Velvet claw lightning paw

▲ IN TREES ▲

2011-08-04T22:22:00.000+01:00

Mysteries of Love

2011-05-21T22:37:00.000+01:00

Sometimes a wind blows
and you and I
float
in love
and kiss
forever
in a darkness
and the mysteries
of love
come clear
and dance
in light
in you
in me
and show
that we
are Love

Sometimes a wind blows
and the mysteries of Love
come clear.

Written by: David Lynch (lyrics), Angelo Badalamenti (music)

C I R C U S

2011-05-05T18:24:00.001+01:00

T ▲ R O T

2011-04-28T14:33:00.003+01:00

PHOTOGRAPHY BY SI▲N

Model: Emily Dixon

...it looks as if the sky is losing its stars

2010-12-17T02:45:00.002Z

children #18

2010-04-29T16:56:00.002+01:00

children #17

2010-01-28T14:53:00.001Z

halloween 2009

2009-11-03T18:12:00.002Z

Paris #1

2009-09-10T14:16:00.002+01:00

All photos taken on my recent visit, with Thomas, to Paris

blood eye

2009-08-27T12:04:00.000+01:00

children #16

2009-08-26T03:01:00.000+01:00

children #15

2009-08-18T23:00:00.001+01:00

Hide Behind the Shroud

2009-08-17T17:35:00.000+01:00

Hide behind the shroud

Let the birds guide us

Follow the worn path

Fall down the well

Climb the trees to danger

Seeing through clouds

Rolling down hills

I've seen your face before

2009-08-11T13:27:00.001+01:00

children #14

2009-06-01T11:56:00.001+01:00

THIS IS THE LAST OF THE LITTER OF SIX,

2009-05-29T16:14:00.002+01:00

here we have a 3 day old kittens skull, it is a little bit biger than in the picture, as the picture is of a newly born kitten aprox 1 cm bigger , its cleaned an bleached to the highest standerd by proffecinal taxidermist (not, speller).this is ideal 4 the serious collector, as i sell taxidermy world wide this is from ,animal atractions,an wildlife decor ,since 1974 also i give percent to rspca on this item THIS IS THE LAST OF THE LITTER OF SIX,

play fast with the truth

2009-05-29T01:26:00.001+01:00

as if it wasn't your intention to mislead

colour dash

2009-05-20T09:38:00.001+01:00

red makes me think of bitten finger

nails

blue..............................
.............................smile

purple............................
.............................hands

brown.............................
...........................fingers

black.............................
.........................eyelashes

ink absorbs into the skin like ointment

dreams I may have had #5

2009-05-19T00:32:00.001+01:00

I'm under a bridge
so many bats above
I catch the liquid dripping down until it is enough to drink
I drink
everyone tells me I will get sick
drinking the bat juice
I wait
and wait
wandering the stalls above
but I don't get sick

children #13

2009-03-27T15:58:00.002Z

my doppleganger

2009-03-27T01:47:00.001Z

everyone is supposed to have one. I think I found mine.
So much so that for a while I thought this was me,
as I'd saved it as 'me'.
Talk about false memories.

children #12

2009-02-25T12:12:00.001Z

children #11

2009-02-21T13:00:00.001Z

Giacomo Brunelli

2009-02-19T11:00:00.000Z

Late last year I took a detour to the New Art Gallery, Walsall to see a small exhibition of William Blake's illustrations, Angels and Imagination. The real revelation came when I took the escalator to the top floor, here were a series of black and white prints by photographer Giacomo Brunelli, Animals. Small inky black prints with hand cut rounded corners and black borders they were intensely intimate and personal images of chanced upon encounters with animals, often domestic, both dead and alive. They're wild, feral, dogs snarl, cats cower, small mammals die, and the photographer is right in amongst them, there's hardly any distance between his camera and the subject.

He uses an old Miranda 35mm SLR camera to take these pictures, a camera that used to belong to his dad, and prints his black and white film in a makeshift darkroom. He likes to work in the half-light and many times in the series the subject is picked out by a limited depth of field against a blurred background. He's a hunter in the early mornings, going out to see what he can find, and the images portray a powerful personal vision of mostly dark and light, brutal and energetic, and strangely uplifting.

www.giacomobrunelli.com

there's a church on my street

2009-02-18T17:30:00.001Z

kaleidoscope eyes

2009-02-17T12:48:00.004Z

darling it's better down where it's wetter

2009-02-15T13:00:00.000Z

children #10

2009-02-14T13:00:00.001Z

unicorns upset me

2009-02-13T13:40:00.000Z

Leah Meyerhoff

If anyone has read 'Not wanted on the voyage' you'll know the hell why.

children #9

2009-02-12T21:52:00.001Z

children #8

2009-02-11T11:58:00.000Z

one day til dark

2009-02-10T16:39:00.007Z

this tree has just been felled

holding hands with a snowman

2009-02-09T22:56:00.002Z

dreams I may have had #4

2009-02-06T16:16:00.001Z

the woman hides herself in someone else,
but I know it's her.

