Hondartza Fraga

I saw a man walking a cat today. And this cat was cheerfully walking along. It was a grey tiger cat, they were gone before I had time to fish my camera out, and anyway I lost precious seconds just smiling and staring at the scene. The best image of the day. I will do a better drawing.

I have been doing a bit of drawing the last couple of days. It has been lovely to be back in the studio, and although I’m still very unsure about where the drawings might be going, it feels good if I manage to finish one without thinking its complete rubbish. Yesterday the sunset looked amazing from the studio window, full of reds and purples. I borrowed the two broken violins from Markus. They are very pretty objects, and even laying there, failed, still can somehow find a function in their silence. For me they are as valid as a fixed violin, I couldn’t make it play.

I feel I need a map to know how to get lost. But if you don’t want to arrive anywhere you wouldn’t look at a map. And if you follow a map, even one intended for getting lost, you wouldn’t be technically lost… I have started to hand-drawn empty polar coordinates graphs.

A superior mirage occurs when the air below the line of sight is colder than that above. This is called a temperature inversion, since it does not represent the normal equilibrium temperature gradient of the atmosphere. Since in this case the light rays are bent down, the image appears above the true object, hence the name superior. They are in general less common than inferior mirages, but when they do occur they tend to be more stable, as cold air has no tendency to move up or warm air to move down.
Superior mirages are most common in polar regions, especially over large sheets of ice with a uniform low temperature. This type of mirage is also called the Fata Morgana or, in Icelandic, halgerndingar. Source: Wikipedia

I have been revising the footage I took on the boat a few days ago. Most of it will probably be unusable, but I am happy with some clips. In a couple of shots there is a superior mirage effect. In most of the outside shots, I don’t really know if it was the wind, the engine or just the light again, but the image is not steady, it trembles as if it were only a reflection. I fear that is how I will remember it. I will forget about the cold wind in my face, the dripping nose and the pain in my fingers holding the camera. The experience will then be reduced to this collection of images. The steady image of the intense blue moving fast below will start to tremble slowly in my memory. And the new memory itself would become then just a mirage of the video, but then isn’t that what memory is anyway, a changing mirage of what it once was? so the video would be my memory. But now I am merely rambling.

Video clip (Quicktime)

Markus Lantto, an artist at LKV, has been kind enough to show me around his impressive collection of hand-made musical instruments. At the moment he is building a ten-string violin from scratch and rescued two broken violins to repair them. He has made also two guitars and my favorite without a doubt is a nyckelharpa. I have never seen one of these before (wikipedia link). The sounds is great and the instrument itself so beautiful. This was the first instrument he made, and each key is a different face carved in wood.

Here’s a little video of Markus playing the nyckelharpa. Although my camera mic probable doesn’t make much justice to the sound…
Click to Video (Quicktime)

Yesterday I went on a boat. I had been looking forward to this even before arriving. I took the coastal express to the first next destination. Brekstad. Turns out it its the second smallest town in Norway. The people that got off the boat with me seemed to be vanished in a moment and I was quickly wandering by myself around the tiny port and the desolated beach beside it. Only the cold wind kept the feeling of time. I had about an hour and half to wait for the next boat back to Trondheim. I didn’t look at the time once.

It was all about color and silence. But it was a dense quiescence filled up with the sounds of wind and waves while still remaining a silence. I remember that feeling of loaded silence next to a glacier when I was first in this country. The saturated blue of the water here is quite overwhelming. A couple of big ships came and went. Seagulls and crows were gliding above the shore and a couple of ducks flew across the sky quickly into the water. The wooden house by the beach seemed to be sleeping, flower pots and crocheted curtains by the window sills as only signs of active presence. There is a path between the beach and the houses with lamp posts which seem to me as witnesses acknowledging the space between me and an undefined distance. Every now and then, the wind brought the murmur of a helicopter. I noticed I have never seen snow like this one, the snow flakes are condensed into small balls that resemble polystyrene. But then again, I haven’t seen that many types of snow… Back in the waiting room with no battery left in my camera I made some quick notes in my notebook, trying to ignored the pain in my frozen fingers and toes.

Yesterday I managed to disappeared. For that short while nobody knew where I was. Here I am living in a borrowed flat, using a borrowed studio, in a borrowed city. Yesterday it also felt like a borrowed time. Just for myself. As I write now, back in my adopted kitchen, it is snowing again.

I never get tired of the snow. It covers everything again. At last with the snow, the cold has receded a little and it is very nice to wander around again. Walking home at dusk my camera has trouble focussing and it saturates the colors. I like it. It may be a cliché, but it is mine, so I enjoy it.

Although I haven’t made many entries in the last couple of days I haven’t been short on taking photos, I just have been a bit busy for the internet. But here I go again, on sunday I was in a revolving restaurant on top of the TV tower, just outside the city centre. The views all over the whole city and the fjord, the mountains… Absolutely amazing. The restaurant completes a turn in an hour, and of course I made a video of that, but something that I find also very interesting are all the chimneys with their white smoke splattered across the landscape. They are everywhere, and I like the smoke against the misty mountains surface, all flattened by the long zoom of my camera…

Here are some random pics of the last couple of days, upon request from my friends at home to see some pictures with me in them… Simon is visiting me this week and that is very nice too, so we went up to Lian again and so far just managed a little more, as it has been -10ºC today!

Last night was the opening of my solo show at Babel. People spent time with each work and gave good feedback. There were another 3 openings that night, this city has a very vibrant art life, with several opening practically every friday… so the competition was high but I was happy with the turn out. I met some very nice and interesting people. After my opening there was another opening at LKV studios, for an exhibition of the other guest artist at LKV, Joost Stokhof (The Things We Are) in collaboration with Ina Marie Winther Åshaug. It was a good evening! Here some photos although I am afraid they are all a little blurred…

My first solo exhibition at Babel, opening Friday 19th Feb 2010 at 7pm.
More info on the gallery Babel here.

During Feb and Mar I am a guest artist at LKV studios in Trondheim (Norway),
click here to see my journal.

I started the installation of the exhibition at Babel today. The opening will be on friday from 7pm. It is all going to plan and I am pleased with how the works sit in the space. It is mainly existing work but I wanted to exhibit something made here, so I have made a video-collage mixing video and stills. Combining my own images and found images mainly of Trondheim, but also of blank maps and the polar exploration journeys. It is not a finished piece of work but I think it reflects my last two weeks so far, a mixture of expectations, facing the blankness of a new studio, looking and waiting for the new place to sink in into my way of working.

Here are some stills from the video which I have titled ‘Elephants, doilies and polar coordinates’.