single-serve universe

cardboard planetarium - draft of single size

they will hang. From tree branches in parks and also, somehow, in laneways. The light will come though, and the universe will rotate on its single string...

universe for one...

slice

planetarium facets in progress - model test

It is always best to finish off an idea before moving on. I don't want any un-requited projects haunting me when i get old, following me around the house and nipping at my old-lady slippers.

So the forests need to wait a week or two before being allowed to cloud my vision entirely. I need to make that planetarium first.

About 6 months ago, a Canadian artist, Shaunna Dunn, mentioned the phrase 'cardboard constellations' in my presence. The phrase stuck to me. And that turned into an idea for a cardboard planetarium, that could just sit, alone, in a laneway or a street.

the cutting room floor... many boxes met their death here today...

A cardboard dome, punched with pinholes. The sunshine comes through the pinholes, and becomes the stars. In this little dark cardboard place. It's a moments visual silence in the middle of the city. Stargazing as you would on a mountain top, but not. You're in some noisy laneway. In the daytime. But the stars are there too. Powered by the sun. A simplified simulation of what we can no longer see, where most of us live...

So. Cardboard is me. I am cardboard. And paper binders. And starcharts of the sydney sky in summer.

permanent curvature of the spine from 12 hours cutting corrugated cardboard with stanley knife in an un-ergonomic position

Leo Coyte... Checking-in

I've been set-up in the studio for almost a month now, here's some of the source material that I've accumulated and been working with over this time...

cardboard-edness

Tai Snaith - of style mutual

Sam3 - parking packaging

Sam3 - parking packaging - DIY pattern

Eduardo Vea - via box doodle project

no*visibles - box populi

lasercut street goodness via flickr - ok it might be plywood but I'd like to think it's cardboard

el fin del mundo mirando al techo

cardboard clouds - from flickr

ghostpatrol - overtimepeoplewillrecognise

Sam3 again - cardboard man reclining

curly goodness - found on flickr here

I love the tenacity of cardboard... always accessible, always democratic, always there for you. Cardboard is my friend. Until it goes slimy. And then it's mulch waiting to grow into something else.

forwards to backwards

Installation view of Saltmilk and other wonders at IASKA back on '05... my first foray with the actual as opposed to the purely projected

I have, so far in my practice, not had to confront the practicalities of nailing the object. Through a lens, the object is always just your own version of a dream, anyways. The only time I've ever actually used objects (if i'm going to be correct about this) - I put them thru a series of lenses, which created the final imagery... the object becoming incidental, put there as a form of proof, rather than a necessity.

a twig, backlit by a slide projector, going thru a plastic lens... which flipped the image and resulted in a distorted stand of tree-ish projections which moved in the breeze as the room was quite drafty...

Now, however, for my forests, objects are needed. And they have to be absolutely exquisite and exactly right in their actuality, not just in their recorded form. And I am now realising how much I have to learn to take this project from concept through to something that actually stacks up. I have to make tiny forests of trees. They need to be robust enough to survive in an underwater installation in a harbor. This will not be easy. Arg.

Fortunately, I am hoping that my concerns can be off-set slightly by my new mentor, who I'm having my first meeting this this arvo. The further I go forwards with this project, the more I realise that Fiona Hall might just be sent down from heaven for my own wiley purposes... at the very least, she may be able to offer some advice on taking model making from much-loved concept thru to, well... a forest that doesn't look crap.

my lens-trees.. made of dried weeds from the back of the old basketball court in Kellerberrin

I have accepted that I may need to make a great deal of awful models before I arrive somewhere useful with this forest thing... so I have begun, and I will endure. But there's many ways to skin this particular cat, so I'm trying to keep in mind that my abstract forest doesn't need to flow completely from my hands... it will be a process of modeling alfoil and wire, collecting twigs and somehow assembling something that can be molded and cast later on down the track, to result in the final objects... a fluid forest of metallic trees that bend in the ocean current.

Anyway. It is interesting to embark on tree-making and realise that the shape of a tree, in my head at least, comes from my time making Saltmilk at Kellerberrin - I did a residency there at IASKA in 2005. And the trees I met out on this deserted saltlake, they embody the quintessential tree to me. And knowing this, I can now forcibly 'branch out' (heh..) into other tree-like forms, having identified my baseline...

saltmilk. an amazing place. that's caked salt on the ground, and these are the trees i mean...

