BeQuest
Rikard Fåhraeus ( Stockholm, Sweden ) and
Kate Koivisto Wheeler ( Perth, Australia )
met briefly at “Meetings” at Supermarket Art Fair 2014. They have since then stayed in touch via e-mail. Some months after the meeting they started sending each other leads, traces, hints and evidence that there is something to be found. Each finding connected to the one before.
Be Quest is a two week focus on this process, from the 16th until the 29th of April 20018.
What they find will be presented here, new leads added as they are found.
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Searching is worth it. There is always something to be found and it always leads somewhere. Where it leads is impossible to know in advance but those that stand still and do not look will never know.
Rikard Fåhraeus
northsouth nightday stopgo pauseplay ebbflow meltfreeze freefall lockskeys
Kate Koivisto Wheeler
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Rikard Fåhraeus 2018-04-16 15:45
Breakfast. Looking out the window, coffee in my hand. No birds in their little feeding house outside the window. Since all the snow is gone they can find other feeding places and I have not put out anything for them. Some of them build their nests under the edge of the roof. When leaving the house I go past there and see that there are some feathers on the ground beneath. Small ones. Have they already started? Probably.
The feathers get me started. Reminds me of the last traces you sent from that building ”Heirloom” in Freemantle down at the passenger terminal in the harbor. I have them in mind as I bike to Studio44. We are all meeting there to decide how to deal with the space, what goes where. I am a bit late and have my mind inside, not focused outside, and I miss a moment, a picture. There is a man who has stopped his truck to unload. He opens the door and there is a low pole on the side of the road that his door is about to hit, but there is a ”bend” in the door, it has a shaped side that is just exactly the same size and shape as the pole letting the door go unharmed. Pure coincidence. Had he stopped a centimeter further on the door would have slammed into the pole. How things sometimes just fit together ( and sometimes not). I am not fast enough and do net get a photo before he close the door again. Hard to explain in words. A picture would have told it instantly.
On my way back to the studio I take the way along the quay thinking that I will find quay place 36, since that was the number on the house in Freemantle. But the numbers end at 26 and after that there are no marked places, only trees and stones. I try to imagine, calculate, where number 36 would have been had the quays gone further and realize that it would be straight across the water from my studio. Getting there I find an empty chair facing the water. Someone has just left it there and it begs me to use it, which is just what I need: sit down, slow down, think slowly.
I think about Heirloom. Something left to the next generation. Legacy. The word loom, which to me is something “looming”, a threat. But I guess it comes from Loom, used for weaving. I think of the torn poster with only the word “dream” decipherable. I think about how we are going to weave our findings together. I think about the incident with the truck this morning; coincidence, fate, kismet. Those in connection makes me think of the Norns in the Nordic mythology. How they are weaving the faiths of people together. Wonder what it would look like? A fabric or just a big mess? Would it be possible to see a bigger pattern if we could see how all our lives where woven together or not? Would we be able to decipher it?
Next to me is a sign warning for weak ice, that there is an outlet of water there. On the backside someone has made a lot of letters. I can not see that they spell anything together. Do they? Or is it just I that do not understand?
I get into my mind that there might be a place, or a street, called “the loom” here in Stockholm, and that is where I should go to find my next trace. I check it on my phone and actually find that “Vävstolsvägen” ( the Loom-road). It is close to a bad conscience for me. I have left some ceramic sculptures very close to this place, at a friends work-space since I was given the opportunity to burn them there. I should have picked up them weeks ago. There was a problem with the glazing and I was hoping it would be possible to redo the glaze. Makes me think of some other ceramics I Raku-burned where the glazing turned out well. There is one in my studio that looks like it is supposed to hold something. It is a small sketch for a larger sculpture that was meant to tell stories. It looks like a Norn or some other ancient figure in a cape and one should sit in its lap and listen to it whisper.
My bad conscience reminds me that I showed a piece at Supermarket with the text Conscience on it. I was asked to contribute to an art project at gallery Rostrum that showed glass-jars with imagined findings from now in the year 3018. What is our legacy (the Supermarket theme this year) looked on 1000 years from now. I put a Pound of meat (pork) in 500ml of alcohol. To me that is a reference to the pond of meat in Shakespeare´s “The Merchant of Venice”. Also a comment on consumption as well as what one is supposed to sacrifice as an artist. Flesh, specifically pork, and alcohol also have religious and cultural references to the concept of Conscience. Various leads of thoughts, to me, maybe not the same to someone else.
There.. What goes on in the head when one sits down for a second in an abandoned chair by the water. I stand up, stretch and walk down to the waters edge. Look down into the little slow swells and waves. On the bottom a torn rug and strings all tangled into the tree roots at the bottom. The Norn tangle of life-threads. And I realize that these are my traces of today. All of those things that went trough my head. Maybe are they to many but to me they only make sense together. For someone who does not read this it would be very hard to follow and see their connection. Maybe I have to take something away? It does feel as if they talk to each other, and as if they are tangled together with the findings you sent last.
It is afternoon here now. In Perth it must be late and you might be waiting, so these are today's traces from me.
Yours
Rikard
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Kate Koivisto Wheeler 2018-04-17 16:41
I wake reflecting on what you sent, the jar of red liquid, red solid, the empty chair, assorted letters, the underwater rug and its tangled strings. I’m still slightly hazy and through the haze comes a vague thought, picture, of two large Morello cherry jars on the top shelf of the pantry cupboard: they hold dried roses, which I have been drawing. Then, I let go, step back, let the leads take their course as I go about getting ready for the day.
Walking down the steps, around the corner and down the hill, the cherry jars of roses again, the red liquid, things submerged in water. Is there something to be found submerged, underwater, today? Under, water. As I turn again and walk along Norfolk Street, I notice thunderclouds, heavy cumulonimbus…looming, hope I won’t regret leaving my jacket and umbrella at home. The iPhone said 30% chance of rain, and though it's often wrong I'd decided I wanted to travel lighter and risk it. A couple of cyclists flash past and they are like echoes, after-images, of you riding to the studio meeting yesterday. Incidentally, your description of the door, the bend in it, missing the post by the strangest coincidence, from your description I had an instant picture of it. On the bus, above the noise of the engine, I hear black cockatoos shrieking and see them flying around looking for cover, usually a sure sign that rain is on the way. As it turns out, my risk-taking pays off though, and I encounter not a single drop of rain the whole day.
Tuesdays are particularly hectic, the morning flies past before I have a few minutes to sit, gather my thoughts.
I read your mail again. and it’s only then I consciously realize that I have sat down on a seat by water.. A garden bench, in a Japanese garden, a stream flowing around a small island of trees, reeds, low plants and flowers. Remembering the rug, tangle of strings and tree roots, you found I feel I should check if there is anything in the water here, submerged. I listen to the stream and think, when I get up from this bench, I will look. Before long, I have run out of time. Rise, look, but see nothing, nothing of note. I will be back here at the end of the day and will look again then.
As I walk down a hallway later, I have a horrible fleeting image of something floating in a jar of formaldehyde, read about in a novel, Robert Mapplethorpe visiting an abandoned hospital.
My next free moment, I’m drawn to follow the thread of the Norns, the three of destiny: past, present, what shall be, necessity. We have some degree of agency, rather than just destiny, in shaping ours and others’, life as somewhere in between fate and free will. The nine worlds, worlds within and without. The well and the tree, things we find, things that find us. I want to go deeper, am called away now, but there is something here. As I walk it weaves together in my mind...the underwater rug, flying carpets, strings and tree roots...Japanese gardens…a rainbow serpent, Celtic knots, runes, the well, Yggdrasil, nine worlds, three Norns.
After 5pm, I return to the Japanese garden, look again into the crystal water. I see just the dark stream bed, small stones lying there, the reflection of the garden and sky. A few small autumn leaves floating on top of the water. And a couple of drunken bees, “swimming” hopelessly. Of course I can’t resist, carefully put them onto the grass and they walk around in a daze, wet-winged. Later I will wonder if they have survived.
This time I stay longer in the garden, and listen, twenty minutes, half an hour, more? Finally, I decide it is time to go.
Dusk. I am on the bus, going home. The days are getting shorter with the approach of winter, and as we progress along the highway, I look out of the window and see three white long-necked birds fly across my line of sight in mauve pink light. The Norns. They fly in the formation of flying duck wall ornaments. One in front and highest, the second in the middle, the third below and back. West, towards the sun, as it sinks softly into the Indian ocean.
