Round and round she goes

Sculptural balancing poses

At our weekly Circus Between Worlds meet up last night we tried out various acrobatic balancing poses. I am interested in the tension of trying to keep in balance, and the relationship between 2 people trying to balance with each other. I enjoy the sculptural aspects of the poses, but feel that i need to move them out of the realm of yoga poses so they become something else.

Circus Between Worlds Sources of interest - Oleg Kantemirov circus arts producer, director, and acrobat

Following on from the last Circus Between Worlds rehearsal, Ive been thinking more widely about ideas relating to balance and movement within the circus.

A number of my blog posts to follow will show research imagery and sources of interest related to these ideas.

These clips have been selected by Oleg Kantemirov as examples of some of the best of what Russian circus has to offer

Artist talk by Yelena Popova

The visiting lecture this week was from Yelena Popova. She is currently exhibiting in the group exhibition, UNsensed at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle.

I enjoy the playful positioning of the wooden 'props' and the way that the paintings are balanced on these. At times, Popova has props paintings against chairs, moving the work in more of a sculptural realm.The arrangement of these elements resemble how they may exist in the studio, and thus hints at the role of process within the work. 

Prior to exhibiting work, Popova sets it up in the studio and takes a photograph of the arrangement.

In the recent work, Popova's use of colour is limited, choosing to use white ink on naturally coloured linen. 

The linen alone is a beautiful surface. In earlier work Popova has used coloured pigments, preferring to limit the number of colours and tones within each painting. Other work used brighter colours, giving the work a different energy. 

It is clear that Popova is very good at making work for a specific context, be it in a gallery, a stately home, or as in the work above, specifically for a collector. Her awareness that collectors need to transport their work wherever they travel, and that sometimes this limits the way work is seen, prompted her to create a series of works that would be made specifically for transporting in a flight case, and therefore would be viewed in the way she intended. When folded out, the paintings have a sculptural presence.

"Popova’s practice encompasses painting, video and installation, and all her work is tied together by an interest in exploring the concept of balance, whether in politics, representation, or in our relationship with machines. 

With their transparent, softened geometric forms, Yelena Popova’s paintings recall the graphics and aesthetics of both Russian Constructivism and Minimalism, and open up conversations about the materiality of painting today. 

“I’m not interested in making single objects, but in creating a complex network of facts, fictions, emotions, gestures, materials and images, which could relate to the world outside it,” the artist explains. 

For a recent project she made paintings and video inspired by the metaphor of the discus thrower; the elliptical curves and repeated, rhythmic shapes on her linen canvases articulate the kind of balance, external and internal, expressed through fixed rotation. Popova’s films, which deal with overt imbalances such as Cold War topics and radioactivity, seem the perfect counterpoint to her 2D work, the flipside of the same theme. 

Balance of Probability is a multi-part installation of paintings on linen that plays with similar ideas. The canvases in a range of sizes combine graphic pattern and unpredictable shapes with a delicacy of touch and thin gradients of pale colour that sometimes even show the grain of their linen surfaces. Precariously arranged on each other or held in place with makeshift pallet supports and even a doorknob, the paintings convey a sense both of dangerous asymmetry and of harmonious interconnectedness."

Lupe Nùñez-Fernández

http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/yelena_popova.htm?section_name=new_art_from_russia

http://www.yelenapopova.co.uk

Chakra

​चक्र)​
Literally means Wheel or vortex.

There are 7 chakras in the human body. They are the spiritual energy centres of the subtle body which energy flows through. Each one​ relate to a different part of the body and provides it with the energy it needs to function.

They govern our psychological properties. The chakras located on the lower part of our body are our instinctual side, the highest ones our mental side. The chakras can have various levels of activity. When they're "open," they're considered operative in a normal fashion. Some chakras are not open enough (being under-active), and to compensate, other chakras are over-active. The ideal state is where the chakras are balanced.

Seated Sequence

Standing Sequence

Surya Namaskara A

Experimenting with Lotus Leaves on a pole

I discovered these large lilypad-like leaves when in a Chinese supermarket, and had to buy some to use in my artwork.

I know that I need to introduce something of height in the space, and worked with a variety of materials to produce a free standing sculpture.

I do not like the white pipe used above because it is too plain and has no character. However, I do enjoy the lotus leaves on the pipe, so I changed the pipe for an aluminium rod that I bent in a way to be self balancing.

In order to maintain the balance of the work, I needed to alter the rotation of the lotus leaves so that the weight was fairly evenly distributed. This was trickier than one presumes!

I tried adding some of the other materials that I had previously been using with the sculpture, but they  were unnecessary. I'm gradually learning that less is more. As the wonderful Irene Brown would say, "Keep it simple, stupid!"