On Music.

This is a journey into Sound.

Quite a lot of my earliest significant memories are music based. There's little I remember before the age of 12, but I can vividly recall breakfast at my Nan's house at the age of 7, with The Scaffold and The Beatles on the radio in 1970.

I love music with a greater passion than most of the rest of life. Which is ironic, because I am most definitely not a musician or singer. The impossibility of describing my arc through the soundscapes and soundtracks of my life is equal to the impossibility of overstating the importance of music and sound to my life, or the totality of my lack of rhythm - as anyone who has seen me dance will testify.
It is important to say that my listening tastes are esoteric and challenging - I am a picky bugger. It depresses me to hear people say things such as "I know what I like", when it comes to anything cultural. Most of the time, what they mean is "I'm too disinterested/busy/lazy to think about it". Their breadth is narrow, their depth shallow. I am the opposite in as much as I know what I Don't like!

For me, culture is like a vast swampy delta. There are many channels, some are shallow, others run deep. And being the man I am, the backwaters and lost pools are where I'm happiest and at one with - for want of a better term, what I shall call - my soul.
(*notice all the landscape terminology and metaphors?! :D )

There are thousands of musics which you may never have heard of. Balinese gamelan, Tuvaluan throat-singing, Indian raga... contemporary avant-garde... improvised, field recordings - all those endless ends... Music is such a living thing! From birdsong to whale song to the wind across the ocean, through the trees and in your hair, resonating in your chest and bones. I experience music as a visceral life-force that literally resonates with my passion for the Earth and the landscape.

I have many pieces that are challenging to the point of unlistenable - but I keep them for exactly that reason. Such musics deserve extra special attention - 'close-listening' - because of their nature. Given the attention and consideration that they deserve, they can open up new ways of thinking.

Which eventually brings me to the object of this post.

In 2010 I created two sculptures recycling the frame and parts from an old shopping bike. The first static sculpture was made from the wheels and handlebars. It's now lost to the skips of time. The second more kinetic sculpture is still here, and it is this - built with my own fair thumbs.

This is the Bikesichord - an electric harp made from the frame and other bits of the bike, with tuning heads, strings and pickups from an electric guitar. It has a home made built in circuit and produces a chiming, bell-like sound. It is a bit of a bitch to tune though, having twelve strings staggering more or less in the vicinity of the pick ups, and a narrow, flexible tube perforated by the tuning pins.

What makes it interesting though is when you start to experiment with it. Running it through a couple of effects pedals such as delay/loop and overdrive, allows you to create more diverse ambient drones and harmonics. Being all tubular construction means that knocking or tapping the frame will produce a sound, and the pick ups will react to things like electric motors operated in close proximity... All of which makes for a deeply satisfying array of experimental noise making. I've goofed around with this machine many times over the last 6 years, even uploading a couple of tracks to Soundcloud for the brave few. (They're gone now. I just looked. It's been a while. If I re-upload them I'll get back to you... but trust me, it's better this way...)

The Bikesichord was revamped and played by Rusty Sheriff at the opening of "In Rust We Trust" in 2012. And I'm planning on polishing it up again for a performance early in July this year. More on that at a later date. :)

As I have said, it has been sat around for quite a long time now, so later this year it will go up for sale. I've had a lot of fun annoying my neighbours with it and now I feel I'm comfortable with it finding a new home with someone who has a fresh enthusiasm for it. If you're interested, give me a shout.

Meanwhile...

"Stay tuned!!" 

(Heh? Eh? Yeah! Ffnarr)...

:D

Chasing A Bee - Reprise

My friends at Southsea Coffee Co. are supporting Tonic Music For Mental Health with a head shaving event and art auction on Sunday 29th May from 4pm to 5pm.

The auction includes work donated by major names from the local arts communities including MDS, Midge, _feop_, Samo and many others along with myself.

This post is about the bird sculpture that I'm donating.

If you can't make it on the Sunday, here's a link to their fundraising page.
If you can contribute, it would be excellent. If you can't, then at least share :)

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These birds, these birds. What do they represent for me? What are our relationships? How do I read them? I've written quite a lot about the landscapes and the different ways that they're read by myself and others, but not much about the birds.
My relationship with them has largely been fairly shallow, pragmatic and ambivalent since I started making them. Each is unique - independent. From conception to delivery, their journeys are often more convoluted and complex than their static appearance belies.

