The Deer, the Bread and the Teeth

This year I have taken up stalking deer and have used my response to this in my art. Instead of sticking the antlers on the wall, I did the usual thing(!) and put them in bread. There is not much rationale for this, its just I like working in bread. It is useful for me to use the various bones, antlers and teeth from deer and play with them as, at the moment, I don't really understand my fascination for stalking.  Is there something instinctual, maybe, about me connecting with the hunter/gatherer inside me?
The first two pieces of work below are roe buck antlers. After cooking, the antlers became brittle and cracked on cooling which is why they look shorter, blunt and broken.

The next two photos are some red deer teeth I found in the woods. They look a bit comical but also rather sinister.

This is the lower jaw of a roe deer. It has 32 teeth, including 8 at the front  which look rather like feet!

From these works so far, what I have learned is to just be quite fluid and spontaneous while working with the materials and not think too hard or plan what I am going to do. The response to the lower jawbone took only 5 mins to conceive and 15 mins to cook and it is an interesting and intriguing little object.   I compare this with very lengthy planning and baking of my bread bodies over the last few years! 

Drugs!

This term I decided I would somehow like to embrace my 30 years as a pharmacist by getting drugs into my artwork. I felt that, after all this time, drugs are my language and that surely they would be able to influence my artwork?  But after playing around, it doesn't seem to be cutting it.  Not for the moment anyway.  It seems forced and too pre-meditated. Maybe having a certain material  to work with is not as important as having a process? And possibly because I have been working with drugs for such a long time, they have a certain place in my psyche? Not fluid enough.

                                           Sponge cake with ibuprofen tablets and capsules

                                           Various drugs in sponge cake mixture

                                           Beeswax 'scone' with various drugs



For the eca open day in October, I made a pretend drug cake, using paracetamol capsules in the traditional pharmacy logo. The title, Sig: 2 QDS,  is the way prescriptions are written, it means 'take 2 capsules four times daily'.

                                                     Sig: 2 QDS
                                                     Clay, icing sugar, paracetamol caps, ribbon

Collaboration

Over the summer, 2011, Roberta Buchan and I decided to collaborate on a piece of work for the 'Fabric of the Land' exhibition in Aberdeen.  Roberta is a printmaking student and was happy to respond to some latex pieces which I had been using to record the moulding and general decomposition of my bread body. Her response was a collograph. We called  them the 'dancing collographs' as she made the latex look quite dynamic.

                                           Latex piece showing bread mould and  zip imprint.

                                              Final piece 'Coming together, falling apart'


 I also made some other little latex remnants from the bread surface which made an interesting mobile.

                                                    Latex remnants from the bread body

                                             
We both felt there was a lot of learning to be taken from collaborating on a piece of work. I feel it is important to listen to each other, be flexible and not too precious about your own work. Its exciting too, when you spark ideas off each other and end up somewhere completely different to where you thought you were heading!

Pelvic Obsession

Last summer, I saw a painting Pelvis with Moon,  by Georgia O'Keefe and became fascinated with the shapes of the pelvic bones, the curves and the holes.  When I thought about the pelvis, I liked its functions of protection and support.

                                                    Pelvis with Moon  1943 Georgia O'Keefe
                                                    Oil on canvas




For a few weeks, I became pre-occupied with drawing the pelvic bones and I bought a plastic pelvis off e-bay.  Below is a 'blind drawing' of a pelvis.  (my drawing is so bad, I may as well draw blind!!)

I made some out of salt dough and then made one out of steel. This was  really challenging. I used cardboard and a glue gun to make cardboard models to try and get the shape right but it ended up looking nothing like a pelvis!  My tutor said it looked like a ram's head. Hmmm......back to the drawing board.

After this, the pelvis left me for a few months, only to return at the end of my course.   It feels like I have turned full circle, after working with beeswax for my beehive sculpture,  I have just completed making a silicone rubber mould of the plastic pelvis and made one out of beeswax.  So finally, I got there.

During the summer, I managed to drop the pelvis and it broke into several pieces.  In the second photo, I melted some of the parts together onto a plinth.

Bees, bees, bees........

I have been interested in bees for quite a few years.  I love honey and honeycombs and when I was living in Somerset, I used to buy my honey from a local beekeeper... that was until a few years ago when the supply of local honey dried up.   Varroa mite, colony collapse disorder - it was all starting to look grim for the future of the bees.
The culture and history of bees is fascinating.  Beekeeping goes back to prehistoric times, the first organised beekeeping was in ancient Egypt.  Below is a representation of a Mayan honeybee from 1800 years ago.

(Image: Collins Beekeepers Bible)
In mythology, the bee was considered sacred and was thought to act as a bridge between the  natural world and the underworld.  Bees were identified with Demeter, the  Greek goddess of earth and crops.  Over the years, the queen and the hive have been used as analogies for political and economic models of society.

So, in my retirement, I am going to keep bees, and what better time to build a beehive than in my woodwork project at eca. I bought a beehive flatpack, a WBC hive (named after William Broughton Carr, 1890).  It is made from red cedar wood and smells gorgeous.  In fact this whole project has been about smells, the honey, the hive, the honeycomb and the beeswax.  Here it is made up before I started making it into an artwork.

For my installation, I used only two lifts and put the beehive on legs to raise it up off the ground.  I  made a beeswax 'nest structure' for the underneath and showed it in a dark room with only a small lamp in the beehive.  This produced and interesting grid pattern on the  wall as well as highlighting the structure.  I dripped honey and honeycomb down the beeswax onto the floor and onto the inside of the lifts so that when you looked through the little hole in the roof, you could see it dripping down. The smell in the room was the first experience people got when visiting my beehive!  My tutor said it was 'a sensorial feast'.

