Easter, Eggs, Box, Beach

Art Intervention News: in my eco-art endeavours I looked through the stuff we leave behind around the food we buy: our packaging. There was the egg-box. Up until

considering the egg-box, one of the things I had done was working with stones, or pebbles rather: little stones – and I had given some of them eyes, i.e. I glued googly eyes on them. So I thought, how about putting the stones in the empty egg-places in the egg-box! I could thereby make a critique of mass-production – how all these eggs, maybe sometimes even the organic ones, were produced in dodgy conditions. Replacing the eggs with stones would make ‘them’ perhaps look like a totally free range example!
Stones instead of eggs! Or Pebbs: pebbles posing as eggs! With or without eyes, the stones in the egg-box were a great idea I thought: those with eggs would have hatched, and those without ones hadn’t. If some have hatched and some hadn’t, it was also a thing of birth in the box! So the story grew already then.

And then I did it: I took the box to the beach near me, and filled it up with 6 pebbles where once there were half a dozen eggs, as planned – some of them with eyes put on, some without. As I was doing it I found, to my surprise, that they had a look of Easter Egg about them! And it so happened that this intervention coincided with the Easter season of now! This I hadn’t planned, I didn’t think to do an art intervention in an egg-box because it was Easter, I just thought of the box as a kind of package I hadn’t used before. It was all a good coincidence and timely. Happy Easter! May you find egg-citing surprises in my box!

Choosing an egg-box for eco-art was like a double-whammy as well, because an egg-box is already an environmentally friendly kind of packaging: it’s made from pulp! And here comes an art-link: on the subject of pulp, my artcouple partner and collaborator Simon has produced a pulpture! – a pulp-sculpture, which will be the subject of our next post on our artcouple blog. Back on the egg-box, I discovered it has an interesting name for its structure, which is called a monocoque or shell structure (meaning it has no frame but is like ‘structural skin’, what this type is referred to technically) – so it’s ideal on the beach, to add to the theme of shells…
And then there was the primal theme of eggs! Especially because the I is the Egg in my childhood language German one may say! So whereas there is primal stuff about the egg anyway, it is heightened when one translates the English I into German on a soundbasis, which sounds as if one had just said ‘egg’.

I filmed my box as well: https://vimeo.com/331419797

A few days later, I took my box to the forest, and then again to the beach. This time on the beach I filled one egg-space with a red button. So there’s the odd one out! Egg out. There’s another thing I did: I didn’t place the box on a stone but on the bare sand, for it to be totally on the ground. But then I found that the sand was wet, and the box got wet, and eventually it broke apart! Here the box came to a natural end then, having been well used, and not thrown away except when its bits got torn!

In the process of its ending interesting images, or rather associations, developed. The long bits between the egg-spaces stood out taller and taller, as the edges of the box lowered, and so a lighthouse-look developed. The the ‘lighthouses’ turned wonky and the box started to look like a sinking ship. Then the image morphed again: the remaining features mingled and bent like those concrete tetrapod sea defences you can see on some beaches. So there it was the image-association series: lighthouse, sinking ship, tetrapod.
The tetrapod image was telling because of the theme of erosion, by the sea. Erosion, decomposition. But there’s been a hatching. A story had been born, an imagination! Something was there, and something remained. It’s what one might call a sustainable story! Re-cycle: it goes on an on. I, egg, you, he/she/it..

introducing ArtCouple blog

ArtCouple blog! + video links

News update: in my Coastal Collaboration post, below, I announced the big new change

happening in my art practice and location (far out of London now): me and Simon working together on the Solway since we moved here at the end of last year, 2018 – the Solway being a borderlands area in the north of England, where we are, but also in Scotland, and bordering on the Irish Sea on seaside and the Lake District on lakeside. So we’ve been working on a blog about this big new project, and it has now gone live! It’s called Artcouple – we are ArtCouple! Here it is: http://artcouple.co.uk/

