HANDSHAKE 5 consists of 12 artists from the previous HANDSHAKE Projects selected by the CODA team (NL).
This one-year specialist programme focuses primarily on DIALOGUES and RESPONSES.
The first of the two exhibition tasks is to go in dialogue with selected artworks from the CODA museum (NL) jewellery collection (Apeldoorn, the Netherlands). Exhibition essay text, read here.
The second task is to respond to the selected spaces at the TE URU museum (Auckland, New Zealand).
Both projects inspire different approaches and require experimentation and artistic focus. Each artist is supported throughout the year by a coaching team, including Roseanne Bartley (online coach and masterclass tutor), Sian van Dyk (studio visit coach), and Vernon Bowden with James Anderson (technical support team coach). At the end of each month, the HANDSHAKERS provide a blog post on their progress. See below for how that process developed over time.
HS5 NEWS & BLOG:
Kōrerorero
There are so many times in making when talking through your work helps to clarify/solidify your thought processes- provided you're talking with the right person. I had my kōrerorero with Sian van Dyke from the Dowse Art Museum and it offered just that. In explaining...
Code for CODA
Looking at the use of knitting in relation to war has revealed some other really interesting connections. I have to thank my son for the first discovery – he was listening to a history podcast in the background and caught the words knitting and espionage. Strange...
Playing through the holes
Playing with holes
In a 1937 interview with Henry Moore, who famously made holes a feature of his sculpture, he said: The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass. Sculpture in air is...
Moving from plans to action
In the context of jewellery, Onno believed the hole was the essence. "The hole is the inside of the piece, it touches the body, is intimate and personal - and that, according to Boekhoudt, was what it was all about, although with jewellery it is, in fact, always from...
“It should be something like breathing”
My initial plan for CODA was quite simple: 1. Play 2. Chinese Whispers 3. No Material Hierarchy. HS blogging requires a reveal of your initial plan in this public forum - useful in relation to deadlines and an audience being able to follow your progress, only...
Leftovers/CODA
My work does not leave me; it travels alongside me in whatever else I am doing in my life. Recently, while retreating on the Coromandal and working on a selection of ‘multiples’ for Coda, I was reminded of one of my notes, that my making process is not about...
Tata nei – getting closer
The many decisions that go through the making...adding and subtracting...where to finish when to stop and will there be an ending, a completion. Titles and names have been given, they relate to the process through making and contemplation. This piece 'Ki a wai?' to...
Kainga-Home
Kainga -Home Home: tastes, smells, sounds and sensations, we carry these as we travel as we move from place to place. I have been looking at sound, soundscapes, mix tapes, layers of sound, beats, lyrics. Songs, waiata that transport us through time and space, that...
Knitting
Social history has provided me with a rich source of ideas and material for making work. The rapid changes in the way we live our lives are a part of human progress, but the speed with which we embrace changing fashions and technologies sometimes comes at the cost of...
The Virtual Craftsman
All three of the pieces I am to respond to would have had to have been designed/modeled in CAD (Computer Aided Design) software. I have taught myself how to use a couple of pieces of software via online tutorials on youtube etc.. It can be a real challenge using the...
Painting
Artists using order and repetition often create works that result in large arrangements that can seem obsessive and even claustrophobic. Lam de Wolf use of splashes of paint and the fraying of torn fabric offer the opportunity for disorder to invade the rigidity of...
Te Uru
Image- car with stickers. someone who loves bling ’New ! Bigger and shinier than ever’ there’s so many teasers to entice the love of bling. Colour, shape, size, all require lots of play. Sound, hierarchy, size, consumerism, flashy, gaudy it just keeps on giving. I...
Coda
Marquette - brass, spray paint, hot glue This is me having an easy play for an outcome that I would like to do using mild steel and wire by wielding. I’ve got to say there’s something in using a hot glue gun!! Essence is something I have found in all three of my...
Experience as Communicator/Te Uru
Feature Image: Memory – Family photo, Artist Unknown I am reminded of a family memory and photo of my family activating an installation that I think was on Te Papa’s Roof top in the mid-2000s. Te Uru Intent; Create an intimate and personal encounter with work that...