I furthered the project for my end of year show by buying some red cedar batons to make new legs and by making a different shape 'nest' underneath. This is my final piece. Its called Melissae which is Greek for honey bees.

Metal Patchwork Quilt

My most recent project has been in the metal workshop which included learning to weld and I love it! Its all sparks, noise and molten metal - something elemental about the whole process. I wanted to make a metal patchwork quilt using 1mm steel and somehow incorporate the remains of an old patchwork quilt that I had as a child. The concept behind this is to parallel the strength of steel and the strength of family bonds, as shown by the quilt which has been handed down through 3 generations. These are some of the original quilt pieces- they contain fabric from my mum's dresses and and my dresses and pyjamas when I was little. So these material fragments are 50 to 60 years old. I can remember there were always hexagonal shapes of material and paper around the house. My mum used a metal template, paper and material to make the hexagons and then would hand sew them together. I tried to replicate her process and use some of my own children's clothes.

I cut out lots of metal hexagons using the plasma cutter. I loved this process, something about the repetition of cutting the shapes, I used to just get lost in it. And it was great when a hexagon dropped straight out the metal and landed on the floor with a satisfying tinkling noise. I then welded them together, firstly using oxyacetylene then mig welding. The mig welding was easier and faster. I also experimented bending the shapes between metal rollers to see in I could get a fold, like in a blanket. This proved fairly problematic when I put the bigger pieces of welded quilt through the rollers in that it fell apart into quite a few pieces which I had to weld back together.

The video shows me cutting out the hexagons with the plasma cutter. The best bit is the squeal at the end as the bit drops cleanly onto the floor. Satisfying!

I tried several ways to combine the material pieces and the metal pieces.

What was more successful was then using the metal piece I had cut the shapes out of, and draped the material through the holes. I feel this is starting to work better and and am going to continue to develop this further by making it more 3D, making the edges more ragged, maybe roll it and have it standing on the floor.

Here is the final piece. 

Bronze Casting

On my sculpture course at Edinburgh College of Art, we are lucky to have a small foundry and we did a bronze casting workshop, which is one of the most exciting workshops I have ever done. The fire in the foundry, the heat and the molten metal were awesome and there was something primeval and archetypal about the whole process.

I made a bronze replica of an antique pharmacy jar which had found its way to me in a pharmacy I worked in. The result had 3 blow holes in it which made it look like some relic from a shipwreck or explosion. It was not what I was expecting but I liked it.

Pharmacy 2010

bronze, disused drugs

Pharmacy Jar

bronze

Pouring the bronze

wax model showing pour holes

and air vents

Female Genital Mutilation

FGM (female genital mutilation) is a procedure involving the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia for cultural, religious or other non-theraputic reasons. It is predominantly practiced in regions of Africa and WHO estimates over 2 million girls are 'cut' each year. (Source: Int. 1997 report : AI index: ACT 77/06/97 what is genital mutilation?)

Apart from the human rights issues, there are serious health consequences, both physical and psychological to girls undergoing this procedure. It is usually carried out between the ages of 4 and 8 years old.

Responding to FGM is an ongoing art project for me with the aim to inform, educate and make people aware of this practice.

A poster and textile piece I made for my Basic Diploma in Art & Design in June 2008

FGM Poster
FGM Procedures Textiles, wood

This is my latest work on FGM. (December 2010) The models are made from salt dough and include stitching. The print is a screenprint from a photo.

FGM Type 1 screenprint

FGM Type1 salt dough

FGM Type 3 (no1) salt dough

FGM Type 3(no2) salt dough

Bread Sculpture

I have been working with bread and dough for the last two years. I like the feel of working with dough. You can knead it and thump it about. If you add yeast, it is all warm and soft to play with. Bread smells nice in the making, during and after cooking and also as it goes mouldy.

I made a series of 'breadheads'.

Breadhead No.1

sliced bread, milk

Breadhead No. 2

white flour, yeast
Breadhead No 3

sliced bread, milk

I use white flour, wholemeal flour, salt dough and sometimes I add yeast to get a more unpredictable effect. I like using zips in my sculpture! Zips can show if I am feeling open or closed about something. The three pieces below are bread fragment no.1 , my hand and three blobs. I like making blobs - I often feel they represent little parts of me.

Bread Fragment No1

white flour, yeast, zip

Hand

white flour, yeast, zip

Three Blobs.

white flour, wholemeal flour

yeast, zip, paper, drawing pins

Bread Bodies


I have made 3 bread bodies. They are based on my own torso which I cast using modroc. The first one, I put out into the woods for 6 weeks to decompose and be eaten by birds and insects.

                                                  

The second one is called 'Anxiety' - I ate the middle out in a performance piece. It was very cathartic. In this photograph, it has been going mouldy for 6 months.

'Anxiety'

bread, mould

This is the third one, Menopause.  Toasting it with a blowtorch was an expression of how I was struggling with symptoms of the menopause at the time.

I like to keep them for as long as possible to see how they go  mouldy.  This one showed some interesting yellow mould.

This year I planned to make body No 4 a celebration of my life being up in Edinburgh and being at art college.  Well, as so often happens with art, the final piece turned out nothing like as planned.  We ended up cooking it for 36hours in the kiln at college so it was well baked and burnt in some places.   So I then had a sculpture that reminded people of the holocaust!  It looked a bit like wood in parts.  Adjectives to describe it from my peers were: traumatic, morbid, grim, sad, like dried meat,  body bag. There is a dichotomy with it looking deathly and like body decay but it being made from bread which has an association with warmth, nurture, comfort and feeding. I watched my response to it over the ensuing days and it was one of wanting to look after it, cuddle it and put it in a nice place with flowers. Hence the photograph of me with it in the art college grounds.

Here is the bread body, 2 months after, its starting to get very mouldy inside with the bread breaking apart.