Seed bombing prep

Spring is nearly here!Time to get ready for the planting season..

Take two parts native seeds and three parts compost..

add 5 parts clay and shape into little balls. Leave to dry for a day or two.

I used this recipe as I as a potter have easy access to clay - other variations here.. You can also use the air drying clay sold in craft stores, just not the plastic varieties!

walls with eyes

Some Dublin streets are so lined with CCTV cameras sometimes I feel like even the walls are watching me..

Though maybe it's just me...


(Blog weary after one week, no stamina, huh. Thanks for all ye visitors, don't be shy to comment)

The Tourist Gaze

  

“Places are chosen to be gazed upon because there is an anticipation, especially through daydreaming and fantasy, of intense pleasures, either on a different scale or involving different senses from those customarily encountered. "

(John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Tavel in Contemporary Societies, 1990, p3.)

Rainy day friend

The rain got to my rainy day friend!

Returning the Gem to the Gem

One my earlier projects involved going around the city noticing things - just random stuff, big or small things that struck me for whatever reason-  and making a note of these. After a week or so of this, I went back to the sites to photograph them, and then worked on the resulting photographs. This is the last leg of the process: returning the images to the original sites. This the Gem returning back to the Gem:

 I went out in the middle of the night feeling like a criminal skulking in the corners and got it on all wrinkly in my nervousness, so I went back in broad daylight and re-did it. Nobody paid a blind bit of attention to what I was doing - I'll definetely stick to daylight hours in the future!

 Here's the original:

7th Oct 2010, 9.05pm. The Gem, Mixed Media on inkjet print, 2010

I was never too sure why I was doing these images, apart from vague political motivations - dereliction, dole queues etc feature in them. But having completed this step it is starting to make sense -  a  process of trying to take ownership of and putting a bit of me back into a city that has never really felt like home.

One down, eleven to go!

An office intervention

a foray into politics

A wee bit of political work...         

                                               

it's all in the eyes:

Not a single Fianna Fail poster survives in my area! The only ones I could see were torn down ones littering empty building sites.

My first friend!

A project straight out of the fabulous Guerilla Art Kit by Keri Smith - meet my first intervention completed on Valentine's Night:

Simple, but it makes me ridiculously happy to see his face every morning on my way to work!