As a creator, the process is equally as important as the eventual outcome. The journey, without a doubt influences the form of the final piece. Many times they start as one thing and end up as something completely other. The fundamental building of a piece is the most controllable and predictable part of the process - but the formation of the story and the context surrounding each one, directly and physically affects its appearance over time in completely unpredictable ways. It enriches, informs and elevates what might be regarded as a mundane ornament into a piece that claims its own space and identity, its own life. Take this piece for example. This is already a remarkably well travelled bird.

I love the challenge of capturing strong dynamic movement in my pieces. These are living beings. When they are stretching for something they are extraordinary; like cats - with that lightweight construction in a loose flexible package that allows them to defy gravity with a finely controlled elegance. I am lucky enough to live by a large open space where the crowds and crows gather in the summer to feed. The people pick at disposable barbecues and the crows pick at everything that's left behind. When the crowds are gone, the crows remain and scavenge for whatever they can catch. In this case, I was watching this particular bird, darting about in a crazy pattern on the ground looking like a complete novice, until I noticed the fat bee that it was chasing. This fellow was coming to me directly from his prehistoric predatory past in pursuit of his prey. Watching him in action was to experience a fundamental resonance of his ancestors' behaviour.

Except that's not entirely true. There was no bee. I made that up. There was a crow, darting about, unsuccessfully trying to steal a peanut before the other birds got there. It was a bit of a dunce as crows go. All of the youthful vigour, with none of the nous of older, more experienced birds. All action and no focus. And that came through in the initial sculpture - lots of pointless running about, chasing aimlessly...

But he was done - finished - ready. I photographed him, put him up on Big Cartel, Artfinder, Instagram, Twitter - all the usual places, to a lukewarm "Mhhmm" from those audiences. That was ok. Sometimes pieces need space and time to grow into themselves. For a while he kicked about aimlessly like a shiftless teenager, and then I stuck him on EBay.

He was eventually bought by a lady in Cheltenham. Then promptly returned as "Not working/Defective". A subtle but accurate description of his failure to impress, as both a character and a sculpture. It turned out that this woman had bought him as a gift for her autistic grandson who had befriended a wild crow in his garden. The boys mother was horrified at the sharp edges and afraid that her son would cut himself to ribbons. Granny insisted that it was 'unsuitable for sale' on Health and Safety grounds. I pointed out that this was a sculpture - not a toy! During the negotiation for the return however, it transpired that Granny and her husband run an online contemporary glass and ceramics gallery... Make of it what you will. Ultimately, I gave in and refunded their money. The bird came back. But now he was beginning to develop a patina, some kind of sheen - a bit of character.

Music often provides a useful reference point. I remembered a track called 'Chasing A Bee' from the first Mercury Rev album 'Yerself Is Steam'. It struck me as a nice metaphor for this crow and his living counterpart. The bird and the bee bumbling about aimlessly and energetically. There was a resonance in the idea. They could focus on each other, which gives them both a sense of direction and a relationship. So I made a bee. We all need a bee...

Around the same time, I decided that this piece needed a different kind of exposure. An alternate route into whatever life he will eventually lead, a different purpose and a new platform from which he could speak about his misspent youth chasing bees, his mistaken identity and his return, and his transformation and completion through finding a redeeming spirit that resonates on so many levels. So they will go together to raise awareness and funds in the event below.

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**Reprise

My friends at Southsea Coffee Co. are supporting Tonic Music For Mental Health with a head shaving event and art auction on Sunday 29th May from 4pm to 5pm.

The auction includes work donated by major names from the local arts communities including MDS, Midge, _feop_, Samo and many others along with myself.

If you can't make it on the Sunday, here's a link to their fundraising page.
If you can contribute, it would be excellent. If you can't, then at least share :)

Cuimhnigh An Cosán

Cuimhnigh An Cosán

Remember The Path

Third in the Voices Of Our Ancestors series of monochrome standing stones/stone circle landscapes inspired by working on the mural wall for Southsea Coffee Co. (**see earlier post). 

The breadth, depth and range of metaphors that stem from the idea of the path is staggering. From ancient well trodden tracks under foot to the neurological pathways that physically form our imagination and memories in the brain, to vast intercontinental motorways, pathways are a physical manifestation of something passing this way. The existence of a path increases the chance of something else following in those footsteps.