The trees at saltmilk were long-dead. They still ruled the lake, though... they were black texta against the sky and the salt. And I spent a *lot* of time beneath them, wading around in the sulfurous salty slush that was that strange place... I was trying to make an animation that did justice the the yawning sky above saltmilk... and it worked.. kinda... here 'tis.

So as a result i spent the other night making trees out of tinfoil which all looked like they were from that place... not intentionally... but i needed to start modeling trees so i could get the first few hundred disasters out of the way... and now i have. Started, that is.

my first tree. it's a start.

What makes a tree

lichen with grand intentions, on a rock in Broger's Creek, near Kiama

it's quite a question. I was sure that I knew. But now, now that I'm trying to actually shape them, to abstractedly make a 'tree-like' thing (or several), I find that perhaps I didn't know quite enough. I mean, I can make a tree easily enough that conforms to the basic laws of organic patterning, but my trees need to flow - to bend in a liquid breeze as if they were in the airy wind.

a sea sponge whose footing-rock got thrown up on the beach at the Boneyard, near Kiama

An underwater forest. Made of terrestrial-like trees, which behave in the ocean current in a way reminiscent of a strong wind in a stand of tall trees.

So not only form is needed here, but solidity and strain and buoyancy and pressure and flow, all together, in the correct amounts. To re-produce nuances of the terrestrial within the land of aqua profunda. Hmmm. Start with form.

more lichen - same patch

sea sponge washed up at The Boneyard - disconnected from it's rock footing

a small stand

pared-back sponge

The beginnings of a new project...

*sigh* - it is so exquisite to be back in a studio again... surrounded by grubby white walls, traffic noise, inadequate ventilation and detritus...

Today is the first day of my studio residency at First Draft Gallery in Sydney. It's your basic blank box/partition out the back of the gallery. A table, a cupboard full of other people's left-over junk, three chairs (two with no backs), a floor sprinkled with cigarette butts and ex-cockroaches, and a single overhead fluro. Paradise.

This new project involves two basic components as i see it. Studio time, here in my little box, and mentorship time, with Fiona Hall (in Adelaide, Sydney, wherever). My plan is to be in Sydney every second week for the next three months, until the end of March, at which point two things will happen. Number one is that Fiona will have a major retrospective exhibition at the MCA here in Sydney, and number two is that I will have a (slightly less illustrious) exhibition here at First Draft Gallery. So I'm working and making and learning and thinking towards dual outcomes... and I am stoked.

I have been fermenting ideas for this project for the past 6 months... there were kernels of ideas sortof knocking against my skull while at the Banff residency, due to all that wonderful cross-fire from my fellow artists there. The idea of diorama as unsettling device. Nature on a tiny, cultivated scale as an ironic landscape. Cardboard constellations. Fun with miniature worlds...

So. I'm all setup here with my wireless modem, teacups, teapots, 4 types of tea, fruit and nuts, and a small stash of dried-out seasponge and some barnacles. And a couple of delicious books... a Fiona Hall monograph, Dancing Up Country - the art of Dorothy Napangardi, Nature Design and the most wonderful All my Friends are made of Paper... and, at all times, I'm keeping Forests - the shadow of civilization close to my chest cause it's really special and is a bit of a guiding light at the moment for me...

Kirsten Bradley: artist profile

Collingwood Weave 2006 - animation still from stop-motion animation. Fence, grass.

Born: 1977 - Kiama, NSW, Australia

Kirsten’s work deals primarily with landscapes - urban, natural, sonic, constructed and imagined. Her current interests are centered in sociological histories of the landscape, and the murky waters between the organic and simulated within our perceptions of nature and wilderness.

Kirsten has exhibited widely across Australia as part of Cicada, a collection of artists including Nick Ritar and Ben Frost. Highlights have included site specific projects such as Resquared for Primavera 2003, Amensal for the City of Adelaide Luminosity Commissions in 2004, MOB for the Meat Market in 2006, and most recently Litter for the Govett-Brewster in 2007. These days Kirsten is working in a mostly solo capacity, collaborating with other artists on a project by project basis.

She lives on the ridgeline of the Great Dividing Range, Australia at a place called Milkwood. But she gets around a fair bit too.

http://thejunefox.com

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