Nikon LiteTouch Zoom 70W, re-purposed with an Arduino Uno and some bits.

A big part of the work I’ve been doing recently is making machines – things that do things, you know. I always liked to make things, but it’s only really been relevant to my practice in the last 6 months or so. The lesson here is that your practice is made up completely of the things that interest you, so shut up and do what you like to do – that’s the point. It all makes sense when you get into it.

Anyway, after helping Aurelia with her Instant Perspective Machine a few months back, I wound up doing a lot of soldering and it turns out I quite dig it. This is the rig for a balloon camera I’m working on and hoping to send up in January. It’s an old Nikon Lite-Touch Zoom 70W hooked up to an Arduino and a couple of relays to control the interesting bits.

I’m looking at plugging in a GPS receiver and a GSM unit to tell me where the blasted thing is once it gets up there. More to come!

I haven’t been posting much because I fall into big lumps of busy on a regular basis, and when I resurface (now and then) I tend to spend the time doing something relaxing like baking or hiking or driving some place interesting. Basically I’m lazy. I should probably force myself to post a little more so people don’t think I’ve died when they google me.

What’s happened since last time? I run a lab, with Aurelia Carbone, inside Fontanelle in Bowden. Fontanelle is a gallery and studio complex of roughly 25 artists, and we’ve converted part of the old factory site into a darkroom. Apparently they used to make remote controls for TVs here. We can run black and white, colour and ultraviolet processes in anything from 8mm to 4×5″ formats, and bigger if you don’t mind contact printing. It’s taken a lot of work to get it to the stage it’s at, which is the nicest way to put it without swearing, and I wouldn’t want to be told how much I’d spent on it. It represents the culmination of 7 years of buying up laboratory equipment and telling my parents that I really will need it all one day, and storing it away. It’s the thing that I’ve been trying to do for as long as I’ve been a contributing member of society, and it feels good to know it wasn’t a stupid idea that whole time. It’s also a little weird because it makes it clear that all of my stuff is photographic – now I’ve moved things down to the lab I only really have a bed, two bookshelves and some clothes at home…

Today I’m here building pinhole cameras for a workshop I’m running in January (You can read a little more about them here), trying to get the measurements right and prototyping things. Because paint cans wasn’t cool enough, no no, 4×5″ pinhole cameras that take double darkslides all the way.

I go to grab a saw and Andrew Dearman is mucking about with some new lenses, he’s found a teeny tiny one that casts a massive image on the wall. He’s building a cigar box camera, he’s scheming things with a bunch of old film. Science Magic. It’s raining a bit but it’s still warm and a bit stuffy inside. I’m covered in sawdust because most everything is. And I get a big old pang of feeling lucky that I get to call this some sort of a career, and a pang of it actually being worth the hours. You see all I actually ever wanted to do was make things, all of my work is process based and focused on the photograph as a physical thing, and the lab is just the biggest thing I’ve ever made, the one that makes all the other ones make sense. It’s wonky, patched together with expansion foam and so many tubes of gap filler I lost count, but it’s light tight, ventilated, and we can make the world inside.

I had a catalogue produced for my Exhibition in August, Re-Collected: A Photographic Survey of Place. Have a look – I still have a few print copies about the place too, get in touch if you’d fancy one. Thanks as always to Jess Mathews who designed the dang thing – it was a hell of a lot of work and I was a picky stupidface, and Lizzy Emery did a wonderful job of the essay.

I really dig ceramic art. It’s a wonderful excuse to buy something handmade thats both artful and functional. You can always say to yourself, “Yeah, but I don’t really need art”, but with ceramics you can always say back to yourself, “Yeah but I totally need a new mug!” and by the time you’ve finished arguing with yourself you’ve already left Urban Cow and you’ve got yourself a new little thing. Ceramics are also generally pretty affordable, and just nice to have in your house.

For example, I’m sitting here this evening with a lovely little ceramic cup on my desk. Usually this is the little cup of water on my bedside table when I go to sleep, and sometimes I just like to pick it up and hold it a little. It’s always cool and fits right there in the palm of my hand. You can tell it was made by a pair of hands to be held by other hands.
I remember being quite young and opening a box of paint tubes, and my older brother told me that the paint was made by machines and put in the tubes by machines, and probably put in the box by machines too. He said my hands were probably the first human hands to touch those tubes of paint. I remember being pretty amazed at the time, but having grown up with that sort of stuff, things made by people and touched by hands have a whole new feeling about them now.
This particular cup was made by Sunshine GB March, and you can read here blog, Ceramirama, here. I met Sunshine when she politely put up with me interrupting her working with Dainica Headland out at the Parks Community Center to ask about their printmaking studio. We all chatted for a while and I really dug her work, I left a few hours later and then kept seeing it all over the place. Most recently she has a lovely piece in the Prospect Self Portrait Prize.
Finally, last month I managed to get some of her work for myself at the Adelaide College of the Arts Art Bazaar, which is the school’s annual market for artists. Two little ceramic cups and a saucer for myself, and a taller glass for the office Kris Kringle.

I’m pretty damn pleased with them, and I really do encourage everyone just to hold something made by hands. Urban Cow, The T’Arts Collective and Pepper Street Arts Centre are good places to start. And keep an eye out for Sunshine’s work.

“And remember, nothing you do actually matters.”

These were the closing words of a presentation on the first day of my Skills for Creative Events intensive earlier this year. And, they’re perfectly accurate, in context. In putting on exhibitions and shows, you’re entertaining people – you’re not curing cancer, you’re not performing heart surgery, you’re not designing aeroplanes. If we screw up nobody dies.
We’re just here to show people a good time. So don’t worry.

Of course, if this rubs you up the wrong way, then perhaps you’re not content to just entertain. And don’t start thinking that you’re work is important because it raises awareness or makes people think or blah blah blah. If you’re not happy with being passive then you need to go out and do things.