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Out of the diary ashes, some drawings made with charcoal...

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Out of the diary ashes, some drawings made with charcoal...

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Diaries, ages 14-30...

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Burning old photos... pre-digital I learnt how to print in the darkroom and had boxes of photographs of varying quality that I'd kept.  Time to make some space... I couldn't send them to the landfill, I had visions of someone finding them and making an art project with them :)

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(Image: Getty Images)

Material from the fire-damaged Glasgow School of Art has been used to fund the historic building's £32 million restoration.

Sir Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Simon Starling are among the 25 international artists who were sent material from the badly burnt Mackintosh library - and the works they have created will now be sold at auction for the Mackintosh Campus Appeal.

Other artists taking part include Grayson Perry, Cornelia Parker, Jenny Saville, David Shrigley and Douglas Gordon as well as The Chapman Brothers and Sir Peter Blake, with seven Turner prize winners among them.

Each artist was sent a piece of debris specifically chosen for them with a note telling them what it was, where it was from and explaining the concept of the auction.

Perry, who has made a ceramic with the words "Art is dead. Long live Art", said: "It's a tragedy. It's the most famous art school building in Britain. It's also the masterpiece of Mackintosh. It's a double tragedy.

"I was very excited when I received the box of charcoal. I had an idea almost immediately and the idea of making an urn was an obvious thing to do. The idea of memorialising or celebrating the difficulty - honouring the wound. It's something I'm trying to do. Move on and make the most of it.

"I really like the idea of using the charcoal from the fire. I thought it was very clever. It's also fresh - it's not something that has come up before. We've all been asked to do T-shirts, knickers and mugs - endless charity rounds. I get about two a week."

The project, titled Ash To Art, was created by communications agency J. Walter Thompson London in collaboration with The Glasgow School of Art Development Trust.

The works will be on display at Christie's in London's King Street from March 3-7 and will be auctioned during the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale on March 8 with the proceeds donated to The Mackintosh Campus Appeal.

Each of the pieces, covering a range of practices including sculpture, photography, drawing and painting, has been created using remains from the fire, from charred timbers and debris to books and furniture.

They include Kapoor's wood fragments in a red perspex box and Gordon's burnt wood cast in bronze.

Students were preparing for their degree shows in May 2014 when flames engulfed the Grade A-listed Charles Rennie Mackintosh building .

The blaze caused significant damage to the west wing including the loss of the celebrated Mackintosh Library.

So far the Mackintosh Campus Appeal has raised £18.5 million towards its target.

Professor Tom Inns, director of the GSA, said: "It has been a pleasure to work with the creative team at J. Walter Thompson London over the last two years on this imaginative initiative that will help in our efforts to raise the £32m required to make our vision a reality."

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Artists use material from Glasgow School of Art fire to help restore it

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Material from the fire-damaged Glasgow School of Art has been used to fund the historic building's £32 million restoration. Sir Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Simon Starling are among the 25 international artists who were sent material from the badly burnt Mackintosh library - and the works they have created will now be sold at auction for the Mackintosh Campus Appeal.

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Interview here >
https://charlottephilby.com/features/the-interview-marie-sjovold/

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Plans For Other Days

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2004 - 2012

"Peter Puklus is an example of a modern documentary author. Questions of an involved or not involved view, an approach based on revealing beauty, or rather importance of daily, even banal things − all that was solved before. The generation of Puklus can now focus on the complexity of documentary work. Everything around can be a subject." Zuzana Lapitkova

The title of this work refers to the radius which defines his closer environment of people. About his work he says: "I collect the portraits of the people around me. I map and document those who are close to me in one way or another (I collect memories). Slowly I will get to everybody. Relatives or friends, the important thing is that the photograph can be the symbol of my relationship to them. Or the relationship of the people in the photograph. Or that personal secret, one's eyes may reveal. I capture a moment, the magic of which lies in trust; intimacy and photography, in other words, the story of love, friendship and identity."

Installation shots:
>One and a half meter, Robert Morat Gallery, Berlin, Germany 4 February - 7 May 2016

This project has been published in book form at Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany.

