Coastal view postcards

Continuing thoughts on unfinished, or in this case, barely started projects: part of my collection of postcards showing Guernsey coastal views. This image taken in Guernsey some few years ago. Current interest for me resides mainly in the images of docks and martello towers. No answers to this as yet - it probably needs another few years of sporadic pondering. 

Inspiration for a sculpture

I rediscovered this old photograph from our Guernsey family side. I think it may be of my Grandfather's beehives - I certainly remember him keeping bees. I like the accretions of the storeys of this wooden tower and imagine it gradually increasing in height until, under the final weight of the blanket, it topples over.  It looks like a tower on the edge somehow and not long to reaching that critical point. 

Nine Perspectives

During a recent Satellite meeting, Nicola Naismith referred to The Becher's Typologies of varying industrial structures photographed from similar perspectives and formatted into a grid for comparison.  German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher had begun working together in 1959.  http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/95

I immediately realised that this was one of the implicit motives for me photographing from within the WW2 defence fortifications, so I've played around with a grid format, almost like a list or catalogue of the views.  Of course, by no means completist, even within my modest boundaries of collecting. I have other versions of these, but decided to try this one as a double-sided short-run A3 print. This is ideal for someone who cannot resist collecting sets of items and I could just aswell apply this to my images of cranes....

Ideas about boat sculpture

Whilst in France I spent some time thinking about my "bateau sauvetage" boat sculpture idea - another piece I have been circling round for over ten years. (approximate Guernsey French for lifeboat.) I discussed the idea during my In Process Residency at The Queen of Hungary Project Space with Nicola Naismith, which set me thinking in a slightly different direction. Bigger. No origami.

I'm planning a maquette first to test some of my thoughts and considerations. I'm still a long way off from even starting the piece, but small steps forward.

Load docks collage

"Load" Digital collage image.
Postcard collage of White Rock Pier, St Peter Port with two types of loading/unloading and slightly differing colourway choices.

Guernsey Docks

Two postcards of White Rock Pier from my growing collection that I am itching to make some work from but cannot until I resolve my A to Z book of my work, or at the moment A to D. I have been working on it for more than a year and just cannot get to an end point or even a point that feels middling like a comma or a pause for breath.

Docks & model yacht pond.

Two views of the model yacht pond on the dock area at St.Peter Port, one from the 1970's.

Monoliths, Militant? Modernist?

Also, revisited some of my favourite cranes at the docks. Still wondering how or if the cranes tie in with the fortifications in my practice - both can be m onoliths and dinosaur-like in the landscape I guess. I'm reading Owen Hatherley's Militant Modernism......

Guernsey Trip

A return trip to Castle Cornet, infact for a wedding, and a chance to see some of my favourite WW2 fortifications, built amongst the centuries old stones and battered by the sea. Anna, Maria and Frieda still resonate with the brasher WW2 American nose-art pictures of 'girls'.

A chain of defences

I've been collecting  some old postcards of Guernsey and a number feature Martello towers. The landscape on these two is quite populated with them and the chain-like siting formation is evident. They are almost like a 19th Century British version of the Atlantik Wall.  I think the Guernsey ones are mainly sturdy granite whereas the East coast ones are possibly brick and rendering, but both with pretty thick walls. The Bunker-like role of unseen observer surveying the landscape recurrs as does the intensifying effect of viewing the world through a narrow aperture or loop-hole. I like the romance of the idea that Martello is a corruption of Motella, so named because of the myrtle growing round about the tower in Corsica.

In the Vale

Jumped out of the car half way between where (Great great) Auntie Min is buried and the power station that stands where her house used to be. The drone of the Spitfire engines that used to be sited at the power station still throbbing through my chest and deafening my ears. This house-bunker-house, camouflaged and now perhaps a lived-in-for-real home.

A sunny few days in Guernsey.

Sunlight through camouflage netting over a WW2 trench. Rather like a net curtain.

talking of the Art of Faith.....

The Shell shrine bunker in Guernsey....

70 years ago

70 years since the Channel Islands were first occupied by German forces.

This shape might be a good base for the glass maquette of the camouflaged bunker/ house work I'd like to make, based around a German plan for a WW2 fairly common casemate in Guernsey.

I read "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" whilst on Alderney - not much concrete in the book, but The Guernsey Press said it had increased American tourist numbers to Guernsey.

I also dipped into "Festung Alderney" by Trevor Davenport and compared the diagrams to the actual sites I visited when at times the visibility was down to shrouded-under-a-white-cloth distance - not like the sky in this postcard. The book is pretty comprehensive, if rather niche.

Shell-shrine, bunker, Guernsey. Perhaps a sort of obsessive internal-space camouflage like the WWII domestication of other Channel Island German defence interiors with pictures and ornaments, while hours were wittled away waiting.

Shell Shrine camouflaged as a WWII bunker, Guernsey & the Shell Garden, courtesy of Branchage, Jersey International Film Festival

Navigation towers and bunkers

Clear skies and sharp shadows on the concrete blocks of the coastal defence installations. I saw one of the towers I've been sketching this year, in a field with some pumpkins nearby. I think it's being used for water or power and was buzzing loudly. Also a casemate with carpet lined plywood doors, a tangle of ropes and a whole heap of tyres - dark and damp. One defence structure has a refurbished shell shrine in it, statues, music and green lights - photos to follow.