This afternoon I’m speaking about the ideas and practices informing my recent Project Space residency at Modern Art Oxford. My talk marks the final day of my Project Space exhibition ‘Keeping Time’, and will begin with a screening of the work.

Sunday 19 February, 3pm. Free, booking essential.
To book a place, please visit the Modern Art Oxford website.

I love this. Bokship. More of them here.

At last here’s a clip from the final pair of videos. Compared to the draft videos in my earlier posts, here you can see the saturation and contrast are pulled low: I found it shows greater tonality in the ink, and it acknowledges the moving surface of the paper quite evenly without a shadow that distracts. The main thing is that it means the video looks much more similar to the real paper and the original marks of the pen.

Putting up the projectors yesterday and keystoning them against the screens was not fun, and nor was the slowness of editing software before that. I’m inexpert and I don’t enjoy the challenge. What I really want is a way to do this kind of work without the detachment and distraction of putting it on video then getting the video back out onto a flat surface. Maybe I’ll find myself painting, or etching. In the meantime – perhaps an interim measure – I’ve spotted a celluloid film workshop in a couple of weeks and I think I might go along with Stan Brackage in mind.

My exhibition of this work at Modern Art Oxford is on until the end of the week, and I’m giving a talk about the work on the closing day: 19 February 3pm. To find out more or book a place for the talk, see the Modern Art Oxford website.

My Keeping Time blog on a-n tracks the making of this work in detail over a couple of months, several camera angles, two hopeless cameras and numerous pens.

My project space exhibition ‘Keeping Time’ opens today at Modern Art Oxford. More details, plus opening hours and visitor information are here and here. In lieu of exhibition photos, here we are installing:

I’ve been tracking the progress of my residency in a dedicated blog on a-n. Happily the blog, also called ‘Keeping Time’, has just been selected as this month’s a-n Choice Blog by curator Tom Trevatt. In his a-n Artists Talking review he wrote:

Writing about a blog about an art writing practice seems perversely recursive, and indeed the more I read blogs dedicated to a self-analysis by artists in preparation for this review, the more I am drawn into replicating the stylistic tropes a number of them adopt. But, recursivity is the key, especially in Tamarin Norwood’s blog, Keeping Time. Very simply she has constructed a pen and camera setup that records the movement of the pen over paper, following precisely the lines drawn. This setup is presented in eleven short, low quality videos embedded on the blog. In the most recent of these, where the device has gone through a number of sophistications and the camera is now mounted below the surface of the paper, a dot appears which quickly turns into a line, then a series of lines, curls, and so on. The pen dances across the page, tracing an abstract drawing that is never shown in full.

Norwood focuses on the conditions of making cursive marks, re-cursing the cursive with her camera, tracing the trace. One might wonder where this recursion leads. And, indeed, the pure act of mark making is concentrated on to such a level of exclusion as to leave out the completed drawing which seems to be, instead, a by-product of just marking the page with a pen. Can one call this, then drawing? Perhaps the drawing forth of the line, the registration of light on the sensor of the small camera aimed at the point on the underside of the paper where the pen meets it, is both recording and simultaneously drawing on a surface. As the pen runs across the two-dimensional paper, the camera reveals the underside, thus the three-dimensionality of the surface is exposed. If the drawing is a mode of not just marking, but marking, or recording time, the passage from a point to another point, then the camera, fixated upon the nib of the pen as it marks off time, is perhaps, a way to hold on to the passing seconds and minutes. Thus keeping time.

Go to Tamarin Norwood’s blog Keeping Time »

Tom Trevatt is an independent curator and writer based in London. He is co-editor of Incognitum Hactenus, a quarterly journal about art, philosophy and horror, and is Curatorial Associate at the David Roberts Art Foundation. He is on the steering committee of Treignac Projet and on the board of trustees of La Barage, both contemporary art project spaces in Limousin, France. He is a visiting lecturer at Parsons Paris, London MET and University of Brighton. Current research includes thinking beyond the contemporary, post-humanist curating, how Speculative Realism and art intersect and the zombie. He is also a DJ.

