I found interesting and I drew that out of context of the rest of the painting.

On returning to my own easel, I then collated these stolen fragments into a composition of my own. I didn’t talk to anyone about what I was doing. I wonder if anyone recognised any of their own work?

trainers

beermats

After this, I spent some time trying to figure out how I could follow it up once I was back in the UK. Main problems (seemingly) being sourcing raw materials and lack of the specialised equipment.

I had a bit of a eureka moment down the pub and thought I could use beermats as my source of pulp. I also thought I could utilise the whole collection process to give any resulting sculptural objects some back-story. I thought I could make a simple sculptural form that used the beermats collected over a set amount of time as a form of documentary tool.

Well, I did a few experiments but I decided that my vague ideas did not have enough weight to justfiy time spent on them at this stage.

Project status: shelved.

Meanwhile…

I had asked my local pub to collect their used beermats for me. This meant that, besides the smells and the stains, several of them had some biro doodles on them.

Project status: interesting tangent that I might come back to later but with a few samples put here for your viewing pleasure in the meantime:

that bunako thing

Last time was the turn of that juggling thing. Now I’m looking at that bunako thing. Still thinking about this thing.

as far as I got

The Set Up:

I was placed with the wood group in the sculpture department of Joshibi.

I was there for half-a-dozen or so afternoons.

I was shown a few techniques for working with bunako and just sort of left to get on with it.

The Results:

I grappled with it for a bit and started by making a couple of basic bowl shapes. …so, then I had a couple of basic bowls. hmmmm.

I spent ages just staring at them trying to figure out where they could go.

original holes

Eventually I focused in on all the holes that had been generated where I hadn’t managed to keep enough tension as I added new strips of wood. That’s right: I had two fairly shoddily made basic bowls!

drawing pins used to highlight the holes

I decided that I would try and make something of a virtue out of these things that would otherwise be seen as flaws. I started by highlighting each of the holes first with a penciled cross, and then later with drawing pins.

darts

In an effort to try and produce something more sculptural, I then drilled out the holes and made some metal darts to basically point at the holes and shout “MISTAKE HERE!”.

For the second of the bowls, I made bigger darts out of cold-forged steel.

… and that was pretty much all I had time for.

I played around a bit with darts-pointing-in and darts-pointing-out and looked at how that changed the feel of things. My next challenge was trying to get it all back to the UK in one piece.

stripes

Back in Blighty I ignored it all for a bit, but then picked it up again and started to think about how I could try and move it forward. Again. This time I realised there were more imperfections that I could highlight. I worked a mixture of graphite and beeswax into the ridges left by my lacklustre sanding so that I was left with intermittent concentric rings around the surface.

blacking

[mental note to self: next time don’t use graphite for this - it doesn’t stay put and everything turns a murky grey colour.]

Did It Work?

Yes and no.

The problem is they still look like bowls. They’re bowl-shaped, and they’re bowl-sized. Too domestic and not sculptural enough. I think it has to do with the materials as well.

darts

I talked with people about maybe using synthetic materials for the darts. Brightly-coloured plastic or something. Trying to get away from the strong craft-related association of the wood and the forged steel. Trying to get away from the novelty fruit bowl effect.

In the end I decided that it was the bowlness - the shape - that I wanted to destroy. The (as yet unrealised) solution that I might try one day is to cast some super-large darts: darts so large that they almost completely consume the wooden fabric of the bowl. Darts so large that by the time you have mode the holes large enough to accommodate them, there is hardly any wood left.

Of course, now you lose the 1:1 relationship of darts to mistakes…

blacked flaws

On the plus side, I liked the idea that it all came from: find a characteristic of the process and run with it.

that juggling thing

… thinking about the stuff I did at Joshibi, looking at what I think I achieved in light of this earlier post.

Remember, I was looking at the way I work and trying to apply that to the situation at Joshibi.

The Set Up:

The group had been asked to use the paper pulp in a more experimental way. At least I think that’s what they had been asked to do: certainly the pre-amble had included references to conceptual art.

I missed the first session because I was being taught a traditional technique by one of the other tutors. So, that left me one afternoon to get experimental in.

soggy paper pulp balls

I made myself some small balls of soggy paper pulp and three simple rules:

  1. I can juggle with the balls, but I am not allowed to move my feet.
  2. If I drop a ball, then it stays where it lands.
  3. See what evolves.

