Hello Explorers!

If you stumbled across this post but don’t have a clue what Exlorer Club is you can learn all about it here. It’s never too late to join in so if you fancy getting involved give me a shout.

Here’s how it works:

- I set an explorer club challenge/project
- You document it in what ever way you like – this means you can write, photograph, draw or film your results.
- You either blog your results and email me with a link to your post or email me your results directly
- All entries need to be with me by the end of the month
- I blog a summary of the results and award the prestigious (ahem…) Explorer of the Month accolade

November’s project was The Museum of Inspiration.

The Museum of Inspiration

The Challenge: Curate things that inspire you throughout the month. You can do this with drawings, photographs, written descriptions, by cutting things out of magazines, writing down poems or lyrics, making things or any other method of recording that you can think of. Arrange the things you’ve collected/made/recorded. Take a picture.

First up is our explorer of the month. The winner.

Due to time constraints this month and the fact that people’s projects took various different formats (mine was a very dull looking list!), I’m only posting the winner but thanks, as always, to everyone who took part. If you do want to post a link to your Museum feel free to do so in the comments.

On to December’s project! A very Christmassy exploration indeed. And easy too…

Creative Christmas – What is the essence of your Christmas experience? Take one picture that sums up Christmas for you.

Send me your results by the 31st December.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS, EXPLORERS! HO HO HO.

If you read my blog yesterday you’ll know that I went to the Saatchi Gallery. I am obsessed with museum and art gallery shops so there was no way I could leave without a little look in the Saatchi shop. I’m glad I looked because I found the wonderful book How to be an explorer of the world: portable life museum by Keri Smith.

It has 59 exercises to help you explore and I’m hoping to use some of them as photography projects.

I was thinking about going back to studying this September and doing another qualification in fine-art photography but I thought about it and I have a full time job, my photography business (which is getting busier and busier) and a wedding to plan, so it’s probably not the right time. I’ll put it on my list of goals for the future.

In the mean time I’ve been thinking about ways to spark my creativity and I’ve decided that I need to do some projects where I explore a brief so this book can be a starting point for that.

Here are some instructions from the book that tell you how to be an explorer of the world:

If you fancy joining me and doing some of the projects from the book, contact me via my website. You don’t have to be a photographer or even an artist – lots of the projects involve collecting things, for example. If you do join in maybe we can swap results and compare notes.

http://www.laurababb.co.uk

Today’s Creative Question: What Art have you seen recently and how did you feel about it?

I went to the Tate Modern earlier in the week with no real plan about what I’d look at. I ended up seeing two exhibitions that I found hugely inspiring.

The first was Photography: New Documentary Forms.

Most of the pictures in the exhibition were landscapes.

While I was looking around I overheard a teacher talking to a group of students about works by Luc Delahaye. He explained that the word ‘landscape’ has a specific context to most people. We think of the rolling hills of the English countryside or of mountains and oceans.

In reality this isn’t the landscape that most people experience on a day-to-day basis. It’s a cityscape or a town or, in the case of Luc Delahave’s work, it’s plumes of smoke in the background as a bomb is detonated in Baghdad.

Luc Delahave takes huge, imposing landscape shots but they show destruction and violence against an urban backdrop.

I liked his work a lot especially his shot of the Palestine Hotel, where the world’s media camps out while a plume of smoke rises in the background. We applaud journalists for putting themselves into these often dangerous situations but we forget that the average Afghan person doesn’t have a choice but to live their life amongst the chaos and destruction.

The next stop was Tacita Dean’s 35mm in the Turbine Hall. I liked the film. I wasn’t blown away with it – I rarely am with Art Films – but it was imposing, as it was projected onto a huge screen at the rear of the hall and it had that beautiful quality that on film has.

What was fascinating was a documentary film where Tacita Dean talked about 35mm film. She said that film is her medium, like oil is the medium for other artists.

One of the reasons that film works so well for her is what she describes as the ‘gestation period’ between exposing the film and getting it back, as a lot can happen in your head between the intervening period.

This made me think about my relationship with film as opposed to digital and the way that I work. I think I’ll save my thoughts on this for another post.

She also talked a lot about the way she works. She doesn’t work to a plan, rather she has ideas and works through them or, as she so beautifully put it, “I find my way through by working”

She went on to explained that the mountain which appears within the film is Mount Analogue from the book of the same title by surrealist novelist novelist René Daumal.

Mount Analogue is a fictional mountain that you can only see from a specific place, as the sun sets over the sea and Tacita Dean likens this metaphor, “which exsists beyond the rational” to 35mm and goes on to state that film is an illusion.

Mount Analogue the book also talks about ‘peradam’ – “a clear and extremely hard stone . . . a true crystal . . . harder than diamond,” so transparent that it was almost impossible to see and extremely difficult to find. The discovery of a peradam was never accidental, but resulted from some kind of inner effort. At such a moment, its “brilliant sparkle like that of a dewdrop” might catch the eye of those who truly and sincerely sought the truth.

I like the idea that you will only find peradam if you are looking for it and want it badly enough.

This and other things that have inspired me this month will all make excellent entries into my Museum of Inspiration. Have you been documenting your inspiration? And what art have you seen recently?

Laura x
http://www.laurababb.co.uk