Paths give structure to space and open up that space to possibilities. They present us with choices. Paths lead and follow; connect, bypass, pass through, provide safe routes, can be ambushed. Mountain paths, the paths of rivers and migratory paths, paths through history, paths through life. Paths entice and delineate - mark boundaries, borders and transgress. Paths open and close - paths breathe. When a new path is created, it increases our knowledge and understanding. When a path is lost or cut off, it leads to isolation, death. Pathways are as intrinsic to us as our shadows. We cannot go anywhere without leaving a path behind us - traces - evidence.

Every journey can be mapped - traced and retraced. The route from the kitchen to the bathroom, from the front door to the bedroom. Intimate journeys. Relationships. Every path is littered with way markers - signs of transience, coming and going, ephemera. Wear patterns on carpets, finger marks on door handles. Some are longer lasting than others, but with longevity comes change as meaning decays. Gentle shifts in paths as age dictates, as water seeks the easiest path in finding its own level.

Whichever way you go, go forward. Continuity and change.

Film Head Crow - Commissioned Piece

I love a good commission, and this one was a cracker. It came through my 'Artfinder' site from a customer in Australia, looking for a present for his sister's birthday. She lives in Scotland.

The chance to collaborate with someone on the other side of the world, on a piece for someone else back in this hemisphere is a lovely challenge. I really do like commissions to be tailored for the people that buy them. I feel strongly that it should be a collaboration - that the punter should be part of the creative process, and that it enhances their connection with the work. Commissions should be personal and should tell you a story, not just say "Can you just do me one of your faces?", or "You choose, you're the artist", or "This is Janet. Janet likes fog".
[*This one wasn't for Janet...]

The buyer had just missed out on buying one of the larger pieces, but wanted something birdy because his sister was into Ornithology - (which is the 'ology' of Orniths, - I looked it up). So, I directed him to archives of my own previous ornithological activity on Flickr and 500px. He liked the 'Tape Heads' but his sister's not especially musical... Further brief discussion - by email between Aus/Uk - honed the thought process and involved the books of Roald Dahl, and working at the BBC...

Despite my own predilection for book-making and sculpture (*see previous blog posts), I have as yet to find a satisfying aesthetic resolution to the use of 'found' books within a sculptural context that has not been done, at least with some originality. Bird books were not the answer, but might still provide a platform...

A quick scan of charity shops and eBay showed that audio cassettes of Roald Dahl narrating his own books were all upwards of eight quid a shot! Eeeshh! That's 10% of the budget! What about some of those old David Attenborough or National Geographic VHS's? - Rarer than the mythological hen's teeth...

And then my friend suggested 8mm cine film... *Ting-a-ling! Back to that there eBay and bingo! A thoroughly delightful old fellow by the fantastic moniker of Arthur Zarb, rendered an 'as new' slice of 8mm cinemagic - Close-up Of An Owl - three quid! One of a series of 16 second classic film 'inserts' for the amateur home movie maker to splice into and spice up his or her own home movies. [Others in the series include such favourites as 'Lion runs towards camera and jumps over it', 'Steam train at full speed enters a tunnel' and 'Airplane flying into clouds, filmed from the cockpit'. - Exciting eh? Hang on to your knicker elastic!]

Thus was born the 'Film Head Crow'. A last minute sweep of the local charity shops brought home a 1980's book on birdwatching to replace the granite pebble in the photos here, (literally last minute - the rest was already packed up for shipping) - and Robert is a sibling of your mother or father. ;)

Enjoy!

Go find and follow me on Artfinder, Instagram, Twitter, Big Cartel and follow the blog!

The Home

It's not a Home - a Home is a house with a future.

I wrote this piece maybe twenty years ago and for me, it still stands as one of the finest things I've written. After seeing a documentary about the lives of a group of elderly folk confined to a home, and knowing a few people who had spent time working in that environment, I taped an interview with my Nan - a hugely important figure in my life. This was in the mid '90's, a long time before the scandals in the press about care homes, amid deep concerns about institutionalisation, Government and care-worker's attitudes to the elderly, and a long time before any of these things were actually to affect my own family directly. 

First published in an edition of 'SILT', it's never really found a space of its own, but I've always felt it deserves it. Maybe someday soon... It's about many, many things, but rather than trying to explain it, I would like you to read it. That's what it was written for - you'll make your own connections, and hopefully find your own resonances.  - D.

