Ruffled feathers smoothed - Salted duckies okay

The combination of Carlisle and Bitts Park playground in the sun and retrieval of dead game birds from salt barrels for a Seditious exhibition is an unusual family day trip, and I did realise yesterday that I am possibly the only person in the world currently blogging about doing this to game birds!

The process of retrieving the birds is typically archeological, involving scrapping layer after layer of salt from around the presumed site of the bird, using the intensity of coloration as a guide.

It is also a highly olfactory process, but not in as negative sense as one would presume, the boxes when opened have a distinctive smell more akin to a newly cleaned hospital than a butchers ( that is presuming the process has gone to plan, in contrast failed preservation has quite a different stench!).

Again, counter to assumptions it is the salt that harbours the smell, not the carcass, as through the process of osmosis the salt has drawn out all liquids and bacteria's(?) from the birds. Salt is incredibly affective at this, and throughout the process I have to be very careful to keep hydrated and even resort to hand cream- quite counter to my usual neglect.

Once the bird is accurately sited, a slow process of excavation begins, being careful to remove

as much salt as possible that is unnecessarily weighing the bird down, but not going within 5mm of the bird itself. Its worth pointing out that at this point the bird is still fairly soft, and as such vulnerable, think about the texture of parma ham (a highly similar process), and as such could easily rip or come out of its desired pose. This point of the process is about the balance between keeping enough salt on to continue the process, maintain the attractive salt structures and formations, maintain the poise and structural integrity of the bird - while also removing enough to safely lift the bird and throughly check them over.

The Wigeon and the Teal (or was it a partridge?!) were particularly challenging as due to their size they shared a box. The other birds were alone lying in state, and largely centred, the main challenge being the temptation to just risk it and stick my hands down the side and lift them up. The size increments of them together seems appropriate and having checked the backs I am confident the hanging method will work, I must use a selection of nails that are fairly long though, to allow for the skin stretching around the backs buckling unevenly while drying.

Aesthetically they have maintained the poise hoped for, with the dehydration tightening the birds around the armatures so formally they almost appear elegant, I am reminded of the extreme curvature of a prize gray hounds constantly 'breathed in' stomach, the dark game meat will be starkly beautiful against the white gallery walls, with salt mediating between the two.

Good Breeding - final countdown

Today, (perhaps tomorrow, feral children dependent) I am going to my studio to check on my barrel salted duckies, one of the three pieces exhibited in Sedition. Its a tense and crucial exhibitionready check up.

I say duckies colloquially, in fact the birds used are a Grouse, Wigeon, Wood Pigeon and a Partridge all raised and hunted within 50 miles of the exhibition. The piece Good Breeding (domestic ornament) is a revisitation of a previously exhibited and sold piece, recontextualising it in what could be considered a 'local' situation; taking into consideration concerns locally such as sustainable land management, local food, indigenous industries and artificial presentation of the landscape for public consumption. In some ways the previous version of the work, (made in 2008 and exhibited in the SCOPE london art fair) wasn't unaware of these concerns, but I had underestimated there potency and resonance with the viewer.

In its initial exposure in a critique context, Robert Williams

my then tutor and still highly respected fellow artist referred to the 3 dead ducks flying up the wall as a 'one line joke' - and there is no denying the continuing humour of the work. However, I think the humour belies a quiet intensity, the piece is esthetically rigorous and not repulsive to view, however it is constructed by completely reconfiguring the game bird carcass's to mirror the facimily of flying ducks so iconic to english'ness. This is a very intensive and immersive process, even for a carnivorous chef familiar with culinary manipulation.

The salt so essential to the preservation process then clings to the wings and any incidental feathers that escaped plucking, taking on the appearance of a heavy frost, the uniformity of colour again sanitizing the fleshy reality of the piece. One irony of the piece is the expectation of repulsion by the viewer, who in a different context - a restaurant or high end supermarket advert would be encouraged to 'desire' the birds, who would be laid out as a dish for consumption becoming both sustenance and a mark of status (an interesting parallel to the consumption of Art).

Each duckie is currently in its own separate salt filled box, stretched around an armature slowly dehydrating and preserving, collection by the gallery is on the 13th ready for install in the show and by virtue of the methods requirements (and associated sanitary sensibility) I have yet to check its is all going to plan. Frankly I am not sure what could go wrong, all the birds were fresh so they do not have the embodied risk of using road kill and the tendency to infestation, from the outside of the box they are behaving as expected - liquids transitioning to the slowly colouring salt, the armatures are well made and backs pre-prepared for wall mounting, but until I am completely sure then I'll be in doubt and still be preparing for plan B...