The True Nature/CODA
Chip off the ol’ Block Chippy Prone to error Fallible These are some of my most recent notes taken as I work, thoughts inspired by my making, a select few that resonate with me more than others. At the earlier stages of this investigation of process, Roseanne Bartley...
Best laid plans, structure and throwing it all out the window.
I mapped out a structured way to respond to this project and Onnos selected pieces, I planned to make a series of responses to each work - focusing on these in three parts....one piece at a time. So orderly! This format may have come from the added pressure of...
Time and time we run out of time
Why did I investigate into plastic when the original work by Dorothea Prühl is made from wood and called ‘Tiere’ (animals). What seems to be contradictory is based on me growing up in the controversy time of abundance of plastic toys and my parents’ love and concern...
The ‘Poly’ Petting Zoo
The 'Poly' Petting Zoo While developing work for the exhibitions at CODA, Appledorn and TeUru, Auckland I got drawn into the multitudinousness world of plastics. A topic as complex as the abundance of different plastics in our daily lives and also one of the major...
Art you can dismantle
The showing of Eva Rothschild's, Kosmos, at the Wellington City Gallery couldn't have happened at a better time for me. I've already been looking at her work intently over the last few months so the opportunity to see it in person is excellent. While the above work,...
Packaging
If you were in any doubt who specific toys were targeted to, take a look at the packaging. Let's look at statistics of engineers relatively recently in the US (since there’s a few meccano boxes specifically for engineering). Women account for 47% of the...
Plastic fantastic
The first plastic was developed in 1869. It was called celluloid and one of its first uses was to produce a white billiard ball (to replace ivory). Bakelite shortly followed. Oil was cheap, and the toy industry was gradually taken over. It was also very flammable. It...
A selective brief history of children’s toys #2
Pre-war. Toys were made of wood, fabric, die-cast metals. Toys generally reflected the perceptions of society. Most came with gender values, designed to socialise children to behave with the gender expectations of their society (childhood by design). Some of the most...
One more grid
One of the sessions during Roseanne Bartley’s workshop at the beginning of the year was based on the idea of using a list of verbs as the basis for working with one of the materials we had brought. Having a list of words (materials, colours, times, actions) as the...
A walk can be a necklace…
I once read an interview with a (Scandinavian?) jeweller who said "a walk can be a necklace". They referred to the boost of getting into nature for body, mind and spirit; like jewellery, but worn on the inside. Later, I drove myself crazy trying to trace the article,...
Mahi mahia – doing the work
The processes of creating are different each time I tackle a project. They can often start the same..materials being often a starting point. With the Coda pieces, it makes life a bit easier? different at least to be able to have a conversation and dialogue with...
Beget
For CODA I've been exploring ideas around genealogy, genetics and family trees. What kinship do my pieces share with the three original works they are responding to? How many branches of the family tree separate them and what are the different lineages that connect...
Melting Moments
While developing the work in response to the artist chosen by CODA Museum I got a little sidetracked... or not? The work will be around the contemporary interpretation/ response therefore current political and environmental issues made their way into the developing...
Interior Space/Te Uru
Thoughts becoming Thoughts/CODA
“For no thought can be thought before it is thought, and thinking a thought has a certain element of materiality to it, found within speech and writing. Contrary to Aristotle’s Peri hermenaias, where speech is a sign of thought and writing is a sign of speech, such...
iii
Wherever I look things seem to appear in threes... even when I'm not aware of it... i am i . you are you . .
I’ve been thinking….
Susan Collis, When We Loved, 2017 Thinking about space as led me to look at some artists who make interesting use of space. Susan Collis’s exhibition When we loved you best of all, 2017 doesn’t look like an exhibition. The room appears vacant except for some odd...
Indulgence with Question Marks
Dorothea Prühl 'Tiere' 1999 What makes this work so appealing to me? Even looking at Dorothea’s work again and again it doesn’t lose its attractiveness. What causes the appeal and therefore the connection? Those were the questions that kept coming up engaging with...