Author: Bill Kouwenhoven
Artist: Peter Puklus

Hardcover
17 x 21,2 cm
96 pages
63 b/w and color illustrations
English
ISBN 978-3-86828-279-5
35 Euro + 6 Euro worldwide shipping
2012

Signed

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2004 - 2012 "Peter Puklus is an example of a modern documentary author. Questions of an involved or not involved view, an approach based on revealing beauty, or rather importance of daily, even banal things − all that was solved before. The generation of Puklus can now focus on the complexity of documentary work.

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Starting a PGCert HE in Creative Education

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Online residency that I've been a part of for 2 years. A supportive peer to peer network of mid-career artist/photographers from the UK and Canada.

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Launching September. 2 images from the Domestic Portfolio series are included.

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Did some moving around of stuff, laid out the table, shot some images on phone, cut out figures from phone photo of 'Play Camp'.

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Mary Kelly, Post Partum Document

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"It's good to have a vision. Even if it's flawed, or turns out to be not what you expected." Mary Kelly would know. As one of the world's foremost feminist artists, she has pursued hers relentlessly for 45 years. It gives her a long view of the feminist movement that is refreshingly upbeat. "Something very wonderful has happened. If you look at how men engage with their children, it's totally different. My husband Ray was the only man with a child in a backpack at the big demonstrations in the 70s. He used to get wolf-whistled picking our son up from school."

When she started out, just getting heard required a shock to the system. In the mid-70s, her installation at the ICA, Post-Partum Document, analysed her newborn son's development, their emotional bond, his early attempts at writing - and framed and hung his stained nappies on the gallery walls. "On display at the ICA ... dirty nappies!" ran the Standard's outraged headline.

But Kelly was less interested in provoking the tabloids than adding a new voice to conceptual art. Something was missing, she felt, from the work made by these mostly male Americans up to that point. Her companion piece Antepartum, a looped film of her pregnant abdomen with her child kicking beneath the skin, hammered this point home. Today, it's shown alongside minimalists such as Richard Serra or Donald Judd, only hers is a minimalism with a human relationship at its core.

It may have been Kelly's education that led her to challenge the establishment. She began conventionally, studying painting outside Florence. But her first job was in Beirut at the American-Lebanese University, where she met francophone intellectuals and pored over the ideas of Sartre and Lacan. When war arrived in Lebanon, she moved to Paris, just in the time for the protests of '68. From there to London, for postgrad work at St Martin's art school. The atmosphere in London added the final piece of her radical makeup: she joined a commune, met her husband Ray, also an artist, and entered the women's movement - an experience she describes as utterly transformative.

Today she and Ray share an immaculate white house in the hills of Bel Air. They greet us at the door, and she surprises the photographer by taking his hand to show him around. I follow Ray into the living room, which looks like a fine exhibition of Bauhaus furniture. They bought the place when Mary became a professor at UCLA.

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Conceptual art with an emotional bond at its core ... Post-Partum Document (1978) showed Kelly's son's earliest attempts at writing. Photograph: Image courtesy Collection Arts Council England.

Kelly does not conform to any cliche of a radical feminist. She has a zen-like calm. She speaks quietly, with sentences punctuated only by a persistent, but rather elegant, cough. Her hair is arranged in a beautiful crown, like something a Dutch master would paint. Now in her 70s, she remains cutting-edge, and speaks fluently of social media, screengrabs and drone warfare. Perhaps her only tell is the critical theory that peppers her speech. The Post-Partum work was "overdetermined", she says, by her pregnancy during an earlier work, Nightcleaners - a study of the women cleaning London office buildings. The groups involved in that project give a real flavour of the time. She was part of a women's-lib cadre called the History Group, and was assigned to work with the Berwick Street film collective to support unionisation. Nightcleaners was intended as a propaganda film, but became a seminal work of documentary art.

"The women took those jobs because they had to look after the children during the day. That began what we called the sexual-social division of labour that underpinned inequality." But Kelly felt that the male-dominated labour movement was failing to see the real issue. "It wasn't as simple as having someone else take care of the children. You had to understand what the pleasure was in the relationship with the child."

She seized on the idea of non-essentialist feminism, that a woman's place shouldn't be physically determined, but created by her experiences. The Post-Partum Document is an analysis not just of all a mother is, but the process by which she becomes those things. Suddenly those dirty nappies seem less shock tactic and more reality check.