A Personal Archaeology of Artists Books - A Retrospective

A Personal Archaeology of Artists Books - A Retrospective

In my formative years at art college I was lucky enough to meet Brian Walsh. This is the teacher who said to me at my interview for the Access course, "We'll put you on the part time course as you're the sort of person who uses the time away from college, in between sessions, to reflect and think about your work, as much as your time here."  This was a surprising statement, I felt as if no one had ever actually looked at me long enough to recognise more than my apparent presence. I was taken aback and disappointed to begin with, but quickly recognised what he had seen, and deeply appreciated the acuteness of his perception - an appreciation that has stayed with me since, and an identification that has since proved to be a fundamental aspect of my character. I am a reflective analytical thinker. I need my time staring blankly out of the window, sometimes more than I need food and sleep.

St. Albans College of Art stood opposite the deserted crumbling shell of the old Herts Advertiser press. When the press had shut down, some of the college art staff had raided the place for whatever they could carry out, and so in a corner of the basement car park of the college, locked in a caged area by the heating boiler were cases and cases of hot-metal moveable type, chases, composing sticks, quoins and leading. I asked Brian about it one day - and thus opened Aladdin's Cave. During a fifteen minute tea break he offered to show me. We went down and in a cold damp basement car park I was given the very briefest demonstration of how to set a line of type... I had taken the red pill - the world shifted inside out, swung round 180 degrees, bounced and rippled a couple of times, popped and made a *Wob wob* sound.

That *Wob wob* Sound - The sound of the Universe turning itself inside out.

And that was it for the next decade, I made artists books. Self penned, illustrated, printed, bound, self published, one off's and limited editions. I've shown and sold work at the Tate Britain, the ICA, the Barbican, the Arnolfini, at shows in Europe, Australia, the Middle East and the US.

Then for a decade and a half life interrupted things and I went off in different directions. Finding a quick summary set recently on Fluidr has prompted me to dip back into the archive and have a fresh look at some of this stuff. So I spent a day rooting around and digging back into the archive of things I've made and things I've collected. Most of the books/artefacts I have made are now freshly photographed and catalogued for the first time in ten years - it surprised me to discover that I've written and published over 30 books and artefacts - and so it is my pleasure to show you some of them here.

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'Apertures', 1997 - Boxed print folio of 33 monoprints exploring textures and forms of obstructions, openings and apertures between spaces.

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'Ardentia Verba - Words That Burn', 1997. Edition of 10. Based on an imagined multi-media performance of Derek Jarman's 'Blue'.

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'Nick Mackman's Beastly Exhibition', 2000. The Red Gallery, Southsea. Edition of 20. Printed letterpress on heavy weight Bockingford paper. Foreword by Chris Packham.

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'Camarata' artefact, 2003. Limited edition of 14. Part used, disposable, single use 35mm cameras repackaged in bespoke printed wrappers and shrink wrapping plastic film.

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'Caution - Abrasive', 1994. Edition of 12. Printed using a 'free' trial version of a CAD software with extremely limited functionality. Early exploration of the theme of 'hacking' and the means of production. Binding is nails taken from a Yoko Ono installation.

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'Dummy' editioned artefact, 1999. Edition of 12. Infant's dummy/comforter cast in copper/bronze, presented in a handmade miniature 'crate' filled with wood-wool.

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'Exit Stencilist', 2007. Produced in two distinct versions. Left (and at the top of the blog post) is the 'Stencilled Cover' version, an edition of 20, digitally printed but each copy bound in a unique, hand sprayed, stencilled cover by m-0ne and Los Dave.

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'IF - Imperative Future', 2002. Editioned printed artefact produced for the UWE/CFPR project 'The History Book That Never Was'.

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'Kitab/Katib', 2008. Hand printed and illustrated broadside to commemorate the bombing of the book market in Baghdad in 2007.  **See previous blogpost.

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'Last Night It Did Not Seem As If Today It Would Be Raining', 1996. Edition of 30, multiple printing methods including letterpress, offset, lino and screen print. 

Designed to illustrate the choices made in the transmission of Std's and HIV.

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'Mapping The Oneiric House', Unique book, 1997.
Based on Gaston Bachelard's 'Poetics Of Space'. Blind embossed etched plate illustrations and hand set letterpress type. Hand carved, sculpted plaster cover.

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'Húum.mÁ~n' - An Ode to Bob Cobbing', 2002. Open edition of photocopied images of digital distortions based on Bob Cobbings' initials. Produced to mark his death in 2002.

