Public appearance of nonny warn
Today Nonny took her Telly box to The New Art Gallery Walsall and told some tales:
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Video Recordings to follow!
tertiary tales of tyranny…
or: The Unwitting Tyrannies of Mistress Must and Mistress Should. or: elementary albert ellis
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SNEAK PREVIEW: The Treasure Hunt of Pyrite Tannin
Featuring a SPECIAL GUEST appearance by ol’ CM as ‘The Monkey’. The last of Nonny’s tales shall appear here soon.
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The Stipplers Scry
But how is one to know who or what or when?
All seem relevant, but if in doubt, if struggling with the very nature of identity, how does one decide?
The Thirteen Creatures were drawn out of a hat long since out of mode, and want their own means of divination. To this end arrives creature seven (vii)
The Stipplers Scry
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Like all means of divination, it’s use is ambiguous – as is it’s accuracy and meaning.
Nonny Gotta Title Card
Nonny’s been busy – first she was filming, then complaining, then writing and stitching and painting…
busy little monster.
The Sad Tale of Navy Cherry
A picturebook -
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Am playing with formats
First to emerge – Nonny Warn, with Navy Cherry and Pyrite Tannin
“He thought there could be nothing finer
than to pilfer all the tea in china.
In India he thought it large
To Covet the Assam of the Raj”
Extract from the Voyages of Pyrite Tannin, read by Nonny Warn
Nonny tells stories. She came out of the nan photograph, had tea and make friends with ol’ CM, who has sensibly given up pornography to help her.
She told him a sad tale about Navy Cherry – it seemed only right to give her a screen test, and Tom Smith was running his bunker in Digbeth, so we went down there and took some footage;
Now she’s written another story about Pyrite Tannin, one of the mystery names, as well as one about ‘Mistress Must and Mistress Should’. She likes that she can be a moving picture, and is also making some others. She doesn’t like children. These are unlikely to be children’s stories.
i can’t explain myself…
…because i’m not myself, you see?
feeling lost, and a lack of identity in the modern world?try some of mine!
I had thirteen pairs of words, looking for all the world like an arthouse film cast and crew list…
Garret Daddy, Pyrite Tannin, Tizzy Awoken, Droid Filvver, Hail Initiate, Gailic Kook, Stipplers Scry, Nonny Warn, Knack Devour, Coney Mock, Mercy Coddled, Navy Cherry, Recovery Vandalism
What to do? People or creatures? malevolent or benign? and how much of me do these fellows reflect? I feel i’ve turned myself into a thirteen sided die…
…a search for identity…
..starting with all my names, from tamworth to vix, separate out the letters, make them into words (26 of ‘em!) do a DaDa draw and get thirteen names….
Nan Photograph
Thinking about the oddnesses of being photographed as another person, Vix invoked her Nan in a picture she remembered from WWII, and other memories, and little myths,
In the MeaNTime
Vix started looking at personal pastiches… first it was ‘Lady with a Coffee Monkey’, as part of the Garret collection, an Homage to Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Lady with an Ermine’, which was devised and photographed by the inimitable Tom Smith
and with a little help…
…they found out about technology, and means of appearing magically on devices….
and it continues…
…but monkeys don’t ENJOY to be cooped up in a garret, with nobody new to say hello to or friends to make. So they hitched a ride and started an infestation…
And away we go….
It’s been a while since I updated – we all seek a sense of direction, and I had a little difficulty with mine – Still, didn’t all the monkeys look swell!
STOP PRESS COFFEE MONKEY IN THE NIP!!!!
Back in January I did a pound shop kit for AAS, a brum based artists group. The documentary evidence was put on youtube: Partial Isolation and Mummification Kit and was also put on the ‘Other Place’ blog: AAS TheOtherPlace
Then it began to get views – when it hit nineteen thousand earlier this month, i said the coffee monkey would pose in the nude if it hit twenty by the end of the year.
it did.
So, without further ado, the first and only fully nude shots of the one, the only, the original and still the creepiest….
