Puddles from New York

Yesterday I got caught in a ridiculous downpour just as I was leaving the gallery I'm working at to run an 'errand'. In a very deja-vu-I-swear-I've-seen-this-in-the-movies scene I was down on 10th Ave in Chelsea at 6 o'clock rush hour, dressed in my nicest gallery outfit under an umbrella (rendered more or less useless) helplessly trying to hail a cab, which is impossible in New York in the pouring rain, utterly soaked, so that I could deliver this iPad to the gallerist at her apartment across town before she left for Art Basel in a couple of hours - when I arrived at her apartment in Soho I had to empty the water from my shoes and attempt to dry them out with newspaper. It was quite hilarious and distressing. I was standing on the street with my arm flailing about wishing a cab would pull over, thinking, if I weren't worried about actually trying to get anywhere right now I would be frickin LOVING this spontaneous bursting of the sky, I know I would be grinning my head off at the way the sky surprises constantly, and it is commanding and simply uncontrollable, we all must redirect our attention to it in such moments. But instead I at one point thought if it got much worse I might cry, it was such a hopeless scenario!

Anyway, today since the rain has cleared, there are puddles galore, and one must jump over them at the last minute to avoid getting a muddy shoe. Also in New York in the summer time there are so many puddles - all the airconditioning units drip puddles of water onto the street below. I remember last time I was here wanting to do something with them - collect the water, or make imprints of them, paintings out of them. They are like microcosms of New York filth, floating with bits of trash, leaves, cigarette buts, I always wonder how long those bits stay there fermenting after the rain in the humid New York air. There are a number of shots of puddles with such filthy 'treasure' in them in that Tarksovsky movie I mentioned in an older post, Stalker. Also drips.

Jessie I don't know if you've ever seen any of my paintings, but they are basically puddles of colour, that dry over a period of days and leave collected traces of the activity of the pigmented liquid on the absorbent paper. Here is a link to a tumblr of many of them, they are an ongoing series I call the Reservoir series.

I've been consumed in the last couple of weeks with a work I was making for an exhibition in Perth about endangered birds. It just opened on Thursday whilst I was sleeping - and came together with the amazing help of my various siblings and mum and the assistance of an old friend. It has been such a strange, rather stressful, but also kind of magical, experience to make a work remotely like that, and I am aware I'm about to do it all over again with Unkept (!) 

Anyway, the work for that show reminded me of your experiments with puddles, there are just some uncanny parallels between our practices! The work is probably best described in this article. The picture in the article doesn't show the work in progress, but here is an out of focus one that does - the glass has since been filled with the Indian Ocean and the pigment egg is slowly dissolving into liquid.

I played a lot with powdered pigments and binders and have spent a lot of time in my newly discovered favourite art supply store in New York, Kremer Pigments, talking to the pigment experts there. After years of being limited to the colours and consistencies available only in tubes of watercolour paint I could buy, it feels like a whole new world opened up to me since finding Kremer in terms of the potential to make my own composites and casting the pigment in different shapes (like the pigment egg I had my sister cast for this work). One thing I would eventually like to do is nest different colours as layers within the one cast - like a gobstopper. This seems to be kind of the opposite process to what you're working with, where you're adding pigments on top of each other to compose new layers, whereas my cast pigment would eventually dissolve/erode away to reveal new colours??? Anyway, I LOVE the idea of evapourated puddles and the traces of colour they might leave - like a ghost puddle.

Which resonates with yet another thing I have spent a lot of time thinking about lately in relation to this show and am hoping to work with - the idea of ghosts, ghosting, absences and presences... but I'll save that for another post.

I'm super excited about this work for you Jessie, and the continual connections we are discovering between our practices!