The elaboratory's elixir

This is another snap shot. More documentation and full outline to come. I guess that is the trick with keeping up making the work, documenting and posting.

Video of one of the rooms for 'The Elaboratory's Elixir'

Jacques Soddell 'The alchemical table' sound works (quick snap shot)

click on this link to see a short clip of one of the installations (Tara Gilbee and Jacques Soddell)


vimeo clip

or try this in url

https://vimeo.com/62221982

Part of the review article on ABC

Periscope, the flagship event of the Castlemaine State Festival's Visual Arts program, takes place across three unique sites. The Hunt and Lobb building, an old Police lock-up and Tute's Cottage, an original miner's cottage - decaying with the passage of time yet surrounded by an extraordinary garden, bursting with life.

Tute's Cottage is a sensory experience unlike anything I have encountered. As I wander from room to room I try to identify the various aromas and where they are wafting from. There are apothecary vessels of all shapes and sizes in this alchemic laboratory, and I am invited to participate and interact, making each encounter unique. The level of detail is extraordinary. I left feeling like I had just experienced something very special; although not certain what.

to read the full review:

http://www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2013/03/27/3724589.htm

Midlands Express: News article

The Alchemical Table 

Feb. 18, 2013, 2:17 p.m.

Curator and artist Tara Gilbee is holding an event which is an introduction to a year long, slow art process she has been 'cooking up' called The Alchemical Table on Sunday, February 24, and Sunday, March 3, at 7pm.

Set amongst the historic atmosphere of Tutes Cottage, The Alchemical Table invites you to feast upon the nature of experiment. Playing with your food is not only encouraged but is the creative act itself. Be introduced to new concoctions, explore new sensory combinations and clink potions in glass vessels. Drawing inspiration from the garden, together with food, fragrance and sonic ambience, the abundance of nature and its transformative effects are big players in the ensemble experiment. Become an ingredient yourself, consuming and producing your role under the guidance of the alchemical conjurers. This is one part performance, one part dinner party, and three parts curiosity.

Tara said she started drying a year's worth of fennel and creating other liquid inspirations with Quince vodka and Quince syrups, to build the mythical apothecary that will inhabit Tutes Cottage in Greenhill Avenue, Castlemaine. The project was made possible through the Mount Alexander Shire community grants.

Led by Tara Gilbee, The Alchemical Table is a dinner as artwork and artwork as dinner. Head concoctor of elements, Nikki Valentti, draws upon her culinary talents to propose new combinations of food in an environment of experimental play. Artists Jacques Soddell and Kent Wilson are on hand as lab partners to facilitate the process and test hypothesis.

All contributions will be recombined and reprocessed into an installation artwork that opens on Friday, March 15, within the visual arts program for Castlemaine State Festival.

All are welcome to dine. Bookings need to be made online prior to the event 

The seats are limited to 15 places for this free event, so get in quick to avoid disappointment.

Images from the event: yes people missed out and were disappointed because those that came, loved the event and felt very special :-)

Working images for Alchemy Project

The elaboratory and the elixir of life: an alchemical wonderment.

This is a installation project in development, a work that explores both the materia medica of the sites garden and a poetic examination of the exoteric and esoteric aspects of Alchemy. 

Summary of Alchemy

Alchemy was introduced into Europe at the time of the Crusades. The first alchemical texts were translated from Arabic into Latin. 

Alchemy was a mysterious and terrifying art to those unfamiliar with it. Alchemists used odd-shaped instruments and magical incantations, codified symbols and symbolic colours. Science was considered a challenge to the authority of the Church, as were many things not understood by everyone. Aristotle's books were banned. 

Crave wisdom of God, the sense to understand,

Else meddle not herewith, nor take it in hand.
For it will cost thee much worldly wealth;
But trust not to other, but do it thyself.
Learn, therefore, first to cleanse, purify and sublime,
To dissolve, congeal, distill and sometime
To conjoin and separate, and how to do all,
That when you think to rise, thou do not fall,
Trust to thyself and not to another;
I can say no more to thee if thou were my brother.
- Simon Forman, 1597

Tutes Cottage

Tutes Cottage and Garden is a rare artefact of the Victorian gold rush. Established c.1854, the property is an important reminder of the Victorian Government's strategy after the Eureka Rebellion to provide land to its new settlers through the granting miner's residential areas.
From 1855, a Miner's Right entitled the holder of a mining claim to also occupy a parcel of land as a Residence Area, for the purpose of a house and garden. The land on which Tute's Cottage stands was continuously held under a Miner's Right until 1996: only then did it revert to Crown possession. It appears that, because the cottage's various occupants could never aspire to own the land, they were little inclined to make 'improvements' to the structure. As a result, its original architectural style has survived with remarkable clarity and integrity.

http://www.fomad.org.au/activities-tutes2.html

The work

An installation that explores transmutation with a laboratory of mystery and wonderment.

