Marcus Keating

Melbourne artist Emily Ferretti came to London for a visit a month or so ago, Emily is one of those amazing women who seem to pick up anything and make it work-clothes, guitars, jewellery, paintbrushes…whatever. Anyway, so her Dad did a short jewellery course and Emily got him to make some bits and pieces for her and among these bits was an amazing necklace she wore here. Three short pieces of square silver piping on a petite chain, it was truly beautiful and i became quite obsessed with it (though not obsessed enough to take photos for some mental reason…). So then three weeks later in Melbourne, I was hanging out with another jeweller/artist-Meredith Turnbull and she unveils some of her latest beauties and lo and behold-a necklace with three square metal sections to in…uncanny huh?! actually they are fairly different to each other and really reflect both of their art practices quite a lot I think, though thats an entry for another day.

Anyway Meredith gave me this one for my birthday this year.

Meredith Turnbull, 2010

I also got this number as a gift from Eliza, its a beauty and also has influenced some of the things im making at the moment…

Eliza Hearsum, 2010

UK two pound coin.

Proving that gold and silver are totally allowed to hang out together, the Brits know how to quietly break the rules.

some dude in  iD summer 2010

Havent bothered to read the article yet, but this picture alone made me buy the issue, all I need now is to find some hexagonal piping…

just in case you were wondering; neither of these are finished, this morning I updated my website and added some install shots of the Brick Lane Gallery show. I felt pretty flat after it which isn’t unusual I guess, but as i’ve said before there is something a bit reminiscent of year twelve discussions about not planning things to much because of the ratio of disappointment-just to clarify what I mean to say is that it seems as though the more i plan the more disappointed I am by the outcomes of whatever im working on-this goes for leaving the house also-if i procrastinate about doing something and then don’t even leave until late midday-then the outcomes aren’t as satisfying and even though i know all this-i still manage to waste away entire afternoons contemplating whether to leave just before the next episode of “The Hills” or after…

As much as i’d love to believe that ideas can be authentically original and therefore created by some genius within; I cant help but actually believe that this is a crock and that everything comes from external sources.

When I was at art school I was asked to write an essay on Roland Barthes ideas on semiotics, particularly about the Fashion System, so I wrote about how the sum of ones parts was almost entirely made up from external stimuli and predominantly influenced by mass media.

It wasn’t a very well written essay-nor did it really answer any of the questions I was asked and in fact I remember being asked to re-write it and finally just scraped by because the lecturer liked me; anyway what I did get out of it was that i started coming to the conclusion that I had no idea who I really was-i was trying to find personality traits and various interests that were authentically mine and I struggled to find more than a couple and even then it was just because it went back too far into my infancy.

So the masks really sparked my interest in a shop in Soho in New York called Evolution, they sell taxidermied animals and bones and human artifacts among other curiosities (including an entire human skeleton in a suitcase). At first I was looking at the price tags of everything and shrieking with delight, then I considered what Heathrow customs would think about petrified animal bones-which then got me considering the ethical questions raised about who and why and how. Leading me to eventually only buy some pencils and a petrified dinosaur turd for a family member (I swear it was all with good intentions). There were plenty of African masks on the walls and although part of me loves their aesthetic and history and potential narratives; I was also starting to feel a little distressed at all of the plundering and/or cheap knock offs for someone to display on a hallway wall as proof that they’ve been somewhere exotic,  though i’m sure they’d keep the New York store bit quiet…

The fortunate thing about being unemployed at the moment is that it gives me a chance to work my ass off in the studio, something i’d forgotten about how difficult and lonely it can be…

I guess its a double edged sword, the busier you are the more you want to do. That said though i’m finding that this extra time has given me more of an opportunity to be a bit more ambitious, though this isn’t helping with my inability to edit (see pictures)…

Part of the idea of the work doesnt involve editing of any kind I guess, I mean to create a junk pile of created stuff sort of means not having to exclude much providing it makes sense to the larger “pile”, and I am a fan of just making and making and not throwing anything out-though the latter isn’t part of any aesthetic or conceptual decision making process unfortunately.

I probably wont decide on the configuration of anything until I get into the space, I want to make an A5 handout of sorts with an outline of the final configuration which is going to be tricky, it means photographing and drawing and laying out and then printing all within a night before the opening, nothing like a bit frantic exhibition making to make more grey hairs…

I think i’d written a while back about finding these weapons and objects of dubious nature in the back streets of where I walk to work, well I started thinking about the broader implications of my assumptions and also my racial finger pointings and blame placing. At the moment i’ve got this whole “white devil” bitterness floating around my head, mixed with the idea of “native” and that word means anymore-at least a couple of times a week something will come up and someone else will make a coment about whether it is native or not-but most of the time they are purely assumptions: animals, plants, people…whatever

Even within the artworld there is this cultural ownership on who owns which artists and where did they come from etc, I read a few weeks ago that Wolfgang Tillmans was criticized for representing the UK at the Biennalle as he is German born-even though he’s lived here since the 80’s…boring to talk about-but about a recent example nevertheless.

When the colonies were being settled and even earlier there was a way of documenting the native folk called Ethnography, it was really a series of staged photographs and measurements and pillaging that “helped” the educated people understand more about the “savages”, I remember when Dr Lucy Elliot talked about it in an gender studies art history class, she compared the same staging to images of women portarayed in sculpture of the 18th century, totally blew my mind.

Anyway so I think about these ways of sensationalising social and cultural objects and wonder how much of it is reality and how much of it is my own cultural baggage laying narrative on top of things that I have no idea about.

I often pick up handfuls of rocks or sticks when im wandering around. These are cast from a group clumped together in a park in Fulham, they’re pretty standard rocks, like the ones that are on the train tracks but smaller.

I made an accessory decision to wear them an hour before leaving the house last saturday night, wouldn’t have been a problem if I had’ve made them yet…i ended up hardening the plaster in the oven-worked fine too, but accidently broke the third rock dancing in a kitchen.

Oh, i moulded them in algonate then cast them in plaster.

I think there are some terrible pictures of the Black Seals already on here, but this is a little prettier-I still need to hone my display and photography skills.

The white ones have a crumpled paper texture on the surface, the matte ones are particularly nice, but just arnt very durable-I need to look into a thin varnish that doesnt wash all of the detail away.

An artist friend commented the other day about how these new images looked really similar to the superstudio images of the 70’s, he’s right-I actually saw a bunch of superstudio stuff just recently and although I wasn’t conscious of making such rip offs-some part of me was making them anyway.

When I was a kid there was a lot of this imagery though. Tron for one or any computer magazine has these vast alien landscapes that had things that were familiar within them. They used to make me feel anxious and still do actually-there is something about the feelings of irreversible loss of what we have now, you know-like if we screw things up so badly here-we’ll have to live on other planets, where they have done away with simple things like clutter and hoarding, makes me shiver just thinking about it.

I’m so much more productive when im making stuff for other people, this was for a friends birthday but im now thinking of making large water colour collages using one and two point perspective photoshop drawings. They kind of remind me of seventies sci fi book covers, maybe from a fantasy novel about digging up an old gay nightclub from a hundred years ago…