August 2012

There are times when you wonder just who young girls growing up are to look up to. With constructs of weakness, dependence and sole survival skill being attracting a protective male often the only model to aspire to. Yet this week has seen some magnificent examples of femininity. Pussy Riot on trial in Moscow for hooliganism, performing their punk prayer to Mary, mother of god to get Putin out show how art trumps politics. Political change is often preceded by cultural change. Some commentates have claimed Pussy Riot are conceptual artists and to an extent there is a feel of the happening to their various performances that can be seen on you tubes. Indeed it is down to you tube that we know how they sound and look. There is a lot of humour to what they do. But the conceptual art claims are cemented by seeing them sat in a glass vitrine, the preferred display means of Damien Hirst. Their unofficial spokeswoman Maria Alyokhina, the situationist punk Yekaterina Samutsevitch looks on proceedings with mocking humour. Most striking though Is the poetic warm grace of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.  Her marriage of strength and vulnerability capture the cruel idiocy of the Russian establishment. Perhaps the world could never rise to support opposition politicians lacking any grasp of how things work there but seeing the Pussy Riot trio on trial has focused the world in support. Watching the footage it is clear that the state when supported by the supposed moral authority of religion is a combination that stamps on individuality and personal freedom.
In the Olympics, whatever your feelings on the spending of money in recession, great things are happening. Digital photography has taken sport in to a new realm. Beauty in the physical form in motion can never have been studied so closely. Watching water in beads fly off flexed shoulders in the pool. The accuracy and perfection on the aesthetic sports like diving becomes crystals of time. Time itself takes on a new meaning. A sprint can be slowed down. Broken in to fragments. Great beauty is to be found in all fields of endeavour. But perhaps most majestic has been Victoria Pendleton who has shown young girls an angle of feminine power never seen before. In the build up over the last few years she had upset her team for the crime of falling in love with one of her support team. Her performances suffered with him removed until Scott was asked back. Happy once again Victoria is in her last few races before retiring . Knowing these are numbered moments has given each moment great gravitas. Seeing her tears after riding to gold last night was an unforgettable moment. Her complex character and her unusually available private life have caused us to invest in her to a far deeper emotional degree than we have with previous athletes.
On Tuesday NASAs CUriosity rover lands on mars. Last night as I took tex for his last walk I looked up and tried to accept what was happening. How unlikely it seems that we are on a sphere spinning round a star in a seemingly eternal universe. Such wondrous thoughts have broken through my human shield since my illness. Of course thre is a sense in which the human mind crumbles back in to mundanity when you try consider space but lately I have found transcendence through opening up to truth.  Curiosity is landing in what may once have been a lake, such is the accuracy of the engineering involved in this project. This 'lake' may hold, beneath the top layers of its surface, evidence of life having evolved in mars' past. To think we have worked out the map of our immediate neighbourhood in the universe, found a way of travelling to another planet and created a vehicle to go out there and take a look is testament to our adoption of science as a system of trying to understand. For a time I kept quiet about my agnostic, anti theist views. I am more open now and see why Dawkins, Hitchens etc found it so important to advance reason over superstition. And essentially that is the argument, the choice of superstition or reason.
And in my working life, the bunk beds I w making when my mind lost touch with reality are back on the go. I had a deep superstition of all things associated with my breakdown so getting back on to this object that has caused me so much trouble, well, came to signify a state of being I could not live with has been a hurdle to overcome . After all the pain it is starting to look good. I bought more yew and have assembled it to see how it will look and it ain't too bad. Though I have no great love for this series of pieces I have come to a pragmatic respect for them. I am making all bedroom furniture for a farm house on Exmoor. Two double beds, two singles, the bunk set, bedside tables, chests of drawers and dressing tables. There are other accessories such as bookends and vanity units. A big project. Due to the designs being taken from the sketches of the builder I took umbridge. My vanity overcame me. Having designed and made furniture all these Yeats meant making others ideas hurt. But I've come to turns with things. I have taken the sketches and developed them in to fresh areas. And to some extent collaboration can be an enjoyable process. There is the added bonus that anything the client doesn't like won't be my fault.
To balance this out I am working on a chair of entirely my own design. I know, I said I would only make art in future but I'm doing one chair. One reason I have gone this way is that imam owed some glass work. I did some bases for the glass artist next door to the workshop. She offered money but I said I'd rath have some glass made sometime. I spent ages trying to think what I wanted made. I have to be honest, I don't find my aesthetics are suited to the organic fluidity of glass. There is something essentially too 'crafty' in it for me. So I've got a different approach. Exciting stuff. Can't wait to see the thing together.