Last weekend my friends put on a private party/mini festival sort of thing out in the mountains of Snowdonia national park in Wales. It took us about 5 hours to get there but it was so worth it to be a part of something truly magical. We were blessed with good weather along with some spectacular scenery and surroundings to spend the bank holiday weekend in.
Our camp was set up loosely around an old barn, with an inscription on the fireplace reading 1511, however, the people who now own the barn and know more if its history reckon it was built around 100 years earlier than this. Not much has changed in the interior and it still boasts most of its original fittings inside.
The Site (Photo courtesy of James Waddingham)
The Site
The barn where I set up the installation
When my friends picked me up in Cambridge, I was quizzed as to why I was bringing so much of my art stuff with me, to which I didn't really have an answer, apart from one of the organisers had told me to bring it! When I got to the site, I was shown the upstairs of the barn. I was so excited because as soon as I saw it I could envisage my work set-up in there and how it would all work!
The original fittings and quirky bits in the structure worked perfectly with the banner from the Faith and Belief installation, and we managed to use the beams and stone walls to our advantage to hook the flags on to. All the pieces seemed to fit together like a jigsaw and I was totally buzzing and couldn't quite believe how perfectly it worked!
The banner filled the doorway shape in the middle of the room and there were just enough flags to go round the perimeter. The rough texture and grey of the stone walls against the crisp white and bright colours with the bright sunshine streaming through the windows reinstated the original concept and thought process behind the project in the first place: comparing my artistic practice to a form of faith, belief or a religion and how it can make you feel the same enlightenment and uplifting effect as a god can have on someone who follows a religion; its all about what you believe in, whether it be a god, art, music. Fact or fiction, pursue what makes you feel happy, chase what makes you feel alive.
Last summer I made a trip to The Eden Project in Cornwall. I was interested to see the biome constructions that house the plants inside like huge greenhouses, simulating warmer conditions, but mainly excited and intregued to see The Seed sculpture in the heart of one of the buildings in the Eden Project: The Core.
The Biomes at The Eden Project
The sculpture has been carved from a piece of granite that took artist, Peter Randall-Page and his team, two years to find, and two years to carve and weighs a whopping 70 tonnes!
I was blown away by the piece. It was tangiable, tactile, appealing and accessable to and audience of all ages. The way The Seed is displayed, inside a sort of circular white room, tapering up in to a funnel that opens out to a window above, which lights the object, made me feel very small and enforced the realization that nature is all around and should be respected, embraced and protected by man-kind, as it provides us with so much, which, sometimes, we can be blind to.
The Seed was carved completely by hand
The might Seed, by Pater Randall-Page
Back in Cambridge, around about the same time I found out about the Fibonacci sequence, as a result of a conversation at the pub with some friends. I spent a long time the next day researching it and watching various videos explaining about it on youtube.
As a reaction to both of these things I began to note down ideas for a new print. I created a new piece called Fibo-Seed using 2 lino blocks, and six layers: A reduction lino multi block. My bedroom floor became my press, with the pieces hung on a make shift line to dry for each layer after it was hand-burnished on my homemade registration block!
After 6 layers of ink I ended up with a limited edition of 22 of these. If you like the piece and want one to hang on your wall they are available to buy from the Saatchi Online shop by following this link.
