A Map of the Ocean Between My Sister and Me

My current project is a map of the ocean from my house in west London to my youngest sister's in Buffalo, western New York.

On my journey to visit her this last week I thought I'd map my route accross the sea by collecting nearly every source of water I came in contact with, bottling it in any kind of small jar I could find.

I've recorded each source of water by the form I found it, time and date of collecting, and location.

I came back to London this morning with some 50 odd samples: from rest room sinks on the plane over, thruway stops, drinking water, Adirondack streams, and loads more. I'm really enjoying this project, though at times I look like a not so undercover food and safety inspector in NY diners, it's been so much fun.

The next level I'm taking the project to is to have the bottles in a more interesting installation and have an A1 map sized letterpress design of my recordings.


A Map of the Ocean Between My Sister and Me
By Erin Newell

01. Camberwell College of Arts water canteen water fountain.
Peckham, London
1326 - 08.May.2006

02. Puddle on the way home from the tube
The Avenue, London
1512 - 08.May.2006

03. Bath at my house
Southfield Road, London
1805 - 08.May.2006

04. Drink from filter faucet in my kitchen.
Southfield Road, London
1209 – 09.May.2006

05. Washed hair after dying it
SCHWARZKOPF COUNTRY COLORS No. 75 Madagascar Rouge Noir. Southfield Road, London
1331 – 09.May.2006

06. Kettle for miso soup.
Southfield Road, London
1345 – 09.May.2006

07. Washing up at kitchen sink
Southfield Road, London
1410 – 09.May.2006

08. Ladies Room Sink.
London Heathrow Terminal 4
1657 – 09.May.2006

09. Vittel bottled
London Heathrow Terminal 4
1659 – 09.May.2006

10. Lavatory sink
Flight BA179
1850 – 09.May.2006

11. Drink with flight meal
Flight BA179
1915 – 09.May.2006

12. Water cup, Drink with flight meal
Flight BA179
1915 – 09.May.2006

13. Women’s room sink
John F. Kennedy airport
2029 – 09.May.2006

14. Ice from Sprite at rest stop
PlatteKill, 17 (Newburgh I-84) & 18 (New Paltz), Milepost 65
2311 – 09.May.2006

15. Bathroom sink at mom’s house
Gloversville, NY
0120 – 10.May.2006

16. Bottle from ma’s fridge
Gloversville, NY
0635 – 10.May.2006

17. Pool, Mom’s house
Gloversville, NY
0738 – 10.May.2006

18. Glass of
Travers Diner
Gloversville, NY
0950 – 10.May.2006

19. Dasani bottled, from Hannaford’s
Gloversville, NY
1730 – 10.May.2006

20. Shower,
Room L-3, Mirror Lake Inn, Lake Placid, NY
2025– 10.May.2006

21. Glass of
View restaurant
Lake Placid, NY
2100 – 10.May.2006

22. Bathroom sink
Room L-3, Mirror Lake Inn, Lake Placid, NY
2345 – 10.May.2006

23. Poland Spring bottled
mini bar, Room L-3, Mirror Lake Inn, Lake Placid, NY
0907 – 11.May.2006

24. Mirror Lake
Lake Placid, NY
1123 – 11.May.2006

25. Last night’s ice from champagne bucket
Room L-3, Mirror Lake Inn, Lake Placid, NY
1140 – 11.May.2006

26. Poland Spring bottled
Lake Placid, NY
0850 – 11.May.2006

27. Poland Spring bottled. Lake Placid, NY
1120 – 11.May.2006

28. Creek. Adirondack Mountains, High Peaks, Lake Placid, NY
1242 – 11.May.2006

29. Stream to Avalanche Lake. Adirondack Mountains, High Peaks, Lake Placid, NY
1350– 11.May.2006

30. Mount Marcy dam. Adirondack Mountains, High Peaks, Lake Placid, NY
1500– 11.May.2006

31. Rain. Lake Placid, NY
0950– 12.May.2006

32. Poland Spring bottled. Lake Placid, NY
1326 – 12.May.2006

33. Women’s room sink. Mirror Lake Inn, Lake Placid, NY
1400 – 12.May.2006

34. Pond. Lake Placid, NY
1421 – 12.May.2006

35. Glass of. The Cottage Bar, Lake Placid, NY
1515 – 12.May.2006

36. Jacuzzi. Day Spa, Mirror Lake Inn, Lake Placid, NY
1830 – 12.May.2006

37. Poland Spring bottled. mini bar, Room L-3, Mirror Lake Inn, Lake Placid, NY
0900 – 13.May.2006

38. Women’s room sink. Nice n’ Easy gas station, Watertown, NY
1258 – 13.May.2006

39. Women’s room sink. 39 (Syracuse West) & 40 (Weedsport), Milepost 292
1420 – 13.May.2006

40. Poland Spring bottled
1500 – 13.May.2006

41. Bathroom sink. Your house, Barker St, Buffalo, NY
1645 – 13.May.2006

42 – 53. Undocumented accounts from upstate NY water sources, mostly bottled water

Fake Paper Cut Out and a Real Angry Man

My most recent project was an installation that carried on from my Berlin concept at Strausberger Platz. Arlette and I decided to construct in the city/ financial district of London, another memorial to an environment that once was, woodlands in England and animals that inhabited them.

