Marc Quinn

Marc Quinn’s wide-ranging oeuvre displays a preoccupation with the mutability of the body and the dualisms that define human life: spiritual and physical, surface and depth, cerebral and sexual. Using an uncompromising array of materials, from ice and blood to glass, marble or lead, Quinn develops these paradoxes into experimental, conceptual works that are mostly figurative in form.

Quinn’s sculpture, paintings and drawings often deal with the distanced relationship we have with our bodies, highlighting how the conflict between the ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ has a grip on the contemporary psyche. In 1999, Quinn began a series of marble sculptures of amputees as a way of re-reading the aspirations of Greek and Roman statuary and their depictions of an idealised whole. One such work depicted Alison Lapper, a woman who was born without arms, when she was heavily pregnant. Quinn subsequently enlarged this work to make it a major piece of public art for the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square. Other key themes in his work include genetic modification and hybridism. Garden (2000), for instance, is a walk-through installation of impossibly beautiful flowers that will never decay, or his ‘Eternal Spring’ sculptures, featuring flowers preserved in perfect bloom by being plunged into sub-zero silicone. Quinn has also explored the potential artistic uses of DNA, making a portrait of a sitter by extracting strands of DNA and placing it in a test-tube. DNA Garden (2001), contains the DNA of over 75 plant species as well as 2 humans: a re-enactment of the Garden of Eden on a cellular level. Quinn’s diverse and poetic work meditates on our attempts to understand or overcome the transience of human life through scientific knowledge and artistic expression.

Really interested in his marble sculptures of people with missing limbs

Circulotory system-blood

Blood performs many important functions within the body including:

• Supply of oxygen to tissues (bound to hemoglobin which is carried in red cells)
• Supply of nutrients such as glucose, amino acids and fatty acids (dissolved in the blood or bound to plasma proteins)
• Removal of waste such as carbon dioxide, urea and lactic acid
• Immunological functions, including circulation of white cells, and detection of foreign material by antibodies
• Coagulation, which is one part of the body's self-repair mechanism
• Messenger functions, including the transport of hormones and the signaling of tissue damage
• Regulation of body pH (the normal pH of blood is in the range of 7.35 - 7.45)
• Regulation of core body temperature
• Hydraulic functions

Swallow Tattoos

I have never thought much about the symbolism of tattoos, for instance the difference between swallow and sparrow tattoos. This will take a lot of research. sigh.


Nine facts about the maritime history of swallow tattoos:

1.Swallow tattoos were traditionally used to show how many miles a sailor had traveled -- five thousand nautical miles got you one swallow, ten thousand the second.

2. Sometimes, when a sailor had retired, he would tattoo laundry hanging between the two swallows.

3. If a sailor's friend was killed at sea, one of his swallows would have a dagger tattooed through it.

4. Swallows always return home -- so the swallow tattooed on a sailor was meant to symbolize that he would return.

5. And if the sailor didn't return, the swallows would help carry him to heaven.

6. In England, the swallow tattoo indicates a willingness to fight -- "these fists fly."

7. Apparently, in American jails, the swallow tattoo can mean that the wearer is into white power. (but hopefully, with an ever-growing number of liberally inclined young ladies getting this tattoo, that message is getting diluted.)

8. To a sailor at sea, the sight of sparrows meant land, and a return home.

9. Luke 12:6 says..."Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God."

Circulatory System

The circulatory system is made up of the vessels and the muscles that help and control the flow of the blood around the body. This process is called circulation. The main parts of the system are the heart, arteries, capillaries and veins.

As blood begins to circulate, it leaves the heart from the left ventricle and goes into the aorta. The aorta is the largest artery in the body. The blood leaving the aorta is full of oxygen. This is important for the cells in the brain and the body to do their work. The oxygen rich blood travels throughout the body in its system of arteries into the smallest arterioles.

On its way back to the heart, the blood travels through a system of veins. As it reaches the lungs, the carbon dioxide (a waste product) is removed from the blood and replace with fresh oxygen that we have inhaled through the lungs

Arteries are tough, elastic tubes that carry blood away from the heart. As the arteries move away from the heart, they divide into smaller vessels. The largest arteries are about as thick as a thumb. The smallest arteries are thinner than hair. These thinner arteries are called arterioles. Arteries carry bright red blood! The color comes from the oxygen that it carries.

Veins carry the blood to the heart. The smallest veins, also called venules, are very thin. They join larger veins that open into the heart. The veins carry dark red blood that doesn't have much oxygen. Veins have thin walls. They don't need to be as strong as the arteries because as blood is returned to the heart, it is under less pressure.