Kelly's work has always retained its personal, emotional payload. For some years, her primary medium has been lint - you know, from a tumble dryer. Like the dirty nappies, the material can seem like an invitation to scoff, but it's designed to emphasise the workaday. Dryer lint is, of course, more familiar to most people than bronze, canvas or oils. The sad humour is there, too: she uses the fluff to make ephemeral war memorials, which often display the words of victims of violence. Kelly is painstaking in her attempts to articulate these voices. In a recent work, Dicere, she prints the testimony of two Afghan children whose grandmother was killed in a drone attack. "They had these phrases that you couldn't translate easily from the Urdu," she says. "Like, 'She was the string that holds pearls together.' The language does something very important to me.''

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Emotional payload ... Circa 1968, a 2004 lintwork by Mary Kelly. Photograph: Image courtesy artist and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates.

Her larger lintworks require 10,000 cycles of the dryer. I imagine a team of assistants manning banks of machines, but Kelly corrects me. "I wish there were," she says, "but it's just a peculiarity of this one" and she points to the laundry room just beyond her studio.

I ask her if it's all been worthwhile. Despite the protest movement, decades of political art and legislation, perhaps the victims of injustice have merely changed. If she were to make Nightcleaners now, wouldn't the people be immigrants, lower paid, and no closer to unionisation? "Well, nothing is ever finally solved," she says. "One would be crazy to think so."

Mary Kelly in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist is at Tate Modern, 22 May 2015. See Kelly's work at A Voice Remains, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery to 30 May 2015
Topics

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10,000 revolutions: meet Mary Kelly, the mother of all feminist artists

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"It's good to have a vision. Even if it's flawed, or turns out to be not what you expected." Mary Kelly would know. As one of the world's foremost feminist artists, she has pursued hers relentlessly for 45 years. It gives her a long view of the feminist movement that is refreshingly upbeat.

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And sometimes you feel a little embarrassed to ask. So as I had the time today, and her name was mentioned in BJP I started looking her up....

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Gloria Steinem is a writer, political activist, and feminist organizer. She was a founder of New York and Ms. magazines, and is the author of The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off, My Life on the Road, Moving Beyond Words, Revolution from Within, and Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, all published in the United States, and in India, As If Women Matter. She co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus, the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Free to Be Foundation, and the Women's Media Center in the United States. As links to other countries, she helped found Equality Now, Donor Direct Action, and Direct Impact Africa. For her writing, Steinem has received the Penney-Missouri Journalism Award, the Front Page and Clarion awards, the National Magazine Award, the Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of Writers Award from the United Nations, and the University of Missouri School of Journalism Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism. In 1993, her concern with child abuse led her to co-produce an Emmy Award-winning TV documentary for HBO, Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories. She and Amy Richards co-produced a series of eight documentaries on violence against women around the world for VICELAND in 2016.In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. In 2019, she received the Freedom Award from the National Civil Rights Museum. She is the subject of Julie Taymor's recent biopic, The Glorias, released in Fall 2020.
Here's a bit more about Gloria's career:
In 1972, she co-founded Ms. magazine, and remained one of its editors for fifteen years. She continues to serve as a consulting editor for Ms., and was instrumental in the magazine's move to join and be published by the Feminist Majority Foundation. In 1968, she had helped to found New York magazine, where she was a political columnist and wrote feature articles. As a freelance writer, she was published in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and women's magazines as well as for publications in other countries. She has produced a documentary on child abuse for HBO, a feature film about the death penalty for Lifetime, and been the subject of profiles on Lifetime and Showtime.

