Not a painting...

Solo show starting today at the MerseyBio, Incubator Building, Liverpool L69 7ZB, tel. 0151 7954101, 5 - 7 pm, email for attending preview:  alison.roberts@2bio.co.uk
Show running from 3rd October till 1st November.
More information at .....
http://incubatingart.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/sabine-kussmaul-fragmented-views.html

  

This is a sandwich of a stitched textile float and a painting...and both were not really meant to go together. But that's the beauty of things...that they actually do.

I am truly amazed how shadow and object merge to make something entirely new...

This little object will be part of our group show in Liverpool which previews this Friday. For more details see here.

              

 

Hospitality....?
...should be a massive topic this summer, with this country hosting the world. 
With Re-view Textile, a Liverpool based textile artists' group, we have been collaborating to produce new artwork rethinking this very concept. The finished work will be shown in the Baltic this September. Have a look at our blog here

Some time ago I made these pictures which got inspired by satellite images of the Earth. I thought that I had moved on from there. But as I went through this spell of photographing every artwork that is here, I put several ones of that kind together. Like the inside of a box or a stage, clad with these images. Interesting, how this cube blends in...

New experiments
How can you make drawing become three-dimensional? I am wondering if I could build a large amount of such transparent cubes....and each face "screens" some  detail..this one here has visual elements of hands ... (.."handscapes...?")

The world between the skins

This is looking into one of my pictures sideways and the image is something of a "mirage", it only exists in the photograph, because several picture layers and their inner reflections on a perspex pane are seen together...giving the photographing its true relevance.

Transfigured Spaces at Barnaby Festival Macclesfield
Great to see so many people come to my show at Short House off 108 Steps in Macclesfield.
I have had so many interesting conversations with people about artwork, my artwork, about what we see and how we see and think about things ... I have started to take notes just in case I forget what has being said....


One comment really stuck out for me ... Helen Walford came with her guitar to sing on the opening night and we chatted about the "fabric" of things and how one thread is rather fragile and thin, but several threads woven together can produce such strong textures... Helen thought it was the obvious thing, "making yourself stronger through yourself" and "is that not actually what we people do all the time?"... How fascinating to find the same thing going on between "the living texture of people" and woven fabrics that people make... Thanks, Helen.. made me think a lot.

New artwork on my show during Maccelsfield Barnaby Festival!

"Dream jetty, journey starting", 94 x 94 cm

"Wind-weave place, cloud circus", 94 x 94 cm

When I was making this, I thought a lot about "Little Wing" by Jimi Hendrix, and this vaguely architectural setting of the picture seemed like a "wind home" for a likewise creature as described in the song. 

Exhibition at Marburae Art Gallery, Macclesfield
Gallery Open Evening 3rd May: 7pm - 9pm
Marburae House, Athey Street, Macclesfield, SK11 6QU
Contemporary Art Exhibition featuring works by:
Sabine Kussmaul, Delpha Hudson, Judy Musselle, Gob Geisthorpe, Oksana Veber, Kate Bufton, Julia Snowdin, Kaite Helps, Charlie Penrose. 


Exhibition running 3rd May - 1st June 2012


www.artinmacclesfield.co.uk

"Hospitality"...as a theme for new artwork

In collaboration with three other textiles artists, I working on new artwork that has the topic "hospitality" as its theme. As part of Liverpool's Biennial for 2012, artists from Review Textiles (that's our group's name) we are working towards a body of new artwork to be on show at the Baltic Liverpool later in the year. In small groups, we all start some artwork and then pass it across to the next person who then carries on the work. 

I find it rather difficult to find visual ways of dealing with this topic. So far, I have printed a sequence of photographic images on fabric... which showed scenes that were rather empty and bland. Like the feeling you might get when you come to a new environment, and you feel like an outsider and don't understand the context.

My aim was to carry on with each image and add people and human interaction to it.