We thought wallpapering a bus shelter with fake wooden vinyl paper and standing life size cardboard cutouts would be a great contrast to the concrete filled area.

We scouted the place on Wedensday, Liverpool Street, Monument, Bank, and around the likes until we stumbled on a beautiful building on Threadneedle Street with lovely columns. We thought this would be a fine spot and agreed to meet at 630am the next morning to install it in time for morning rush hour, and we figured it wouldn't be busy at this time.

I went home and printed out, glued together, and cut around the actual size of a wolf and a Eurasion Eagle owl, while Arlette took care of a deer.

And soon it was 5am, time to get up.

Because it was well before rush hour it only took me thirty minutes on the tube to get to Bank Station. The plan was to meet in front of the Royal Exchange building at one of the benches, I was fifteen minutes early, and that was too early and too much time to sit there and contemplate what we were about to do. I thought for sure we would get in trouble and was already rehearsing my lines as the nieve American and Swiss students, which of course is mostly true. It was wholey due to the fact that I didn't realise until then that the "beautiful building" we choose was the Bank of England. No matter how cute we could be I didn't think there would be anyway to talk ourselves out of defacing the property, and at 6 in the morning with a black plastic rubbish bag of animal cut outs I looked more like a homeless animal rights activist then a school girl.

Arlette arrived and she too was thinking the same on her cycle in, and neither of us could believe how busy the area was.

But we did it anyway.

It must have taken us ten minutes to set up. People stared but no one said a thing. We originally planned to do three sections, but we thought better not to risk it and instead to get some photos. I went off to throw our litter away and Arletter crossed to the other side to document it. By the time I got back (about five minutes after I got a cup of coffee) a man in a black suit was tearing it down.

Now even if he worked there, and I really think he didn't, the aggression that he ripped the paper down and kicked the cardboard animals in was just bizarre, why would he do that?
You can see the film from it here, if you look to the far right side, the man at the building. I wanted to get closer to film him, but then we figured if he's this mad we might get shot!

Artskool Exhibition Porto, Portugal

Portugal is a special place.
Porto was only my second trip to the country, but you know when you go somewhere and you just love it? Like there's this great energy around it and you could so see yourself living there? That is how I feel about Portugal.
I went by myself to attend the private view of the Artskool exhibition I'm taking part in. It's the first time I had the opportunity to see my work shown internationally and I was so excited. It's also only the second time I've exhibited internationally, the first, the show in Paris a few months prior.
I was really looking forward to seeing the other artists' work and meeting everybody. The first night I arrived, after checking in, I went to meet the others at their hotel, the few artists that came over from Paris. There was Adrian (the curator), Sophie (Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts), and Emeric (Beaux-Arts) who made it to Porto on a 24 hour bus journey... and I felt bad for complaining about Ryan Air, Julian, another artist from Beaux-Art was too ill from the journey to make it out with us that night. Samantha, my friend and artist from the Slade shortly joined us and we headed out into the pouring, slashing rain to go to a party at the Universidade do Porto. Twenty minutes later we ended up dripping on the floor of the fantastic building the college is in only to find the party was cancelled, it was a BBQ. Oh.

In any rate we found one of those great Portuguese bars that's packed with young people drinking Superbock and chain smoking, and dried off there with a few beers and a side of pommes frites.
I was so nervous the next day about the opening.
So, I decided to call a friend of a friend's father's friend and do some sightseeing. Why not? The sun was finally out and it was an amazing day! The day out confirmed my love for Portugal, fantastic architecture, great food, and a beautiful beach.

Galeria do Palacio in Porto is a fantastic exhibition space. I couldn't believe that my work was hanging there and more shockingly that I liked it (disastrous visions of having to run out of the gallery after being discovered my work was accidentally accepted kept overwhelming me beforehand). It was such a great feeling to be pleased with my own stuff.

RIGHT LEFT

Strausberger Platz, the remains of a fallen system

Strausberger Platz was constructed in the 1950s after the second world war and was built by socialist workers from war ruins to create decadent facades to architecturally glorify communism (to the west side). It is the starting point of Karl Marx Allee and was once the pride of east Berlin. The main architect was Hermann Henselmann, who designed the area in the then contemporary, stalinistic-neoclassic style of the 1950s. Karl Marx Allee was actually called Stalin Allee until 1961. The boulevard extends from Strausberger Platz to Alexander platz and is a unique representation of Socialist Realist architecture in Germany.