The trinity of artists – CODA
The works I've been given to respond to are made by a trinity of artists I've long admired. It's a daunting prospect, but an invigorating one. It'd be daunting enough to respond to each artists' work in isolation, but to respond to them in concert with each other is...
Te Uru – Diaspora
Title: Diaspora I intend to make a series of work 3-5 pieces with a sound component. I will be researching the theme and concept of diaspora it is used in a contemporary context to describe indigenous/native people who live away from their homeland for one reason or...
Nga ahua – shapes
When I choose the pieces from the coda collection the most prominent attraction for me was the shapes of the main pendants and then the materials they were made from. Therefore I began to explore the shapes the round convex matte object of Ruudt Peters, how would this...
making actions (in three parts)
making actions (in three parts)...... which will overlap I'm sure. part one - currently thinking of Onno's joined works; repair, adjust, improve, reconstruct, replace, mend, reform, substitute. I often start in object samples that work their way into jewellery form...
CERAMIC EXPLORATIONS
One thing that all three pieces selected by coda have in common is that they are 3d printed or contain a printed element so 3d printing and the digital path is also the way I will go.The Dunedin School of Art where I work has recently purchased a massive ceramic 3d...
Totem – Te Uru
I've been working on the idea of creating a series of modern "totems". This raises the question of cultural appropriation for me. While I won't be using motifs from any culture apart from my own, even the term "totem" sits uncomfortably with me. The issue is that I...
Dissection/CODA
I am searching for a truth to my materials. How do the materials make me do what I do to them; how does process dictate form? Currently, I have been making notes as I work with the intention of understanding what makes me do to a material, what I do. Dissection is an...
Backtrack/Te Uru
My understanding of the term ‘Actants’ comes mostly from Bruno Latour’s, Technology is Society Made Durable, where his initial engagement with the reader describes a scenario of European hotels displaying notices to remind patrons to return their room keys on...
Coda
Balance , colour and particularly the joins have interested me in each of the three artist selected from Coda. I mentioned I wanted to find out what that extra something each artist adds to there work. Paul Adie inspired me to look closely at joins. I have become very...
Te uru
Further research into bling bling- turning it on its head. reflect, detracts, mirror where do I identify -more or less . With low brow bling or high brow. Or can you have both? im also interested in using bling as a onomatopoeia . How can I make a piece for the body...
Another grid
In my spare time (lunch is over-rated) I made a necklace that responds to the Google translation of the Dutch that described one of Lam de Wolf’s necklaces. I put the description of my necklace through the translator: Ketting gemaakt van stof bedekt trouw met...
A selective brief history of children’s toys #1
Most anthropologists seem to agree that children’s toys have always had an educational element to them. The education is usually gender specific (no surprise here) – weapons and tools for the boys and dolls and cooking implements for the girls, whatever era we’re...
Making a start
THE YEAR THAT IS HS5: Handshake5 comprises a masterclass with Roseanne Bartley and a series of coaching sessions with Roseanne, Vernon Bowden, James Anderson and Sian van Dyk, all to support the making of work for two exhibitions occurring later this year. The first,...
First Steps: Te Uru visit
For Te Uru Waitakere we're each to make work that responds to the gallery itself. I visited the building to scope out the spaces where we might be showing. The gallery is emphatically NOT a white cube. Behind the copper frontage are mezzanines, voids and vistas (both...
First Steps: CODA pairings
For CODA we're each to make a body of work that dialogues with three pieces in the museum collection. My conversation partners are two very different artists; Lam de Wolf (who creates process-based works, often interactive projects) and Reka Fekete (a maker of...
Mind the gap
The starting point of the work I am going to make for Te Uru is Billy Apple's The Cut Away. To quote from Te Uru's website, 'This is part of an ongoing series, started in the 1970s, in which Apple has critiqued the ways that exhibition spaces function. In doing so, he...
Pendent opera interrupta
A month ago I started a new job. For four weeks I have been in full-time training which has meant that any progress on my Handshake work has been unwillingly short-changed. For four weeks I have been coming home during the week and slumping on the sofa. staring...