The body she is in dislocates, pulls part
atom by atom as if sheared across one plane
two dimensional. Linearly it falls apart
digitised, red and bloody.

children #7

2009-02-05T17:34:00.003Z

This lion died long ago

2009-02-04T12:25:00.002Z

All images shot from a super 8 projection

children #6

2009-02-01T17:27:00.001Z

naked eye

2009-01-31T03:33:00.001Z

Apparent to the naked eye was
a heartbeat thumping deep
and reverberating, rattling round
the brain
reminding of imminent hangover
neither recreational
nor pleasurable
more a compulsory scratching or picking
of a scab

the clock ticked clear indicating
all too well
the dwindling hours before
the mobile phone called in the morning
breaking up the undulating silence with
catterwails and rubbing the cat awake from
it's slumber

a Friday night spent crying into pink fingers.

2009-01-27T00:37:00.000Z

Richard recognises his sister from the feel of her spine.

my feet

2008-08-05T19:00:00.000+01:00

children #5

2008-07-21T00:33:00.000+01:00

children #4

2008-07-09T14:27:00.000+01:00

The blood in my bones

2008-07-07T23:30:00.000+01:00

the pain in my throat is humming

the falling passed in spades

fingers caught bunched in skin

lice and tears

wine and fear

The blood in my bones is solidifying

children #3

2008-07-05T19:52:00.000+01:00

children #2

2008-07-04T01:33:00.000+01:00

King Alfred's Cakes or Daldinia concentrica

2008-07-02T16:39:00.000+01:00

This fungus is very hard and carbonaceous much like a lump of coal. When you section Daldinia concentrica through the middle, you can see concentric zones. These zones each represent a season's growth, much the way tree rings represent a season's growth.

info and photo: http://botit.botany.wisc.edu

children #1

2008-07-01T23:16:00.000+01:00

Dreams I may have had #

2007-12-14T00:56:00.000Z

I meet the devil.

I know it's the devil.

She's younger than one would expect. Beautiful. Black and white and red

eyes.

Her back to me the words slip out from my mouth quicker than I can stop them.

'Satan'

Too late.

She heard.

The hill

2007-12-14T00:42:00.000Z

Wandering to the school, not knowing quite where it is. Down a hill my feet taking over, one after the other quicker than I'd like. I see the girl I asked for directions from just moments previously. She's waiting for a bus. Our eyes lock briefly and both attempt to smile, a recognition of an interaction however spurious, non-significant. Makes me feel, what, better?
That's the school? It's a school, but is it the right one? The mothers pushing prams seem unsure, the special school? Yeah. I think so.
Boy comes towards me, bent towards the hill, mobile phone pressed to his face, angry tears coursing his small features, fist pushing them back towards his eyes.
Snippets of information, '...haven't got any credit....she's got to'
I know I'm staring.

ownership

2007-11-16T16:23:00.000Z

she was eating up his face
trekking the contours laying
claim to the landscape
He looked away what
the hell all he'd done was
say hello
made the appropriate noises
shown the requisite interest required
in such situations

Photo Story #2

2007-09-13T13:56:00.000+01:00

A disagreement

Dead animals I have known

2007-09-11T02:28:00.000+01:00

3 Clarendon Street

2007-09-04T21:48:00.000+01:00

Dreams I may have had #3

2007-09-03T02:09:00.000+01:00

Image: Bara No Soretsu

Hundreds of thousands of birds explode out of a woman’s front.

She is thrown back by the force.

A large deer runs from out of a man

Darling They've Found The Body - Katie Jane Garside

2007-08-30T18:59:00.000+01:00

Images from an exhibition by Katie Jane Garside at Woom, The Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham

Katie Jane Garside

And 10 hours earlier there’d been spiders

2007-08-27T21:33:00.000+01:00

Image: Unknown

The sun streams in through a gap in the curtains

I’m momentarily blinded and cannot see her face

Only an outline, indeterminate

The story continues, but I’ve lost the thread

And am content to listen,

Letting the words soak in, scrambled

Photo Story #1

2007-08-26T20:25:00.000+01:00

Reporting from the hard front

Dreams I may have had #2

2007-08-24T20:37:00.000+01:00

7th May 2007

Image: Boyle family projection

I was in a large spacious flat. It belonged to a guy I work with. There were throngs of decorators, interior designers doing up the place. Large blow up structures made of rubber and filled with air started to fill up the place. I delved underneath one, someone had a machine that blew up balloons super quick. They weren’t ordinary balloons, complicated structures comprising of different coloured shapes were created and flew off. I was impressed by them. There was a large raised play area on one side of the room, my companion and I bounced around on it, looking down on the ground, it seemed far below. Again the structure seemed complicated, slightly unfathomable.