Ms. Steinem helped to found the Women's Action Alliance, a pioneering national information center that specialized in nonsexist, multiracial children's education, and the National Women's Political Caucus, a group that continues to work to advance the numbers of pro-equality women in elected and appointed office at a national and state level. She also co-founded the Women's Media Center in 2004. She was president and co-founder of Voters for Choice, a pro-choice political action committee for twenty-five years, then with the Planned Parenthood Action Fund when it merged with VFC for the 2004 elections. She was also co-founder and serves on the board of Choice USA (now URGE), a national organization that supports young pro-choice leadership and works to preserve comprehensive sex education in schools. She is the founding president of the Ms. Foundation for Women, a national multi-racial, multi-issue fund that supports grassroots projects to empower women and girls, and also a founder of its Take Our Daughters to Work Day, a first national day devoted to girls that has now become an institution here and in other countries. She was a member of the Beyond Racism Initiative, a three-year effort on the part of activists and experts from South Africa, Brazil and the United States to compare the racial patterns of those three countries and to learn cross-nationally.

As a writer, Ms. Steinem has received the Penney-Missouri Journalism Award, the Front Page and Clarion awards, National Magazine awards, an Emmy Citation for excellence in television writing, the Women's Sports Journalism Award, the Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of Writers Award from the United Nations, the James Weldon Johnson Medal for Journalism, the University of Missouri School of Journalism Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism and the 2015 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. In addition to her bestsellers, her writing also appears in many anthologies and textbooks, and she was an editor of Houghton Mifflin's The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History.

Ms. Steinem graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College in 1956, and then spent two years in India on a Chester Bowles Fellowship. She wrote for Indian publications, and was influenced by Gandhian activism. She also received the first Doctorate of Human Justice awarded by Simmons College, the Bill of Rights Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, the National Gay Rights Advocates Award, the Liberty award of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Ceres Medal from the United Nations, and a number of honorary degrees. Parenting magazine selected her for its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995 for her work in promoting girls' self-esteem, and Biography magazine listed her as one of the 25 most influential women in America. In 1993, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. In 2014, she received The Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal Award and in 2013, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor. Rutgers University is now creating the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies.

In 1993, her concern with child abuse led her to co-produce and narrate an Emmy Award winning TV documentary for HBO, "Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories." With Rosilyn Heller, she also co-produced an original 1993 TV movie for Lifetime, "Better Off Dead," which examined the parallel forces that both oppose abortion and support the death penalty. She is also host and executive producer of the Emmy-nominated VICE series, .

Gloria has been the subject of three television documentaries, including HBO's Gloria: In Her Own Words, and she is among the subjects of the 2013 PBS documentary MAKERS, a continuing project to record the women who made America. She was the subject of The Education of a Woman, a biography written by Carolyn Heilbrun.

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Gloria Steinem is a writer, political activist, and feminist organizer. She was a founder of New York and Ms. magazines, and is the author of The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off , My Life on the Road , Moving Beyond Words , Revolution from Within , and Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions , all published in the United States, and in India, As If Women Matter .

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Carmen Winant is an artist and writer based in Columbus, OH.

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Today was the first time in studio since lockdown/Rae's birth. Managed to read BJP and move a few things around. Ate quite a few snacks and fed Rae about 4 times. Not sure how productive I was but it felt so good to get out of the house and into a room of my own.

I have set up a table that I'm going to lay some things out on, then start pinning them up once I've got a flow/structure in my mind.

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Introducing simple, everyday objects can improve creativity, boost social and problem-solving skills and support inclusion.
"A 'loose parts' toy, is open-ended; children may use it in many ways and combine with other loose-parts through imagination and creativity. Nature, which excites all the senses, remains the richest source of loose parts."
Richard Louv, Author

If you any ideas to share, let us know at info@playscotland.org

Loose Parts Play - A Toolkit

The aim of the toolkit is that more children will have access to loose parts play and that adults in the play, early years and education sectors will feel more comfortable and confident about introducing loose parts play within their settings.

This updated edition offers:

a greater focus on skills that help adults to facilitate loose parts play sensitively and respectfully

more starting points to link loose parts play with education, curriculum, wellbeing, social and care contexts

a wider range of 'snapshots' and case studies illustrating real-life application of loose parts play theory in the field

more pages to print, photocopy and share

Who is the Toolkit for?

The Toolkit will be useful for:

people working directly with children and teenagers, in many types of setting

people in management and leadership roles

play and community associations and networks

"When children interact with loose parts, they enter a world of "what if" that promotes the type of thinking that leads to problem solving and theoretical reasoning. Loose parts enhance children's ability to think imaginatively and see solutions, and they bring a sense of adventure and excitement to children's play".
(Dale and Beloglovsky)

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Loose Parts Play - A Toolkit The aim of the toolkit is that more children will have access to loose parts play and that adults in the play, early years and education sectors will feel more comfortable and confident about introducing loose parts play within their settings.