See our blog for more information of the project and other artists' work

http://reviewtextile.wordpress.com/

Black earth, volcanic sand and craters

I have spent the last week cycling and sporting around the North of Lanzarote. The bike allowed me to glide on long, winding roads through landscaps of bizarrely shaped mountains and broken up ground made from flows of lava seemingly petrified in mid-flow.

How, I wondered have the local people, their folk talkes and communal memories been shaped by the experience of living in such a special environment and living through the trauma of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Father Andrés Lorenzo Curbelo from the parish of Yaiza recounted that...."On the first day of September 1730, between nine and ten o' clock at night, the earth suddenly opened near Timanfaya,... An enormous mountain emerged from the ground with flames coming from its summit. It continued buring for 19 Days."

Would local people's feeling for their own position in the world, their relationship to the ground (and therefore agriculture) be determined by witnessing such events, and by living in an environment where the soil is black and vast areas of land are impenetrable and look to the eye as if a giant had stirred through flowing magma before freezing its shapes through a spell of magic.

Some of my thoughts when making new artwork move a lot around images of environment and buildings, real or fictive, and how these feature in people's thoughts, feelings, memories.

The Environmental Memory
I found that Malcom Quantrill elaborates about the wider context of such things in "The Environmental Memory". He explains that we all have a pool of imagined images that make up our past experiences and feelings relating to architecture, land and habitation. Such images, that we keep in our heads and that link to memories of life events and feelings feature architecture in a special kind of way. Each individual's personal  "pool of images" (that is my own naming of it here) makes up a structure or grid that make us read new existing landscape and building contexts (if seen for real or in a picture). 

I wonder, how people's set of imagined architecture could be used and challenged when I am planning and making new artwork that offers a visual experience that has real, imagined, impossible, strange, ...comforting, irritating, ....architecture in it. 

And what about shapes of houses or buildings in the forms of semi-visual memories ...
... Should I make new artwork that depicts  a town-full of one's own buildings of events and traumas, arranged in ways so it suits the structure of our memory...

Shapes to house memories of events or feelings

I have been experimenting with sketches in pencil, trying to paint/draw an environment that reminds of a place to live in or of an outdoor market square area where people could meet. 

I wanted to place objects there that are neither building, nor human form, but some kind of vagueness of a movement or an event like the faint memory of something that happened there or was remembered at that spot. 

What shape would I draw for the feeling of abandoned-ness, or for the memory of a wonderful childhood event,...?

It is intriguing to relate such thoughts to Gaston Bachelard's "Shells" and "Nests". He describes them as special features of people's visual feelings for things relating to architecture. In "The Poetics of Space" he writes how shells have an unresolved mystery and dynamic to them that encourages our creative thoughts and how nests have this quality of home, discovered after the children have gone, the past of some caring activity that is no more...

His book is very hard to chew, but worth while every page...though it seems that one has to grow a certain stamina to marshall through it.

Liverpool Biennial and Re-view Textile

Since last summer I have been part of group of textile based artists working in the Liverpool area. For this year's Biennial we are collaborating in small groups to produce pieces on which all of the group members will have worked on. The theme of the Biennial is "hospitality" and we are making this the topic of our works. The "end products" will be exhibited in "the Baltic" during the course of the Biennial. Very exciting. 

For now, artwork needs doing...

Transfigured spaces

January has been the time for planning. As part of Macclesfield's Barnaby festival at the end of June this year, I will be exhibiting new artwork that draws form the location of the exhibition, which will be Short House (on Short Street), off the 108 steps. So far I have decided to name the new artworks under the title of "Transfigured Spaces" as I will relate to the location, but in a loose, more abstract way. 

Waterside Open 2012
What a nice surprise to come back from sunny Lanzarote to find out that Sale's Waterside Open 2012 have accepted all three pieces of artwork that I handed in for their Open. The show runs from Sat. 11th February till Sat. 21st April 2012 at Waterside Arts Centre.