We moved on, entering a fair arcade. There were cushioned seats on one side of a room, a variety of people including an older woman sat there and surveyed a selection of machines on the other side of the room. One of them was glass fronted and was made up of a variety of penises (real) entering cushioned rubber/plastic in simulating sex. It was vaguely educational ‘Oh, that’s how it happens’. There was the ability to select other phenomena using a touch computer screen that was alphabetical. We went to v for ‘vagina’ there was no entry. I suggested w for ‘womb’. On another screen was shown a video of a Russian red haired woman in a Space suit listlessly smoking a cigarette. She looked bored. She was speaking but I could not understand, it being in Russian. Subtitles were displayed on the bottom of the screen. She was then folded into a machine that looked like a spaceship.

Another area of the Arcade, lots of machines everywhere, a dingy room, low ceilinged the boundaries unclear due to their being shrouded in cloth. The machines were monsters, robots, in turn trying to consume us inside of them. One with thick tentacles, another with an exposed rib cage. Finally we exit and sit down to recover. ‘Phew, that was hard work!’

This Is For You - An Exhibition at Studio4, Birmingham

2007-08-22T18:35:00.000+01:00

I am presently part of an art show of collaborations between Paul Roberts, or Monsters Monsters, and over 50 international artists. The exhibition runs from the 13th to the 24th August. See below for pictures. His monsters are fab.

www.studio4gallery.blogspot.com

www.myspace.com/monstersmonsters

Shadow bright - An Exhibition

2007-08-18T00:00:00.000+01:00

The Shadow, An Exhibition at Compton Verney

Image: Marvin E. Newman, Untitled

Shadows are never owned. They are ascribed; fleeting moments of belonging to someone/something in a combination never to be repeated and almost certainly to be ignored. Their associations are manifold, signs of malevolence, foreboding, a representation of the inner psyche, of dreams and desires. Tear the shadow from the person and the spirit is sick or worse still, absent, like Bart Simpson hissing in the dark when he sells his soul to Milhouse.

And so we wonder into the dark subdued tones of the first room of the exhibition at Compton Verney. There are faint shadows on the wall, flickering, changing, hard to decipher. On closer inspection their sources are tiny metal skeletons, reminiscent of Mexico’s day of the dead. But either the room isn’t dark enough or the candles aren’t bright enough; the effect is underwhelming. It’s not a patch on Ray Harryhausen.

However, no matter as it’s time to move on and things improve instantly.

Image: Fiona Tan, Downside Up, 2002, Video

Next room is taken up with a large scale video projection of a starkly black and white road scene, by Fiona Tan. What immediately becomes apparent is all is not what it seems, for the camera is focussed on the shadows not the people. Some make immediate sense to the eye, others, I’m never quite sure who or what they belong to so distorted is the angle. It’s disorientating, mesmerising you find yourself following the individual paths of people, but shorn of unnecessary detail, reduced to shape with purpose, with a rhythm of it’s own.

Image: Tracey Moffat, Laudanum #13 1999

Tracey Moffat. I have never come across that name before. But instantly, in the next room, I feel like I should have done. It’s all that I’ve ever wanted in a photograph; several photographs. It’s the Laudanum series. She is the killer combination, the distillation of my aesthetic world. A top trump. The shades of grey give the feeling of a bygone era, I find out they are no ordinary photographs, produced using the photogravure process onto paper.

A photogravure

A photogravure is a photographic image produced from an engraving plate. The process is rarely used today due to the costs involved, but it produces prints which have the subtlety of a photograph and the art quality of a lithograph.

Source: http://www.curtis-collection.com/process.html

There is a strong allusion to German expressionist cinema, in the distortion of the shot, in the melodramatic gestures reflected in certain photographs, even in the staging of the scenes. A loose narrative unfolds but only in closer inspection on the internet, a problem in the gallery being the poor hang. The top prints are hung too high on the wall, a problem I encountered in an earlier exhibition at Compton Verney, Only Make Believe, and something they really need to address. There is no shortage of space in the building, however exhibition rooms are small and distance cannot be achieved to view some of the exhibits satisfactorily.