I have to stand on a chair to reach the jars on the top shelf of the pantry, and there is a small origami box. Inside it is an unglazed ceramic piece, a little dragon, made by my daughter. It seems to link with your ceramic figure, so I ask her (A. O’Connor) if I can photograph it and send with the other images. Included are two versions of audio from the Japanese garden, one 9 seconds long, one 90, you can choose whichever version you think is best. In the image of the stream there is a small circular eddy, I wonder about that, didn’t notice it until after I had taken the photo.
Yours,
Kate
Kate 20180417 Bees.MOV Storlek: 1472,62 Kb Typ: MOV |
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Rikard Fåhraeus 2018-04-17 23:15
Night. Darkness looming outside the window. Stillness after a days work. Work with other artists art. Making the presentation of their leftovers nice. Leftovers is maybe a harsh word. They have spent hours, days, lifetimes to make these things. But still. It is things and those things are hopefully praised for more than their uniqueness. For unique things is what nature makes, as each grain of sand is a being unique. Which makes “the unique” not unique. Among other it is also the process, the doing that is part of the value. At the least it is for the artist. For the artist does not only strive to accomplish a resulting product. Or? I will not dive deeper into that bottomless pit.
I look up and in the window is my cat breaking the silence of the night. She wants to come in. I let her in but soon, I know, she will want to go out again. She is looking for a mate. Someone to give her what she needs to get her kittens. She is running in circles since there is no one around to help her. But it is spring and life is about to sprout so who knows, she might succeed this time.
After having read your mail I went out into the garden and saw the first bees do their job. Bees and Bequest. Bees with a quest. Their limbs yellow thick with promise to the next flower. Nectar in return. Then they will turn back to their friends and do that dance to tell them where to go, in the shape of an eight. A dance that have been danced for an eternity, since the dawn of life. Number eight, turned on its side it becomes the sign for eternity.
Think about your little ceramic dragon that your daughter had made. Is there not some connection between the eight and the dragon? I make a quick search and the first ( yes first!) I find is “the Perth Mint, Figure eight dragon coin”. A quite unusual coin I must say, and beautiful. I do certainly want one of these. It makes me ( for a minute) want to take back all I wrote at the start of this mail. But it is crazy that a coin issued this year with the minted value of 2 dollars cost 200 Australian dollars to buy. Value, finance, money. What a mess that is. It is clearly a deep misunderstanding going on there. It is a dragon biting it´s own tail indeed.
2018-04-18 18:35
So, another day of work. Among other tasks I was sent on an impossible mission; to hang a big heavy picture 4.5 meters up (in a stairwell ) with a 2 meter ladder. Not much to do but back off and promise a return. It was in a duplex apartment on the 10th floor, on a hill overlooking the fjord/inlet leading in to Stockholm. An incredible view. Far away in the distance I could see the “castle” my great great great grandfather built. Högberga gård. Wealth lost long ago. Got me thinking about last nights writing about money. The coin and the dragon. That you went to a Japanese garden. When Högberga was built east Asia and Japanese culture was something very inspiring to many artists. The garden there has a Japanese stone lantern. I will go there tomorrow and see what I can find. I did not have the time today. Sun is setting and I take a walk on this island instead. There is a wild rose garden on the other side. Not much to see this time of year but some buds are carefully peeking out here and there. Among the bushes some dried remains of last summers abundance. Black stars on dry thorny twigs. Reminds me of your glass jar filled with dried roses. I guess they have a story to tell.
Yours
Rikard
Kate Koivisto Wheeler 2018-04-19 17:39
Today.
I was asleep when your traces arrived last night, early morning here. This morning I did not have to rush out. I wondered where on earth I would start with the leads, felt a slight anxiety. But once again, as before, felt myself succumb to just letting them meld, sink in, whirl around, knowing they would take me somewhere, to something/some thing. Before long the anxiety left and next I noticed a slight rush of adrenaline for the day ahead, where would be I led, and to what? As it turned out, more than expected, so please use the images you feel most important because there are several. I’ll send the first 3 here and 4 in a separate mail, they are not ordered in priority.
The first thing, reading your email. Eternity, I thought of the obvious, well known at least here in Australia, Banksy has made it more well-known...you probably know it too, the word in chalk script, on the streets of Sydney: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity_(graffito) For a moment I thought maybe I read you wrong, did you say infinity? But no, re-reading, it was eternity. I thought how alike they are. Then find myself looking at Marvel’s Eternity (time) and Infinity (space) characters, time and space again. Eternity, time.
Reading about your bees, looked at the bee dance diagram. The arrow, the twenty degree angle, food/flowers, sun.
The Japanese garden with the stone lantern, did you go there today? There is one, a lantern, by the stream where I found the bees scrambling in the water on Tuesday. Or maybe it is faux stone, this garden and the building surrounding it must be hundreds of years newer than your ancestor’s. I think briefly of Langgård in Norway near Oslo, lang gård, the “long farm”, where my own ancestors lived, the name adopted as the family name by the most recent generations.
The black arrows in the diagram, I have an arrow in my bag, obsidian, black glass, which my brother gave me, from his visit to the Black Hills in South Dakota in the 90’s, the Lakota Sioux. I read about the troubled history, parallels with here.
Head to the studio to think, move with these things.
Stop for lunch, coffee and potato rosti, feel a slight nag at my conscience about the bacon in it, and think of your jar of conscience. Then again about the arrow, twenty, food, flowers, sun. Look at the weather on my phone, so the forecast is twenty degrees. Not quite there yet, but close at 19. Dance music is playing. There are framed prints of flowers on the wall. Before I leave the cafe, an older couple enter. The man is Japanese, softly spoken.
I go to briefly visit a gallery, an exhibition, installation by Hossein Valamanesh, called ‘Passing’. Time, past, present, future. He writes in the exhibition text about a residency in Japan, where the inspiration for the work came from. I google to find something to send you. Instead of ‘Passing’, I find another work of his called “Passing Time”, a video piece in which his hands form the shape of “infinity”, the figure 8. It is from the MCA, Sydney…eternity..:
https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/works/2015.25/.
I have a meeting for 1.30, stop briefly at Hyde Park lake on the way, it is actually two lakes, a figure 8/infinity pathway winds around them. I flick over to the image of the black stars/flowers, 5 points, skim over the well-worn path of David Bowie, the coffee brand, Sydney pastry shop. There’s a 5 pointed star in my own front window at home, from Christmas, that I have left up, the window looked empty without it. A friend jokes that it looks like a pentagram. After the meeting, I go home to photograph this star. By which time I’ve looked more closely at the dragon coin you sent. Gård. Guard. Dragons guarding gold, as the coin shows. Looking at it then, my first thought was of clutching gold, clutching at gold. Gold in the Black hills. Gold clutched at. Land. Like here, Resources, wealth, clutched at, seized, stolen.
But the dragons on these coins are, I read, associated with a more positive symbolism, that of the Chinese dragon of good fortune, wisdom and generosity. I’m reminded of a dragon dance I saw from the studio earlier this year at the Chinese New Year celebrations… The dances I saw near the studio for Chinese New Year not long ago, the Year of the Dog, dragon dances and lion dances. Think of a friend who was born in the year of the dragon, and is a lion, Leo.
Home, I photograph the star, north facing. I remember the light blue marble I found here at home yesterday, it suddenly appeared, rolled out of a pile of papers while I was cleaning up, I'd forgotten about it. Found it on the way to a movie a while ago, when I got out of the car to see the Man Who Fell to Earth, I may have told you. Then, this morning, I unrolled a pair of socks, boots weather today, cloudy and cooler. Out of the socks rolled a ring with a light blue jewel, I’d put it there in a hurry one day. I began to wonder if there was a third small blue circular thing I would find. Where? Arrow, star, north. My dragon lion friend lives in North Beach. I lost a hat at North Beach once, larger of course than the other things, darker, but blue and round. Maybe that was it. Then again, maybe I should just go there, to North Beach to see if the thing, whatever it was, was there. Maybe it was something in Stockholm instead, that you would find? Had already? Well, I got in the car. Drive in peak hour traffic for half an hour or more to North Beach to see if there is a small blue round thing to match the marble and ring. But I have the time, just, and either way, it will be good to see the ocean.
Park, there is the place waiting for me, just one place left right near where North Beach Road reaches the ocean. This is where I should look. Take my boots off and head for the beach, but before I even get down there I find it, a round light vivid blue spot of paint on the low brick wall between the road and the ocean. The pale blue dot. I read the sign at the site. Notice the dog on it, the Year of the Dog. On the way back to the car, I do a double-take, there is a large figure of an owl sitting between the front seats of the car I'm parked behind. Racks for surfboards on it, there are a lot of them out in the water today.
