Collecting Colours

While working on the planning of a performative walk in collaboration with the UK-based artist Blake Morris, he introduced an interesting and useful app to me that had been developed by friends of his: Taylor and Bob Snead and Chloe Bass - City Palette.

City Palette

As my work often involves aspects of recording experiences in outdoor locations, this app was attractive and so I tried it out at two locations: Tung Wan and Nam Tam Wan on Cheung Chau Island, Hong Kong. For these tests I restricted myself to 8 colours.

It quickly became apparent that it is important to set rules for its usage if colours captured in different locations are to be compared. The palette can be manipulated somewhat if the user focuses in too much on selected colours rather than recording the 'ambient' colours encountered at each place visited. However, several different ways of using it have become clear to me and I'm sure that this app will prove useful in some of my on-going projects.

The palettes recorded at the two locations are as follows:

Nam Tam Wan palette - February 2018

Tung Wan palette - February 2018

Drawing Project - Work in progress

On Sunday 7th May I gathered my prepared materials and walked down to Nam Tam Wan to take a close look at which rocks could be suitable for the next stage of my drawing project.

The small tests I had conducted previously showed promise and I had intended to build upon those results, I just didn't foresee that it would take so long to move the project along. A conference paper, Dada collage, a digital print and various other things came onto the agenda and pushed the drawing project back. However, putting that delay aside I could now turn my attention to drawing the rocks down at the little bay near my home.

I began with a roll of Chinese calligraphy paper, which I have found to be particularly good at picking up the texture of surfaces when creating frottage images. Sometimes the paper may tear, especially when enthusiasm urges me to work faster and so these tears will need to be repaired later at some point.

Several stones picked up on the beach helped to keep the paper in place and prevented the wind from blowing my work away. I used sticks of willow charcoal to transfer the rocks' texture and as I worked I snapped the charcoal into shorts sticks of approximately 2 inches so that I could slide them across the surface of the paper to create soft swathes of texture on the paper.

When the first drawing seemed to be resolved I took a look at it and thought that it didn't require any further working back home, although I will look again another day to see if my opinion on that has changed.

The second attempt was with a larger piece of paper. This paper was thicker, smoother and had a waterproof covering on the reverse side. This had advantages and disadvantages. The advantages were that the paper was more durable, was easier to pin down using the rocks and was easier to push the paper further into crevasses to pick up the texture. The disadvantages were that the smooth surface texture of the paper meant that it was more difficult to create an organic surface of marks, the waterproof covering on the reverse side formed a barrier, making it more difficult to 'feel' the rocks' texture and the pure white colour of the paper was much 'colder'. I was pleased with the results of this second attempt too, although I will certainly need to work again on this one later. It was satisfying to work on a larger scale, it felt as though I was beginning to get somewhere!

Although it was quite a hot day, the wind that threatened to blow away my paper, also cooled me down and stopped me from over-heating.

The first drawing

The second drawing

This project was referred to in the blog of Garry Barker, artist and educator in Leeds, UK. Garry goes

into detail about the use of frottage in art, in great detail and great eloquence here.

Nam Tam Wan 2016 - Book Publication

Referring back to a previous post about the photographic project I am undertaking at Nam Tam Wan on Cheung Chau Island - Hong Kong, I have now finally arrived at a satisfactory format for the book of images I would like to publish.
I do not intend to print up multiple copies, instead I will present, exhibit and promote the book myself and I will only print copies upon request. This means the book is therefore not being produced commercially and the price cannot be reduced by large unit numbers.

Below I have attached low-resolution captures of the introduction and two pages of images.

If you are interested in purchasing copies of the book, please contact me using my email address: patricksford@live.com

The book is 8" x 10" 20 x 25cm, portrait format, 64 pages, 60 images, colour photos taken by phone camera, 1 image per page, title page, introduction page, blank page at the back, the hard-back cover is black with white lettering on the spine, spine text reads: Nam Tam Wan 2016 Patrick S. Ford

A review of the book as well as an interview I conducted with the 'Local Idea' section of the 'Lik Ink' website and blog can be found here: https://www.likink.com/patrick-s-ford/

Photographic Project in Progress - Nam Tam Wan

In an earlier post I introduced a short 2 minute video I made that was screened online and in the exhibition gallery as part of the 3rd Istanbul Biennial. The theme of the biennial was 'Are We Human? ' and I composed the video using images I had collected while working on another photographic project. I would now like to talk about that project.

In the Autumn of 2015 I went for a stroll along the east coast of Cheung Chau, a small island in the territory of Hong Kong where I had already been living for 3 years. I discovered a pleasant trail that lead down to the water's edge in a small bay that featured a Tin Hau Temple and this had become my regular Saturday and Sunday afternoon walk.

Around 50 meters past the temple there is a concrete walkway raised above the beach, which extended the trail up a short ramp and onto the adjacent headland. One day, as I stopped on this concrete walkway to take a photograph of the bay, I noticed a silver arrow that had been spray painted onto the seaward side of the walkway, pointing down toward the beach. The sand had almost covered the arrow head but there was just enough left to recognise that is was an arrow, rather than a silver line.
One or two weeks later I returned to the same spot and realised that the arrow indicated a drain that had been cut through the walkway almost at beach level. This drain allowed the water that seeped down from higher ground to pass through the walkway and drain back into the sea. The arrow had obviously been painted so that the location of the drain could be found whenever the sand built up and covered the drain.

On subsequent walks I began to notice that the terrain around the drain changed dramatically depending on the amount of water draining from higher ground, the intensity of the rainfall, the amount of debris washed ashore by tide and winds etc. I took a photograph with my camera phone so that I could compare it with how the drain may appear when I returned on my next walk. Without really planning it, I started to take a photograph at that same spot each time I visited the bay. As the images accumulated I realised that something had been triggered and a project had begun by itself without me being aware of it. I value these kinds of phenomena and decided to let it run to see where it may lead.
I purposefully did not pre-plan my visits to the bay to take photographs, I went there only when I had time for a walk and so the frequency of the visits varied. This added a touch of serendipity in that I couldn't predict the condition of the beach around the drain and each visit was a surprise.

I currently have around 50 images and as I had been reviewing them as a series my first action was to create a book of the images so that they could be reviewed sequentially and therefore the changes to the beach could be seen easily as the pages are turned. I  created two hand-made versions and then had a third version made at a local commercial photo lab.
A fourth version is currently underway and will hopefully be published soon as a commercially available book.

2015-11-29

17.17.03

2015-12-21

16.49.09

2016-01-31

16.11.47