Sketchbook Page 3

I'm making headway through all my research and gathering more visual material to work with. Theres so much potential its a little hard to see the wood for the trees! I've started 9 backgrounds on which to paint/collage. They are 17"x17" the largest collage works I've tried on paper to date. Hopefully beginning these will clarify the most interesting path to take the work down. The page above highlights some of my studies and colour interests.

Collection

Back in the museum today finishing a set of photographs based on some of the natural history artefacts in the archive. I’m struck once again by the level of care required in cataloguing and preserving these object: the labels, the neat boxes, the acid free paper. It’s an ongoing process that is largely unseen. The stand-out item of the day was a tiny piece of red coral. Exquisite.

SKETCHBOOK PAGE 2

The butterflies and moths of the reserve are quite varied but unfortunately the butterflies are generally suffering from the inclement weather all summer. Its been difficult to get the timing right for best days to see them flying and of course they are difficult to photograph well. The most common I have seen are the Green veined white and Meadow Brown but also a beautiful Small copper occasionally. The moths on the other hand are quite amazing in terms of both the diversity of species and their colour and pattern. I intend to explore their patterns in an abstract way by combining my photographs of them with painting. The images on the top half of the page are all moths and are really quite stunning. I am continuously reminded of Fred Tomaselli's works, in particular 'Field guides' 2003. 

Curiouser & Curiouser

The Artist's Talk that I gave on Saturday was called "Curiouser & Curiouser". It was a chance for me to pick out some of the emerging themes from my work so far. It was useful to put my thoughts in some sort of order and to communicate them to people who have no idea what I'm up to. It was also good to share my ideas in a semi-formal way with some of the council staff who have been enabling the work. It's easy to take it for granted that they understand my inspiration and direction. Maybe now it's slightly clearer. I hope so.

I have become more and more intrigued by the objects in the Museum Services collection and have recently been focusing on objects related to natural history. Everything is beautifully wrapped and conserved, carefully handled and stored. Sometimes this is in direct opposition to the circumstances that brought the object into the collection. I've also been thinking about what is natural and what is unnatural within the reserve, about the contradictions entailed in management of the site.

I feel that I have gone through a saturation phase and now I'm letting everything settle, waiting to see what emerges as the main ideas that I will pursue. It's inevitable that I won't be able to pursue every avenue that suggests itself -I need to concentrate on goals that I can achieve within the time I have here and see where that leads. So I'm printing out images and assembling them on the Artspace walls to create a visual reminder of ideas, making notes. The wall is in flux -I will move images to fit beside each other, reposition others to make them more obvious. Colour is creeping in as well. I thought that the work might be dominated by the blue and white of cyanotype but at this point it is beginning to balance itself out. That seems right and natural.

SKETCHBOOK PAGE 1

My residency is beginning to take shape and I'm working on large scale sketchbook pages as a way of correlating all my ongoing visual research on the reserve. I've taken hundreds of photographs and I am slowly exploring the visual elements of the environment that most interest me. The pages are approximately 6ft x 4ft and I'll be displaying new pages regularly in the window of the Artspace and will be posting the images here and in my journal on my website www.emmaberkeryart.com

Threads

I'm preparing for an Artist's Talk on Saturday and so have been reviewing my work so far. It's a good time to pull out threads and see what I am going to concentrate on for the next while, deciding which images work as a collection on their own and which are right for printing as a cyanotype. My decisions are based on emerging themes and also on the clarity of the image. Something very subtle will be obscured slightly by the monochrome output available via the cyanotype process, perhaps ending up unreadable -the process works best with outlines and strong contrast.
I think that cyanotypes work really well with text and have been figuring out which text to lift from the collection of images I have already gathered. I might also generate new text based on themes of conservation, collection, preservation.

Some images are complete as photographs and others will be taken an extra step or two into print form.