COFFEE MONKEY (yer can take yer tie off)
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Kitty & Dynah go to the Seaside
The tremendousness of it all! the colours, sounds and shapes! the dread and nausea, the joy and euphoria! and, the sad demise of the muso scope…
It’s been somewhat more of a rollercoaster than usual. The descision was made to ditch the musoscope, as it was a bit delicate and we were expecting people to interact with it, so it’s lifespan would have been somewhat limited. Certainly a project to reprise in the future though – i think with development it could be wondrous.
But what of our other two mechanical wonders? The Red Carbuncle and the PPP? They both blossomed beautifully into more than we could have hoped for them, and earned their names.
Dynah – she’s tall and red, playing an infomercial from Shelley Smith Industries in glorious 3D!
She has an internal periscopic system, and a hand-cranked flap. After all, no-one knows what will happen to the human brain if you stare too long into Dynah’s eyes. It’s only been tested on coffee monkeys.
Kitty – the little sister, with a reel which plays the ‘menagerie of Ms Roden’
Kitty is a customised mutoscope kit from Barenpresse, an excellent German company who specialise in this kind of cut out kit. Check out their site, it’s wonderful. The images in the film represent three totems, or fetishes, related to my personality – the ET doll represents my childhood realities, the jenny haniver my childhood fantasies, and the coffee monkey is something i see as that element manifesting itself in my adulthood. i love the fact it pulses like a heartbeat, but, onto pictures!
The projection… didn’t work how we initially intended it to, like the musoscope it deserves a lot more attention than to just be a hasty add on. However, we got the effect we were after by allowing the light to spread across the wall behind the machines, rather than back projected on a screen
Vicky Roden and Tom Smith - All My Dreams Came True! (but now i have a bunch of other dreams)
It was excellent to get such a wide range of responses at the Private view – i found i was getting locked in trains of thought, as i’d been working with it for so long, so to get so much fresh perspective made it completely worthwhile. It reminded me why i enjoy art so much.
All my dreams came true! (but now i have a bunch of other dreams)
Things have been hectic, hectic, hectic… what with the Flickernic, and college, and everything I’ve again arrived at the point where i have a months worth of half written blog posts cluttering my drafts folder…. most importantly though, the FMP piece for the exhibition at the New Art Gallery Walsall has taken tremendous shape, now being fully thought out and in the making. and it’s called…
All My Dreams Came True! (nut now i have a bunch of other dreams)
I’m working in collaboration with another student and member of the Garret, Tom Smith, who was planning a working mutoscope showing a short film. As we’re working together we’ve been given a fantastic space, so the single mutoscope has now become a trio of various sized machines, next to a backlit projection of the horizon. Two of the the mutoscopes represent the follies and fetishes of our youth, whereas the smallest is powered by a music box movement showing a spinning ouroboros. This is our bit of blurb:
Vicky Roden and Tom Smith
“All my dreams came true! (but now I have a bunch of other dreams)”
The first collaboration between Vicky Roden and Tom Smith, “All my dreams came true! (but now i have a bunch of other dreams)” is an investigation of man’s eternal rush towards an untouchable horizon.
This installation combines disparate and obsolete technologies with childhood nostalgias, mythologies and desires. As the future predicted in our childhood rolls near, we neglect that which we already possess in favour of a mournful nostalgia of an unrealised promised land. This installation counters this in a temporal celebration of that which has been before, through exploration of the mechanical and the digital, the real and the illusory. In keeping with the disparate nature of the subject, this work combines both physical interaction and virtual space.
Our space is in front of you on the left side as you enter the space, and directly under the stairs so we have a lovely secluded alcove for the projection. As for the mutoscopes themselves, each has it’s own pet-name:
The Red Carbuncle: The first and largest machine, it’s free standing and will be showing the information film for the Artonator mk. 2, a.k.a. ‘Bianca’. This will be presented in glorious 3D!