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'Phaedra', 2000. Open edition leporello, printed on an electric word processor with digitally printed covers. The text is a 'stream-of-consciousness' performance piece designed to be read aloud, based around visions of consumerism and religious iconography.

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'Ritual and Circumstance', 2002. Edition of 75. Printed, folded sheet of heavy watercolour paper into which has been smashed a glass ball. Celebrates the hammer as a printing tool...

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'Sea Of Clouds', 1998. Edition of 50. Leporello, printed letterpress with 'dry' printed, etched illustrations. The text is taken from the 1965 HMSO publication "Instructions For The Preparation Of Weather Maps".

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'SILT'. A 'zine that I published from 1998 to 2012. Essentially a vehicle for various modes of writing and illustration. An eclectic kaleidoscopic vision, by turns surrealistic, dark, poetical, comic and tragic. Character filled and opinionated. Often all at once. Should have done better than it did, but no one actually gave a shit. Still one of the publications that I'm most proud of.

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'Stone Dead Forever', 2008. Open edition, two volumes published through blurb.com in both hard and paperback. A photographic record of a project I started in 2008, writing on stones on the local beach. There is an earlier blogpost Here. 

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'The Dixon-Hurlingham Mysteries', 1999. Published to commemorate a memorable Christmas event, in which 'a protagonist' [anon], threw a Christmas tree - still in its pot - through the roof of a neighbouring building from five floors up...

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'The Interactive Book', 1997. Edition of 20, letterpress, loose 14 page folio with hand calligraphied, folded covers. A collection of quotes about books, printed in typefaces contemporary with their origination. 

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'Title <> Author', 2000. Originally produced as something to do while whiling away the weekend at the Y2k Bristol Artists Book Exhibition (BABE), at the Arnolfini in Bristol. The edition was compiled from off cuts of Fabriano paper and pre-printed stickers that I had taken with me. It was later re-produced in a Moleskine edition.

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'Typecast', 1998. A group publication, self funded and published by myself and a select group of recently graduated illustration students for our first independent showing at the Artists Book Fair at the Barbican Centre, London in 1998. Beautifully designed and printed by Mike Cooter at the uni print dept. and out of date before it even hit the stands... typical.

*F.t.a.g.h. - contact me if you want one!

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'Typonegative', 1998. Edition of 30. Incorporating handmade and printed elements with imagery cut from adverts in glossy magazines. Hand stitched, hand printed covers.

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'The Universal Book Of Tongues', 1997. Unique book. Hand made, letter-pressed covers, mono-printed tracing paper images dry mounted onto Fabriano paper and perfect bound. A visual exploration of calligraphic mark-making in the context of an essay on linguistics and the origins of speech by Noam Chomsky.

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'Untitled', 1999. Boxed folio of 33 hand-finished calligraphic monoprints. Finished with graphic additions in colour gouache individual to each print.

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'Urban Wildlife', 2004. Edition of 25. Handmade 'Khadi' paper covers featuring stencil and authentic pigeon 'shit'. Folded, stencilled plastic lining interwoven with pages from London A-Z, bound with crimped fluorescent fishing line. Inside each book is a used rail ticket 'colophon', a typewritten 'treatise' on Urban Wildlife, an invitation to a 'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park'** event and a couple of origami pigeons also made from London A-Z pages. 

(**Bring your own cyanide laced raisins...)

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'Veneer', 2004. Unique book work. 7 digitally printed 'page scrolls' encased in sand and clear resin inside three unique, handmade, engraved, glazed ceramic cases.

(**Unfortunately, two were damaged in transit on their way back from a show. Shit happens.)

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'Write Protected', 1997. Unique bookwork. 8 floppy disks stitched into a thin plywood binding.

The content of the book is entirely digital and stored on the disks which can't be accessed because the stitching goes right through them. I no longer have a record of the content.

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There are at least two more books that I can think of that are no longer represented here because I sold them and the photo archives are deep, deep, dark places for a man to wandering alone in. Maybe one day when I am otherwise incapacitated... until then, hold your breath.

The vast majority of these editions still have a few copies and re-runs left. If you're interested in any, drop me an email.

If you've made it this far and haven't expired from boredom or despair, thank you with all my heart for your commitment and stamina. 

Peace and love, Los Dave

**Poisoning Pigeons In The Park' is not and never was an actual event. It's a comedy song from the 1950's by Tom Lehrer!! - Catch it here :)