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This is a place on my street, a building site, in between the culture centre for music and drama, and another building which includes a hairdresser, pharmacy and the post office at the corner. This place used to be a house, or a block of flats I think. The company building there (they are just at the foundation stage now) have an advertisement on the street for new flats, in this future building, which will keep the old facade, as keeping with regulations.

I went inside this vast hole on a day during the week when most of the builders had finished for the day, just one man was still welding a big pipe and one man who was maybe the security guard. He didn't stop me, he said something but we didn't understand and he didn't seem to care. I wanted to go deep inside as far as possible without being too near the edges, to do a short dance. The dance was an attempt to feel the size of the hole around me, and to occupy the space that will be gradually built up and up with walls, floors, ceilings, levels.

It reminds me of going to a new supermarket where there used to an old one and the doors and aisles are in totally different places. I remember getting lost between the freezer aisles in Supermac in Belfast when I was very young. Supermac was demolished in 1994/5 when I was 8 or 9. When it was built in 1964 it was the first supermarket in Northern Ireland. Someone I know took some memorabilia from the demolition site, but I can't remember now if it was one of the letters from the plastic SUPERMAC sign, or a Supermac trolley. Anyway, the Forestside shopping complex was built on the site in 1997, housing Sainsbury's, Marks & Spencer, Boots, HMV, GAME, Dunnes Stores, Clarks Shoes, Monsoon, Accesorize, River Island, Warehouse, Carphone Warehouse, an underground carpark, and overground carpark, Toys'R'us, JJB Sports and more.

 

Weave

Weave backwards and forwards on wool strung between a barred window and a balcony railing with two girls. The neighbours have to either go under or around the courtyard the long way to get past.

Two women go under once each, one man goes under once, two men go the long way round twice and one of them goes out a second time by going under.

Mennydörgés és Villámlás

Mennydörgés és Villámlás means thunder and lightening in Hungarian.

Pineapple

I've been hypnotically drawing the pentagon shape (see previous post) into masses that look like: islands, molecules, chemical structures, maps. (These are some of the things people have said when I've shown them the drawings.) When I begin the drawings, I try not to dictate where the pentagon shape takes me, and I try to disengage from thinking of it as a drawing, and more of a trace left by a specific time and place combination that I happen to be in when I make the drawing.

Loose rules of drawing a complete pentagon each time, and not going over the lines of one pentagon with another are something I try to encourage my hand to remember, without it being a priority. The form it takes looks like quite a precise drawing, with a certain amount of concentration involved, with trying to work out how the shape will not appear to have too many gaps, but the overall process is a free and intuitive excercise for me.

After a while, maybe two weeks, of drawing these masses of pentagons, I started to find it difficult to get the same feeling of freeness in the process of the drawings. I began to experiment with colour, backgrounds, and even drawing on pebbles (pictures above). I think the initial surprise at the outcome and process being on a par with each other in terms enjoyment, had gone. I was looking to push the outcome without waiting at the process stage for an organic boost. I have included below a excerpt from a statement by an artist who works in a 'stream-of-consciousness' style of drawing:

Chris Natrop: For his works on paper, each piece is spontaneously created without the use of patterns or pre-drawing—this stream-of-consciousness approach is, in fact, the crux of the artist’s practice. Graphic silhouettes emerge from a meditative-channeling activated by the repetitive practice of cutting paper. Natrop works on enormous sheets of Lenox 100 drawing paper stretched out vertically on his studio wall. Wielding a standard utility knife, he spontaneously cuts away at the paper to create a hybrid of landscape imagery. Natrop’s free-form process of “knife drawing” reveals the negative space by removing the emptiness in-between forms. Often an amalgam of things previously observed, the graphic nature of the work becomes a freeze-frame of Natrop’s own direct surroundings revealing the artist’s particular sense of place. In many cases one feature will be multiplied over and over, re sulting in a dense layering of a single element.