So, it's Blue Monday! Never an easy day, no matter the year, but obviously it has hit 10 times harder this year. I'm feeling pretty low and under the weather - hasn't been helped by the fact that I've just had to undo 10 inches of crochet after realising I'd followed the pattern totally wrong... If you're feeling a bit rubbish and miserable, stay strong - know that you are not alone and isolation is only physical - reach out and give someone a call! This week I've had a bit of a play with a new medium - I've never used expanding foam before - in fact, I've really avoided it, because it seems to have become such a cliche in art school. However, I've been seeing lots of expanding foam experiments in a more domestic setting recently (such as mirror frames and vases) rather than the classic art school enormous sculptures. So I ordered some and started playing around. I've also done a bit of drawing - I'm quite obsessed with turkeys - my partner described them as looking like their "heads are crocheted out of flesh", which really sums up their weird fleshy faces in a suitably grotesque way. This one lives at our local inner city farm, which I enjoy visiting when it's not lock downed... My 2 favourite pigs live there, they're called Alan and Nigel and they're absolutely huge and hilarious. I quite like marrying the texture of the turkey's head with the 3d brain-y vibes of the expanding foam and the added texture of the crochet background - it's definitely not a 'finished piece', but I'm quite happy with it as a starting point. Nothing else I've worked on this week is ready to be put onto the internet just yet, but I have been doing quite a bit of reading.
A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to go to Australia and saw the absolutely incredible Patricia Piccinini show, "Curious Affection," which completely blew my mind - Sam bought me the show catalogue for Christmas and I've delved into that this week. Patricia's sculptures are absolutely bizarre - surreal, tender and challenging; they play with ideas of genetic modification and the possibility of where science could take us in the future. There's a 'Frankenstein'-esque vibe to them, but they all have such exceptionally soft eyes. I also really enjoyed seeing a couple of her drawings in slightly closer detail - they didn't interest me as much as the sculptures when I saw the show, but looking at the catalogue, I was really drawn to the ideas of bodies and birds; it creates a really magical sense of fragility.
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