Artist research-Dave Cole

Dave Cole knits things... paper, pink batts, electrical cables, porcelain, lead. Anything 'weird' i guess. a cool technique of joining long threads of things together. I like knitting as a way of making things and think he has totally transformed it from having craft connotations to being ummm... just like one of those things made of something else, Claus Oldenburg's soft toilet etc. Not all that interesting because its the same concept it would seem and gets a tad boring. Basically i only like it for the fact that knitting was used. He has other cool works with knitting on a very large scale such as a teddy bear that fills the whole room made out of pink batts, well not pink batts but whatever the material is that that brand of insulation thing is made out of.




More to do with the knitting idea... an interesting environment is created from changing the surface texture of objects.

Concept-Mapping Skin-circulatory system

I have used this concept in my work before, looking at skin as a kind of map. Little scars, bruises, moles as markings on the landscape that change over time, some permanent, wrinklier as you get older. Looking at tattoos, especially those cool sailor style ones they're so naff.
I really want to work with the floor space because i see maps as being a flat diagram from an aerial view. I have thought about mapping the system of veins and arteries inside the human body, using something to translate this onto the floor. I want to make it interactive somehow, could sort of animate the veins and draw little pictures in the style of the sailor tattoos and make it almost like a child's road map for matchbox cars. The names of each artery could go inside the banners of the heart pictures etc, and i could research the function of the artery and the body parts it relates closely to and draw symbols and pictures to go with these. BUT i can't think of any sort of digital media that i want to use to make this, i thought about knitting it because i have been looking at craft/high art in my gender studies lectures and think why not use wool?? It's only rendered kitsch because it is female art/craft whatever.

It would be awesome if i could carve the veins directly into the floor and have liquid running through it and out down the stairs onto the footpath, but have the grooves deep enough so that it didn't get on your feet when you walked over it. This would be a cool way to represent it but i don't know what relevance it has to anything... the source of the 'blood' could be from things we use to fuel our bodies, say animals and meat eating, even though i am not vegetarian/vegan at all. You could have animals dripping the red liquid that flows into the circulatory system, the amount that flows out could somehow be determined by the viewers???

Artist Research

Sonasphere-Karl D.D Willis

The video of this explaining how it works and how different elements of it change and interact with each other was very informative. The technology behind it seems very complex to me. Here is a blurb about it from the website--->

Sonasphere is an audio visual application for Mac OSX, which represents audio samples, effects and mixers as spherical objects within 3d space. These objects interact with each other in a generative way to produce interesting and complex audio visual results. An installation version of Sonasphere was exhibited atICC in Tokyo, in an exhibition called Ne_xt, a new generation of Media artists from April 23rd, 2004 - June 27th, 2004. The main application interface is projected from above onto the floor and users who enter the projection area have their movements tracked and fed back into the application. Users can manipulate and interact with the environment by walking back and forward. Thus changing the makeup of the environment and moreover the audio output. User movement is tracked by a CCD video camera mounted above the projection area.

http://www.theyrule.net/
Cool website mapping connections between directors of major companies in America. Saw this in first year i think,.

Concepts

I like the grid formations in maps, and think i would like to do a piece that incorporates these somehow in an installation work. This reminds me of those sliding puzzles i had when i was little..
Like these lovely ones. Minimum order when you buy these averages about 10,000!!! Thought i could work with multiples in an installation to build a sort of map. You can get these puzzles custom printed when you order them, so maybe i could do that?? It would be interesting to get words printed on it and see how they translated them, 'engrish' etc.
Another idea is to make a giant floor puzzle that people can interact with, maybe not in a set structure like the sliding puzzles but a giant scramble puzzle or something similar??

Could make a giant map on the floor like google earth, with giant pins to mark the places, maybe mark out a body on the floor and use the pins like acupuncture needles.

Auckland Community Art Gallery

et al-Maintenance of Solidarity
I went to the Auckland Community Art Gallery over the weekend and saw quite a few of the works as relating to our mapping brief for project 3. Et al's work was very interesting, there was a projection on the wall of images from Google earth showing places in the middle east. There is a desk and chairs set up in the room along with stacks of newspapers which i took some of but can't make any sense of, they just have printed lists of data and graphs that are irrelevant to me. There was a computer generated voice reading out co-ordinates or something playing loudly that could be heard throughout the whole gallery, and what sounded to me like middle eastern music playing. Didn't really understand what was going on, it looked like some sort of surveillance system and someone was meant to be at the desk watching it but it was left empty inviting you to sit down. I was looking at Dunedin on Google earth and you can add photos to the area where you took them, so i uploaded some photos i took at Bathun's gully to the exact spots i took them at.

Boyle Family-Earth Pieces
These works were enormous and i don't know how they stuck to the walls. Really elaborate re-creations of pieces of earth that they had found by throwing a dart at a map. View information about how they made their works here on their website.
There was also a map done in a similar style to this that had facts about countries and highlighted things that happened there such as torture, slavery and other breaches of human rights. A standout for me was the little story about a mother being forced to watch her 9year old son be tortured and killed. Pretty intense for a cartoon-like drawing.