silence and wind research

Research on wind 

This summer I have been thinking a lot about space and silence in the work and most recently trying to draw the wind . here are some ideas and other artists work that is inspiring.

It interesting that wind can really only be recorded or seen when it passes through or up against something. So most of the artists I have found are almost engineers and use huge heavy machinery to construct things that can capture wind… like sails – The ones I can most relate to as a human are the pieces made to a human scale – with idiosyncratic parts and mistakes within them like cameras Robbins or Karin Fisslthaler. Do we need to always think so big ? And isn’t that part of our problem in the environment : maybe not but there is an element of conceding in many of these works, ingenuity , cleverness – which I suppose is part of trying to capture something so elusive an invisible. Much of my work is about the invisible and fleeting – even the work I did on the tsunami – the surfaces that are left as a consequence of elements passing through it. 

Karin Fisslthaler – I can feel it coming 

“The wind has several different qualities, which are sometimes opposites: it can be tender but it can also be destructive. Because it is outside our control, wind can make us fearful, but giving up control can also be a liberating experience.”

John Grzinich’s

John Grzinich’s sound installations, it’s the wind that is in charge. For almost 20 years, the Estonia-based American artist has perfected building harps whose strings are plucked by movements of air. Also known as Aeolian harps, after the Greek god of wind Aeolus, string instruments played by the wind were once an obsession of artists of the Romantic period, cited in poems by Coleridge and Shelley and painted by JMW Turner.

Theo Jansen – strandbeest

Dutch artist Theo Jansen takes his kinetic structures for a walk. Or, more accurately, they take themselves for a walk.

With skeletons of lightweight yellow PVC tubing held together by cord-tie sinews, Jansen’s strandbeest (“beach animals”) look like giant insects. When the wind catches in their Dacron sails, their movement across the firm golden sand is an elegant crab-walk rather than a jerky robot shuffle.

Janet Echelman who produces aerial, net-like sculptures that are suspended in urban airspaces. Huge nets that billow in the wind – amazing stuff but don’t birds insects get caught up in these gargantuan forms ? 

Anthony however wind powered kinetic sculptures – almost like opening flowers or computer generated swam movements 

Cameron Robbins 

Focussing energy from wind and weather, Cameron Robbins’ large scale permanent wind drawing installation Wind Section Instrumental produces an output of drawings at MONA (The Museum of Old and New Art) in Hobart Tasmania. Situated on the grounds of MONA between the Turrell and Kiefer permanent works in the Roy Grounds Roundhouse above the Library. 

The installation is producing a 50 year archive of Wind Drawings, transcribing weather systems and events in a changing climate. The drawings are archived on site in a purpose-built scroll cabinet housing the many 5 metre ink drawings on watercolour paper. 

 Wind Section Instrumental maps the passing weather systems by making large scale ink drawings on paper. Outside the museum a 9 metre tower supports wind mechanisms driving the indoor drawing machine to make its marks, via a long series of heavy duty axles entering the museum through a window aperture. 

This large scale wind-drawing machine uses wind speed to drive the pen, wind direction to swivel the drawing board, while electrically moving the paper slowly along at 500 cm per 13 days. Weather systems leave complex traces as they slowly pass through the area.