Ruairidh's museum of thoughts and images.

2006-11-13T05:31:00.000-08:00

I've been in Chandigarh for almost a month now and now feel that I understand Nek Chand's Rock Garden (where I'm doing some voluntary work) well enough to say something about it.
To get the official overview check out the Nek Chand Foundation website. The garden itself is more vast than the public ever see; as with all the best visitor attractions all the best stuff happens behind the scenes, and it is a great privailage to visit the workshops where the sculptures are being made and see how it is done, and to have access to the aerial walkways which snake their way through the garden, mostly out of view from the public. The garden gets 3000 visitors a day on adverage, and only the most adventurous and inquisitive ever venture into the forbidden places behind the closed iron gates and over the concrete walls; those are secret places, it is a secret, enchanted garden, with no end of places to explore and curious half built structures to give you plenty to think about and delightful insights into the mind of Nek Chand himself, who directs the ongoing construction of the garden without plans or even sketches, and has no qualms about changing his mind and starting again, or allowing things made to fall into disrepair half finished, and directing his attention elsewhere: his thoughts turn to concrete before they are fully formed and are left behind as his imagination wanders across the park. He has a unique mind, and a quiet charisma.

2006-09-30T17:15:00.000-07:00

2006-09-30T16:59:00.000-07:00

These are some woodcarvings of pupae. I exhibited them at an exhibition in South Queensferry recently, in the Priory church. They were in a small stone alcove along with a few drawings of pupal and larval casings.
They focus on the idea that once a block (of wood etc.) has been set aside for carving, it is as though it has entered a sessile phase, and from within it the sculptor causes the adult form to emerge (the imago of an idea).

2006-09-30T16:47:00.000-07:00

2006-09-30T15:56:00.000-07:00

2006-09-30T15:51:00.000-07:00

2006-09-29T16:28:00.000-07:00

No fossils of thoughts

The colours of this moment are so bright
The smells so rich that I
Don’t want to let them slip away.

Some creatures dead committed
Their bodies to the bog or sands
So some remnant of them can be found
Beneath the land

If only smells and sights
And thoughts
Were made of stuff
As tough as bone
That in time would turn to stone

But old bones care not
If turned to stone and never found
And thoughts built into temples
So that time won’t bring them down
May crumble into sand
Once tumbled to the ground.

Without his anchor

“I’ve left behind my soul!”
Said he
As he reached for the nearest
Branches of a tree
“I am so much lighter now!”
He cried climbing
Up from that lowest bow
Up up into the tree
“I’d never have known
How little I weigh
If I hadn’t left behind
My soul today!”
And up he climbed
Up up into the tree
And he reached the highest branches
The very highest twigs and leaves
“How light I am!” he cried, and jumped
Up up into the sky
He was so light then
Without his soul.
He was never seen again.

2006-09-25T13:41:00.000-07:00

At the British museum at the moment there is a tableau of the Hindu goddess Durga under construction by some Bengalese traditional sculptors who've been shipped over especially for the purpose.
You can see here that her eight extra arms have been set in place but the gap between them and the Durga's body has not yet been filled in. Two very knowledgeable women were on standby to answer people’s questions. Firstly they told me that usually those arms would be constructed along with the armature of the rest of the body, but since this one was to be moved to a smaller space for a ceremony it was necessary to construct them separately.
I began to ask further questions about the anatomy of the Gods – how does their skeletal structure fit together? This is a question I have previously quizzed people on regarding angels; if you have both arms and wings, each needing a pair of collar bones and shoulder blades, as well as everything else necessary to enable the mobility of forearms, how do you fit them all into one torso? I’m not just being facetious, this leads to a serious point about the way people are willing to discard certain aspects of their understanding of reality in order to embrace their faith more completely, and to why people like me have difficulty embracing faith – it’s a question of suspending disbelief.
She told me that the skeleton is straw and string wrapped in bundles. The flesh is clay, covered in pigments. I pushed further – those are the materials from which the representation is made, but what physical structure do the gods possess?
She was firm with me now: It is just a representation. Originally they would have worshipped a pot – a vessel filled with water, Devi, a vessel, the female divinity.
The physical forms of the gods are described in scripture, which describes the anatomy of their power, and these representations are interpretations of those descriptions; normal men and women cannot stretch their imagination to embrace their god as a pot.
They really gave me a lot in the end, those women. To me what they were saying, although they did not really agree with one another, was that you must decorate the ideas you hold dear; give them limbs aplenty and fantastic clothing – do not let them languish in a puritan sessile phase (like the pupa of a deity), which gives nothing to the eye to feast upon, because in their plainest, purest form, the one which may be closer to the truth, they are so much more difficult to appreciate.
Another part of me disagrees entirely, preferring the somber frankness of the pot.