PPP (Portable Picnic Player): A customised child’s kit, the PPP will play ‘The Menagerie of Ms Roden’ (dreadful working title), a forty frame animation of three childlike images drawn in oil pastels to resemble wax crayons: An ET doll my mum made for me as a child, which is one of two childhood possessions i still own: A Jenny Haniver, one of the many faintly sinister myths that fascinated me from an early age, and a coffee monkey, which i see as the adult realisation of these two aspects of my childhood.
The Musoscope: A hybrid of my fascination with automata and Tom’s love of steampunk, added to our shared interest in folklore. The musoscope is powered by a music box movement, which turns a small reel which has a magnification lens in front of it. The film is of an ouroboros turning, symbolic of the eternal journey towards the untouchable.
more info on all of these as and when, and hopefully with more regularity. more mental prunes and spinach.
Army of me
I’ve finally got a handle on how many homunculus badges i’m going to be making – it’s currently around the 410 mark. A lot less stressful that the 1500+ I estimated at the beginning! As I’ve been making them i’ve been pinning them to a large square canvas, partially for safekeeping and partially to see how they looked together, and they seem to work both as a collection and as individual pieces:
One of my major problems during this course has been what to do with old work – I still have the mutantscope sitting in my bedroom, my house is overflowing with artwork, and there’s no way to keep everything. Plus the scroll had the potential to be a bit of a white elephant – I’ve already exhibited it twice, and keeping it in my possession has always led to my being completely overzealous of it’s care, and it’s rather delicate and easily torn.
A beautiful example of how to use old work is Bob and Roberta Smith’s ‘The Bonfire’
This reminded me of the homunculus project in respect of the way it highlights sections of words – something i’ve noticed as i’ve been assembling the badges is odd, disparate words that are thrown together, such as ‘vivid processed meat’. Sometimes they read like haikus, some only show the damage age and light has done to the paper.
The process has also forced me to read the scroll, slowly and in detail, for the first time in quite a while – it’s reaffirmed to me how far I have come in the past couple of years, and is proving cathartic, like i’m trapping an old demon piece by piece, and the eventual distribution will be scattering the ashes of a part of myself I’ve longed to let go.
Tales of the Garret
Another reason for my supreme tardiness in respect of blogging has been the activities of The Garret, whom you may remember as the scampish ne’er-do-wells who generally get around presenting artworks. This time, we’re working on something a bit spectacular… holding a birthday picnic for Kathleen Garman;
We’ve been tremendously fortunate to have the support of The New Art Gallery Walsall, and even got to assemble our own case of items from the Epstein Archive which is currently on display in one of the Artists Rooms in the Garman Ryan Collection.
We’ll be assembling on the gallery’s terrace at 12 noon and indulging in a variety of artistic and picnicking practices. Then at 3pm we’ll be cutting a birthday cake, toasting Kathleen, and reading out birthday messages. As part of our celebrations we would like to invite you to send Kathleen (or any other special person in your life) a birthday telegram which will not only be read out at the flickernic but displayed online and preserved in a book made by the members of the garret. We also want you to share your first memories of art with us, whether at a gallery, on the street or at a performance, and you can do this in a number of ways:
Post a comment on the GGAS Birthday Telegrams page: http://the-garret.org/birthday-telegrams
Email your message to telegram@the-garret.org
Post your message to the G.G.A.S. Facebook Event wall: https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/event.php?eid=155610497836092
More on this one as it happens!
Lax-a-daisy
Nearly two months between blog posts isn’t good. But I have been so extraordinarily busy! rather than a massive swinging post about everything, i think i might finish off the ten unfinished drafts that are currently reside in my sidebar… or a post about each element of the project.
Late March saw the fifth Flatpack festival, which i was lucky enough to be a venue co-ordinator for. I also had the good fortune of working at the Dirty End, the joint festival hub between flatpack and fierce, so it was where all the best cake and the widest variety of events were:
It was a brilliant experience, hard work but absolutely worth it! Thanks to Pip, Ian, everyone at 7 inch Cinema, all the other volunteers, and especially to Selina!
my boys…
I FINALLY got the balls together to start chopping up the scroll – and start making my homunculi. I’ve made eight of the little fellas so far, fancy a peek?
