PS Mirabel presents, The Process Residency 2013: Antony Clarkson

Well it’s been a while since I have posted anything on here, it hasn’t really been possible to keep the blog going during the previous two residencies. But I am here again now and just starting the first proper day of the Process Residency 2013 here at PS Mirabel Gallery based at Mirabel Studios Manchester. Over the coming days and weeks I will post more about what this residency entails and will also add some details about what I have been doing since my last posting. For now I will begin by just posting the residency poster.

Day 1? ,17:00 China Standard Time (CST).

Well I’ve been here for 5 days now, as I expected “blogging” is something of an issue, which is why I haven’t been able to post on a daily basis as I did when I was in Ireland. I hope the posting that I tried to add from the airport in Helsinki got through; the connection seemed good but it was rather a rush so I haven’t managed to look at it. Anyway I think I have found a way around the problem, which will be self evident if this gets posted.

It is a great shame that I was in such a rush in Helsinki, as we flew over Norway I managed to get some great photos out of the plane window. This one makes it hard to believe it was actually taken at the end of May whilst the UK was experiencing its first proper summer weather. Even Helsinki was warm when I landed, just glad I didn’t have to transfer flights in Oslo.

Of course when I landed in China it was hot, although not as hot as I had expected; about 26 or 27c, which was about the temperature in the UK when I left. The difference is that the temperature here is still steadily rising and has the potential to go up another 15 degrees or more. And then there is of course the humidity to be added into the equation. It should all make for an interesting trip.

Well that is pretty much all I am going to write for today. As you can guess quite a lot has happened in the last few days and I will bring events up to date over the next few days, but for now I will leave things with my arrival in China and my greeting at the airport by Yan Yan, who had never seen me before and who I am delighted to say was awaiting me at arrivals with a sign saying “ANTONY CLARKSON”. An image which he let me photograph and one I will always remember.

Day 252, 14:21 BST, 16:21 Local Time, Helsinki Airport.

Hello everybody. It has been an awfully long time since I was last here, and in that awfully long time an awful lot has happened! The sharp-eyed amongst you may have already noticed that the tag-line at the top of the page has altered; this blog started out as just a way to document my time as Artist in Residence at Cow House Studios in Ireland, but it now appears that I have now become a serial-artist-in-residence!

The other thing that you have probably noticed is the time index, once again I am out of the country ,actually  I’m sat in a lounge at Helsinki Airport. I’m just on my way out to start a new Artist Residency, but it isn’t in Helsinki, I’ve just stopped off here between flights: I am about to start a 2 month stay as Artist in Residence at the 501 Artspace in Chongqing, China. Like I said a lot has happened and is still happening and I will go into more details on another occasion, my time and web access is limited here, so onward.

In the time that I have not been blogging I have been working on my second residency, but this was a residency with a twist. I will go into more details in the coming weeks too, but the basis of it was that I won a  commission from Trafford College in Manchester to produce a permenant installation for the new main building of the college. it was not a project that I felt I could blog about at the time, but as it officially opened on 2nd May I feel that the time may now be right.

So anyway that tells you a bit about what I have been and am doing, hopefully  I will be able to blog alright when I get you China but you never know. Just watch this space and hopefully I will be able to act more details over the next few weeks, for now I must go, they are about to call my flight.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,300 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 22 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Day 76, 22:00

OK. So can somebody tell me what happened to Day 75? Believe me, I am as confused as you are! I know this system has been problematic but I didn’t expect my posts to completely disappear. Still I guess we live and learn, can’t wait to get back online properly.

Day 74, 23:30

Well here goes another attemp at posting from my phone, it wouldn’t be so bad if everything I typed registered, that way I wouldn’t have to type so slowly and do it all at least twice!

Tomorrow should be my first day back in my Manchester studio, I will have to measure it up to see if the new commision pieces can be produced there. As always, watch this space.

