Gobsmacked, Summer and Ritual

gobsmacked! Jon Dixon

This is the last Friday of my holidays, its as the above picture suggests is gob-smacking, it's all over, i am not complaining i love teaching and look foward to the challenge of new classes. It seems funny that on returning to the staff room on Wednesday and seeing my desk i felt excited.
Work becomes a ritual and as i mentioned previously the modern world is all too short of ritual.

Ritual stones Jon Dixon

 I am really enjoying writing this blog, i noticed a fiends blog has a update schedule for Sundays, it made me wonder how often i can get to this once work resumes. i have never been great at routine and sticking to things except study and work.

Cacoon Jon Dixon

It seems easy to end  up cocooned in our work life,  while all sorts of tragedy and drama can unfold in our personal life work remains stable and you can rock up and pretend all is well.
 Last week i watched a friend's small child throw a massive wobble at our house, screaming as his father picked him up and took him to the car, i found it amusing, after four children of my own i have had my fair share of tantrums, stay at home mum have a real task while fathers escape off along to the cocoon of work.

People Cacoon jon dixon

I think writing of the blog is therapeutic, it makes me consider Jon's sculptures in a different light and there is of course a long history of art as therapy, so perhaps im just self medicating!

Big Huggy Jon Dixon

I hope reading it might bring a smile to someone else or Jon's sculptures might either way is good. The comedian Adam Hills suggested that we can be either inflaters or deflaters, make people feel good build them up or let them down, so this is my inflating effort.

oh and about the cat:

Cat Beau and Jon Dixon

Viewer Positioning (an apology for the snot)

Yesterdays blog had my sculptor husband scratching his head, and not overly happy with me, his comment was that "i don't take mistresses or throw sculptures on a rubbish heap like that, i think they are all beautiful and there are men in there as well" Or something like that, so i am here to appologise, explain and commiserate can.
Artists, sculptors, painters and writers all make there work and then send it out there into the world in search of its true destiny, what many do not relise and are shocked to find out it would appear its that this is where they loose control of their work......the reading of it.
Take the pile of sculptures in Jon's sculpture....now i looked at it as his casts off, fallen out of love and left to age and grey over the seasons, a recent park visitor saw them of a reflection of too much hostility between men and women..., another accused him of hating woman. Jon tells me that that it is now one sculpture but does not elaborate on what it means (rather than the snot simile which upsets him,(sorry!))
Now my snot simile was flippant , a throw away line written in the heat of the moment, i watch him work and that's how i see things. I just as he cannot control how someone reads my work, if they don't get my jokes or they thing that references to snog abhorrent...so be it, theses are mere reflections of how i see my life around the park... oh and someone did say don't let the truth get in the way of a good story, so watch out for exaggerators!
So are we all clear? how you see a work of art is up to you.....now when you come and visit the sculpture park you won't find any interpretive signs explaining the concepts behind the park, now nice safe brass name tags because we want you to attribute your own thoughts to the works, some visitors love this and some visitors  can't cope (there the ones scurrying away without talking, their senses overwhelmed!). Effectively Jon has been upset by his reading of my blog, his interpretation of my interpretation of his art...I am sure there is irony in there somewhere!

So do i need a disclaimer on the start of every blog? These are the mindless waffling of the artists wife and do not reflect the thoughts of the artist....? mmmmm hope not!

on the inside

some days it's hard to get started!

Talking to a hare. but its not dead.

Joseph Beuys and a pair of hares nesting in the sculpture park, the inspiration for my latest work,,