As I wrote in response,

The Project Space component of my Modern Art Oxford residency begins on Tuesday and runs for two weeks. Visitors are welcome to stop by any time during the Open Studio periods on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays 1-3pm. From the Modern Art Oxford website:

Through a short residency, Tamarin Norwood will explore the Legacy Fellowship to develop a visual vocabulary of choreography, instruction and transcription. As part of her ongoing investigation of the gaps between words and things, rules and games, intentions and accidents, she will track the progress of the Fellowship to create a new body of text and video work.

An exhibition of my work immediately follows the residency, running from February 14th to 19th during normal gallery opening hours. I’m giving an artist talk and Q&A on the closing day.

27 January 2012, 7pm
Tenderpixel Gallery, London

To Draw A Practice includes presentations by antepress (Julia Calver, Patrick Coyle, Cressida Kocienski, Claire Nichols and Tamarin Norwood) and invited guests, each demonstrating their own individual practices from scratch and from memory.

To Draw A Practice is part of the events program running throughout Patrick Coyle: To Draw A Blank, an exhibition and series of performances. Coyle re-presents found images, objects and texts that demonstrate an encounter with misunderstanding, whether in terms of ambiguous meaning or a deliberate misappropriation of material. Working across writing, performance, sculpture, drawing, photography, collage and painting, Coyle displays new works which explore varied meanings of blankness.

Tenderpixel Gallery is at 10 Cecil Court, Soho, London WC2N 4HE – Tenderpixel Gallery, London

#Nightwatch2012 is a collaborative performance for mass participation, taking place on Twitter. The performance will be streamed live to RHYTHMS OF TIME SHARING curated by KIOSK in collaboration with Vox Populi Philadephia at AUX Performance Space in Philadelphia.

Friday 27 Jan 2012 00:30 – 02:30 GMT/ Thursday 26th Jan 19:30 – 21:30 EST

Participating artists: Joanna Brown, Tiffany Charrington, Eddy Dreadnought, Sally Labern, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson and Natasha Vicars. The artists will tweet to a score published in advance. To join in, please follow the score and tweet to #Nightwatch2012. The #Nightwatch2012 score will be published at 00:00 GMT on Tuesday 24th Jan.

Just posted at VerySmallKitchen: an assembling of texts and images gathered at the conclusion of I AM NOT A POET, a two week festival exploring connections of language, writing and art practice. I AM NOT A POET was co-curated by VerySmallKitchen and Mirja Koponen and took place at TotalKunst Gallery, Edinburgh in August 2011.

See the Assembling here.

An exhibition in tribute to Lettrism, including contributions from Irene Gonou, Eleni Oikonomou & George Papadopoulos, Panagiotis Papafragas, Pentzikis, Christina Sgouromyti, Juliana Borinski, Tamarin Norwood and Stéphane Graff.

Opening: Wednesday, January 18 2012 at 20.00
Performances & Talk: Saturday, January 21 at 13.00
Open weekdays 14.30-20.30, Saturday 14.00-18.00

For further information see the Beton7 website.

Here’s a photo of the setup I made today to match yesterday’s diagram. The black matchstick looking up at the pen through the glass is the very small video camera I’m using. I’ve made a messy wire and fabric clamp for the camera to keep it entirely supported by the pen (which here is resting on the upper surface of the glass against a sheet of thin paper). The clamp keeps the pen and camera exactly in step with one another as I draw or write, so the position of the nib on the screen never changes.

The paper is just 50gsm and the pen is a heavy permanent marker, so the ink comes straight through the paper and is visible to the camera filming from underneath. You get this kind of thing:

said

The problem I have with that name – not that I’ve got a problem, I like it – but I keep thinking, ‘what work would someone called Leo Fitzmaurice make?’ I don’t think it would be the work I am making.

Art World, Issue 2 (Dec 07) p.72

Meanwhile, one attempt to choreograph movements about a piece of paper. This, and probably some instructions and arrows:

First draft of a project I’m developing for Keeping Time: a residency and exhibition at Modern Art Oxford in February. More about my residency and the Legacy Fellowship it accompanies is here.

Through a short residency, Tamarin Norwood will explore the Legacy Fellowship to develop a visual vocabulary of choreography, instruction and transcription. As part of her ongoing investigation of the gaps between words and things, rules and games, intentions and accidents, she will track the progress of the Fellowship to create a new body of text and sculptural work.

Two more drafts are below, still very much in progress:

Carl Kleiner
ABILITIES: Balance

www.carlkleiner.com