Back to the narrative; a mistress and her bare chested servant appear in various stages of madness, in laudanum induced ecstasy, whereby they cut hair, prostrate themselves, watch each other. There is a strong feeling of voyeurism, peeping through keyholes and windows, drawn into this melodrama of increasing freedom in madness. It reminds me of the dirty glamour of that legendary mother and daughter (their names escape me), society beauties, who deteriorated into madness.

Image: Laurie Anderson, At the Shrink's, 1975-1997

Laurie Anderson reached number two in the British charts in 1980 with her record ‘O Superman’. She can currently be seen in the corner of a room in Compton Verney, approximately 10 centimetres tall, sat talking to her shrink. It’s unnerving.

Image: Gary Hill, I Believe it is an Image in Light of the Other, 1991-92

The next room.

Initial total disorientation. The room is so dark, faint shapes can be made out on the floor, and I stumble and kick a book at one stage, but I’m not sure what it is and what it means. Slowly my eyes accustom to the dark (dull memories of my psychology days make me think; how long does this take? 10/20 minutes?). I begin to see the projections on the books, arranged so as to allude to the pages turning, to mouths moving intimately over the surface of words. I Believe it is an Image in Light of the Other by Gary Hill. It’s like seeing words for the first time without context, initial meaning. I stumble over books again. And this time it’s because there is an indecipherable urge to get closer, to get drawn into the images displayed on the surfaces they are so alluring, erotic.

What stays the same, what changes when an image is reproduced on the 2d plane? This is what Ceal Floyer neatly explores with a projector and a wall. It really is very clever, though a bit dry, the ladies I shared the room with at the time of studying really were very impressed.

Image: Annie Ratti, Shadow, 1996, Video

Annie Ratti’s large scale projection of a doorway, a room reminiscent of Hammer horror, of Powell and Pressburger, sees the shadow sheering form the body in an act of defiance. In becoming a separate entity it walks the earth a phantom, a doppleganger. This is an example of successful curating, the video is projected at the bottom of a set of stairs, one with a gradual slope, giving a long range view. The viewer is forced to walk towards the moving image, being at once a part of, and separate from the image, in much the same way as the shadow.

We walk through a darkened room full of a projection of crabs on the beach. I stop and stare for a moment. Let’s forget about it, it’s not very interesting, let’s move on.

We come to the opening of a small black room. It instantly brings a smile to the face for inside there is a lantern casting bright images on the wall at lightning speeds. I gingerly step in and it is glorious, total submersion in a world of light, speed and childhood. Centrally is the device, an Arabic lamp, ‘Misbah’ an instrument for light.

Image: Doug Aitken, Lighttrain, 2005, 5 channel video installation

And then the last room. It’s long, a cross of video screens displayed at the end of the room, quite a distance away. We sit and watch. The colours are beautiful, the rhythm in which images come and go from the five screens is undeniably clever, it’s glossy, high paced, Hollywood. And yet there is an absence of figures, we follow the shadows instead through sun and neon. It’s erotic, dazzling. But ultimately a mystery.

Andy Warhol’s shadow greats us as we move out. Appalling place for it but no matter, my head’s still reeling from Tracey, from Gary’s books, and the lantern that let you into the inner sanctum.

Dreams I may have had #1

2007-08-15T18:06:00.001+01:00

Russian poster, artist unknown

1st May 2007

It was a ceremony to bring in the new. There was a father figure leading it all. People were stood on two sides of a deep body of water.

A girl in turn had to dive into the water and come out the other side to represent a decade. The first two girls did it, their path flashed bright (blue and pink) after diving in. The third girl I was having an affair with, I was mumbling encouragement as she dived (initially I thought it would be me, I was relieved when it wasn’t). She was ages in the water but eventually she made it. But she hadn’t succeeded, the king read out from a list of offences to ask which she had committed. She was guilty and banished, to spend her life as an insect, with someone to look after her (a shapeshifter)

I was sad as we would be separated. I went to visit her, she was happy, we walked past the place we used to live, there was a strong feeling of sentiment, reminiscence for things lost. She was flying around an abandoned house having fun.

Wolf in Donkey's Clothing

2007-05-21T21:29:00.001+01:00

Electric Kool Aid-Acid Trip

2007-05-21T20:52:00.000+01:00

I've been buying copies of Love It! magazine (a bargain at 40p a pop) for train journeys recently and have become quite fascinated by the salacious headlines and article construction. It really is mindboggling, but also quite addictive.

Here are some of my responses:

Aloha Lolita

2007-05-16T16:20:00.000+01:00

Welcome, I think.
Or maybe a cautious hi.

My name is Sian and this is a little foray into the world of blogging, where I will mutter words about art and fumble attempts to rationalise my thoughts on it, and the wider world. And probably give up and post lots of pictures of naked pagans and blood guts and gore, oh, and skulls of animals, I like all of the above.

So hi.