Rikard Fåhraeus 2018-04-19 19.16
I got your mail in the evening, read it and reflect on how we both went by car at the end of the day to check a place we thought could hold traces. Sunshine today, and probably around 19 degrees here to. An equilibrium of seasons; the same here as there, for a short time. You went to the beach, to the big blue at the north shore. I went east, towards the sea and Högberga gård, in my blue car. I have used my car twice today and both times they sent the same radio program about the beat-poets. The circle around the famous Chelsea Hotel in New York. Jack Kerouac was reading, to music and I both times thought it was a nice coincidence (trace?) that the writer of “On the road” was heard while I was on the road to.. where really?
I found the Japanese lantern that I talked about. There was even two. One was next to a pine tree. Remembered your drawings when I looked on the ground full of little round pine cones. The ones you sent pictures of so long ago. Collected a cone from the ground and put it in my pocket. The other one was closer to the edge of the cliff. I could look through the hole in the lantern. It was facing the city far away and had it been possible to see to the other side of the town I would have seen my home in the center, or so I imagined, framed in the shape of a crescent.
I walked around looking at the building and found myself finding connections everywhere. The stone dragon at the main entrance. The pond with walking stones leading over it. The iron dragons at the entrance to the smaller garden. There is only one stone ornament on the main facade; a ship. No connection to ships in the life of my ancestor that I know of but your ancestor was a sailor. And you went to the sea today..
Above the entrance door is a stone relief with a hedgehog biting a snake and the words Pax Dei. Think about the sign you sent. It also warns for snakes, among other things. Pax dei was a way to try to reconstitute the “public space” after times of to much violence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_Truce_of_God . Public space: what can and can not be done in that supposedly free zone. The Eternity chalk tags.
Inside there is an oriental room. It has two large carved pillars with ornaments and figures. One is supposed to picture my ancestor. I have been here before and even if it was a long time ago I do not really expect to find anything new. But looking on his picture I now see that he is holding something in his hand. Is it a monkey, or a little sculpture? I am born in the year of the monkey.
In my warm car back to the city, listening to Jack Kerouac for the second time. Sun blurring the view through my dusty windshield. I pass a strange tower-house that I a couple of times have tried to rent for studio and living space. It is abandoned. Shut down and windows covered with board. It was once the spearhead of research as they tested submarine periscopes there. Now it is blind and see no sea. A shame, but I have tried. Maybe just as well. It would probably have caused me a lot of headache. It is a constant juggling with time. How to use it. I would like to have a boat but now when I am taking care of one it is giving me troubles with all the time I have to spend on maintenance even though it could easily have been much more. I look on the watch and believe for a while that I will have time to go to the Kyudo archery if I want to. But then remember that I have a meeting booked, and maybe I do not want to go. Not really.. I have not been there for a month. Other things in my life has taken the time needed. But yes. It is also a choice. I have not really connected to anyone there. Not that it is bad or people are evil or anything. I did fine, but something more was needed.
I think now about your arrow head. Black. How it has lost its rod and feathers and become useless, detached from its purpose. How it can get another meaning or purpose. Blue evening hour now when I look out the window as I sit here and write. I will look for connections tomorrow. Meaning and purpose? Maybe. At the moment I am within that feeling where those words make me .. blue.. as usual, when there is an exhibition coming up.
Leaning a bit and looking up into the sky I see the moon in much the same shape as the hole in the Japanese lantern through which I saw the city. Crescent. The celestial objects. And our Earth as a little lost blue marble in the big black void.
Maybe I have been to fast. Your traces will stay with me tomorrow and I know there is more to find.
Yours
Ps. There is so much writing.. and already so many pictures. The wall will be full and for someone that does not put in a lot of time and effort it will be .. well hard to comprehend. But I am planning to draw threads, red, from each connection to the next, words and pictures. That will be like a web and might not make it easier for a viewer to follow, but it will be visual, and it will remind of how detectives connect leads on a similar wall. Do you think that is ok?
Rikard Fåhraeus 2018-04-20 20:28
Quite a hectic day today. Did most of the hanging of our pictures, and the threading. This will take an hour or two a day at least. Well, that is usually where I end up, with a bit more on my table to sort out than I am really comfortable with.
I started the morning by printing our photos. While waiting for the printer to do its job I made a sketch, a drawing that in a way visualize our work. I know it is wrong, that it does not tell a true story. But it sort of made a better picture this way. A bit of yin and yang, light and heavy, opposites. So, I hope you forgive me.
After this I had to do some writing for an application soon due. For money to go to Iran in November. Then a long meeting with the people going to get that in order One of the participants talked about a book she just had read named (trans.) ”The less you do the more you get done”, which was about that and other similar life-paradoxes. Today I would really liked that to be true.
Your blue findings have been on my mind all day but I have barely had time to go searching. I did have five minutes in the garden this morning and found a bumblebee asleep in a purple flower. A lot of blue flowers around but no bees in them.
When I was working in the gallery a bumblebee flew in through the open window. It could not find its way out but kept bouncing into the light tubes in the ceiling. I tried to catch it to bring it outside again but the ceiling is to high up and it did not come down but kept flying around. Thought about your drunken bees. Hope It will survive until tomorrow and that I will find it then.
Today has been the first warm day and now spring is really on it´s way. Biking home around eight pm there was people everywhere sitting outside in the warm evening. I kept my eyes open searching for the blue but did not find anything but a poster about the tv series “Blue Planet 2” with some bad graffiti on making the ugly fish look even worse.
There was a blue light-bulbe in the yard at Studio44 that I took a photo of. As I was biking home I was thinking about how insects are drawn towards light and why that is so. Looking up there was the crescent of the moon again and on a building an old lamp with what I first thought was a dragon but that turned out to be a little black angel. The gate was open and I went in there thinking I might find a lead. There was an old lamp-post, in the background the city hall and the sky dark blue but no insects swirling around it. Most of them are still sleeping their winter-sleep, but there is definitely less insects today than when I was young. Then the windshield of my fathers car was spotted after a days drive. Nowadays nearly nothing. There are more insects than the bees affected in the world.
I could not let go of the blue, and the flowers. Coming home and into my room I realized that just that is what I soon will have to deal with. There was the model of the public commission work I will make. My summer will be about that. The tree that I am making for (trans.) “The Blue Flower Park” in Gustavsberg, and the blue flowers that it is supposed to have in the branches. Eight of them was my original thought... Guess that number is haunting me to. I only have a first test flower to show so far. The ones that will be in the tree will have to look a bit different.
Two people are making tree-like installations for the exhibition now at Studio44. Not that they knew about it beforehand, it just happened to be so apparently. I guess our project could be seen as a piece branching out also. But looking on it now it more looks like a spider high on something yellow and red has gone wild. Do not get me wrong. I might sound a bit lament, but I must say that I truly enjoy our project even if I am at the moment is a bit tired.
All well
Remain flying
Rikard
Kate Koivisto Wheeler 2018-04-21 17:24
So here are some things from your writing of yesterday, and some from the one this morning. Mine is not completely chronological, loops back on itself a bit..
Your day at Högberga gård. The garden, water, arches and walls. The ship on the wall. An old brass woodbox which my parents bought at an antique store years ago. It has a sailing ship embossed on its lid and each side, your photograph of the ship on the wall reminded me of it (in storage or I would show you a picture). My mother also collected china, and bought two ceramic jars, one decorated with birds, the other with ships. Today I flicked through a writing case looking for a picture of the town the sailor ancestor you mention came from, Fredrikstad, Norway, a town once famous for its shipbuilding. The postcard is from the 1950s, my grandfather, traveling with my mother and uncle. Sent to my grandmother, the sailor’s daughter.
A Wilhelm Wallenius cargo ship is always docked at Fremantle whenever I drive along the harbour. Again when I went there and found the feather, ‘dreams’, heirloom’.
Your yellow house, it looks interesting, and I wonder what the view from it is like. There is a “yellow house”, called that by my family, in Finland, and we visited and photographed it in 2005. Those photos, of the house, just a handful, were lost when the camera card had a glitch. I will have to ask my cousin again about the significance, but it was a house where my family lived at some stage.. Then last year or the year before, an Finnish-Australian artist here exhibited some photographic work at the State Gallery, and there was an image called ‘yellow house’. I wondered about the significance behind that image/place for him.