2006-09-24T12:34:00.000-07:00

These I found in a Lisbon junk shop. They are the hands of dolls, puppets and icons, broken off and lost.

2006-09-24T08:45:00.000-07:00

One of my reasons for writing this blog is to work through some of the ideas which I have most difficulty with in a public space in the hope that someone might make some suggestions or correct me when I'm wrong, and I'm using these images to help me explain one of my half-formed ideas which I'm currently grappling with.
This idea relates to pupation, and emergence - to lifecycles, and I'm hoping that this blog, and my trip to India will both help me turn this into a fully formed idea.

This is a 12th century woodcarving from Kerala, in the South of India. It is in the British museum. It represents a male dancer, and its surface and particularly its extremeties are weather-damaged, unsurprisingly, since it would have been part of the elaborate exterior decoration of a Keralese temple.
The extemities always suffer the most servere damage; fingers and noses are first to go, along with male gelitalia and any other fine protrusions. These are followed by limbs, and finally heads, and if a sculpture has suffered really severe damage there is likely only to be a torso remaining.

The larvae of insects generally shed their skin (chitinous exoskeleton) several times, growing larger each time (each larval stage is called an instar). After their final instar they shed their skin to reveal the pupa - they discard their limbs and their head - their mouthparts and sensory apparatus, and are helpless. Rather like a torso. And from within this 'torso' the adult will emerge.

The peculierities of the lifecycles of insects vary wildly from species to species, but in all the basics are the same: the larva forms within an egg and hatches into the world with one mission; to eat, and survive. Then they pupate. They must metamorphosize, and survive. Then they emerge. They must mate, and reproduce, and survive long enough to do so, and they may do this several times, and then all that's left to do is die.

2006-09-24T08:15:00.000-07:00

This is a chrysalis which I installed in my cousin Beth's living room in Basildon, as a wedding present, while she and her husband Nick were off on their honeymoon in the Maldives.
I gave it to her wrapped up. Tied to it was a brief note telling her that it might one day emerge into a butterfly, which made her rather reluctant to open it, and when she did, the prospect of touching it seemed not atall appealing, and she laid it to one side. So as soon as they were gone I nailed it up in the corner of the room, being warned all the while that Beth is very particular about her home furnishings. I did explain that it was infact merely a model of a pupa - a jesmonite casting of a woodcarving, to be exact, about 6cm in hight, and that it was merely a fiction of mine that a butterfly might emerge from it, however she did not seem reassured. I wonder how long it will stay there for.

2006-09-24T07:56:00.000-07:00

This is a church ship, from All Hallows by the Tower church on Byward st. in London, where there are several such ships in various styles.
These votive ships were often made by retired seamen as thanks for safe journeys. It is a fitting gesture of thanks, and I love the way they float above the pews, as though the surface of water were above the heads of worshippers.

2006-09-23T17:58:00.000-07:00

Very convincing replicas
In Levenshulme, Manchester, there is a pound shop where the products are so impossibly cheap that when you buy them you know they’ll never work for what you bought them for.
The handle of a pair of pliers was so brittle it snapped when I attempted to cut a thin piece of wire.
Scissors whose blades are not well enough aligned to cut anything, although you get twelve in a pack for a pound.
Tape that doesn’t stick, string that snaps instead of tying, spray-paint that doesn’t spray in the right direction.
The most incredible was the super glue (twelve for a pound!), which was such a powerful solvent that once you opened the tube the glue evaporates instantaneously and settles on everything in a thirty centimetre radius, gluing it thankfully-not-very-firmly to whatever it is touching, including your fingers to one another and to the tube.
These objects are produced in factories which manufacture exact 1/1 scale models of the products they are sold as; it is an effigy of a pair of pliers, a forgery of sticky-tape, a sculpture of a pair of scissors, replica super glue.

