The kitchen project - 3

Middle of week 2 and the reconstruction has begun. The walls in the kitchen have been plastered, the electrician has been, and the floor has been tiled.

Meanwhile, everything is a mess. The four pictures that follow are of our hall.

The sitting room and the spare bedroom are in the same condition.

Despite daily hovering of the rooms we live in, the dust keeps coming back.

Today, they have started fitting the new units.

Lorna Simpson

Unanswerable, by Lorna Simpson at Hauser and Wirth, London

Simpson came to prominence in the 1980s through her pioneering approach to conceptual photography, which featured striking juxtapositions of text and staged images and raised questions about the nature of representation,  identity, gender, race and history. These concerns are reflected throughout her present exhibition at Hauser and Wirth and present the artist's expanding and increasingly multi-disciplinary practice today.

Ice 4, 2018, (ink and acrylic on gessoed wood)

In the Ice series of paintings Simpson layers the appropriated imagery and Associated Press photographs of ice glaciers and smoke with nebulous washes of saturated ink which partially obscure the source material. The smoke plumes signal upheaval and discord in nature and society, in reference, perhaps, to images of riots following police brutality past and present that Simpson has more explicitly illustrated in other related works. Barely discernible strips of newsprint allude to wider issues in society. Here, as elsewhere, the artist is sparing with colour; her disciplined palette consists of inky blacks, greys and a startling blue, contributing to an atmosphere of bristling movement. Deftly navigating the territory between figuration and abstraction, these paintings cut through the calculated glamour of magazine imagery with the brute force of the natural world. As the artist explains, 'conceptually this is in tandem with what I'm experiencing emotionally but also what I feel is going on politically: the idea of being relentlessly consumed'.

looking closer

Ice 6, 2018, (ink and acrylic on gessoed fiberglass)

Ice 3, 2018, (ink and acrylic on gessoed fiberglass)

Ice 5, 2018, (ink and acrylic on gessoed fiberglass)

Ice 7, 2018, (ink and acrylic o gessoed fiberglass)

Woman on Snowball, 2018, (Styrofoam, plywood, plaster, steel, epoxy coating)

An oversized snowball made of plaster on top of which a small female figure perches precariously. The combination of the absurd and the association of the expression 'to snowball', alludes to an unstoppable force that gathers momentum with the potential to slip out of control. For Simpson, ice has a significance since it recalls the expression to be 'on ice', or in prison, as well as Eldridge Cleaver's 1968 book 'Soul on Ice', written while Cleaver was incarcerated in Folsom State Prison. Prison is where one does time and is an enforced form of isolation from wider society. And yet, Simpson remarks, 'there's something about ice that has come into the work that indicates either freezing or endurance'.

12 stacks, 2018, (Ebony and Jet magazines, poly shelves, bronze, plaster, glass)

The found image continues to be a source for Simpson's work. Here, she incorporates photographs from her collection of vintage Ebony and Jet magazines from the 1950s to the 1970s. These publications focused on subjects of lifestyle, culture and politics from an African-American perspective and are credited with chronicling black lives and issues so sorely under-represented elsewhere in the media. The material has both a personal and a wider cultural significance for Simpson who describes how the magazines, 'informed my sense of thinking about being black in America and are both a reminder of my childhood and a lens through which to see the past fifty years of history'.

The theme of natural elements appears as a metaphor throughout this exhibition in the form of sculptural works of 'ice' blocks made of glass.

The stack of magazines are glimpsed through the thick glass cubes that distort the cover imagery and lend an impression of being anchored or weighed down. 

Montage, 2018, (ink and acrylic on gessoed wood)

5 Properties, 2018, (Ebony and Jet magazines, poly sleeves, bronze, plaster, glass)

Double Stacked, 2018, (bronze, glass)

Sally MacDonell

One of MacDonell's exquisite heads. They are created from tubes and slabs of clay, squeezed and pinched together. The figures are finished with copper oxide, underglaze stains and coloured engobes, fired up to 1186' for the final glaze firing.

Liquid Light, Christiane Baumgarter

Liquid Light by Christiane Baumgartner, at Alan Cristea Gallery, Mayfair.

Liquid Light depicts ever-changing natural phenomena including the effect of sunlight, moonlight and electric light on landscape scenes.

