Saturday 26 September 2009

About Time

Having our residency in an old jail really pronounces our ideas about time and how we choose to spend it. One of the important aspects of our project is time decompression. This morning we woke to blustery dustery gales outside, which would have made it difficult to ride our bikes anywhere. Although we were free to leave the building, we still felt like prisoners of sorts.

The This is Not Art festival starts this coming Thursday, so we are pressed for time to get some kind of exhibition of our work ready. Having a looming booming deadline is a great motivator, but it's also a great tool for compressing time. Today we tried to strike the balance of working towards something and drifting at the pace of our own clocks.

After the wind quietened down, we biked here and there, picking up rubbish as we went, ending up like storm-water inevitably does, at the beach.

Our goal was to pick up as much plastic as we could to add to what we have collected up until now:

The beaches here are so beautiful, one of the reasons we thought Newcastle the ideal place for an Artist as Family adventure. While the littlest artist busied himself with paying homage to the land art movement of the 60s,

we two older ones combed the beach for waste, looking much like our chickens at home do as they forage in the soil for grubs.

Here's a pic of what we found today, soaking in the sink when we got home.

4 comments:

  1. Wow,
    like postcard that unfold in a concertina,
    this is looking great
    and moving along at a beautiful pace..
    A pang of envy not to be up there
    just came over me.
    X

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  2. We wish you were up here too, Eddy. Collecting rubbish has never been so fun!

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  3. AaF, I'm fascinated that in both photographs of the plastic rubbish, it's so brightly coloured. Not at all faded by the sun and/or salt water.
    I'm certain that with your creativity you'll turn it into fantastic artwork. But the litterers didn't know that when they littered.
    If people treat their local beach with disdain, then one cannot feel anything but disappointment. And despair.
    I hope you novo-Novocastrians have a great week. xxx

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  4. hi there fd, thanks for your comments.

    it's true that much of the detritus is still bright, however there is much we have collected that has been out to sea, sun-faded and worn like driftwood. i did an hours roam between 6-7 this morning and pretty much cleaned the surface of the beach, but by the afternoon the aaf bought home another 5 bags just from that day's consumption – pretty relentless, i hate to think of the waste being generated in Australia behind closed doors if this is the extent of what people are publicly willing to display.

    p

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