I moved outside to give myself plenty of space and worked on a tarpaulin so that the paper pulp could be used again - I planned to use a lot of pulp, but not to keep any of it beyond the experiment.

The Results:

Phase 1: Juggling by myself
I was stood in the middle of the tarpaulin and a ring was just starting to develop around my feet when I acquired an audience…

Phase 2: Teaching someone else to juggle
A difficult enough task as it is, but made more interesting through trying to communicate across languages…

Phase 3: Another participant
This time throwing the balls to each other across the tarpaulin. Two more zones start to develop.

zones begin to form

Phase 4: Bedlam
By request, the rest of the group joined in. I couldn’t really formulate a strategy for this, so we just let people get on with it ‘till we ran out of pulp.

bedlam begins

Did It Work?

As a piece of work it doesn’t really stand as much more than a tentative experiment. Ideally I’d do away with that nasty blue plastic and use an obscene amount of paper pulp. I’d like to see it splatted all over and into the place where the event takes place and at least knee high. So much so that you’d really have to climb out of and over the stuff when you decided it was time to call it a day.

and then we ran out of pulp...

I hadn’t really bargained for the extent to which other people would want to get involved. Bringing in extra people raised interesting points about communication etc etc, but diluted the splat-pattern(s) starting to emerge. If this were to become a piece of work then I think it might be best to stick to one person in one location.

As for the way I was working, I really liked the set-up of defining the rules of the system and then leaving things to work themselves out. Emergent systems? Something to think about later. This methodology harks back to earlier work I have done and I think it could well be an interesting line of enquiry to follow up on.

Proposal

So, how would this become a piece of work?

Well, we’re gonna need one hell of a lot of paper pulp. [does it need to be paper?]

debris

This will either need to be prepared in advance, or prepared in situ as the event unfolds. [ok, so I seem to be thinking of this in terms of a performance piece with the resulting splat-mountain acting as some sort of documentation.] If the balls are prepared in advance, how does this affect their splattability? If the balls are prepared in situ, we’re going to have to think about a support team and facilities. Hmmm, not necessarily a bad thing - might add to the spectacle!

Who would do the juggling? Surely more effective if the person doing the juggling can’t actually juggle?

In a public place, you could recruit someone who wants to learn to juggle: they are furnished with the pulp balls and the same rules as before:

  1. They are not allowed to move their feet (except perhaps for toilet breaks).
  2. If they drop a ball, then it stays where it lands.
  3. See what evolves. It finishes once they have learned to juggle.

The splats become a record of their learning a new skill.

So, the recruit has learned their new skill and the splats have been splatted. What happens next? Are they left where they are [environmental implications?] or can the whole thing be dried out, picked up, and transported elsewhere?

It might be quite nice to have the event taking place near steps or something. Then, when the mass is lifted away, you are left with the negative space of the steps. Ha! A new way of casting!

Joshibi 1

So, I decided I needed to put the lid on, shake things up good and proper and then see what came out: I needed to scare myself a bit.

I went to Japan; I studied at Joshibi; I learned loads; had a great time and was not ready to come back home. It may not have turned out to have been that scary, but now I’ve had some distance, I’m starting to realise exactly how much it’s turned things upside down.

To borrow somebody else’s words, “watashi no sekai ga hirogaru”. My world has spread. And that’s probably a good thing.

I’ve been looking at things differently:

  • Wandering around with a camera, wondering how to explain car boot sales.
  • Actually appreciating [some of] the architecture of Birmingham.
  • Oh yeah, and myself.

I’d been questioning the way I worked for a few months prior to going to Joshibi. I’d been doing the Professional Development sculpture course at Dudley, learning stone-carving, wood-carving, more welding, more ceramics and more casting - but not being quite sure how that was going to manifest itself in my work.

Then I had a bit of an early-hours-of-the-morning-eureka-moment. My best work wasn’t to do with what media I worked in, it was to do with the way I worked. Joshibi was a chance to try out a few hypotheses.

Rule #1: A clean canvas

Don’t take any materials/plans with me. Don’t resume any existing projects.

Rule #2: Learn new things

Well, it would be stupid not to.

Rule #3: It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.

OK Pugh, think defining the rules of the system and then leaving the rest to chance. Think putting yourself in a situation and then documenting the results. Think that compulsively collecting random things is entirely justifiable behaviour.

Rule #4: Relish being illiterate.

‘Cos it’ll be different next time I’m here.

I’m going to leave it there for now and have a think about what the results were…