Tag: zaratan

AIR – Done and done

 

It’s done! One month went by so quickly and now I am living one neighbourhood over from Zaratan in the very top room of a four storey building on a hill overlooking Lisbon and working at a fairly prestigious English college. Weird how quickly you can find yourself living in a place.

Kicking off our time in Lisbon with this residency was a fantastic plan. Loki and I feel connected to the gallery and it’s community and it’s comforting to know we can always wander in for a beer or a coffee and check out what’s going on.

Gemma and Jose decided to keep our (mine and the Italians) exhibitions up for an extra week which was nice. I think they didn’t expect it to be so annoying to install (hello 6.5metre drawing sorry everyone) so they thought they should get as much out of it as possible.

This residency helped me to understand and value my practice and process. Doing an artist talk made me feel a lot more confident in myself and validated in my creative choices. Gemma offered gentle guidance and helped me conceptualise my work in new ways.

Below are the artworks we ending up showing in the exhibition and a couple of drawings that we ended up cutting.

And there was the performance ‘By-product’ on the opening night. The video was then screened at the gallery.

 

So yeah, I’ve done an artist residency now! I can’t wait to do another but it will be awhile because I’ve joined the ole workforce again. In the meantime I’ll see how I settle into working life and think about getting a studio space with a couple of mates.

 

In other news, we are in a lovely apartment in Bairro Alto and there is a VERY tiny and cute mouse called Ferguson who keeps scooting around. He needs to get out of here though because he has been getting a bit big for his boots and ran across a pile of mushrooms as I was cutting them up on the dining table. FERGUSON! Plus there are actually two Fergusons AND then I had a dream that there were like, 80 Fergusons, so we are considering catching him in a box and putting him in a garden somewhere.

I have some work showing at a conference this week, Endangered Bodies, and they will be screening my video Beauty Makeup which is exciting. It will be nice to hang around at a university and pretend I work/study there.

AIR – By-product

Here is the video of my performance By-product in the form in which it was live streamed on September 27, 2018. By-product explores the perception of bodies and social behaviour by turning a potentially sexy attitude into something grotesque.

Music
‘Horses’ – Workhorse
‘Beige II’ – Mannix Flowerday

Livestream/video/effects/nicolas cage courtesy of Zaratan Arte Contemporânea

Final residency post coming soon!

AIR – AUTOMATED & SUGAR FREE

OPEN STUDIO OPENS TONIGHT!

That there is the poster.

We hung the show over the past two evenings. When I say ‘we’ I definitely do not count myself as a useful team member. I always forget how much I struggle with hanging until I step into a gallery with a pile of random shit I’ve made and someone asks my opinion on something. I usually just stand there pretending to think about it but really I am just wondering if I can just arrange everything on the wall in a vaguely symmetrical shape and be done with the whole thing. I also am absurdly bad at things that require precision – ie hanging something level on a wall. I literally broke my foot trying to level a painting a couple of years ago.

Luckily, Gemma and Jose (the Zaratan team) are great at what they do and also very patient with the likes of me. Laying all my work out on the ground I was surprised by the links and stories they were able to draw from things I was used to seeing haphazardly blue-tacked around my studio in no particular order.

Here is Gemma trying to find a way to make these little weirdos work together.

It was surreal to see people treat my work with such care, like they were precious objects. I don’t know if that is indicative of my not valuing my work enough or perhaps just the nature of my work. One of my pieces was a 6.5 metre painting that I hadn’t quite intended to be so long! It proved fairly difficult to hang, and had it been left to me would have probably ended up crookedly pasted in an ill-fitting corner. Here is the offending item –

Gemma has really helped me to understand the value of my process and the freedom with which I can just make and make and make. What I tend to see as a bunch of weird experiments can actually all come together and tell an (almost cohesive) story. I remember one of my illustration teachers at UniSA telling me that if you create something very quickly or very simple that doesn’t mean that it is worth any less than something time consuming or detailed. Which I liked at the time because it was relevant for me but the truth of it still hasn’t entirely sunken into my brain.

Here is everyone working on hanging yet another inconveniently large piece of my work whilst I stand idly by.

