Rude cakes @CCP Opening

For the opening of the drawing exhibition, 'Chalk it Down' at the CCP Gallery, I proposed the idea of drawing on and selling slightly subversive cupcakes with messages from a desperate housewife who expresses her anger to her husband via cake.

I thought cupcakes and rude drawings would be an interesting contrast. It took longer (beat until light and fluffy) than I thought to make the cupcakes. Also, I was overwhelmed by the amount of products available from the cake-decorating industry with its beauty pageant-like mix of bile and spectacle.

These are some of the designs I had planned for the cakes. On the night I ran out of time to decorate them all so I brought icing, letters and sprinkles and let people indulge in DIY artistic expression.

This produced such poetic gems such as, 'he's no good' and 'he's got a small willy.'

Patrick St. Gallery Exhibition 28 August - 10 September 2009

There were three pieces in this show. All the pieces were relational; viewers were asked to offer prayers, questions, suggestions or apologies depending on the piece. The opening reception was a tea party. The idea for a tea party instead of the usual wine reception was to make it more social and conducive to interacting with the pieces. It also tied into my interest in cultural hybridity and rituals created during the eighteenth century as a result of commodities and cultural exchange with Asia.

Ask the Cosmos/Prayer Tree offered viewers an opportunity to post a question to the 'cosmos' or offer a prayer on the tree. I was pleased at the variety of comments that were posted, from poetry to drawings of an 'iceberger' (Am. English 'ice cream sandwich'). The work was a musing about time --cosmic time, elandscape time, tree time, a moment in time.

The other painting, Helpful Hints the viewer was asked to comment about the work on the work itself --- to make their thoughts transparent.
Apologies was a board on which one could offer apologies on cards with quasi-Victorian sentiments by filling in the blanks. 'Please excuse my appalling want of ______ for _______ing on your _______.'

London: 27 May - 30 May
Michael Raedecker at the Camden Arts Centre
http://www.camdenartscentre.org/exhibitions/?id=100645

He uses thread as a combination of colour and line. Had a discussion with an artist about why he wishes Raedecker would 'use paint instead of embroidery' ---the lack of 'hand' and expression is what bothered him.

Things I looked at today:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/feb/22/highereducation.highereducationprofile
Michio Kaku talks about string theory and parallel universes

Kenzaburo Oe talked about how ones life splits when a tragic event like a death happens there exists another universe in which the person didn't die. So if everyone is generating parallel universes all the time wouldn't it look more like a fractal? But I suppose death keeps the whole thing in balance as the universe is expanding and slowly dying

ArtTrail 08

ArtTrail, September 2008, Hironari Kubota performance, spinning a Ford Transit van, one of the highlights.













My work at ArtTrail was similar to the Crawford degree show. Titled, Welcome to Our World, it invited visitors to plot their journeys on a map which I had traced out by hand. I think the enlarged Ireland on the map works for two reasons-- 1) Ireland is enlarged in my mind (it should actually be larger) and 2) Most of the people will be starting or ending their journey from Ireland (it was completely obliterated on my degree show map)
I had hoped to render the hurricanes on the map to make it more of a hybrid diagram and verisimilitude object. Some school kids came in and wrote exactly how they felt about it. Which is part of the plan to ground it in place and time. I got some really 'Irish' comments.