There is a yellow house here, square and squat, comical, in a semi-industrial, commercial concrete jungle area called Osborne Park. The house is not just yellow, it is lurid yellow, the most lurid yellow you can possibly imagine. Which makes it memorable, though I can’t remember exactly what it is used for, maybe a real estate agent's…? At the end of the day today I decided I should drive down to photograph it before the light ran out, it is only about 10-15 minutes away. (First, though, I walked a few houses down to photograph the dragon on the roof). In the car, driving, I thought of a yellow painting I made a couple of years ago, which I gave to my son. It is oil on wood, found wood, has a letter ‘E’ on it, his first initial. Its proportions are similar to the long and tall house in your picture. In fact the painting looks much more like it than the house in Osborne Park does. And as it happened, when I got there, there was no yellow house, just a vacant block, actually two vacant blocks on either side of another building. I couldn’t remember which of the two blocks had had the yellow house on it. Now I wonder if I will go back there to look on the blocks...
You mentioned the sun in your dusty windshield on the way home. Then the mail I read today mentioned your father’s that you remember covered with insects. Today I wondered if there was something in that, or might be still.
The blue flower/s, the tree. My mind went to blue tree, and then came a vivid image of the blue birch tree tiles my mother ordered for the bathroom in the house where I grew up. Bathroom. Blue, tree, pipes and ceramic, and flowers.. I think I have told you also that ‘Koivisto' means birch wood.. My mother planted a little forest of 4 birch trees in the back garden. On the grass they grew on, she had planted blue flowers, forget-me-nots. Last year, at a local Red Cross op shop, I saw a cheap little brooch, the forget-me-nots on it, true to their name, reminded me of my mother, her garden, and the flowers on the grass by the birch trees. I decided that I would go the op shop today, as that is where the lead had progressed to, the brooch and its source. I thought about red and red cross, was it like a progression following the blue dot..(the one at the edge of the Blue Planet poster..)? Back to the brooch, the flowers, I think about forgetting and remembering.
I walked there, and on the way, heard the sound of an all-day festival going on a few blocks away, at the soccer park. A man’s voice on an microphone, speaking, then breaking into song. A local celebrity Italian butcher, who sings. As I kept walking down the street, the song was drowned out by the whine of a leaf-blower. Then as I turned a corner toward the main road, the leaf-blower faded out again and the song returned. At the corner was a pane of smashed glass on the ground. I had vague thoughts of the windshields you mentioned.
At the Red Cross, I looked around not really seeing anything, ships or dragons, or hints of a lead. Checked the bookshelf and there was a book called Angels and Demons? Or Devils? Dan Brown. I left it (later I parked behind a Volvo with the number plate 666). However, my small black vinyl bag has been falling to pieces for a couple of weeks, and I found one the same size, simple black leather, so bought that. Bad conscience again.
Walking through a carpark, I thought again of windshields. Walk back to the pane of glass corner, and back along Norfolk Street past upside-down fallen frangipani’s, and a glowing blue plumbago.
Yours,
Kate
Rikard Fåhraeus 2018-04-21
A moment of stillness. Just sitting here. Staring a hole into nothingness. The sound of city silence. Cars far away sound very much like the ocean, as waves breaking on the shore in the distance. A picture of time, the endless. That is the feeling I want to be in now. Another day of constant activity, to get things done in time.
Started the morning by going to Studio44 to set up your leads from yesterday. Drawing the threads is a good way to get them into the head. The opening was great. Culture-night and around 300 visitors, which is rare for us. We had, in a moment of joyful craziness, decided to declare the arrival of David Bowie at midnight, and that without a plan of how it would happen. Can not remember how that came up and am a bit amazed that it went as far as to being officially announced. We solved it by asking all remaining 30 people to find a video-clip or sound with Bowie on their cellphones, turn it on and then place all the phones on the floor in the middle of the crowd. It became a nearly religious, serene moment. Everybody just stood still looking and listening to the chaotic mass. My choice was “The man who fell to earth”, of course.
Sunny Sunday. Rolling slowly with my blue bike. Towards the Red Cross store. Thinking that I might find leads there, here connected to there. Thinking about yellow houses. There are quite a lot of them here. Have not really reflected on that before.
I stop on the other side of the street from the Red Cross op shop to take a photo, turn around and see that I am standing outside the office of the architect firm Claesson, Koivisto & Rune. In the window a little asymmetric tower of birch (?) wood. A little yellow figure beside it. To much of a coincidence. I had no idea their office was here. But they are closed, Sunday, no one inside.
More people at the Red Cross. A corner with blue things in which is one book about how to cook meat. I do not want it, but it reminds me of the meat in the jar, with its blood stained alcohol.
A rack of framed art. One etching of a boat; “90/100 Rederi Nordstjerna” (trans. Shipping Company Northstar ) and then I can´t decipher the rest, from 1920. Think about your star. Decide it is part of this. A rack with books not in the book department. One blue book “Place de l Étoile” of Patrick Modiano. Étoile means star. It is a reference to the jewish star of David. Conscience. The pound of meat, the jew in the play “the Merchant of Venice”. The text on the back of the cover indicates that it is about conscience. Is described as deeply serious and violently rambunctious at the same time. I take that to.
Think that I might find a better lead, a trace more fortuitous, if I find the book you found and take the one next to it whatever it might be. But there is no (!?) book at all by Dan Brown which is strange in itself.
No trace of any Forgetmenots but too much porcelain with blue flowers.
Coming out of the Red Cross it is high time to get something to eat. They have next door a cafe named “Kupan” (trans. The Hive). Your bees in the grass and yesterdays bumblebees make me go in. While I sit at my table and wait for my pie I look at the assembly of red lampshades over the table. Think about an artpiece I made years ago, of hundreds of lampshades. It was about how it is easier to reach a goal when one knows where to go and it had the name “ Where the rainbow starts” ( not ends). Blue dots, yellow houses, red lampshades. Who is afraid of red, yellow and blue. Barnett Newman and Virginia Woolf.
I eat my lunch and think about bees and honey. Virginia Woolf and Orlando.
When I leave I am close to go in to the Red Cross again to see if there is any book by her but do not. But just a few blocks away I pass a restaurant called “Honey Honey” and below the sign are two posters for concerts: Slowgold Holy now – Slaktkyrkan ( trans. Slaughter church) and Tex Hoth with a picture of a sad woman.
On my way back to the studio I pass the house where Wallenius shipping company has their head office. A blue dot painted on it. A blue light on the restaurant on the corner in the same house: Hellströms Bar & Restaurant. Håkan Hellström is a well know musician in Sweden. One of his most well know songs is called “Känn ingen sorg för mig I Göteborg”. Göteborg is the harbour city by the ocean.
In the window of Wallenius they have models of some of their boats. A red one named Tamesis from Tönsberg catch my eye. Tönsberg is just across the fjord from Fredrikstad. Tamesis is the ancient name for river Thames. London. That is where you are going.
In the entrance is a Chandelier (lampshade again) made of plastic bottles. Makes me think of the plastic islands floating in the middle of the Pacific. Also reminds me of the message in a bottle that I sent so long ago thinking that it might reach you, the one that gave me an immediate response from a Russian couple ( do you remember ?). If it found it´s way out into the big oceans, if it escaped the plastic dolldrums. How long it would take to drift to Perth.
Next to Wallenius there is a decoration in the middle of the street. Three steel globes with equators of blue light. A man is in the middle of the street taking photos of them. He has to run back and forth to avoid the traffic. He is waiting for the right moment. He knows what kind of picture he wants to take. He has a mission unknown to me.
So many leads today. But no Plumbago. In Swedish they are named (trans.) “ Lead flowers”. Heavy. I thought I might get a heavy day. Until now not so, but the rest of the day was.
Kate Koivisto Wheeler 2018-04-23 16:03
The top book on my bedside table is by the French writer, Colette, Earthly Paradise. I thought I’d start there, your opshop find of the French book. This book by Colette is also from an opshop, across the road from the Red Cross one, the RSPCA. I made a mental note to visit again before the end of the day.
I pick up the book, suddenly see them on the cover, blue flowers on my bedside table all this time and I hadn’t noticed.
The cover doesn’t lie flat and distorts the image on the camera, so I open a drawer under the surface I started to photograph on.. I need blu-tak, none there. But I see something else there I can use, might work. Perfect. ‘Magic dots’, blue.
Maybe there is something in the pages where my bookmark is. But I find something else I haven’t seen before. The book fell open to an admission ticket, Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, cost: 500 lire. This:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Cultural_Heritage_and_Activities_and_Tourism_(Italy)
And see this in the link?:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Cultural_Heritage_and_Activities_and_Tourism_(Italy)#/media/File%3AEmblem_of_Italy.svg
I read through the pages the ticket was between and found in the last line of the spread: “the blue street lamps”.