The idea of me and Simon as an Artcouple came about as our work unfolded together, in the same area, sharing similar concerns and interests. We realized we were not just a couple, but an artcouple too as it was about our work becoming more and more intertwined and coupled up.
For me there was an unprecedented thrill here, as Maryport, where we are, is one of the few towns in England that I hadn’t even heard of before! The idea of having moved somewhere one didn’t even know existed is intriguing to me. It’s such newland, newtown, and furtherland! Ironically, I know the coast behind the sea which appear on the horizon in the distance from here: these are the Scottish mountains of Dumfries and Galloway, where I had visited before and taken great walks: Annan, the Nith Valley, Dumfries, the Isle of Whithorn. It is thrilling to think that I know what is on my horizon but that what is in front of me is totally new! Tbere is a lot then, though this town is small. This town is smaller than anywhere I had lived before and that brings with it new experiences, new coordinates – an unknown unravels and thereby transforms into a known: though only in my mind, the town itself is what it is. My relations have changed, expanded yet again, acquired new dimensions once again!
This unprecedented adventure of being somewhere elsewhere, and on top of that doing new things, and on top of them working on stuff together: living by the coast, up so far north that Scotland is around the corner! Like Scottish Borders on the other side! Coming from down south, through this island’s centre-land-piece Yorkshire, the last big road to take to get here is the A66! Like 99 Red Balloons upside down, side by side with the sea.

Harbour behind my back at the breakfast table, seaside at backside, and therefore all that history that goes with it, too: a harbour past its prime, with no more of the big boats coming in (and mining too, has been undermined). Upon leaving the house, I walk into the setting of this plot of post-industrial decline, this declension, even if they don’t tell you, for it’s too hard and too long to say just by the way. You might notice it indirectly: when you feel like feminism hasn’t been processed yet. There’s some kind of stagnation somewhere in the air, though the sea is flowing. So I have been having a lot of joy getting my teeth into all this: here I am somewhere else! I love experiencing and dissecting this new old form.

New art forms
A lot of artistic development has been happening for me here simply through being inspired and taking on three new art forms: art-interventions, taking videos, eco-art! I can splash out here, make waves among the waves that I am already surrounded by.
My first new art-form I homed in on was taking videos: I had taken some before but rarely, due to a permanent lack of space on my phone-camera. With an SD-card that Simon put in my phone for me, I had a lot more space, and so I could dive in to my new video-art. This was about introducing movement, motion! That felt revolutionary, for now I could do a kind of a series instead of single photos, I could connect, and thereby able to tell a longer story! So movement was about story!

The ability to tell a story now led me to doing interventions – so one thing led to another. It all began with my sheep wool from Ilkley Moor, which I had carried with me in my bag ever since Simon introduced me to that moor last summer. I had already enjoyed carrying the Yorkshire-picked sheep wool out of its place in London with me – and now I discovered it consciously as an intervention! So this started the intervention-story, which is so long and exciting, that I will talk about it in my next Artcouple blogpost! So have a look there.

Then came the third art-form: Eco-art. This in turn came out of my interventions – when I thought about what meaningful objects I could use for my interventions: packaging objects seemed ideal because they are already there: in the stuff you buy – and instead of throwing them away I could make them tell stories, or serve as a warning of the excess of waste we have to process.

And here 2 my videos:
Below are two little videos I took.
1): Eco-art: Seaside Supermarket. The idea were these critical questions/imaginations: What if stones were commercially sold like onions? What catch is in the net? this is an eco-art vid I took in my locality, the Solway coast, England, to bring up questions about how our society operates in relation to ecology and consumerism.

2): a video against hard borders (and thereby against Brexit, in response to our current crisis): Sea no hard border! The idea was to show the continuity of the sea (and the land under it!) and how that makes borders become absurd. We are facing the Irish Sea here, and so a sea-consciousness arises. I wanted to document this, as the Irish Sea is not even only Northern Ireland, but borders on England itself, and so the issue gets very close.