Firstdraft Studio Blog

If drawing is what happens when we take a line for a walk, then the way I see it, animation is what happens we when dare to watch. I have just moved into my new studio at the firstdraft Depot. I am uncertain about where my work will head over the next six months so I felt that the best thing I could contribute to the blog at present is a recent example of my work.

This film was created over three months during a recent residency a Waverley. It is hand drawn and an example of
the labour intensive process I engage in as a part of my practice.

Somewhere in Between

The past 6 months have been a continued exploration of colour and shape placement in painting during my Firstdraft studio residency from June – November, 2011.

Primarily working within the square canvas, I have investigated pushing the relationships between colour and balance. This series began in 2010, after several years of travelling to major museums , two residencies (one in Paris and one in San Francisco), and with exposure to American and European abstraction; I have synthesised different influential styles into my own work from artists such as Malevich, Sol LeWitt, Josef Albers, Diebenkorn, Stella and Lee Bontecou.

As I develop a visual language, my organic rendering of geometric and lyrical abstraction is still shifting in palette, tone and shape. This flux or movement allows me to continue exploring different colour combinations and the spaces in-between major shifts in light and dark tone.

by Lila Afiouni

For random quotes from Eighty-Four Doors, a translation of 1984 using every language on Google Translate, you can follow this Twitter account.

I’ve been investigating Professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s visual illusions (see http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html). He studies the underlying mechanisms of visual perception in the brain and generates illusions that activate those mechanisms. It seems that advances in computer technology and neuroscience have pushed ‘Op Art’ into a realm of increased complexity and saturation.

I’ve been developing my own drawings in response to the Professor’s illusions, and the papers that he writes about them, by using some of the principals he employs.

Upon review of the Professor’s website and the work made, I’ve realised I responded to particular illusions because I read meaning into them. This meaning relates to concurrent investigations into yoga philosophy and practice, Sufi poetry, rhythms in nature, and new theories of time, space and the structure of the universe.

(To be continued…) Michelle Genders

Below is an excerpt from Eighty-Four Doors, an experimental translation of Orwell’s 1984 using Google Translate, which is part of my upcoming exhibition at Firstdraft Lingua Franca.

Winston wrote in a blog in history.

Turn the all the door ans.Il humming current three, he was somewhere else.
There is almost no light. Young face, painted very thick. It is pure white mask and love the bright red lips. Party girls paint their faces in all. As long as $ 2 on the TV screen from the road for everyone. I -

Teeth on the edge of the abyss. It will throw the kitchen in the basement, said he believed it was Hubble yard femme.semblait Catherine. Proles just taste. It is mixed with the smell of treason near cœur.C: “This is serious, but life, but the sheep, the poor girl mort.Quartiers Want something you can sell a bottle does not cease to sell proletariat, the party forgives Condrieu weakness. Crime. It’s historical sexual activity, take all the fun as the target itself.
Interesting: Provide two, child marriage only ha repent for life. We are sex workers, poor foundation, consider the use of enemas.

What does a wetland and laundromat partnership look like? Can the two live together in domestic bliss?

After moving a lovely community of wetland plants, a few hundred kilos of gravel and a couple of hundred litres of water into FirstDraft depot, the wetland is coming along swimmingly…

Google Earth:

0 48 N, 176 37 W

With the aim of making a work about Sydney the Depot was an apt place to be working from. From my bolt-hole in Woolloomooloo I could regularly hear an orchestra playing in the PCYC next door and boys hammering balls on the basketball courts, a friend and I watched as paramedics from The Cross moved a body from beneath the overpass. The proximity of the Botanic Gardens, Harbour and Hyde Park reminded me that Sydney was at my doorstep and that it was Sydney that I was aiming to render. I would walk, trolley in tow, from the depot through The Domain and into the city to hit the hardware stores for lights, nut, bolts and other materials.

The city is always in conversation, always dishing out scrutiny. One night as I hauled my trolley over Macquarie Street I noticed a woman staring at me, I pulled off my headphones and asked her if I looked crazy. “Yes,” She said, looking grim. “I thought you were a homeless woman, but then you looked so young.” Returning to the studio I would sit and stare at my supplies and hope that the work would appear, unaided, from the tangle of receipts and plastic packaging strewn across the floor.

The depot gave me the space to prepare all the production materials I needed to shoot Second City off site in Glebe. I used the depot as a space to imagine, test, scrap and define the elements of the work that eventually emerged as Second City.

Glebe Youth Centre Staff and The Artist. Second City. Two channel HD Video projection.2011

Stella Rosa McDonald is a video artist based in Sydney. She is currently completing her Master of Fine Arts by Research at COFA, UNSW. Her current practice and research focuses on community based performance and the city of Sydney.

www.stellarosamcdonald.com