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Baltic Street Adventure Playground is a young organisation, which was set up in 2013 by the art and architecture collective Assemble, and arts organisation Create, as a temporary and direct response to the lack of play space and out of school provision for community of children and families in Dalmarnock.

Local demand and the impact the project was able to have on children's day-to-day lives lead to a small management committee being formed from the temporary project team and existing volunteers, and, with on-going input from the children, work begun to make the project permanent.

The Community Interest Company which was established has a board of six, a staff team of four and a community of some 250 children . The organisation was developed using an incremental and responsive approach, which thoroughly involved the children every step of the way, from the development of the site to the appointment of the playworkers.

Throughout this process, the organisation has invested in relationships with families and neighbors. The collaborative culture and community spirit which has grown out of this has an enormous embedded value and is increasingly resilient. It has the potential to be an active and critical part of the area's future growth for many years to come.

The original project, including a package of capital works was funded as a project by a consortium of Glasgow City Council, Clyde Gateway Development Corporation and Creative Scotland.

It was concieved and delivered by Assemble, in collaboration with
Baltic Street Adventure Playground illustration by William Goldsmith.

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Baltic Street Adventure Playground is a young organisation, which was set up in 2013 by the art and architecture collective Assemble, and arts organisation Create, as a temporary and direct response to the lack of play space and out of school provision for community of children and families in Dalmarnock.

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"...personal testimony, mingled with research, and theory which derived from both". intro, x.

Resonates powerfully, deeply, I continue to try and read it....

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Cast, week 34 single pregnancy...

Do follow up shot with Rae (now 12 weeks old)

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https://www.instagram.com/timtopple/

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Cleaning out pockets before putting clothes in the wash - found some really beautiful little arrangements. T especially likes to give me things and makes collections in boxes throughout the day.... Could be visually interesting (one or two shots?)... I wonder how this will change over time.. the things they'll be interested in/by.

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Nan, Evie, Me, Mum (and Tommy on background vocals)

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Noticed repeated action in some photographs of me touching my eyes/tired/drained... kind of nice, can't hide it, I'm exhausted a lot!

Maybe collate and collage these?

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2Day's Monday - Whilst filming Mum started singing this song, she remembered it from her childhood. There's something about the repetition/order of domestic tasks that makes sense right now.

Why are they called The Scaffold? a bit ominous...

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Cut out arms/hands - negative space
Mother Vessel

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katharina bosse art photography portfolio portrait mother burlesque

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About This Show

Show Info:

Mother's Project is a podcast devoted to celebrating the relationship between motherhood and the creative work mothers do. I'm Ariel Lavery and throughout this podcast you'll hear me interview creative professional mothers, asking them about their personal experiences with becoming mothers and how their creative work has influenced that experience and vice versa. One thing I've learned since becoming a mother is that, although there are now many people telling their stories of parenthood and women vocalizing the difficulties of balancing career and motherhood, the celebration of motherhood in professional creative fields still remains a taboo subject. I hope to shift the conversation a bit. Let's shed light on what women do everyday and celebrate the difficulties and triumphs they experience.Read more "

Listen Whenever

Related Shows

Most Recent Episode

Bonus: Birth and Body in a Pandemic

In this bonus episode I learn from Carly Dothsuk, living in rural Western Kentucky, about what it's like being 8 months pregnant during this COVID-19 pandemic, and how she is preparing for her hospital birth. She speaks candidly about her mental health struggles early in pregnancy and why she is striving not to obsess over birth planning. We speak a lot about the focus on the body during pregnancy and how it relates to the focus on the body during this pandemic.

Read more "

Episodes of This Show

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mother's project is a podcast devoted to celebrating the relationship between motherhood and the creative work mothers do.

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Listen to Mother's Project episodes free, on demand. Mother's Project is a podcast devoted to celebrating the relationship between motherhood and the creative work mothers do. I'm Ariel Lavery and throughout this podcast you'll hear me interview creative professional mothers, asking them about their personal experiences with becoming mothers and how their creative work has influenced that experience and vice versa.

