Car commercial on YouTube

Hi, and many apologies for not adding anything to my blog since the end of last year. A number of things have happened.

Firstly I’ve been closeted away working on my theory. This is quite a challenge to me, since it’s the first time in my life that I’ve been required to write such long essays. The MPhil at the ANU SoA requires two 6000 word essays and one 10000 word studio report. This might not seem like much to the average student who is used to essay writing, but believe me, it is a personal challenge to the art student who hasn’t written an essay since the year 2000.

I think the biggest hurdle has been to come up with a coherent and focused question actually, as my interests range far and wide. Space is a wide field (no pun intended). In honour of this undertaking, I have set up a new theory page, and you will notice the permalink in the top bar of this blog. My essay is not there, but links to my research resources are, and I talk a bit about my thought processes. It might be of interest to someone else looking at issues of spacial representation in ceramics, and its only a beginning, so I’ll add to it as I have time.

Secondly, I’ve added a couple of new links to the side bar. One for an excellent online resource for ceramic artists called Ceramics Today . Ceramics today is site run and edited by Australian ceramic artist Steven Goldate – although at this stage I’m not entirely certain whether he is still involved in pursuing new articles. Nether-the-less, the articles already there are really fantastic. The other is a link to James Steele’s blog. James is a PhD student at the ANU SoA and is working on a project to do with mapping space with user generated images, ie photographs taken by members of the public. I find this fascinating because of the cross-over between two dimensional and three dimensional space that such a project examines.

And last but not least. I wanted to ask advice/ opinions from anyone who might read this. Last year I gave a talk at the ANU as part of my work in progress seminar. In that paper, I talked about my influences and one of them was a particular American ceramic artist, whose work I had seen at the last NCECA conference I attended in the USA.

During the conference I took a photograph of a piece of hers in the gallery space where it was exhibited. I made sure that photography was allowed in the gallery. Then I wrote an abstract for my talk and published it on this blog. I included the photograph.

After quite a few months I got an email from her telling me that the piece is under copyright and she wants me to remove the photograph. I removed the photo and wrote to the artist apologizing, but also explained that I thought that since I was the photographer, I had honestly thought that the copyright for that image was mine. I also explained that this blog was being used for educational purposes, to document my studies. I asked if she had any other images of her work I could use in my abstract without breaching copyright.

She didn’t get back to me.

Now, I realize that I probably should have asked her permission before I used the photo on my blog. I did contact her a while before this incident asking for images of her work and she told me to look in a book. There was only one image in the book and it was quite dated, and I think that using images scanned from a book on a blog would be more likely to breach copyright than using images I took with my own camera.

What should I have done? Do I own copyright on photos I took, or is the copyright to those images owned by the person who made the work? This blog is not commercial, I don’t make money from advertising. Is copyright different for blogs like this? Does anyone know the laws/ rights for the artist and the blogger in such a case? What do other bloggers do when they use images of work by other people? Do you ask every single person before you use an image of their work?

Many thanks to anyone who is willing to discuss this issue.

To see the latest update on what I’ve been up to in the studio as part of my MPhil work, click here.

Click here to see the latest update I have made to my site; work in progress, weeks 16 and 17.

This year the Glasgow Ceramics Studio and Parade Artists have combined for a massive Christmas Art Exhibition and Sale. It will be held over two weekends, 29th – 30th of November and 6th – 7th of December. There will also be a special preview night with free drinks on Friday 28th November from 5 till 8. So come join us! Click here to see work by other folk in the Parade Artists group.

You’ll find my MPhil work in progress in my studio album, semester 2, 2008. I add to it every two weeks.

On another note, if you are in Scotland, in the vicinity of Glasgow, please come and visit us for Open Studio weekend. The Open Studio weekend is being held across all WASPS sites all over Scotland. The Glasgow Ceramics Studio where I work, will of course be opening it’s doors alongside all the other artists’ studios.

It’ll be on Saturday 4th of October (11am till 5pm) and Sunday 5th of October (12 noon till 4pm). You’ll be able to see where we work, our work in progress, as well as finished work for sale to suit all budgets. Hope to see you there.

Light_sequence

This movie is about an 18MB file. I suppose it depends on the speed of your connection how long it will take to load, but for me it takes about 2 minutes. The actual length of the movie is under a minute.

It shows a PICBasic program which turns LEDs on and off in sequence running on a programmable PIC chip. The sequence of the lights is the same as I will use for my final installation, although the time period the lights are on is only 1 second in this instance. Each of the lights represents an LED tag which will come on long enough to scroll a message across it.

You can see that one LED tag has been connected to where the first diode should be. It reads “Message” but as it’s on for one second, you only get to see the first couple of letters scroll across it.

I would like to offer sincere thanks to Dave Russ, without whose help this project would not have been possible.

mvi_0616

This is a very short movie showing some of my work in progress – a translucency test in Glacier Porcelain, fired in reduction to cone 9/10. Glaze is Leach cone 8 clear (well, a variation of it). I’ve put the LED tag behind, so you can see how the text would look through the porcelain as it scrolls.  By the way, the LED tag doesn’t blink like that. The blinking is due to the processing speed of my digital camera, which is rather old.

Susie O’Byrne is a studio holder at the Glasgow Ceramics Studio in WASPS, where I also have my space. The piece you can see below is roughly life size, or about 50cm tall. It is painstakingly built up out of small patches of individually printed paper porcelain sheets. The work is hung in the kiln during firing to retain it’s incredible grace of form. It is an anthropomorphic piece, inspired by dreams and images which populate the subconscious, and informed by nature study in Africa.

Susan O’Byrne, Cheetah, 2008

This amazing sculpture is on exhibition at the Aberdeen Art Gallery, in Aberdeen, Scotland until the 31st of May, as part of the Aberdeen Artists’ Society seventy-fourth exhibition of Painting, Sculpture, Drawing, Photography, Architecture, Video, DVD, Design and Craft. If you would like to see it for yourself, information on gallery address and opening hours is here.