Soft Sculpture - body project
The agapanthus in my green and white garden has never looked more stunning. A jungle of green shades and textures surrounds and inspires my outdoors working. Sun warms my bones and enables these quiet moments when pain takes second place.
Indoors my floor is strewn with body parts.
And Jessie has finally lost her hair. I have been reluctant to remove the long black dreads, but since Kouros, my soft sculpture figures have had no hair; Jessie, who is being worked on from (what were) the toes up, is now ready to go bald.
The new man (as mentioned - just a newer version of the old one, less hair, but that doesn't show) is in pieces. I get a little thrill of excitement anticipating putting him together.
In the garden I work on smaller body parts, it's important to keep them white, and in the heat that can be a challenge. Anticipating two new men, I make extra parts and they line up on the decking. The third man creates interesting questions, so soon I must grab pen and ink and start investigating his options...
Emerging, sunkissed
from the gentle shade
of my garden-green
umbrella, stitching
nipples for the new
man as the sun slides
into evening;
I imagine life
doesn't get too much
better than moments
like these.
Earthbowl 3, Fleet Lagoon
I could hardly sleep a wink last night. I might have been a little busy this week, but today has had big, bold, red pencil marks all over it for a while now. Depending on the weather, the tides, fate...Today is the day!
Today, in filming for 'Creating the Spectacle!' the underwater wheelchair takes what anyone could only describe as the absolute scariest part of it's journey.
I'm heading for Portland to be witness and part of the audience for this stage of the project. I shall be travelling with mixed feelings; I am looking forward to seeing Sue and the underwater wheelchair in the water again: that bit is positively magical.
But the underwater wheelchair cannot be confined to a pool, even one as deep as the Osprey Leisure Centre's.
Today Sue and the underwater wheelchair are going to be filmed disappearing into the sea.
A lagoon? Thats like South Seas or something?
Warm, clear water; it sounds so inviting,
not sure about the wheelchair though. Why not
just dive? The Fleet? Where's that, somewhere local?
Oh that changes everything. Bloody cold
off Portland. With bad tides round Chesil Beach,
plus that lurky, murky, muddy sea-bed...
I dunno why, but somehow the wheelchair
makes some kind of crazy sense; now I know.
Fleet Lagoon: that really is so awesome.
Proof of Existence
I traveled part of the way to Hakone under a poster with an image in grey, of cracks in a pavement - Proof of Existence. The Hakone area seems stuffed with museums and galleries that will tempt me back; this poster was for Shinji Omaki's Proof of Existence.
Passing the Hakone Open-Air Museum I saw evidence of artworks that will need to be explored. Plentiful signs and posters pointed to other inviting destinations; Hakone brought itself to my attention and certainly has something to live up to, next time I come.
Standing in front of the naked musician blowing an oversized horn, I presumed it was an homage to the real life naked trumpeter.
This one was small - less than hobbit-sized and on loan from, yes, somewhere in Hakone. A bronze statue in the Marunouchi Street Gallery in Tokyo, he was modestly shaded by a tree, small in every detail (bar the musical instrument), and looking very comfortable with his nudity.
If I am frequenting all the wrong places to find disability culture, it is not just the lure of the 'mainstream' famous arts, it is also their accessibility and plentiful abundance. I continue to question the existence of disability culture yet daily hope to find it hidden in plain sight. Invisible only because of a culture chasm.
Yet is a society without the need for disability culture good or bad? Is this taking integration too far? Does it free up disabled people or oppress them?
This experiment of trying to find Disability Arts and artists 'from the ground up' needs some control data to line up against. Maybe I need to visit London as a foreigner and see how far I get.
Those universal sounds, uttered by
deaf people signing, alert me. Here
on the train I travel, wheels on wheels
back to the crowd, quietly watching
window reflection, unobserved.
Instant curiosity lifts heads
momentarily; and flashed tension
comes, goes, never was. I get the
outrageous idea of a culture
where disability just isn't
a concept; a culture where people
are just and gloriously people.
Greenroom Festival. 2012
Yokohama's Greenroom Festival of music, art and film (www.greenroom.jp/ ) was this year held in the historical Red Brick Warehouse, close to the futuristic Odaibashi ferry terminal:
"Never has architecture been so clearly at the forefront of the festival experience as it is at Yokohama's Greenroom Festival, the annual jazz, ska, lounge and surf-rock celebration that takes place at the Odaibashi International Ferry Terminal at Yokohama port"
(www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jun/09/turning-Japanese-architecture-pop)
Under blue sky, sunny but not yet too hot, this was the perfect weekend for an open air festival. Approaching the festival area we passed families sitting in clover - green spaces where patches of clover grow unchecked, and the festival atmosphere could be appreciated for free.
In fact a lot of the music could be heard, and seen, without entering paid space. Arts and craft stalls were in freespace too, and apart from the crush of people, everything except the tree-house seemed very accessible.
I saw no trace of other wheelborne festival goers, and felt sure my presence in the crush must have inconvenienced quite a few people, but they were never, publicly, other than friendly and helpful. The atmosphere was great.
The music sounded rather more international than when the Guardian reported on the Festival in 2009, but I did find some of the Japanese rock musically difficult to access.
Early evening we headed out to Chinatown to find food some time after the easy to listen to Tokyo Number 1 Soul Set had finished playing.
Stumbled upon,
coincidentally
strangely
in keeping with
the accidental
theme of this year's
Japanese blog,
the Green
Room festival
feels like fate
joining my
search for
Utopian
spaces.
.
Waiting
The Dawn Chorus seeps into my consciousness with liquid joy. Night brought sleep, so I open my eyes with a question.
These days play out on a yo-yo string, some are stretched out towards the promise of wholeness; some like this one are curled in on the pain. And waiting an unfocused kind of waiting, between moments that I try not to fritter away. Yesterday comes like that when I wedge myself against the garden wall and paint a long view. And later I watch the birthday flags waving from terracotta pots and take a rain check on chocolate layer-cake.
Days, moments, that leave no memories, just quiet folds in the chronological order of my life. Out on the pleated edges is where the sun shines and creation swirls; and where hope still has a cheeky smile.
I know of no way to acknowledge the value of hours devoted to breathing through pain; no way but waking and living. No way to honour love and life, but living; being; creating.
Sensuous lines swirl
white on white, kissed
by the glass walls
of my house; embraced
by the Nouveau frame.
Day by day, week by week,
I wait
pressed against the glass
while the sun rises
Klimt gold
and a squillion snowflakes
dither and refrost.
Impatient for my
jewelled garden to emerge,
I stuff
armfuls of silken narcissi,
fistfuls of fake muscari
into the waiting canvas.
Beardsley morphs into Mucha
waiting melts into spring.