It’s once decadent and demonstrative ideal, a glorification of a system, has now lost it’s significance only to function as a motorway roundabout. In the centre stands a fountain surrounded by ta very dismal metal art deco-esque sculpture. At night Strausberger Platz is even more depressing. The entire area is dark and the fountain switched off.

Arlette and I wanted to create something in the area as a reminder of what once was, a kind of monument or cemetery. I like the idea of a life size photo album in the space, like a picture on a grave.
So, we cover all of the buildings in gold wallpaper from top to bottom, we fill the fountain with dirt and erect a life size image/ photograph of the fountain standing on top of it. The materials we use, mainly paper or cardboard are 2 dimensional to contrast with the space and environment, and most importantly what is actually there and what is just a representation, or a symbol of the past.

Bang

I was pretty stunned the other night when my mom told me she didn’t really enjoy Tate Modern.

How can anyone not love modern art?
Ok, I see her point.

She said it made her feel uncomfortable and she didn’t know why people would want to make art about things like that. She said, “you know what really upset me, those paintings that you said were surreal and they were like nightnmares.”

And I said, ‘Yeah, but, Mom, isn’t it so amazing that art can just make you feel. That even though you don’t think it’s a good piece of work, you don’t like it, but it causes you to react in some way, don’t you think that’s powerful?”

“Not really.” She said. “Like I was wondering about the painting in your living room. Why do you have a painting of guns in there? I don’t get it. I said to myself, why the heck did she paint this?”

I think that’s a good question.

I explained how I wanted to represent the iconic nature of the gun, masculine, violence, power... and contrast it with associations to color, yellow = cowardice, pink = feminine, playfulness... She thought that was very intelligent.

But why would my 8 foot painting of guns bother her? Someone who has three different kinds of rifles in her closet?

Unveiling

I never should have underestimated the complexity of humour and how hard it is to be funny.  Even after the lecture we had from a stand up comic, who said it was the easiest thing in the world, I should have know better, that he’s far too modest and making people laugh is difficult!

Freud says we laugh to rid our subconscious feelings of aggressions or our repressed feelings of sexual desire, like how we laugh at dirty jokes or the ones when someone gets hurt…

In any rate, I was intrigued by the relationship between humour and sex, and to the image of the body and the pornographic. It’s an interesting subject to me mostly because of the hysteria around it.  The whole idea of a part of the human body being pornographic - depending on context - and the taboo around sex, even the fascination with it and how that all changes depending on the culture of the gender of a person... Would people even be bothered with it if there wasn’t a social stigmatism around it? is it the whole thing with being naughty? Ok different subject, not going into that right now.

Here’s what I was thinking when my fellow student, Arlette and I, came up with the idea of the “unveiling project”… penises just aren’t funny. According to our lecturer he said you’ll always get a laugh if you talk about them, wanking or whatever, and he was right! We went to a stand up night and nearly every male comedian had some version of the word… and people laughed. I couldn’t understand it, but if juvenile humour is the way to go I thought if I made the biggest penis in the world people must find it hysterical.  I told Arlette the idea and she agreed carrying in a big sculpture and just leaving it standing in the middle of the room would be funny and suggested a giant paper mached cock would be guaranteed to get some laughs.  Don’t get me wrong, of course I had my doubts during construction about what people might think, but that’s the whole point!

That night I went to buy chicken wire, the next day glue, and we set to work. We were happy right away after we built the base structure out of the wire, but things didn’t go so well once we started gluing.  The weight of the wet paper was causing the sculpture to collapse... clever Arlette thought it best to lie it on its side, and then shoved a chair inside and sort of hoist ed up the middle with twine to the ceiling.  We also didn’t want anyone to see what we were building before the performance and so then decided to store it in the small office of the studio, which meant we had to go through the whole tying up procedure again. 



By the middle of the next day that proved to be an exercise in futility as the heat from the room not only prevented the paper mache to dry but all of the newspaper we taped to the the walls fell off and the sculpture was exposed!

We didn’t get to painting until the early morning of the day of the performance. Though painting was the easiest part of the construction and where the sculpture really came to life. We left it to dry and went to the studio to watch the beginning part of the performances. It was soon our turn and as Arlette and I were the only members from our group that decided to participate in this I started to get really nervous, not because the entire first to third year of graphics students would be watching, but what if they didn’t laugh!




Arlette thought it would be good to dress in security jackets with fake moustaches and I was up for the idea of being disguised. We could hardly carry the structure downstairs to the performance area as it was so large and unstable and not completely dried. We entered the room with this huge ten foot thing covered in a dirty dust sheet and took it to the centre of the room then up onto the top of a table... the problem was we couldn’t unveil it... we couldn’t get high enough to lift the dust sheet off. When we finally uncovered it the whole thing flopped over! I was too embarrassed to remember if anyone laughed or not and I’m pretty sure they didn’t , but seemed most likely terrified by the two perverts who created it!!!  
Click here to see the performance