Then looked at the pages my bookmark is at:
“the old blue victoria”, “the blue Titaresus”. Then “a perfect circle of birches and oaks”. Also wolves, foxes, and “a leaden sun”. I close the book, look again at the blue flowers on the cover.
I would be going to Victoria Park today for a meeting with my work in the afternoon, at a place called Holyoake. Holy Oak. I thought of the Pax Dei you mentioned.
On the way, I drove past a large sign, QUEST.
After the meeting, I headed for an oak tree on another street in Victoria Park. I remembered parking next to one when delivering an artwork (‘northern eyes, southern land’) to a space a while ago, for a group exhibition, called Public. (Oaks are not so common here, and my daughter collected some acorns when I took her with me later to the exhibition. When I found the street again today, I saw that the whole street is lined with oaks. An early childhood memory of the carpet in the rooms of my paternal grandparents’, oak leaf design, the floor was covered in oak leaves.
After that, I drove along the highway in Victoria Park, looking for somewhere to get a coffee. A few places, none I fancied, so kept driving, and wondered if I’d be led to somewhere in particular. Starting to lose patience, just a little, let that go, really just wanted a good coffee from somewhere that looked worthwhile.. I saw a place, the Sparrow’s Nest. They were about to close for the day, and I still had a couple of other places to go to, ordered a takeaway. There was an old upright piano, various collectibles, including a tapestry of deer, and what I thought at first was a barometer, in fact a wall thermometer. Then as the man behind the counter poured my coffee, I saw a tattoo curled around his forearm. A thick black outline of a large star, just like the one in my window. I would have loved to see your face if you’d been there. Paid, thanked him, he wished me a good afternoon and I walked back to my car for my next destination.
I drive to the causeway, the road back to the north side of the river. In the middle of the causeway is an island, Heirisson Island. I’d thought about it a couple of weeks ago in relation to Heirloom, and your islands in Stockholm, legacy. Pax Dei. Public space. Then you sent the book lead, French, I decided it was somewhere I should go to see if there was a lead on the island. This island, like ‘Australia’ in general, and like Rottnest, is another sad story, part of the same larger one, and bad conscience on the part of the Europeans who claimed it as theirs. Pax Dei. I thought of the 1905 ‘Protection’ Act, which ensured the control and endangering of the First Peoples here, an effort to ‘disappear’ them. And the ongoing struggle for this island. I know, I’ve talked about it before, more than once.
As I remembered, the car park is on the east side of the road, so I traveled all the way to the north side, parked, then walked back towards the island, the causeway goes across its center. I took my coffee with me and decided I’d head for the south side, facing Victoria Park, Holyoake and the street of oak trees. Surprisingly little rubbish left around. Just a single plastic bottle, lid gone. I imagined that a message had been taken out of it. By the water’s edge, a beautiful white bone-like branch, maybe a ghost gum, maybe just weathered and bleached by the water, sun and time. Clams and oyster shells scattered along the banks, I hope and guess from the people who have lived here for thousands of years.
Back on the north side of the river, I walked back a slightly different path to the car park. Not far along it, saw a sign warning for bees. Then, reaching the carpark, saw what seemed to be a figure 8, part missing like when painted with a brush.. At home, I asked my son about the Chinese characters at the bottom of the sign. He said the first one says ‘8’.
At my car, I saw I’d parked at a bay numbered 180. And thought about degrees.
My last stop was the RSPCA op shop. They no longer sell books. The only thing I saw there of interest was a pair of fairly dreadful paintings of ships, I preferred my money to those and made my way home.
After dinner this evening, I sat down to put this together. Began, then got up to boil the kettle for a cup of tea. Opening the cupboard, realised I’d used the last of my black tea this morning, so reached for one I don’t use so often. Of course it should be the Yunnan Pu-erh tea, though it was purchased before your travels to China last year, is sealed up tightly. Nearly all gone. No use-by date. Would it still be ok? Only when I pulled the packet out did I see the brand name, Golden Sail Brand, and the logo, a ship.
Your mail, so much found, I’m still thinking about it. The opening, so good.
See
K
Rikard Fåhraeus 2018-04-25 00:36
It feels as a middle day, as if we have come half way, but I know there are only five days left of this exhibition and this intense surge of leads.
Your little sign of 180 was on my mind quite a lot. 180 degrees, a half circle, turning around and look what is behind. I could not really let it go and it made me think about what has come up so far. I did so much thinking that I must have missed leads right before my eyes as I rolled through the city.
Threads of destiny, Bees, conscience, blue – yellow, East Asia – dragon, Stars and the celestial, flowers-trees-birch and oak, ancestors. The collecting and losing of value – the wealthy and the robbed. Signs and messages, books. Boats and the sea. And more...
Last night, after reading your last mail, I wanted to watch something. I have had a go at “Lost” but got lost myself and left it. Turned to the public television streem-site and of course “Blue Planet II” came up, about life at the coastline, the small and the big. Five-finger starfish on film with higher speed did their dance. Majestic mountains of waves in slow motion. The octopus hunting its prey. The full moon pulling and the little man pushing the limits of the liquid life. I maybe discarded wrongly the lead a fellow artist came with. The misinterpretation of the name of our project and the book she reads to her son: “ Beast Quest”.
I had a dream last night. There was a hole that needed mending. I looked everywhere for the things needed but did not really know what it was. Someone was talking, telling me not to worry, that the construction was complex and that the hole was part of how it should be.
Today, after setting up our last leads and after leaving the gallery, I was thinking of our two books. How you found blue words on your page. Is there a hidden meaning, how should one then find it? It struck me that I put a needle in my book, to attach threads on. I hammered it straight in where the “O” is in Étoile. It should be long enough to go straight through the rather thin book. Wonder what words it goes through. Wonder what words a needle going through your book at the exact same point would be. If this was a story by Borges the needle-words would form their own story. If it was a story by Dan Brown the needle-words would reveal a hidden and forbidden religious truth.
I had to take care of the sailing boat today. It goes in the water on Sunday and has to be ready then. Still things to do. I watered it, to make the dry wood swell and tighten the cracks. Water to stop water. The nose has been a bit damaged. Not by me but I have promised to fix it. It is supposed to be oak-wood there I was told, but it is mahogany. Oak, the traditional wood for boats here. Every oak was royal property before, not anymore.
It is a bit to dark in the boat-house. It suddenly struck me that it is because I last autumn replaced the old tarpaulin with a new and bought a blue one. I went out and realized that every other boat in the yard has a white tarp, for a reason; they let through the light. The clarity of vision.
Under my tarp is a blue world, a bit like working under water. Obscurity.
While working I was thinking of your leads, that there might be something that I have missed. Something hidden. I took a break and checked your photos again. Something is written under the “Quest” sign. Reception on Arlington Ave. Have you been there? Have you been recepted? Have I been receptive? Who was Arlington? When I write the question Google suggest Edwin Arlington Robinson. Was he a Crusoe? No, a writer, poet who in Swedish Wikipedia is described as “missanpassad idealist I dollarsamhället” (aprox. trans.) An idealist missadjusted in a world of dollar. On “poethunter.com” he is number 236 of to 500 poets. Number 36. That is the house “Heirloom”, and the quay number where I found the tangled carpet in the water.
On my way to the studio I think about those “ missadjusted to a world of dollar” and boats, and sailors, and connect these. The workers on the sea, threatened by the monster-waves I saw on Blue Planet II. The Iconic picture “The Wave” by Hokusai. The boats and fishermen there that are about to be crushed. How mount Fuji is just a little detail far away even though the series of woodprints all were views of that mountain. The holy mountain.
In the stairs up to my studio is a watercolor I made some years ago. It is also a wave, but in the background is Stockholm cityhall. It was made with the rising of the oceans in mind, not really any reference to Hokusai that I was aware of at the time. But it is there. I Google the picture by Hokusai and learn that it is number one in a series of 36 (!) views of Fuji. That the dominating color is Berlin-blue. It should be ( since it is Japanese ) “read” from right to left.
Our pictures I now install from left to right, since we read that way in the west. Maybe it then, in the end, should be interpreted from right to left? Looking back. 180 degrees. The dragon biting its own tail. The message in a bottle returning back to its point of departure after a circumnavigation of the globe. Upon looking for a photo of the wave-painting I find a photo of a painting that I had forgotten about. One of a message in a bottle.