Giving away stuff that doesn’t work
In Edinburgh there is a café called the Forest, where there is a free shop, where you can ditch the stuff you don’t want but would rather pass on than throw away. This is an inspired idea I’m sure you’ll all agree, and should be seen more often. You often find all sorts of incredible stuff there and you’re quite free to take it away and keep it.
The free shop also demonstrates a curious attitude towards getting rid of stuff, possibly a psychological phenomenon: people ditch stuff there that doesn’t work! I suppose they think that some artist is going to come along and find the exact collection of spent light-bulbs or empty tubes of glue they’d been searching for, but I think it’s just people not being able to let go of stuff, and finding the ideal solution – I’ll give it away, then someone else can get rid of it instead of me! This thought is of course never conscious. For the free shop medication to be effective it is necessary to believe absolutely that someone else will be able to find a use for the tat you’re discarding.
Hoarding is a disease that creeps up on people. I suffer from it to a moderate degree. So may anyone who is able to see a possible alternative function in pretty much any object they lay their eyes on. The free shop is a powerful medicine for the disease; no-one ever need feel that they are throwing away a useful thing again, no matter how useless it is.

2006-09-23T12:50:00.000-07:00

Enacting an emergence from a Pupa
This image is from a performance at a festival in Germany, near Lubeck called Kultur Sommer.
Emergence from a Pupa was an attempt to enact the emergence of a butterfly from a pupa. I made the chrysalis from a thick black fabric. It is dangling from the bridge at Anker which spans the Lubeck-Elbe canal. Once I had climbed inside I sat there for some time before beginning to blow up a rubber dingy, to represent how a butterfly inflates its wings (with a fluid stored in its abdomen which is swollen when the butterfly first emerges from the pupa).
Once the boat was mostly inflated I emerged from my pupa, dangling, and finished blowing up the boat before lowering myself into it. Then I paddled downstream.
There is an article about it at
http://rzkultur.de/index.php?kat=31&cont=1226
From where I nabbed these last two images.
A working knowledge of German will be necessary for your comprehension of this article.

I’ve been increasingly fascinated by the lifecycles of insects for some time now. Particularly the sessile phase, when the larva sheds its outer casing for the last time and discards its limbs and head and mouthparts – everything that had been necessary for its survival, and just waits for adulthood. It is a remarkable right of passage.

I would have liked to put a quiktime movie of it on here, but blogspot seems not to be up to it. If you were interested enough in it to really want to see it I'd be unusually happy to send you a cd. For a bit of p&p perhaps if you live far away.
I’ll get back to pupae another day.

2006-09-23T05:45:00.000-07:00

This Image (from Mark Carter, who I hope is safe and happily wed and in Australia), is of Mark's mate Andy, who I believe is something of a Great Auk fanatic, and this is the touching moment when he met my conceptually adapted model of his favourite (extinct) bird. A prime example of the union between ornithology and art.

2006-09-22T07:16:00.001-07:00

These are two examples of a little known variety of smoking birds, which I exhibited at an exhibition titled "Aviary" in Leith in June this year. Notice that they are blind, and possess mouth parts equipped for nothing more useful than blowing smokerings. They are made mostly from wood and leather. At the moment I think of them as examples of creatures which have no practical means for survival, yet somehow manage to exist. There are so many things which exist seemingly against all odds. The bird on the perch (approx 1.5 metres height) can be used as a smoking device.
The bird which resembles a penguin is infact based on the Great Auk, or Garefowl (Penguinus Impennis), a creature so poorly equipped for survival that it has infact joined the throngs of species apparently ill equipped to survive the modern world.

The Great Auk.
It is said that the last Great Auk (of the British Isles at least) was captured off St Kilda, and was clearly a rare sight, since it was mistaken for a witch and stoned to death. St Kilda folklore for centuries preceding that event had said that the arrival of a witch would herald the demise of the island, and indeed within a generation the last inhabitants were shipped off to mainland Scotland on the premise that the inbreeding that was rife there was causing alarming effects on the intellect and physique of the inhabitants. They also wanted to use the whole island as a military base, which always prompts the authorities to action with far greater urgency than the mere tribulations of human populations. It is a fascinating island, and there is lots about it on the internet, as there is on the Great Auk, but the military base, I believe, is now closed, and if you want to visit the island you're going to have to spend lots of money on the trip, I'm afraid, unless you have a boat, and if you do, please be in touch, I'd love to get out there someday.
(For these Images I have to thank Jo Collins and Nation Photos, since I nabbed them off their website)