october 2009 | week three
THE LAB
Open residency project
Ocular Lab
West Brunswick
WEEK THREE
NOTES.
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Riding week two’s collected toilet and organic material back to the compost site on Thea’s bike as honey-wagon. Weeding the overgrown house garden and feeding it to the heap, enjoying time in the sun and air outside in this grassy meadow.
october 2009 | week two
THE LAB
Open residency project
Ocular Lab
West Brunswick
WEEK TWO
NOTES.
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Clover seeds pushing up through soil and sprouting.
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The red rose Bianca brought on my first day, opening and changing.
october 2009 | week one
THE LAB
Open residency project
Ocular Lab
West Brunswick
WEEK ONE
NOTES.
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For the first week it felt right to observe things as they were in the Lab. The given conditions, the objects in the room when I arrived - a plinth, a ladder, a trestle table, an amplifier and some foam - and the movement of light and air into and through the space. It was surprising how much was going on in and at the edges of an empty room. I felt no need to remove the objects, figuring I’d wait to see who had left them and what they might be useful for. For the first few days I was strongly mindful of the practices of Thea Rechner and John Borley, as I paid attention to air and light and sat on the front step with the doors open making eye contact with passing drivers.
october 2009
THE LAB
For the month of October Lisa Kelly will be developing an open residency project at Ocular Lab, Brunswick West, Melbourne. Less an exhibition than a set of actions, processes, reading and renewal, THE LAB will draw on the Lab’s past use as a private artists studio and observe its shift to a public gallery. Combining the dual purposes of work and presentation space while being attentive to the specific conditions of the site, Kelly will engage in simple process cycles that annex the basic functions of a public venue. Areas of exploration will include onsite waste, streetfront visibility and natural lighting.
This project for Ocular Lab continues the artist’s practice of using critical frameworks to investigate the institutions her work is hosted by. In 2008 her project THE__HALL explored the re-purposing of a community hall into an art gallery by a local council.
Ocular Lab
31 Pearson Street
Brunswick West
VIC
Open & in progress:
Wednesday to Sunday 1pm-5pm
10th October to 1st November.
Closing gathering:
Saturday 31st October 3-5pm
september 2009
Fresh flower & garden corsage making
workshop with Tonia Gatt
Cut + Paste
Sustainable Craft Festival and Makers Market
11-13 September at The Red Rattler
some photos thanks to Hello Sandwich!
august 2009
recent reading:
Life Work
Jan Verwoert
‘Working in the field of art makes it very difficult to draw a line between a professional and private life. What’s the best way forward? Life, to start with, is not just about your professional life. There is so much more to it than just work. The trouble is that, when you get into art, that ‘so much more’ is precisely what you want your work to be about. Life is what you want to immerse yourself in through your work. The freedom of the artist and intellectual, Theodor Adorno wrote, lies in the possibility of not having to separate work from pleasure as all those caught up in the system of division of labour do.1 This is our chance for a good life…’
published in Frieze magazine, Issue 121, March 2009
read the full article here
july-august 2009
BEING
THERE.
One Day Sculpture: An International Symposium on Art, Time and Place
26th-28th March 2009
Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
In the late summer I was fortunate to be able to combine a visit to a friend on New Zealand’s Kapiti Coast with attendance of the One Day Sculpture symposium in Wellington. Conceived by the Litmus Research Initiative within the Massey University School of Fine Arts and creatively directed by UK-based curator Claire Doherty, the One Day Sculpture project was a one-year program of twenty temporal public works by local and international contemporary artists staged across the North and South islands. Lasting more or less twenty four hours each, the projects were realised Cuckoo-style (1), commissioned in partnership with a suite of institutions including museums, public and artist-run galleries and thereby nesting into a wide range of organisational resources. Instrumental to the accompanying discursive program - together with public discussions, responsive critical texts and a rich website of documentation and recommended reading - the symposium was held over two days at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. It featured a dynamic range of local, regional and international critics, academics, curators and practitioners and was timed to coincide with the presentation of two of the One Day Sculpture projects in Wellington.
I’d been drawn to attend by the dynamic structure of parallel session streams - academic papers, close text readings and project case studies, bracketed by keynote and positioning papers and panel discussions - from which delegates could fashion their own symposium experience according to their leanings. Mine were toward the strong foregrounding of practitioner voices via the project case study sessions with One Day Sculpture participating artists. This composite structure suggested a malleability running counter to my prior experience of contemporary arts forums - though this was the first time I’d been at a symposium as a delegate, not before having been able to afford the cost of registration fees or loss of paid work time. Conferences and symposia tend to privilege arts industry professionals over producers, being typically staged on weekdays, when institutions can despatch their employees to attend in work time in continuance with paid work duties. Showing up on my own money and my own terms, my experience of the symposium was of an abundant, stimulating but ultimately overwhelming program that left me musing on some reverberating motifs of expectation, interjection and locality. And the distinct gaps between situated and secondary viewing and the specialised research community of contemporary art and the real live world. Continue Reading »
february 2008 - june 2009
The Lively Plane (continued).
February 2008 - June 2009
growing and ongoing
and part of:
curated by Zanny Begg & Keg de Souza
The Performance Space
May-June 2009
Sydney
By June 2009 «The Lively Plane (continued)» will have played out along the leafy length of Wilson Street - plus inner-west & city sidelines - over two summers, two autumns, a winter and a spring. In February 2008 I used a commercially farmed London Plane tree (Platanus x acerifolia) in a work for the exhibition «1.The Lively Plane» at the Institute for Contemporary Art Newtown (ICAN) at 191 Wilson St.
Then and now, my interest is in the strong opinion and emotion that attends plane trees. They are both the most commonly planted street tree in Sydney, other Australian capitals and many world cities, and the most widely disliked for the profuse, fine, allergy-provoking bristles that aid seed dispersal from the flower-heads. They are the trees that everyone hates. While favoured for their tolerance of contemporary urban conditions - bad air, poor light, compacted soil and little water - their detractors are many, from talkback radio callers to prominent Australian scientist Tim Flannery. Flannery has often argued against the planting of London planes in Sydney streets, as both a persistent mimicry of European cities and a failure to explore alternatives from our ample native species that would better foster insect life and biodiversity, which plane trees notably do not. Continue Reading »
february-april 2009
week one.
week two.
week three.
week four.
week five.
week six.
week seven.
week eight.
week nine.
week ten.
Wild Sown Understorey
Seeding action, project document & climate almanac.
February-April 2009
wBST
West Brunswick Sculpture Triennial
curated by OSW
March-April 2009
Melbourne, Australia
download wBST poster pdf [48KB]
Wild Sown Understorey is a seeding action for the front yard of 135 Union St, West Brunswick. In February green manure crop seeds were cast, and the grass left to grow until the close of the wBST. The potential for a shaggy transformation of suburban ground will lay dormant or flourish according to rainfall, becoming a simultaneous ten-week weather index. Using the methods of natural farmer Masanobu Fukuoka, the project plays out between disturbance to a lawn-scape, land remediation and productivity, the absence of wildness, probable failure and climate change.
Project document & climate almanac.
A6-ish ha-ha foldout with weeks one-ten card series
single colour printing in brown, blue and teal
printed with love on The Rizzeria
edition of 100
copies available ~ contact l kell 88 [at] gmail dot com
Continue Reading »