Now, in the night, when I look for a bag to pack some things in for tomorrow, I find the bag I got from the Red Cross opshop to transport my things that I bought. It says “Manteco” on it and has a tag saying “100% made in Italy”. I Google (again.. a lot of that this evening ) and find their page. The page “Manteco Social Heart” attracts my eye and there is one image to crazy to ignore.
Connect the dots
Rikard
_
Oh that was a bit to much.. I always copy the mail for printing after sending, and that includes the date and time... Here it was 00:36 .... 36 again!?
/R
Kate Koivisto Wheeler 2018-04-25 15:16
Starting to write, I look at the clock here at the top of my laptop, exactly 12.00 pm. Strange to think that just as yesterday ended for you, today was beginning here. But that even before noon here, day had begun for you.
I drove my son to work, at the place where he climbs, then walked around the lake. My sunglasses broke as I went to put them on just before we drove out of the gate, I must have dropped them one too many times. Missed them straightaway, the sun is bright today, the opposite of my previous walk there when it was grey and dark, raining heavily. This morning, sunny, peaceful activity, people, dogs, bicycles, wildlife. On the eastern side, almost back where I started, I see something I’ve only seen once before, wonder if it is a seasonal event. It’s as though overnight, a million spiders have encased the foliage of the trees in bags of silver white silk, looks like Halloween. In the sheltered, shady grove where there is a smaller walking path. A little spooky. The silk billows and glistens. Reminds me of what you said a few days ago, a spider high on something, gone wild.
All morning, I saw no 36’s, then something, a little before noon. Maybe more confirmation bias than anything, as it’s now in my head and I’m alert to it, but the way I found it was interesting. I’m drafting this on my laptop, over the course of today, and will send to my phone later, partly as it is technically easier for now to take, store, send the current photographs, and everything from the phone. I save the ones you send too, so that I can quickly look again at what everything, and they are mostly in order. Of course, some of the things we are sending over this fortnight were taken at earlier dates. Today I went to look again at the watercolours from your email this morning: the bottle in the ocean and the city hall view. Where were they, I scroll back, and find them. By chance, the bottle in the ocean one is next to a photograph I took of the ocean, also from 2014, though I’ve deleted most photos from my phone between then and the beginning of this year. The cloud line of your painting lines up with the horizon line of the photograph. There is a gull in the photograph flying towards your painting. Although the same year, the months don’t correspond, mine was from August, yours in May, the months are written as words. I look at the things that are different numerically, not 2014. The remaining numbers are the time of day, and day of the month. Yours,13 (May) 4.39 (pm). Mine,18(August) 2.23 (pm)…there it is.
I wanted to check also the painting of the City Hal, look at the spire. I have a postcard of the harbour and City Hall of Oslo, again from the 1950’s, from the travelling family back to the sailor’s daughter. There is also one of Stockholm, somewhere, probably from that same trip.
I told you what my daughter said on Saturday morning before the opening. The next day, I showed her the Beast Quest cover picture you sent (I’m sure that book is from a series) and she also commented on the eagle. In your pictures today, at the top, like a spire, the eagle from the “Manteco Social Heart” site. My younger son’s name, from the Old Norse word for eagle, after an eagle I encountered at the top of a mountain years ago. The eagle pin his godfather gave him.
Yes, the threads, repetitions, what is most salient, things that connect, things that follow on… next, reminds me immediately of the black leather bag I bought at the Red Cross shop a few days ago. It is Italian leather, and the brand is NEXT. When I saw the bag in your photo, I remember a bag I was given to put things in, from another local op shop, where I bought a new red jacket for my daughter a fortnight ago. The bag they gave me is from the Holland America Line, and has a ship logo on it. My father and stepmother have drink coasters and tea bags from the same company, having traveled on those ships many times. “Alaska, Asia & Pacific, Canada & New England, Caribbean, Europe, Hawaii, Mexico, Pacific Northwest, Panama Canal, South America, Grand Voyages”. They will soon ’sail' again, though this time with “Princess”. Among other places, to Japan.
Japan and your speaking of "the holy mountain”. Remember Hossein Valamanesh’s residency in Japan, which I wrote about the other day? While there, he visited Osorezan (trans: Mount Fear), an ancient and sacred place for all religions in Japan he wrote, a mountain with a lake at the top, and a Buddhist temple, people travel there and leave piles of stones with the names of people who have recently died, in memory of them. It is surrounded by 8 peaks, and is seen as a place between life and death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Osore . A place for all religions. This reminded me of something you said in one of your mails at the beginning of this fortnight. Norns, and weaving faiths together.
Very different from Osorezan, but following that thread, I have been to a place for those of all religions and those of none, a building in Helsinki, my cousin took me there one day, very light snow falling off and on. It is clad with wood outside, inside it is airy and tranquil, softness and warmth.
The needle in your book sounds really good. You know Bowie’s juxtaposed texts, using chopped up and rearranged text? I like working like this, letting some things form as they will, have made some writings using a technique a little like throwing darts. Where would I put the needle in the French blue book? The O in Colette? I have Borges’ The Mirror of Ink I remember, that is something else in storage. Needle in a haystack.
Your attending to the boat. My father’s small boat, Aura. He talked about it this week, and the winter season starting, they continue though it is often a case of extremes - wind too strong or no wind at all. Swedish flags on the wall at the yacht club where Aura is moored. The Finnish flag colours of the tarpaulins in your picture, the large blue and white painting of Saaristomeri/Skärgårdshavet in my little lounge room, made after my third crossing by boat of that sea, a very Barnett Newman woven piece of fabric from another Finnish cousin, the civil war in Finland in 1918, WW I. Today is a national public holiday here, ANZAC Day. A few planes flying overhead, but much more restraint overall this year, in the air and on the roads.
The wood, mahogany, I read that the tree is from warmer climates, think of my grandfather’s old mahogany dinner table, somewhere close to the Mirror of Ink. The turbulent economic climate in the country of his youth. He studied economics in Finland, and later ran his own business in the city’s central business district here as a tobacconist: http://innopac.slwa.wa.gov.au/record=b2314031
An idealist misadjusted to a world of dollar >> A room of one’s own.
The moon is between half and full tonight.
What will you find next?
/K
Rikard Fåhraeus 2018-04-26 21:39
Last night. Scrolling a stream-site to see a movie. Find one that is called Wonderstruck. I like the name and choose that for better or worse. It is as if someone has planted it under my nose. Have never heard of the movie. Watch it! In relation to what we are doing it is just too much. Or maybe it is me that has just read your mail and therefor am caught in a way of interpreting what I have around me. There are of course things in the movie that does not correspond, but there are very much that does to. The two main characters are deaf though. I am glad I am not.
Morning. Straight to Studio44 wobbling on my blue bike, still a bit sleepy. Focus. Wake up!
Our wall is expanding, growing, sending its threads, roots, branches, mycelium out in every direction. I have no chance of connecting every lead and thought to the one before but work on it as long as I find it possible. As I stand there I keep seeing more and more connections. The web spreads and all the little threads tangle into each other. As I draw them from one lead to another they want to attach themselves to other points. They cross each other at points that attract my attention and give me new ways for the mind to wander off.
As I leave I am in quite a state, the mind is all set on finding connections and that is what it keeps on doing. 50 meters from Studio44 is a school. A basketball bounces over the fence and the kids call on me to throw it back. I do. See that the old iron fence has David stars as decoration. I turn (180 degrees ) and look on the other side of the street. The sides of two houses are covered with white tarp, for a renovation. Makes me think of the spiderwebs you saw. The number of the house is 36. I roll on slowly, mind so set that I see blue things everywhere. Yet another 50 meters there is a tattoo parlor, street number 16. Your grandfathers cigarette shop, the man with a star tattoo.,, In the window copies of some old Japanese woodprints. Samurais, not Hokusai. The name of the parlor is “Sanctum” and has a cross on the door. Religion. On a hook on the window frame someone has left a lost dog-collar of leather. I take it with me. I look across the street again, another 180 degree lead. There is a plaque in memory of the Finnish philosopher Wilhelm Snellman who had his childhood home there. I have never seen that before. Have never heard of him.
I roll on, Stockholm mosque to the right, pass the high tower at Medborgarplatsen, some knitting street art on the mocking hand of the sculpture of a jester. The threads in the hands of the Norns are but a fools dream? As I come to the other side of the park there is a man washing away graffiti with a high pressure washer. Think about that Banksy piece you mentioned. I take photo after photo and feel a bit wound up. Too much, too soon, the day has still many things to show. How will this end? As I continue my ride towards Långholmen and all the boats there I think about photos. How this, visually, has become something of a photographic project.
