Krakow, Berlin

Writing this from Tegel Airport in Berlin, en-route back to Paris. Spent a few days in Krakow, the took a night train to Berlin for Transmediale.  My head is finally filling up with images of new projects....

MORE PARIS~!

For reasons unknown, I don't seem to be able to upload images to this blog. At first, it seemed that the problem was that the internet service I have here did not allow uploads over a certain size... I have now subscribed to a different service but it does not seemed to have fixed the problem. I try to upload images, but the 'uploading routine' never comes to a conclusion. Any suggestions welcome!

Problems aside, things are great. Loving getting to know Paris. Have been on some long long walks and had the two other artists here from Canada over for dinner last night. I am taking french classes twice a week and am slowly getting to know other artists and musicians in the building. My studio is a bit noisy, its facing a main road, but the plus side is that there is lots of life to watch right outside my window. 

PARIS!

Arrived last night by Eurostar from London. Its damn cold here! I know, compared to Regina its small potatoes but its a wet cold here and its biting. Spent the evening and this morning settling in, bought some basic groceries, moved the furniture around, unpacked. I'm sat at my new desk looking out the window at the Seine... hows that for digs. Off out to explore a bit...

New Years Day walk

Started 2009 with a bracing walk in Merthyr Mawr! Fascinating landscape.... sand-dunes that sit about 2 miles inland. It was a damn cold day but a real delight. Six adults, two dogs, one kid. I like this tradition of long walks on New Years day... last year we hiked around Caerphilly Mountain so it was great to do something like that again this year. 

Tropea

After Naples, we took the train south to the small town of Tropea, perched on a cliff in the Calabria region of southern Italy. We stayed in an cave-like apartment in a former convent, with beautiful balconies overlooking the sea and the Aeolian Islands. Needless to say, we ate some stunning food and drank a whole lot of Limoncello... I have fallen in love with capers!

NAPLES

Step two of the Italy adventure consisted of two main ingredients: pizza and Pompeii.

ROME

Stage one in the Italy adventure was a night train from Munich to Rome then a blur of a day rushing from site to site to site. Beautiful. Loved it. Lots of rain, thunder, lightening, but we narrowly avoided the flooding. Bling old and new, fountains everywhere, fabulous creamy risotto... 

Italy to Wales

Hello from Lamezia Airport in the south of Italy! Once to get to Wales I will do a FULL update! Internet access has been non-existant in the small town of Tropea where I have been living for the last week... but just as a taster, here is a picture of the island of Stromboli as seen from the beach...

ZKM

After a mildly harrowing night train ride from Vienna to Karlsruhe, we spent 3 days at ZKM centre for media art which is housed in an old ammunitions factory. This was my first visit to ZKM having heard about it for years and I was damn impressed... the scale both physically and the amount of exhibitions, art works and catalogues they generate is incredible... I saw three shows, Medium Religion, YOU_ser and Bit all of which were very interesting. We had a tour of Bit with curator Darko Fritz, just a stunning show. I'm posting 3 images: the robot bible-writer is from Medium Religion (beautiful, so delicate), the big light wall is an installation in the ZKM main foyer by Rosalie, and an image from ZKM from the outside. The glass cube building contains studios for the Music and Acoustics department....

heaven

Finally, bed, coffee and wireless, my idea of ....... The last few days have been a busy blur of traveling of being programed round the clock, hence the silence. So will try and catch up. First... THE LIGHT LAB. We took a visit to this very cool space at the Department of Building and Environment at Danube University. The lab is a dome made of lights that can be controlled to represent the exact lighting conditions of any time of year, any time of year, bright or overcast - where you can test what the interior lighting will be of a building. You make a scale model of your proposed building, put it in the middle of the dome, adjust the settings and hey presto. Aside from its general usefulness as a tool, for an installation artist its just a very interesting and unusual space!