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Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption

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Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption

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Lisa Barrister

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A friend sent this link - very stylish! symmetrical, I can't help feeling they took longer than half an hour to construct though... and her house is so tidy! Still, beautiful shots, I'm left wondering what the relationship is between the items that make the sculpture and the form they express - maybe none. Certainly aesthetically pleasing.

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"... Pillars of home are ninety-eight balancing sculptures, made during my son's nap, when our home - the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom or even the stair case - became a studio for no more than thirty minutes at a time ..."

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Pillars of home are ninety-eight balancing sculptures, made during my son's nap, when our home - the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom or even the stair case - became a studio for no more than thirty minutes at a time

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Multimedia, screen print, alternative processes, textile material.

'Hybridity'
'My Hologram'

Uses woven textile, images found/archive/taken, thread, cyanotype. Critiques fashion industry textile waste.

http://www.zohraopoku.com/

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http://mc2.gallery/galleries/patricio-reig/

Can't find much in english about Patricio's work, he is showing in Buenos Aires at the moment. It seems to be more about the female form and ideal beauty in a conventional sense, so perhaps not so inspiring..

This series on gestures is visually stark, symmetrical, low contrast.

http://www.patricioreig.com/index.php?/-gestual/

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A metaphor for my stretching and protruding naval.

Govanhill, Glasgow.
October, 2019.

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The Pond.

http://www.adamjeppesen.com/#/the-pond-an-excert/

UNSEEN, Amsterdam, 2019.

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The Pond

Use of hand, traces thoughts on identity (self and collective human).
Hand as symbol - a reference to our own ID without a mirror (not really seeing). Expressions of hand, technique conveys feeling, separate from body/suspended in water, lifeless, lack consciousness.

Pond = Danish translation of marshy area of water that is still and doesn't move, absorbs history, things falling inside the pond, identity, things changing in society/humans, insecurity, what is inside the pond? what happens if you go inside the pond?

Installed in darker space, natural light only, compliments/like the pond.

Artists talking about exhibition here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcEagEC-Gn4

Photo at: UNSEEN. Amsterdam, September. 2019.

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Sun, salt, water, cyanotype.
Large scale abstract cyanotype.

“The elements that I employ in the process—waves, rain, wind, and sediment—leave physical inscriptions through direct contact with photographic materials.”

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Inky blues, frothy whites and occasional flecks of gold make up the color spectrum in Meghann Riepenhoff's breathtaking camera-less cyanotypes. Some still, some more dynamic and animated, her abstract prints capture the many moods of the mysterious and powerful force of nature that helped to create them: the ocean. Littoral Drift- a geological term used to describe the transportation of sand and gravel by wind-driven waves-is Riepenhoff's "collaboration" with the landscape and the ocean, in which she opens herself to chance and embraces the textures of nature into her working process.

Invented in 1842 by the English astronomer and photographic pioneer Sir John Herschel, the Cyanotype produces Prussian blue tones made by coating paper with an iron-salt solution, exposing it to light then washing it in water. Since its inception, many photographers over the years have used this process to explore their curiosity, most notably the botanist and photographer Anna Atkins, whose beautiful studies of nature made use of the direct contact between natural forms and the resulting photographic print. Taking it to the extreme, Riephenhoff's equally curious contemporary work strips photography back to its basics using only sun, salt and water to create her abstract, large-scale Cyanotypes. Coating huge sheets of paper with homemade Cyanotype emulsion, Riepenhoff plunges her blank canvases directly into the landscapes she is interested in.

Submerging pieces of photosensitive paper into the ocean, Riepenhoff's images bear the movement of the sea and extraordinary patterns of the sand, salt and seaweed contained within it. In her statement, the photographer comments: "The elements that I employ in the process-waves, rain, wind, and sediment-leave physical inscriptions through direct contact with photographic materials." From allowing fierce, violent waves to crash onto the paper to letting the shorelines' ebbs and flows tenderly caress it, Riepenhoff works with unpredictability of the elements to create a raw and physical impression of nature.

