Antikmarkt Bamberg: Eindrücke

Antikmarkt 2023

Deutsch.

Antikmarkt in Bamberg: Ein zelebrierter Bummeltag, in dem die ganze Stadt mit Antiquitäten aller Art gefüllt ist, und alles von Trödel bis zu echten Kunstschätzen zu finden ist. Dieses Jahr besonders schön im noch fast spätsommerlichen Sonnenschein.

Fies dreinblickende Weihnachtsdeko, teilweise mit handgefertigten Glas-Christbaumverzierungen aus dem 19. Jahrhundert.

Thoughts about Lichens

Thoughts about Lichens

Today, I’m reading about lichens. How they cover as much as 8% of the earth’s surface (more than is covered by tropical rain-forests), how they are ancient composite organisms made up of fungi, algae and cyanobacteria, how they can exist in the extremest conditions. Merlin Sheldrake calls them “small worlds” in his book Entagled Life - How fungi make our worlds, change our minds, and shape our futures. “Lichens are places where an organism unravels into an ecosystem and where an ecosystem congeals into an organism.”

I’m very interested in this miracle of symbiosis and collaboration, not to metion the aesthetic versatility they display. On my recent travels to South Africa, I encountered them everywhere - pink lichen growing directly on the red hard earth in the Cederberg mountain range, bright yellowish-green ones on coastal rocks, exposed to sun and Atlantic sea-spray and salt. What happens when mosses and lichen are neighbours?

I’m thinking about how to build an impression of organisms-growing-on-other-organisms in my work, how I can play with these soft-hard surfaces, how I can use these textures, colours to create a sense of encrustation, composite beings, colonies (as you can see in my recent experiments below).

My 40 Day Autumn Challenge: 29.09.2023-07.11.2023

Autumn

40 Days ofd Seasonal Thoughts & Impressions

These images and thoughts below are fragmentory on purpose; they are intended to capture different snapshots of this season, being edited and expanded with each passing day.

End of September: Meadows. Currently one of my biggest joys: exploring the meadows that slope around the Altenburg hill above Bamberg, spending time in that infinite and ever-changing ecosystem, bending down and looking at life up close, moving between grassland and hedges teeming with insects, wildflowers, birds, rosehips, berries. Every season paints these hills in new colours. Right now, a large variety of pale pinks and bluish purples are complemented with creamy white dabs of Queen Anne’s lace flotsam. The meadowflowers’ evocative German names are like poetry; Wiesenflockenblume, Herbstzeitlose, Wiesenschaumkraut, Gamander-Ehrenpreis,  Schafgarbe …

Here, my search for this week’s colour combinations is accompanied by one of my grandmother’s hand-crafted blue stoneware vases.

The early October vegetable patch: a place of solace and quiet joy and late-summer-early-autumn abundance, a place to sketch on a Sunday afternoon, a place to tend in meditation.

It’s the season for long rambling walks, for the very last of the wild plums, for harvesting apples in the garden, for slow transitions.

While October marches on and the first night frosts have hit us already, I’m documenting some of the wildflowers in my sketch book that are still to be found in the meadows this late in the season: mugwort, yarrow, knapweed, the occasional Queen Anne’s lace bobbing above the green sea, and some other stragglers too. Most spring and early summer blossoms are long gone.

It’s a time for collecting seeds, in the garden, at the road-side, in the fields. Now that I’ve watched flowers grow and unfold and blossom, I’ve seen their entire cycle of life and know their characteristics inside-out: I know the exact shade of yellow of that clump of St. John’s wort bushes, or the tantalizing aromatic smell of the cinnamon basil on my doorstep, or my favourite type of blue-bell. So it’s time to gather the promise of smells and flavours and colours and potential for next year.

GOLDEN HARVEST - OR MY 40 DAY AUTUMN CHALLENGE

GOLDEN HARVEST - OR MY 40 DAY AUTUMN CHALLENGE

I have become increasingly disillusioned  and alarmed by social media. I love seeing a kind of chronicle of my work, with colours, inspirations, studio snapshots and finished artwork curated into that neverending tiled layout. I love selecting images thoughtfully, matching moods and colours. But the perils of social media have become impossible to ignore, and we know it. Yet, we creatives (I) cling to these platforms, thinking that they are essential for reaching more people, for displaying our work. And it’s true, it’s difficult to come up with a benign alternative.

So, I am embarking on an #autumnchallenge for myself. Here is an experiment: For the next 40 days, or until this year’s autumn craftshow season starts on the 9th of November, I want to create and post something new every day. A thought, a photograph of my autumn meanderings, a snapshot of my jewellery bench, or a drawing. Some kind of real creative output. The overarching theme for me now is the changing season around me, harvesting, the golden slanted light, the stark contrast between the living and the dying.

I will not post these daily snippets on any social media platforms I don’t own, but rather on this blog. 

The purpose of this 40-day immersion is two-fold.

I want to see if I can create a curated chronicle of ideas that will give me the same sense of satisfaction elsewhere than on my Insta feed. But in an online space without the distractions, without the echochambers, and without the precarious feeling that my creative work is no longer under my own control. 

More importantly, I want to generate momentum for another productive period of making, I want to dive into the studio, to draw, to enamel, to saw and bend and solder and compose, to put together what I have gathered over the past few months and watch whatever emerges.  I want to share this process with those who want to see, but without making myself dependent on likes and responses. And I want to hold myself accountable, to move against the tide of short attention spans and superficial ideas and lack of concentration and decline in deep though that is spreading across the globe like an epidemic.

If you wish to accompany me on my explorations, you are exactly right here on my blog. I’ll see how I feel and reflect on this period of making - hopefully a rich October harvest - afterwards. 

Photograph by Knipserchris.