Next time I have to stop there is a traffic jam at a crossing and I take my bike to the pavement to walk pass it. To messy. Turn 180 and look again. At that spot there is a secondhand bookshop for photographic books. I look in the window and find connections to virtually every book I see, nearly... In the middle, for some reason, is a photo of King Oscar 2nd who was king of Norway and Sweden. There ares some books on a rack outside that are for sale. One is “Photograms of the year 1938” (not 36). I flip up a page and it says “Australia” and starts with a big O (in Once) . The “O” in our books. I take it in and talk to the shop owner. Ask if I can take a photo of his window display and explain briefly why. He starts talking about a book by Bruce Chatwin called “Dreamtime” ( in Swedish it is called “Drömspår” trans. Dream-trace ). We chat a bit and then I leave. Another secondhand bookstore next to the first. A book about boats in the window. I go in and ask the owner if he has the book “Dreamtime”. He helps me to look but we do not find it. But I do find a long row of other books that connect.: Castaneda “ Second ring of power “ (since we are looking for a book about dream-trace ) Cela “the Hive”, Rilke “ Malte Laurids Brigge “ ( a book that is a bad conscience memory ) so I buy them instead. As a gift I am given a Yearbook 1919 for the Saint Eriks society.
I take the road home that leads down to the water. A yellow house overlooking the town with the Town hall spire sticking up in the background beside it. In front of it a sea of little blue flowers; Scilla also called Bluestar. I wonder who lives in there?
Down the hill to the quay. As I pass the place where I found the carpet, quay 36, I see that the chair is still there. I also notice that there is another sign some meters away facing the water. Backside, which faces me, covered with graffiti. In the middle a sticker saying “Akira”. Kurosawa or the manga figure?
As I come home I look in my sons room if he has a manga with Akira. I do not find it but think about my sons name; Sanno. When I heard the name first ( it is a family name ) I thought it was Japanese but it actually comes from a Estonian version of Alexander. There is though, a Japanese deity called Sanno in Shinto Buddhism. He is the “mountain king” of Mt. Hiei and is there is a relation to monkey worshiping. The three monkeys” See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil . I google this and the mountain Hiei is related to North East and the Demon gate in relation to I-Ching. I have an I-Ching book and throw the coins to get an answer on “BeQuest”. The result is no. 16 “Enthusiasm”. It ells about “the law of least resistance” and religious rapture with musik, the reverance of ancestors. There are two changing coins talking about “pressure” and “do not doubt”. The changed result leads to no. 8 “Holding together”. Quite a bite I must say.
I had to do some work on the boat toady to so I leave after a quick lunch. More Bluestar flowers. At the shed where the paints and tools are someone has hung a question for a quiz-walk. The obvious answer is “Eagle”. Even a photo of one. This is too much. I dive into my blue-light boat-house and keep my head bent down in work for a long time. No more traces for a while. But hanging there with my nose in the fumes of varnish I can´t help thinking of the oracle in Delphi who was breathing toxic fumes to get visions. Is this where I am heading? Am I intoxicated by this quest of ours? I hear the planes flying over my head on their way to the landing at the city Airport Bromma. Think about ANZAC day. War. The ways people do tricks just to hurt someone. My own troubles with people around me. Not all but a few. One is definitely our neighbor at Slipvillan that take every opportunity to take a swing at us.
When I later bike over there I pass a boat with the name “Gadden” (trans. Sting (of a bee)). Wonder what the “sting” of our “bee” in BeQuest would be. How something that hurts can hurt in various ways. In good as well as bad and how we as individuals choose to relate to this that hurt, mentally and physically. I pass my car parked on the backside of Slipvillan. She, the neighbor, has complained about that but we have used that spot for parking since we got here, 8 years (or more?) on directions from the house landlord. It has never been any trouble before. Now suddenly there are 2(!) parkingtickets on the car. I mail our caretaker, who is new to us, and quickly get the answer that this is not their land and that they can not take responsibility and he does not know anything about any permission from them to let us park there. I can do nothing but sigh since we have no written agreement on this. Just pay and think about another solution. The devil neighbor has won again. I wonder what comes next. It has gone so far that if there was any opportunity for me to do her harm I would be very tempted to do so. But I will not look for that. There are better things in life to focus the energy on. Like writing things like this, that is a better focus. Every day these becomes longer. Must find a way to turn 180 degrees.
Kate Koivisto Wheeler 2018-04-27 18:42
Tomorrow I will be at the studio, the window at the end of the hallway overlooks the Brass Monkey Hotel, which features the 3 wise monkeys. I’ll take a picture.
Sanno sounded familiar to me, and on checking, yes, a place in Western Finland. More than a few Finnish words sound Japanese. There is an entry from Latvia for the name Sanno, as being originally from Japan. And the Sanno Marracoonda Perth Airport Hotel, which has been there forever but when I was a child was just the Marracoonda Hotel. And I find Alexander: means defender of men.
https://www.names.org/n/sanno/about
Osorezan: gate to hell
I grab a cardigan to take with me before I go out, notice in a box a scarf with a flower print, bought at a shop in Stockholm in 2005, I think it was called Make, it sold second hand clothes, some of which were remade, stitched onto etc. The scarf was made in Italy.
Usually, I leave my phone at home when I walk around the lake, but took it with me this morning to see if I could get a photo of the spiderweb. On the way, a number of detour signs. Reroutes.
The webs are still there but messy now and littered with fallen leaves, the light a little too bright for good images. But I send here just one photo, a bamboo plant, wrapped Christo-like.
As I continue walking I see a small black arrowhead, white arrows, think of arrows, needles, good and not good stings. Acupuncture, vaccinations, defence,
wound, attack, offence, poison...
A couple of men are spraying weed killer. There are signs alerting to its dangers, what does that mean for the wildlife, the water? Further along the path, just beyond the weedkillers, a lone dandelion, rebellious, defiant.
I think about the path, the Tao/the Way, yin and yang, equilibrium, balance.
Stop to photograph a bottle lid on the ground, blue. To my right is a large open green space where on weekends targets are set up, arrows shot.
Notice a hole on the path, think about the hole in you dream. Positive and negative space. Cracks.
The artist dilemma. What I want to do needs money, which creates pressure and takes time and energy. Think about paths, which is the way? The book you spoke of, doing less, more is done.
Yesterday. Pressure. Being needled, holding together, not doubting, survival, extracting oneself from pressure. Arrows. The path of least resistance. Detour signs, reroutes.
The lotus tea I drank before driving to the lake.
The circuit almost done, I see the basketball hoop, nobody there and think of the children at the school, the ball you tossed back to them. I veer off the main path to take the smaller one by the lakeside. A little bird flits down onto the middle of the path in front of me, I’m too late for a photograph before it has flown off again. Turn 180 degrees and walk back, then forward again. Maybe the bird will repeat its movement for me? No. But as I continue on my way, and glance over my shoulder, the bird has turned into a man in orange high-vis. That’s a trick I haven’t seen before..
Waiting at traffic lights on the way home I see a blue bowling ball on a sign, a t-junction I stop at several times each week.
At home, I think of 8 as I work through sets of weight and core strength training.
Later, I visit a couple of galleries with a friend. One of the artists talks with us about Anselm Kiefer. Between galleries my friend and I stop for a drink. The Como Hotel. I stop to rush across the road to take a look at an old house, my Finnish grandfather’s. It is now a commercial property and I walk to its side, take a photo and video of a tree in the back yard, full of pink parrots.
Later we go to an event in Fremantle, between the Round House and the building by the harbour with the dreams poster. Put together by Tim Burns. Music, film, art.
It’s late now. What I’ve written is fragmented, notes, half formed thoughts, and I’m sleepy. I hope it’s okay to read. The decision to go to the event tonight was last minute, but I decided to go, as there may be something there..maybe not. There was a man in a long faux fur coat and a white T-shirt with a big red star on it. And I had a conversation with an artist friend who talked about escape, ancestors, and making boxes in a blizzard in New York.
/K
2018-04-28 07:22
How are you?
Those videos, if not easy to present, that’s ok I understand. Maybe it’s possible to print a still, but if not and too difficult to present as videos, don’t worry about them. They can just be connected to/from the written mentions of them in the email.
I look forward to finding Wonderstruck.
I feel also intoxicated by the leads, it builds up, and then my mind lets go as if it needs a break, then again reconnects with it all... Maybe things are also going on in the subconscious at the letting go times. It feels that way. The network, mycelium continue to connect and extend inside while I’m sleeping or have let go for a while. Outer and inner. Atoms, cells, neurons, nerves, bloodstream, synapses, breath.
