Fat Arsed Lassies and Beyond

Well its been a wee while. Finally settled down after Thursday. All went really well, was really busy. Now I'm on holiday for the next three weeks which is great. Time to chill out, relax, see some art, visit some places, do some research and have a good time.

So Thursday, yeah it went really well. John, Martin and I headed off about ten past seven, John with a handycam strapped to his helmet, Martin prepared to max his body out keeping up with us on foot and me in my Peter Fonda cowboy hat and shades. We got the Silver Machine out of the car, I fixed up the speakers and gave it a wee blast of leftfield before we set off.





We headed down College Street down to the arches, there were a few honks, but probably more about John's helmetcam than than the speakers on my bike. We headed through the arches and then me and jon had to cycle round the industrial estate for a while to let Martin get to Torry bridge. Ended up making a mistake and coming out on Market Street instead of next to the river, we passed Cam and Roisin as I got to the bridge. Gave them a quick blast of the stereo and they gave me a quick blast of abuse as I got onto the bridge.

Martin caught us again as we headed over the bridge and on up to Slogan.
We got up to the space and there was a group of people outside, who I assumed was everyone waiting for me to get here. When I got to the window I looked inside and realised that the space was totally packed and it was a bit of a struggle to get the Silver machine into its place in the middle of the space.

Here's a few of my favourite photos from the opening itself once we had arrived.

Stew smiling next to a photo of Louise
The Haynes Manual. And some booze. We drunk Project Slogan dry. Twice.
Assorted people hanging out in the space.
Me talking to John and Mhairi about somehing.
Loadsafolk!
Say Hello!
More

The screening of Ezy Ryder. It was quite difficult to fit everyone in and project it at the same time.



So it all went well, was suitably drunk when we headed to the pub afterwords, although we went to Snafu and it was baws. The rest of the weekend was pretty good as well, my folks were up and Mr Brady paid a visit so just chilled out mostly, went to Banchory for a cup of tea and my mum was in search of some sort of mythological Victorian train.

So now to my holiday, technically I've been off work for three weeks, but that's been spent with the show so I can finally relax now. I'm going to go to Glasgow and Edinburgh for a few days each just to get out of Aberdeen for a while, as could be told from my previous blogs getting a bit sick of Aberdeen and just want to experience a real live city. Going to Edinburgh tomorrow to see the show at the Fruitmarket, apparently it's amazing.

Got Bill Drummond's new book at the weekend, 17. It's about this art project he has been working on creating a choir of non verbal, non musical music, working with a different seventeen members each time and creating scores of instructions. The book goes into his motives, and experiences that led him to the idea, also his doubts and failures during the project. it's refreshing to read that someone who is classed as a professional artist has the same doubts I do.

Last weekend in the run up to the show Martin showed me a piece in Creative Review about these Trinidadian kids in Queens who mod their bikes with the biggest stereo systems they can find. There's a documentary been made about them that was screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival this year. (You can find out about it here www.madeinqueensfilm.com) At first I was a bit shocked and quite annoyed that I hadn't thought about it before, and obviously worried that people would think I had just nicked the idea, or assume that the work was being made about these kids. Although now I'm ok about it because nobody else I've come across has encountered the film or made the connection in any sort of negative way. Although time will tell if this happens. It was a pretty bad time to recieve the news, a week before the show went up, but with no time to try and react to it, not that I should have really, the ideas behind the show have been stewing for two years now.

I've also been putting together a proposal for my next show, something that is slightly older than Fat Bottomed Girls, but is also where the idea of that show came from. It'll probably end up quite a safe show, but it's something I wanted to do more and more when I was working on the photographs for Midnight Bicycle Mystery, to work on some more photographs, but this time something more sculptural. If that makes any sense at all. At the moment it's called The Pleasure Principle, and that's all I'm going to say for now.

Another idea, which with The Pleasure Principle will probably put and end to this transport stuff for a while, is building more, different models of the Silver Machine, and an idea Amy suggested, to take them on tour.

I think I've rambled on enough for now. I'll hopefully write a bit more over my holiday.