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A decent blog entry will be coming soon…
That, Hillary, is An Homunculus!
I had the assessment, half term is coming up, and now I’m working on ideas for the big assed end of year show. Which has brought up another idea – my kerouac scroll.
Being the first thing i did at college, and having already being exhibited twice, it’s become something of a ‘reserve’, an impressive item that i have knocking around that i could keep exhibiting in different ways until the day i die (or it tears). I don’t want to work like that, so I’ve decide to turn it into badges which i’m going to give away. To be honest, I’m nothing like the person who wrote the content of the scroll anymore, and I’m different to the person who typed it up, so it seems to be a good call to draw a big line under the whole thing.
photo by Hardluck Hotel
So I’ve started a project with the working title ‘Homunculi’. A bit of rough maths suggests that to turn the whole thing into 2.5 cm badges will give me about 1500, and will destroy the artifact in the process. These are going to be distributed in a variety of means, and there’s something quite seductive about having 1500 bits of my psychology rattling around the place.
Updates to this as and when!
Vix
Fly my pretties!
Monkeys. Where to start with the monkeys? all the weeks of fretting about gears and mechanisms has boiled down to a few finalised monkeys, and together with the odd evolution of the Semi Detached Cinema it’s odd to think that this started with the rehashing of old ideas and enough gingerbread to feed the armies of Lapland.
From the beginnings of the coffee monkey i’d always felt the need to include some form of automata – he had the right balance of sweet and sinister: it’s entirely conceivable that he could be given as a toy, but there was something tremendously odd about him… plus i’d always considered the coffee monkey to caper in a similar fashion to the cymbal monkeys of old. I was also reminded of Chris Cunningham’s ‘Monkey Drummer’:
as well as the off kilter world of Jan Svankmajer, whose particular style of stop motion animation has always left me eerily fascinated ‘Punch and Judy’ (1966) starts with a particularly appropriate monkey orchestra…
But essentially i had three automata monkeys that worked (in my opinion). First up! the rolling monkey (in his sack of beans);
Next! the melancholic monkey on her hill of beans:
and finally, the acrobatic monkey dancer!
and yes, she has…. a crown of beans. And for a demonstration of what they’re like when they’re working:
While working on this project I’ve been amazed at the variety and beauty that resides within the parameters of kinetic art -
Jean Tinguely – Requiem pour une feuille morte (1967)
Len Lye – Flip and Two Twisters (1977)
this diversity extends to individual members of kinetic arts groups – for example, Applied Kinetic Arts;
Ben Cowden – Penelope’s Cousin
Nemo Gould – Head Case (2009)
Tom Haney – Music Box No. 1
Another of my favourite examples of the creepiness of such broken down toys is Julie Lawrences ‘Ballerina Story’ (2009):
Yes, suffice it to say, this blog could go on forever. So onto the Semi Detached Cinema!
Although the name doesn’t sit right. It began as The Gingerbread Cinema, inspired in part by Yoke and Zooms ‘Gingerbread Gallery’ (2010)
I really liked the idea of such an object being functional too – i.e. a gallery that essentially is artwork also displaying artwork, hence the gingerbread cinema actually showing films. However, i feel what i finally came up with beat that rather flimsy idea:
I must admit i do like the fact that the main body of the piece is made of only those elements required to spy on ones neighbours. I was also vastly inspired when I got to see Mike Nelsons ‘Coral Reef’, which gave me the impetus to experiment with spaces within space (albeit on a far smaller scale)
Mike Nelson – ‘The Coral Reef’ (2000)
So anyway – on the whole I’m really pleased with how this whole project has turned out – while i’m not sure that I’d be happy to exhibit any of these as they are it’s a case of remaking them neatly, rather than coming up with something new. And now, to Gin!
Vix
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