August 2007 Archives
Turning 40 turns something on inside one that tends to send out a sense of panic. Luckily I stepped back a few years ago and reassessed my life and depressions and made some steady but fundamental changes. These days I find myself trying to stitch back what I tore apart as a younger person. It has also made me think a lot more about existence, where it begins, and where it ends, if it ever does. In that sense trans_end (transcend) finds me at the perfect moment to play with these notions as an artist.
One thing we do have is a definate fascination with death and everything that represents it. The following sketch experiment grew out of my discovering a very much dessicated and cleaned up ghecko underneath one of my shelves when I moved my studio around. I kept it in a plastic container for about two years, carefully moving it here then there and gingerly dusting off the box in case any of the fragile bones disintegrated. I eventually decided to commit the remains to scan and bumped into them the other day... I decided it was time to resurrect the ghecko -
immortal link
One thing we do have is a definate fascination with death and everything that represents it. The following sketch experiment grew out of my discovering a very much dessicated and cleaned up ghecko underneath one of my shelves when I moved my studio around. I kept it in a plastic container for about two years, carefully moving it here then there and gingerly dusting off the box in case any of the fragile bones disintegrated. I eventually decided to commit the remains to scan and bumped into them the other day... I decided it was time to resurrect the ghecko -
immortal link
A hurricane lantern is a wonderful symbolic image for how I'm feeling about this quest into our next journey. In many ways the internet is still a largely unexplored territory by artists as a venue of experimentation and expression. Our theme 'trans_end', implies the exploration of the apocalypse myth, but the threshold gap between 'trans' (change) and 'end' (apocalypse) also holds hope if one inserts the missing 'c' - to 'transcend', to rise above...
I think of this blog as my scrapbook - a place to experiment and play... this weekend I found myself at a wonderful new garden centre with a new addition to the garden gnome variety... as a women I of course find these garden props absolutely insulting... as an artist they tickle my funny bone and I had to have some fun with them... the originals are life size, for your pleasure...
I then went to play with them in html... here is what I explained to a friend...
"...more than anything I'm playing technical games and experimenting with techniques - I'm very excited about the potential of what I'm doing - animations without a single video or flash movie in sight... I can now animate backgrounds and foregrounds with incredibly little pixel power - for example, my animated background (jumping lines) consists of an animated gif that is 1 x 1000 pixel in size - it duplicates itself up automatically to produce the illusion of a full background of jumping lines, when in fact they're only single pixels skipping about...
i guess that all means very little to you - and so many people looking won't twig to the technical aspects lying below - but it sets up a kind of restriction on what I can accomplish, and will therefore generate a recognisable 'style' and focus my attention in terms of technique... I love the visuality of what I'm doing - the repetition and structure - it references the predominent visual language of the web, and that's what I'm trying to achieve as an web artist... for me video and flash are cop-outs to what the web is really made of - code..."
the fountain lady
the pot lady
I then went to play with them in html... here is what I explained to a friend...
"...more than anything I'm playing technical games and experimenting with techniques - I'm very excited about the potential of what I'm doing - animations without a single video or flash movie in sight... I can now animate backgrounds and foregrounds with incredibly little pixel power - for example, my animated background (jumping lines) consists of an animated gif that is 1 x 1000 pixel in size - it duplicates itself up automatically to produce the illusion of a full background of jumping lines, when in fact they're only single pixels skipping about...
i guess that all means very little to you - and so many people looking won't twig to the technical aspects lying below - but it sets up a kind of restriction on what I can accomplish, and will therefore generate a recognisable 'style' and focus my attention in terms of technique... I love the visuality of what I'm doing - the repetition and structure - it references the predominent visual language of the web, and that's what I'm trying to achieve as an web artist... for me video and flash are cop-outs to what the web is really made of - code..."
the fountain lady
the pot lady