This series of works builds on research in France 2011 and personal themes relating to the body. The alchemist's work was based on Aristotle's theory of earth, air, fire, and water : These four elements were related to the four humors: phlegm, blood, bile, and black bile. In a healthy human, the humors were balanced; illness resulted from imbalance of the humours. Alchemy was not entirely just a search for the stone that would turn lead into gold. Many alchemists used that search as a metaphor for the search for moral perfection, believing that what could be accomplished in nature could be accomplished in the heart and mind. 

This new work will be presented at the Castlemaine State Festival, within the theme of the festival 'Elemental'. Utilising a unique and historic venue within the goldfields, the concept of transmutation within Alchemy will be explored as a sensorial and evocative experience. Drawing parallels with the search for the elixir of life the work aims to draw the audience into a sensorial exploration. The audience will be lead through a few rooms which will be set up in various states. There will be glasses filled with aromatic liquid, reflections projected through various lighting techniques, as well as rooms with an abundance (which appears overgrown) of dried herbs, lit and silohetted within.

This work continues a relationship to previous works Deluge and Cold Light exploring various transformations of material that eluded to watery under world states, with mysterious forces at hand. 

Finalist

Rick Amor Drawing Prize: Ballarat Art Gallery.


Josephine Ulrick Photography Award

my work Drop the Zero.

http://www.theartscentregc.com.au/whats-on/whats-on-items/2012-josephine-ulrick-photography-award

You Must Remember This

Catalogue Essay by Kent Wilson 2011

Inscribed by time, marked by history and floating in a blackened void of implied vastness, Tara Gilbee sets before us a collection of gathered artefacts. And not unlike icons cast up on the walls for us to decipher in an exchange of give and take, these images are conduits of transfer. They provide us with hints of their utility, with fragments of text, words and scribbles that imply a proscriptive intent – they are guides. But they don’t give us enough. They are like a rosetta stone or a broken code to be translated through a process of gap filling. Who wrote these, why did they write them, and where are these people now? Only the invocation of the vast void within which they now flounder can offer recourse, if any, as we project our own histories into the well.

This is forensic grappling. The documented nature of the original artefacts, photograms of lists and notes collected by the artist over time, give the images a sense of focused inspection. Light has been poured over scraps of paper, reacting with the film below, and leaving an indelible imprint of the materiality of the original. These are shadowed reflections. A once important task, a fleeting significance, now monumentalised here as a granite asteroid.

The rich blacks, deep and heavy, envelope the space and create a still and silent ambience. Not unlike a library or secret archival storehouse, the works hush the space. The granite and marble textures of the captured notes read like tombstones and reinforce a sense of reverence. Floating and drifting like weathered leaves or planetary palimpsests. Fleeting and ethereal paper, fragile and transitory, chiselled into solidity and structure.

Time spent in the space is rewarded with a fluctuating and oscillating sense of slippage. The works walk a tense tightrope between figuration and abstraction, between minimalism and complexity, and between dynamism and stasis. As soon as you grasp one aspect, the other creeps in to take over - only to slip back away again. What at first appears to be a set of black and grey abstract patterns, not unlike Rothko paintings stripped of colour and materiality, and rendered in flattened photographic prints, suddenly emerge as clearly documentary images of actual things. But just as quickly as that transition is made, they slip back into abstraction, and the mind grapples with other interpretations of the forms.  The flatness gives way to depth thanks to the unfocused sections of the photograms generated by the folds in the original notes. The scribbles flip between random markings and legible text.  All this within an invocation of the universal sublime.

I hope you enjoy this series of works as much as I do, and that you find your own rambling meanings amongst the beautiful imagery.

Kent Wilson 2011

www.kentwilson.net

Thanks: goes to Stockroom and Colour Factory: The staff's professional handling of the artworks and production was impeccable! As well as my friends Kathryn McCool, Tony Cameron and Robyn Walton for their continued support. Also to Punctum Inc and their funding supporters for the opportunity to attend Inhabit International in France; as well Regional Arts Victoria for supporting my professional development through their quick response grants.

http://www.stockroomkyneton.com/

http://www.punctum.com.au

noirlac

Please review the page titled Noirlac Research Residency for ongoing updates and information about the project. 

I am not a regular blogger, so the updates will be sporadic,  however I am interested if you would like to add comment or if you also have inspiration to share! 

The project is open for comment and input and I would love other artistic responses.

Please see the link to the Abbaye for some background, it is in French, I can fill you in on some details if you have specific questions.

http://www.abbayedenoirlac.fr/

France via Hongkong and lots of waiting

I have made my way to France for the beginning of the Inhabit Residency. The journey was long with a 5hr stop over in Hongkong so I am just beginning to land in this time zone.

I will post a few pictures taken on route to the France in this post.

I will create a separate page for my project at Abbaye Noirlac see tabs on home page.

The weekend I arrived a fantastic artist group ZUR where presenting their research for a performance in May 2012

http://www.groupe-zur.com/

The work was presented in most of the buildings of the Abbaye and the work was an encounter with the poetics of the space, it enchanted audiences with kinetic sound and light pieces that entranced and enlivened curiosity.

What a wonderful way to venture within the Abbaye and begin the residency ..... now what can I do...