Day 73, 22:30

Sorry for the break-down in postings, I’ve had to spend all day rebooting and reinstalling everything back onto my computer. And even now I’ve had to borrow someone elses computer to update this. Hopefully in the next day or two normal service will be resumed, including photos.

It’s very strange being back in Manchester, its seems like an even bigger adjustment coming back from Ireland than it was than it was going out there. The computer problems aren’t helping either; especially as I have a lot of computer design to do on my new project.

That is the other thing that is strange; the change in the nature of my work. The pieces I have been working on in Ireland have been on the whole very practical and hands on, which this project will become, but in the early stages, which I am working on at the moment, it is very computer based, not my favourite kind of work.

Day 72, 18:00

Hello, so I come back from rural Ireland where I had the best internet connection ever, to Manchester, the big city, and now I can’t get on the net! Typical. So my only option is to work from my phone, and let me warn anybody out there who is thinking of trying this, DON’T! WordPress and Blackberry don’t seem to get on which had made this an incredibly slow and painful process and so I will have to finish here for now. I will try to get things working properly for tomorrow. Whatever happens I will try not to miss posting, even if it’s only a couple of lines.

Day 71, 23:30

Well now I’m back in Manchester, hence the late and probably short posting, I’ve been traveling for most of the day. Dublin is only a 40 minute flight from Manchester, but the Cow House is over 3 hours from Dublin, so it’s taken me a while to get back.

My time at Cow House has been wonderful, I would really like to thank Rosie and Frank for the opportunity they gave me to go and work there over the last 10 weeks, it was an amazing, cathartic experience which I feel will have a profound effect on my work. They run a fabulous place there, I really can’t recommend it highly enough as an artist residency and although I wasn’t there during the summer program; knowing their passion and work ethic I’m sure that it will deservedly go from strength to strength.

I’d also like to take this chance to say thank you and goodbye to everyone else I met in Ireland who made my time there so memorable, especially to Mary & Michael and all their family and friends. I’ll be back to see you all next year and I can’t wait.

Day 70, 14:00

Day 70, ten weeks exactly. I’d like to start today by thanking everyone who looked at and commented on Heaven and Earth, Diptych, on Day 69, it is turning into a very popular piece and project. So, on with today’s posting, no Turner Prize this weekend, as it is my last weekend here I am just going to put some more of my own work and thoughts on here, I may return to the Turner Prize next weekend, I haven’t decided yet. One thing which I have decided on is that I will be continuing with this blog after I leave the  Cow House; it was originally started just as a project for here but now I have made new friends through it, it would be a shame to give it up.

My studio here is starting to look quite empty, I packed a lot of my stuff up for shipping yesterday so I now have just a few things like my computer here and of course the large “canvases” which will stay in Ireland for the exhibitions here next year. Actually I have a new piece which I, typically, started on just yesterday; above. It will be another form of sculptural canvas, this time based on the tetrahedron rather than the cube. As a form the tetrahedron has always fascinated me, I have looked at them in relation to previous pieces; I have an ongoing project involving a spherical canvas which is made up of tetrahedra in the same way that a geodesic dome is, that will hopefully make a future appearance on here too. The tetrahedron is actually a lot more complicated than it looks, all of the corner angles are of course 60°, which is problematic enough to work on when all carpentry tools are basically designed to work with right-angles, but the angles between the plains is not, that is actually about 70.5288°, now I don’t need to be quite that accurate, but if I don’t get close the whole thing will just not fit together, and that’s where the insanity lies!

Actually the thinking behind this piece has become something of a project by itself, I have got really into the idea that the tools I use are made essentially for working with right-angles and that I have to make adaptations to them to make these pieces and it is these adaptations which are also starting to interest me. What if they weren’t adaptations, what if we used the tetrahedron in our lives, and especially in our architecture, in the way we use the cube, then those tools would be designed appropriately and that is what I am starting to look at now. Not just redesigning tools to work with the tetrahedron but based around it too as they inevitably would be. Yes this one may just push me over the edge!