Studio for the holidays

New Year’s lends itself to resolutions as macaroni does to cheese, but how about New Year’s Mottos instead? Words to live by as opposed to words to do:

– ‘Play the scrabble hand that you have rather than waiting for the one that you would like’ life as scrabble metaphor courtesy of my sister
– ‘Make it work’ life as reality fashion design show courtesy of Tim Gunn

I’ve updated my AXIS profile with this work.  I really like how the process of making and unmaking these shapes is made more visible by printing with two colours. Originally I was planning to title this work ‘unfurl,’ as this was the word that I was thinking about when I made them, but put altogether, I love the fact that even that simple word no longer fits when viewed like this.

detail from ‘Five Little Maids From School’ Collographic print on paper, 2011

There was a man sitting on the tube directly opposite me a few days ago. He wore an untied checked scarf over a military-style tweed coat and he was playing on his smartphone what I guessed to be some sort of brain gym, judging by the  intermittent hand movements and the aforementioned military-style tweed coat. Why I found this noteworthy was because he was one of four men in a row, who were all engaged in some sort of activity on their phones. Reading from left to right, I surmised: youtube, brick breaking, brain gym, brick breaking. There was a girl who sat at the end of the line and she was reading Frank Herbert’s Dune. I make no judgements, just remarking.

I just ate a slightly dodgy banana. It had brown spots and inside was dry and fluffy but not in a good way, and it’s left me with a faintly medicinal aftertaste.  It isn’t going to kill me or anything close but whenever I eat anything that’s bordering on the edge of being rotten, I think about Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road.’ I read this last year and it’s now beat Terminator 2 in my mind as the face of the apocalypse. So what I was thinking of was this: if the big red button got pressed, and I survived (the second is far less likely than the first by the way), and I was now making my way through a scarred and scorched landscape, then that banana would taste like manna from heaven.