Baumgartner combines contemporary technology in the form of digital video and photography alongside time-honoured wood-cutting techniques. In addition to film stills and photography, the images depicted in her works have also been sourced from magazines and the internet. Once Baumgartner has selected an image that she wants to use, she modifies it on a computer using line grids and then transfers it onto a wooden support (often plywood), carving the image by hand. Baumgartner can work on some woodblocks for up to several months before printing an edition.

'Translating a still image into a woodcut makes the work a powerful instrument demanding an emotional, retinal and physical response. Through my selection and transformation of a single frame, I create a unique woodcut that brings experience and weight to an otherwise unexperienced moment'. Christiane Baumgartner.

This was a very frustrating post to do. There was a lot of reflection from the gallery lights and because these woodcuts are so delicate, the photographs came out very distorted. I was consequently unable to use most of the photographs I took.

Lindenallee, 2018, (woodcut)

Lindenallee, 2018, (woodcut)

The Wave, 2017, (woodcut)

Reminiscent of Hokusai's 19th century woodcut, this shows a colossal cresting wave, depicted an instant before crashing downwards.

Nordlicht, 2018, (woodcut)

This one of a set of four, records the sun setting through a wooded landscape recorded over a period of nine minutes at 5.59, 6.00, 6.01 and 6.08.

Nordlicht,  taken at 5.59

Kleine Landschaft, 2018, (woodcut)

With and Without Thinking - Ultramarine, 2018, (etching)

Again, this is part of a set of six, but only one was successfully photographed.

Weisse Sonne, 2017 (woodcut)

Based on her own photograph, Weisse Sonne is what you see when you look directly at sunlight. Schwarze Sonne, which I could not include, depicts the image that gets imprinted on your retina after looking directly at sunlight.

The kitchen project - 2

The beginning of day 3. Most of the kitchen has been gutted.





The hob is still here but once the electricians start work later today, this will go in the skip.





The fridge is still in place because there's basically nowhere to put it. The house is full of stuff, everywhere, but the major problem (as predicted) is the dust. Our house is a building site, and even though every evening we clean as much as we can, it all comes back the next morning. We have bought an ioniser to help me breathe and I carry it with me from room to room - it helps, but then, as I leave the room I'm in, I start coughing and having difficulty breathing.

The cleaning we'll have to do when this is over is going to be monumental. I hope our wardrobes and chests of drawers will escape the dust - we had to clean all of our clothes the other times we had work done to the house, and I am dreading it, but there you go.... No gain without gain, to use a cliché.

They had difficulty pulling out the tiles in the kitchen and in the process three tiles in the hall broke. We have no replacement tiles, and certainly do not want to have to re-tile the hall, so this is an issue we'll have to try and sort out.


On top of the team who work on the kitchen, (four workers today), there is another builder here, who is doing other bits and pieces: we had some water damage on one of the ceilings following the heavy snow we had just before we went to Greece. This was re-painted yesterday. We are also doing some work in the main bathroom, replacing the bath with a shower. Messy work again, and consequently, the whole house is affected. Chaos everywhere.

Heron

The kitchen project - 1.

We took the decision in May. We could not put it off any longer despite my abhorrence of having builders in the house. (We have done this three times before and I have always hated it). The kitchen was very tired looking. Furthermore, half the cupboards would not close properly anymore, one of the ovens had stopped working, we had no grill, the hob was temperamental and I always hated the brown we had inherited from the previous owners.

So here is a series of photographs I took of our kitchen before all the upheaval started.

Going round the room anti-clockwise

The welsh dresser with some of my blue and white, the antique plate rack and a shelf with some of the antique glass I have been collecting in the last 30 years.

I will miss a lot of the things I have been collecting over the years.

 All of this, is no more...

Last Monday British Gas came, removed the old, temperamental, inefficient boiler

and the new boiler was installed. I would like to take this opportunity to say how impressed we were with British Gas, with their professionalism and efficiency. 

The days before Easter and Easter itself were spent clearing everything out.

I have lost count of the number of boxes we took to charity shops but I have the feeling that we have still kept too many things - I foresee lots more trips to the charity shops when we start putting the new kitchen together.

Tomorrow, the nightmare begins: the whole room is going to be gutted making way for new units, new floor, new everything. I am dreading it. I am dreading the disruption, the mess, the chaos, having to live without a kitchen for four weeks, and most of all, the dust, as it's one of the things that triggers my asthma.

I am however, focusing on the future, and look forward to our new kitchen.