Each work is rooted in the specific moment it was made, its title detailing the location, date and conditions along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts where Riepenhoff usually makes work. Yet the photographer chooses to only partially fix her Cyanotypes, which means the remaining photosensitive chemicals continue reacting to the light and elements of their surroundings. In a state of perpetual becoming, the prints are living things-unstable, changing and mutating over time-that challenge the idea that the photograph fixes a moment in time.

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Littoral Drift - Photographs by Meghann Riepenhoff | Essay by Sophie Wright | LensCulture

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Inky blues, frothy whites and occasional flecks of gold make up the color spectrum in Meghann Riepenhoff's breathtaking camera-less cyanotypes. Some still, some more dynamic and animated, her abstract prints capture the many moods of the mysterious and powerful force of nature that helped to create them: the ocean.

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I'm currently 4 months pregnant with our third child.  Although I'm currently obsessed with images of missiles, I have a nagging sense that I should be more tuned into the changing landscape of my body and the impact it's having on me.

Turns out I'm just not that interested in documenting my body, but I do find the work of others interesting....

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Current

Birth - curated with Charlotte Jansen

Paula Rego, Rachel Howard, Boo Saville, Tracey Emin, Hester Finch, Charlotte Colbert, Sian Davey, Juno Calypso, Poulomi Basu, Maisie Cousins, Ying Ang, Elinor Carucci, Cynthia Cervantes & Travis Gumbs, Iringó Demeter, Madeline Donahue, Andi Gáldi Vinkó, Fergus Greer, Loie Hollowell, Anna Lukashevsky, Berber Theunissen, Agnès Varda, Hermione Wiltshire, Carmen Winant, Aviya Wyse

We all experience birth - and yet, unlike sex and death (art's favourite subjects) encounters with birth in contemporary art are rare. Birth is the universal subject - so why is it so obviously absent in contemporary art?

To put it down to the oppression of women's bodies would be a fundamental reason; but it's more complicated than that. Explicit and direct images of childbirth elicit profound emotional responses. Birth is universal, but it is also intensely private and individual. Artists are as likely to self-censor their work on the subject as galleries and museums are to shy away from presenting it in the public space. While safe expressions of birth include pregnancy, breastfeeding and ultrasound scans, depictions of the gruelling, transformative, violent, sexual, psychological and physical consequences of birthing a body from a body are controversial.

Birth is not, as visual culture would have us believe, always a happy experience. Whether women choose to give birth or not, our bodies are politically policed and defined by fertility; a whole industry has grown around it, from egg-freezing to surrogacy and IVF. From a prepubescent age we are taught to fear pregnancy, but later in life we learn it isn't something we can control. From first menstruation until menopause, women aren't ever truly free from the question of birth. Conventional ideas about birth are only part of the picture: miscarriage, abortion, and infertility remain taboo topics despite the huge number of people whose lives they affect.

It's these acute, candid, unflinching depictions of all aspects of birth that we wanted to bring together in Birth - an exhibition of twenty-four artists who are changing our perception of the most underexplored and underrated subject in art.

One of the artists who has exploded the silence around birth in contemporary art is Carmen Winant, the American artist whose monumental 2018 installation My Birth (now in the MoMA collection) of 2,000 found photographs of birth has changed the way we see this subject. Part of the success of Winant's project has been the way she has dovetailed all of the issues that birth brings up without avoiding the explicit and without narrowing its intellectual possibilities. A departure from her previous work, a new glass and found photos work by Winant is included in this show.

Hermione Wiltshire's image 'Terese in Ecstatic Childbirth' from Ina May Gaskin's book, shows a woman experiencing an orgasmic birth. While it's estimated that only 0.3 percent of women who go through labour will have an orgasm the phenomenon is provocative. Wiltshire's work proved unpopular with both midwifery professionals and feminists. The idea that we all emerge from the same place that our mothers experience pleasure - that mothers should experience pleasure where pain is expected - is an image that is divisive (embodied on Netflix in the form of Workin' Moms Kate.)

Another pivotal work in Birth is 'Blood Speaks', a VR film by Poulomi Basu, shot in Nepal, documenting the ritual exile of a young woman after birth - banished with her newborn for postpartum bleeding. It is an arresting, difficult work that is a protest and an accusation, and forces us to think about the way we treat women's bodies all over the world.