Lines

The fundamental foundation of drawing is the line, the foundation of sculpture the form, the fundamentals of community the connections and lines between people, between families, between places. The unseen founder; the boundaries and lines inherent to the landscape, to place and to history.

I have been lucky recently, in applying for and winning a competitive tender for a public art commission in my adopted home city of Carlisle. Lucky in the sense that I am not an artist that constantly churns out variations on a theme of 'art in the public rhelm' for any old client with cash, I have an ongoing investigative practice and commitment to the conceptual explorations and articulation of that process.

As such, it is beyond lucky to have been at a point where my concepts, ideas, drawings and intentions chime with the public rhelm improvements in Castle Street, where I can render my ideas on permanence and boundaries in material choices usually beyond my normal scope;-Granite and Steel, Resin and Sand blasting. Where (fingers crossed) in doing so I can create a work that both maintains integrity and accessibility. Its all very fundamental in so many ways.

At present, I am taking some time considering the composition of the marks created in the community engagement workshops. Its all looking very petroglyphic, which suits me just fine, I have a minor obsession with fossilization, encrustation, accelerated aging and associated craft and methods. This work builds on those foundations, incorporating the naturally occurring lines that shape our community and our city, alongside the imprint and uninhibited mark making of a community of place.

I have interpreted the brief for the 9 monolithic stone benches as three distinct triptychs, each with a distinct line;

-One triptych of three benches will represent the mapped line of the river Eden using sandblasting and engraving to render the lines appropriately.

-One triptych will represent Hadrain's wall using concrete effect resin as a secondary material.

- One will represent the railway lines (all of them) using polished steel as an inlay.

By Triptych what I mean is that together as a set of three benches the designs form one whole 'image', the line from one is continued onto the next and the next. This suits the layout of the benches as agreed by the highways and council bods, and allows me a whopping 19.8 metres of surface space to draw designs for.

These designs will essentially represent the lines that have been important to Carlisle as well as the transport/economic lines which have been formative. The surface image and also the re-curated community work will also draw on maps and contours, cup and ring designs and the surrounding industry and heritage landscape.

They contextualise the historic quarter - mapping the arterial lines at the heart of our 2000 year history.

One of the nice aspects of the piece is the resonance and relevance of the lines featured goes beyond the potentially narrow focus of contemporary public art: One third of the work (one triptych) would have had resonance and looked familiar 150 years ago, marking the distinctive pathway of the (then many) railway companies. One third would have had relevance to the local and visiting community 1500 years ago- marking the distictive border line of hadrians wall, and the final line will have been familier to, and resonated with the community many thousands of years ago, marking the line of the river and its tributaries, an essential 'cultural waymarker' for any culture, in any time.

Sedition

I have three pieces of work selected for exhibition in an upcoming show in September - Sedition in Tullie House Art Gallery.

Ironically, given the nature of the work and the dominant material they will be scattered across the gallery space in a manner that could be described as 'seasoning'.

I am thrilled to be included in this exhibition of excellence and innovation in Cumbria, and am delighted to be able to exhibit the selected pieces in such a context, one of my all time 'art' heros (if one can have such a thing) is fellow exhibitor Russell Mills. I first experienced Russell's work in Sonic Boom in the Haywood, London, a fantastic exhibition curated by David Toop and written eloquently about by Guy Brett who I have again fortuitously, had the pleasure of meeting and digging alongside in LYCs garden clearing parties.

Russell and collaborator Ian Walton's use of conceptual and intellectual rigor and reasoning, coupled with an advanced visual aptitude and grasp of the spatial and emotive properties of scale and habitat made Mantle an extremely engaging and life affirming work. They combined accessibility and an immersive environment with wit and allegory, and could articulate what they were doing!

"Accepting that history and memory feed continuity and change, giving shape to living things and substance to our speculations of possible futures, Mantle explores the idea of land as force and as a metaphor for transformation, whilst also seeking to articulate a sense of the immense global influence of human impact on the landscape over time. Mantle has evolved out of, and is a reflection on, a multitude of inter-related ideas born out of our awareness of the aesthetic of the natural world as being profundly and inextricably political and economic. It dwells on the uneasy and currently unbalanced symbiosis between land as fundamental matter and how we shape it and are in turn shaped by it. "

Sonic Boom was the first art publication I went overdrawn for, pre-amazon addiction I saw only the present as the chance to buy the book and learn more about the artists exhibited and their work, as it came with a sonic art works CD my Dad and I spent many an interesting afternoon surrounded by speakers blurting out the fascinating and affronting noise of a electric guitar being dragged along behind a car, a video camera recording its own demise and water droplets at high speed.

DSCF0616

DSCF0616, originally uploaded by English Artist- Hannah Stewart.

Beautiful dead thing.