putting up walls

i have never said the word 'wall' so many times in a day as i have today. after a week of working out the best kinds of wall for AURA i feel like i'm officially obsessed with the things now.

so, apparently my main task at the moment is to build some walls for the studio. primarily for the purpose of a clearer demarcation between "what's mine is mine" and "what's mine is not yet yours".

as much as i wish that the looseness of the current studio space could be kept as is, the reality of the project (ie, people moving shit around) and the long-term ideas about having artists in the space for a while, means that it's time to put walls up, people.

i guess this is what 6 months in berlin has come to.


over the last week i have been talking about walls, drawing walls, taking pictures of walls and getting random voicemail messages about walls.

cardboard
last friday i went and met with marika and anna from dear patti smith - a new, performance-friendly artspace on smith st. the show they had up recently featured some beautifully made cardboard walls, complete with inset open spaces as shelves. i thought they would look amazing in the underground space - lit well, and we could still talk to each other through the open spaces.

we talked about the possibility of commissioning some walls from them, maybe running a wall-making workshop and seeing if residents wanted to learn how to make walls out of cardboard (??), or something. anyway, thanks to all the recent rain, and the proof of how much water actually does get into the basement, that idea is now basically a crap one.


concrete
then, on the weekend, i saw these amazing cast concrete mini-walls. i imagined a stack of them on (braked) castors that we could use to keep customising the space and would fit with the aesthetic of the space.

then i realised that i had fuck-all skills for pouring or casting concrete, that they'd be heavy as fuck, and a scary risk nightmare waiting to happen. dammit. one day, they will be mine...


plaster
so, kids, the final solution appears to be you're old 'strut'n'baton clad' version of a studio wall.
build the wooden freestanding structure, clad it in plaster board. tried and true. and able to be built by 4-6 peeps in about a day.

which means that, as soon as i have enough cash to go to provens and to recruit wall-building helpers, we will have ourselves a working bee. huzzah! i think i'll bake a cake.

the long march

so, first of march will officially be the first day of the aura project.

perhaps the long march is not such an appropriate first blog title post, but i'm sticking to it. only because i'm sensing that it the next 12 months might, in a monty-python way, resemble at slow, systematic inculcation of our nation at 253 hoddle street.

as artists-in-residence, hopefully it will become a conversion into beautiful randomness, openness and a sense of worth and radness. [rather than what happened on the long march 1.0.]

on the first tuesday of march, ben and craig and i will meet with the CHEAC crew - introduce ourselves to residents, members of yarra council and the BANH/CNH crew we already know.

it will obviously be a shining bureaucratic metaphor of the starters gun: sending us speeding off from the blocks and sprinting headlong into who-knows-what.

and i'm hoping that snippets of thought/documentation and planning goodness from said who-knows-what will end up here. it will be an interesting mix of styles and flavours, but hopefully the end will resemble a gelato bar, rather than a pile of vomit.

it could go either way.


i'll be blogging about both roles i'm playing: ms admin/build-it/fix-it, and then as an artist working with sound. and i'll try to keep the swearing down. you can all get plenty of that over at my own blog.

i also have big plans for other online spaces for aura

flickr/youtube/twitter.
and maybe some other fun stuff that probably only i'll like. like soundcloud or etsy.
and its own site that we can manage too.

in the mean time, it's mostly pics and words.

oh, and we have an email you can contact us on if you have any penis enlargements or missing inheritance to offer:

auraprojectresidents@gmail.com

bon voyage.