Cynthia Cervantes - one of two artists included in Birth who are due to deliver their first child during the show run - collaborated with her husband Travis Gumbs to photograph nine women, representing the nine months, culminating in a crowning image - the moment of transition from in to out. Cervantes began the series as a way to confront her own fears about pregnancy and birth, having experienced the death of her infant baby sister from SIDS, when Cervantes was only 13. The Crowning image is central to this exhibition: it is a direct gaze on something most people - men and women - do not dare to imagine. Cervantes invites us to all confront that deep-rooted fear and understand it.

The earliest work in Birth is perhaps one of the most radical: 'Diary of A Pregnant Woman (A Opera Mouffe)' by Agnes Varda, 1958. Varda made the 16-minute long film when she was pregnant, experiencing the grimy streets of La Mouffe in a completely different way through her transforming body. It's what the writer Maggie Nelson relates to in 'The Argonauts' as the queering of the body that pregnancy and birth bring about, but it's a perspective we're not used to seeing. Varda was no doubt ahead of her time in exploring pregnancy from behind the camera, as active subject, rather than passive object.

Birth articulates so many narratives about feminism, oppression, matriarchy, freedom, culture, gender, power and politics. It contains the most fundamental stories about humanity and human nature. Understanding this narrative about the beginning of life is the beginning of understanding the way we live life.

Charlotte Jansen

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Current Birth - curated with Charlotte Jansen Paula Rego, Rachel Howard, Boo Saville, Tracey Emin, Hester Finch, Charlotte Colbert, Sian Davey, Juno Calypso, Poulomi Basu, Maisie Cousins, Ying Ang, Elinor Carucci, Cynthia Cervantes & Travis Gumbs, Iringó Demeter, Madeline Donahue, Andi Gáldi Vinkó, Fergus Greer, Loie Hollowell, Anna Lukashevsky, Berber Theunissen, Agnès Varda, Hermione Wiltshire, Carmen Winant, Aviya Wyse We all experience birth - and yet, unlike sex and death (art's favourite subjects) encounters with birth in contemporary art are rare.

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upload to vimeo

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Archive Image: Circular sample taken from Kildonan archive - image of missile launch, South Uist (1964)

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Archive Image: Circular sample taken from Kildonan archive - image of missile launch, South Uist (1964)

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Since the initial case study where I discovered these images in the archive (see here) I've become rather obsessed with this singular image and keep returning to it, exploring how I might re-present it through cyanotype and screen print processes.

“From the narrower viewpoint of Gaelic culture, establishment of the rocket range in South Uist might be an act of arrogant vandalism: from the wider viewpoint it would be little worse that what was done, month by month, to the rest of suffering humanity.” (Davidson, 2016:83)

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A short investigation whilst visiting the Hebrides in summer 2018 has sparked a fascination with the military base and the launching of missiles off the Atlantic Coast.

Read the full case study here, produced as part of a case study for The Open College of the Arts.

This details the first part of the investigation. This column will detail further developments from those investigations.

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I had started thinking about the repetitive actions, how we learn co-ordination, motor skills. The part at the end where he helps clean up is quite skilful. The urge to create then destroy is part of the play. My hands look a bit like those of my sister and mum. It got me thinking about how I learnt co-ordination, my relationship with my mum.

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Although this one probably communicates the strain between us and the tiredness I was feeling to better effect.

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June 2018, I was caught up in the routine of childcare, many repetitive actions and movements on a daily basis. I wanted to document it but didn't have much energy to do so myself. My friend, photographer Julia Bauer, documented the typical morning activities for me. Of all the photographs she took, this one appeals to me most - something about being caught between them, paused in action, attention on cleaning  the floor.

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Today I spent several hours coating up paper and printing, only to be greeted with mixed results. This is the fourth time in recent months. I feel frustrated and I need to change it up.

This process isn't suited to my way of working (short, intense bursts, must be able to pick up/put down over long periods - weeks >months).

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Yet it gets hi-jacked by other life stuff such as packing, lists and recipes.

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You create a space to hold your thoughts on creative work and ongoing projects....