Metafiction, Myth and Language: A World in Words (and Pictures)

 Today's tutorial went well, focusing mainly on space - both physical and visual, in the 'museum'/exhibition layout, and in the text itself, which is now in the final editing and presentation stage. We discussed the nature of traditional museums and how they tend to put the visitor through a planned timeline of experience - navigating different places and spaces - circular and/or linear. This came back to my sketchy idea of enforcing some kind of cyclical physicality upon the visitor to my space - bringing them back to the beginning (cf. the ouroborus snake design, again). Seeing strong examples of what can be done with art books and layout had influenced my thoughts on using more white space in the book/text (and reflecting this in the physical museum layout) - by adding blank pages, or creating extra spaces between lines and words at crucial points in the narrative, and interpolating the drawings of characters not as illustrations but as 'break points', for exampl...

 The ouroboros - an ancient symbol of fertility, totality, eternity, being a serpent or dragon chewing its own tail. The design below is a 'cleaned up rough' of the first visualization I created for this project, last autumn, and grew out of a sketchbook scribble originally planned to be a collaboration with a metalworking student, aimed at producing a brooch or similar piece of physical jewelry design: With its horn or antler, the design also echoes the hybrid beasts of Celtic/Pictish design, and my own 'cosmic beast' which is supposed to embody attributes of all animals, being the progenitor of all species. The design is also intended to look in two directions at once, in something of an Escher-like visual paradox - the tail curving around in one plane to be held in the mouth, but also suggestive of moving away from the viewer and ending up behind the snake's head, hinted at by the distortion applied to the bodily decorations, and the fact the inner space is not ...

 A most excellent curatorial tutorial today pulled things in a totally unexpected - but possibly inevitible - direction, given the themes of deconstruction, subversion and metatextuality which have been at the forefront of things lately. It all started when we dismantled the glass display case to get some stones inside...and then we started moving things around... Currently it's all about utilising the space, and subverting the expectations of what a traditional museum ought to look like, even down to whether the explanatory texts ought to be placed alongside their corresponding exhibits - and in a sense also echoing early 20th Century criticism of Beowulf  (which Tolkien confronts in his famous essay The Monsters & the Critics ) that the 'marginal elements' (i.e the monster fights and the dragon) are given centre-stage (because, obviously, any 'serious' epic must not trouble the reader with such trivia - despite the plethora of sea-monsters, one-eyed giants and...

 Trying to figure out exactly how the finished, printed book will look with very little actual time remaining (I reckon I'll need at least 3 weeks to allow for the printers getting the job done and delivered, depending upon 'the situation' out there), so this evening I cleaned up a couple of the character designs into .eps image format so they can be resized to any scale. The 'marching band' of Ulfhednar border design and the Gifli character turned out quite nicely:  I'm not sure how much of this kind of thing I want to use - or how I could use it - as one of the plans at the outset was to produce visual work with physical and material qualities in order to get away from any form of 'illustration'. Besides, there's plenty of great artists out there who can do this kind of Celtic design work ten times better than me with beautiful knotwork and so on, but what I can bring to the visuals is a certain individuality, I reckon.  But I did always see the Ul...

 A few thoughts (and collected fragments of research) regarding oral, written, and recorded texts and stories… Whilst the printed text of the Gyldlandsaga can best be described as an ‘epic saga’, I decided to deconstruct the meanings of both those descriptive terms (both of which can also be used as nouns). Namely: epic ( derived from) Epos < L. < Gk. epos = “word, song”; stem of eipein = “say” → early unwritten narrative poetry celebrating incidents of heroic tradition. saga < O. Norse (Icelandic) 2. Partly after G. “sage” – mythical story, handed down by oral tradition; historical or heroic legend. (Source: The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3 rd . ed., BCA, 1988). The interesting connection here is the oral nature, or unwritten aspect of [what has become] the text. The origins of the epic are in song – that which is spoken or sung – and numerous references to songcraft are made throughout the text. Several times, Sigfri recites (or sings) to an audienc...

 Managed to find some time today to visit my exhibition space and begin to arrange things. The solid display case has been delivered and I'm thinking now of putting the two largest stones under glass. Will we have a public show of any kind in August? Only time (and the government) will tell, but it's a nice goal to be working towards anyway. In the meantime, the writing of the epic saga continues...

 While this week has proved to be the most harrowing I've ever faced to date, yesterday I still managed to find time to sneak in a flying trip to Auchmithie on the coast to capture a piece of very impromptu 'cave art':  The whole operation took no more than 20 minutes, including actually finding a suitable cave spot on the beach (luckily the tide was out, as I hadn't had time to check beforehand). The painting, intended to resemble the ancient red ochre tradition, was simply ground sandstone powder ( prepared in a previous post ) applied with a wet brush (and finger) and, I think, looks actually OK. The painting is designed to resemble the head of the raven god Hrefni, who is lord of storms, and is therefore an invocation to him by fishermen for calm seas: As I forgot my sketchbook with the full-length figure of Hrefni and his shaman's drum, I would like to revisit the caves at Auchmithie and spend longer realising another piece of prehistoric cave art, which can th...