In other news, back home it was my grandpa Scott’s funeral today. I really wish I could have been there but am also relieved that I didn’t have to cry all day which is what I would have done. My dad suggested that I draw something to distribute at the funeral – here is one of the images I sent him – 

Scottie’s passing is bittersweet. As he grew older his memory deteriorated but he maintained an incredible optimism that inspired those around him. If you were to ask him how he was on any given day, he would likely tell you that he was ‘very well’ and assure you that if he wasn’t very well he would soon forget about it. He looked forward to each day and savoured simple pleasures like dancing in the supermarket, discussing languages, eating a piece of fish, contemplating characteristics of wool samples, going to the bank and hanging out with his best mate Alwyn (my grandma).

My final news is also very bittersweet. I got some great new shoes for work, those who know me well will understand that that a lot of thought was put into purchasing the correct size. Despite 45 minutes of wandering around the store googling Doc Marten sizing charts and different shoe lasts, I haven’t managed to escape the dreaded Doc Martens breaking in blister.

Seeya later drongos!

Artist In Residence

I officially began my first artist in residence program on Saturday. One of my goals during this adventure is to engage with the online world more consistently – so I have decided to blog about my experiences during the residency.

 

The basics,

WHERE? Zaratan Arte Contemporânea

But WHERE IS THAT? Lisbon, Portugal

HOW LONG? One month

WHAT DO YOU DO DURING AN ARTIST RESIDENCY? I don’t really know yet. My impression of this residency so far is WORK MAKE PLAY MAKE MAKE WORK WORK WORK PLAY MAKE etc etc. I have been assured that there is no pressure to create a ‘final product’ so I am going to use this opportunity to have fun with my art and see where that leads me.

WHY LISBON? Just had a good feeling about it and spontaneously applied for the residency.

 

Days 1 and 2,
were basically just Loki (my fiancè) and I relishing in our new digs. We had been staying in Airbnbs and hostels since we arrived and were ready to stay in one place for a bit.

On Day 3,
I had my first meeting with the gallery directors Gemma and Jose, and the other two resident artists, two Italians Gianluca and Marco. The Italians are collaborating on a very epic sounding project – I won’t give too much away but there’s talk of masks, prints, urban mythology, found objects, zines and street parties. The more I heard about their plans, the more I felt that my approach was totally opposite. When I try to plan things too comprehensively it always feels contrived and stresses me out. My plan was to buy a big piece of paper and start drawing some butts with my non-preferred hand. I tried not to feel too self conscious when it was my turn to explain what I was going to do during the residency but I definitely felt like I was being very vague after hearing the Italian plans.
We are going to do artist talks during the residency – my first one! I was initially anxious and was like ‘what the hell would I even tell people?’ but then I remember I spent five years getting paid to rant to uni students about art and art processes and realised it will be fun, so that’s cool.

The meeting ended with a 40min discussion about why risograph printing is the worst thing to happen in the world vs why its actually really nice and cool, and Gemma digging up a big piece of compressed bark chip wood stuff for me to paint on which I quickly scuttled off to my studio with.

Basically, if you are interested – my plan so far consists of playing around with drawing, painting, sculpture, multimedia, performance and dance.

Loki and I also began Portuguese classes which is nice. I LOVE HAVING A TEXT BOOK! I LOVE HOMEWORK…how long will this last….

 

Day 4,
The first official day of work! Had a severely prolonged battle with the snooze alarm situation on my phone, eventually made it to a cafe to do my Portuguese homework, this was slightly marred by an unfortunate overpriced orange juice situation but I’ve been instructed not to dwell upon that any more.

Today I make a tiny prototype sculpture of big-butted visor wearing gym junkie, a half woman/half chicken sketch, some hairdo studies and got really obsessed drawing the same cranky face over and over again (see my instagram for the GRIPPING live coverage of this). I also made some photo collages using photographs of neighbourhood buildings and some old magazines. They made me chuckle out loud a lot so I think I’m going to go nuts on those, here’s a little clue as to why.

I went to a pole dancing class for the first time in one million years and it was wonderfully difficult because the teacher noticed all the things I was doing wrong and made me do them properly OMG whyyyyyyyyyyyy. But obviously that’s a good thing and I am planning to do a live performance online and want to incorporate pole dance into it so stay tuned for that!

AND now I am writing this blog and now I have finished because it’s getting late and I want to eat a peach and some chocolate.

xxxxx

Alice