At the gallery, Anselm Kiefer. I forgot to say also I thought of Hélène Cicoux, “writing one’s self”. Perhaps this also may apply to what we are doing in some way partly, consciously or not, in Be Quest. In a sense all of us are always doing that I guess..
In what you wrote last, yes there is so much there, and so much here.
Again, thank you.
Ride easy
K
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Rikard Fåhraeus 2018-04-28 17.06
Saturday. I will be guarding the exhibition today until five pm. Tomorrow morning I have to go to the boat-club and help delivering the boats to the sea, including the one I take care of. So I will be to busy to get her in the morning and add what comes up from me today. I will have to take it from here, and why not.
I had to rusch off this morning to get to the store, buy new ink to the printer so I can print your photos and add them before the opening at 12. I was at the mall abit early and while waiting for the store to open I wandered about. A wall with a decoration showing that there the elevators are located on the other side. The large sign shows a symbol of woman going up and a man going down. Is this us? You down-under going up and me up-north going down. Maybe a more broad sense than just us, all humans; women coming up, men going down, changes coming and maybe we all end up on the same level. Equality. Think about interpretation. The differences on behalf of point of view.
How does a visitor interpret BeQuest? Probably quite fast as something complex. Connections and thinking-threads. Depending on background they will interpret in various ways. Filters of the mind, like having different colored glasses stuck on through which we see the world. The photographer will look on the quality of the photo. The painter will look on the play of colors or patterns. The curator will see the complexity and think about another artist to compare with (probably someone famous who already has done something like this in the 70ties ). The Etnograph might, if he takes time to read and understand what is going on, think of aboriginal Dreamwalks and Nordic myths. The Party-animal will remember yesterday if he sees and hears your video from yesterday ( one has to press play and can choose one of the two videos at a time ). The psychologist will.. yes.. depending on what school he belongs to he will draw various conclusions. The Jungian will see the collective archetypes. The Freudian will see a man and woman mating and the tower as something phallic. The environmentalist will see nature in decay. The list can go on. Maybe I am a bit blunt. There are always ways to see beyond the personally habitual, I hope..
What do we see, you and I? Our hopes a bit fulfilled or a bit damaged? I wish to be able to say “I see you”, but do I?
I will stop speculating here. I will wait for one and only one lead today. Have patience and trust that it will come. We have been looking everywhere. Think about the dog-collar I found outside the tattoo parlor. It is in my pocket. A leash. Leather found. Your black bag wit the text “Next”. What comes next? Maybe I have to restraint myself. Not let my mind run wild. Now I will wait for the next lead to come to me.
Very few visitors today. Too good weather to go inside I guess. But one of the other artists ( who also contributed with the Beast Quest book ) brought in a curator friend from New York. We had a long and rather interesting discussion about some of the things I wrote above here, Interpretations, ways of view based on background. Afterwards I wondered if this really gave me any new leads. Maybe, the connection to New York. She talked about things that are a, visually, connected to older times, ancestors. She was pleased that our work , BeQuest, was not as messy as it could have been, as one might expect, and she liked it, which is a good thing.
My son visits but ends up in a corner reading a manga called “battle through the heaven”. I look out the window to the heaven that now has turned to a fine drizzle of rain. On the window sill something has rained two dozen little hairs. Looks like eyelashes. Someone has let his eyes lash out through the dirty glass and dropped them there as a consequence . Someone who now is without that eye-protection. Think about your broken sunglasses. How it is in your pictures from yesterday is such a hard light. The ground looked burned, even as if there was pieces of coal among the brown leaves and little nuts. The dandelion, a ball of readiness, seeds about to fly away.
Look over the street and there, high up, is a curtain with dandelion pattern. Barely visible.
Time to close. Time to print out this, attach it to the wall and the strings, the web across the wall. Me, the spider. Some parts now remind of the bamboo in your photo. Covered. Something will hatch from this.
Yours
R
Kate Koivisto Wheeler 2018-04-29 12:16
As I read your mail, something from last night’s dream flashes suddenly. I stop, and let the dream remerge. There was a kind of map, like a diagram, stuck to a wall, showing a line going north. I was looking at it, standing in front of it maybe, or maybe I was not present at the wall in the dream, but could just see it as the dreamer. The line of north was something to do with you travelling north, you’d plotted out two or three places, and I remember seeing the word Svalbard by the end of the line. I’m not sure if that was one of the places you marked out, but it was on the map. Prior to the dream, I knew it was an island, near Norway I thought. But I Google and find that it’s one of the most northernmost inhabited places in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard
I didn’t know that before. The name means ‘jagged mountains’. On the wall, instead of going up, the line heading north went downwards, down the wall. Svalbard was still at the north end but the north end was shown as furthest down.
Yesterday I was thinking about interpretation and meaning. That I’ve sent you collections of things, things I’ve seen, heard, brief accounts of things that have happened. But any reflecting on meaning has been perhaps fleeting, brief. At least that’s what came to my mind on Friday walking around the lake. I’m always in motion. I could do well to only sit, for enough time for me to really slow down, stop, look, at what we have found. It does become difficult to not find more and more, to instead stop and digest what is there first. Not just connections and leads, but how what we’ve gathered may be interpreted. I suppose I’ve been mainly collecting, and would like to look at what has been found, presented, see what is there, just reflect, sit. I don’t mean only the whole, gestalt, but smaller details too. I feel you’re better at doing this along the way, I tend to be too much in constant motion, inside and outside, and probably need more time to reflect. I hope I can do some of this. Now that the fortnight is done and I’m not in the constant action mode of gathering leads, finding, seeking or awaiting them for the wall in the gallery... I don’t know how long you take to write, but I think it takes me longer than average. Some times are easier than others, to gather my thoughts and put them into some kind of coherent form, but it usually takes me a long time. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it, I really do. It helps in itself, to gather my thoughts, reflect. What we are doing here is important to me, my life, it IS life. And gives that. The constant motion though, I guess has something to do with both my own nature and my current life circumstances. I need a lot of time and quiet space to decompress, that’s not easy to find, no doubt not for you either. Other things are bearing down, pressing, awaiting my attention but I am keeping those wolves at the door until tomorrow.
These things on the wall the things that have surfaced for us and for visitors. They become a mass of images and words, images and words en masse. Sewn together. Complexity, holes, cracks, things in the cracks, things in between, the whole.
Yes. Who is the viewer and what do they see? We have lived these things, we continue to. They are part of our life, lives. Looked, found, things have found us, happened to us, been presented to us.
I was putting some clean clothes away in the wardrobe, saw the sailboat dress in there. That was the dress to wear for today. Boats, Bequest, closing tonight. The dress has a button at the back of the neck, and the loop for the button needed mending. So I found the loop that had been safely put away (a miracle in itself that I knew where it was), sat down with needle and thread, and fixed it. Strange how much I love hand-sewing like this.
Later I also photograph the needle. At the studio, I did some reflecting, the needle. Also to north, compass, You made a sculpture with a spinning compass that didn’t point the way, which direction…? Something also about how it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of God? Religion. Needle in a haystack. Dirty needles, addiction and poverty. All these things seem to speak of difficulty. Yet needles are used to protect, to make things, to repair things, as I did today with the dress I wear right now. I can wear it again now because of the needle. Things that are double-edged.
Stream of consciousness. Instead of photographing the 3 wise monkeys, at the Brass Monkey on William Street, I remember a photograph I took a few months ago from the studio building, my floor. Chinese New Year. I find it. You can’t see the 3 monkeys in this, but because there are dragons, and a monkey (drinking beer, how ‘Australian') watching them, it seems like the one to send (I don’t think I have sent it before??). Maybe there is more in that picture too..
Then I think of the intersection of William and James, the street names of where the Brass Monkey is. I think I know that name. Yes, William James, an American philosopher and psychologist. There are connections there abounding. For example “streams of ’thought”, a baby’s consciousness of the world “as one great blooming, buzzing confusion”: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/. Sounds fairly accurate to me (but then I’m an Aries, just a baby, apparently. Whatever, but true or not, I have to concur with that whether or not there is anything of use in the zodiacs). I'm reminded that I still want to look more at the Finnish philosopher you found, I don't know of him either.
Before I leave the studio, I go to the sink for water to soak some brushes that have dried paint on them. A couple have trimmed ends. Maybe that’s what the eye lashes at Studio 44 are..
Yours,
K