The Adventures of Sen, Sonja, Toroa and Tamatea.

Gallery Space Station Sixty-Five, 65 Northcross Road, East Dulwich.

July 10 -14
London

Tama and I caught the 6.04 (a.m.) train with the help of Sen and then snoozed on the boat going across to Harwich. We got to the gallery at about one but it was far from looking like this photo. Jo, the owner, and others there were still renovating the space and it was full of stuff. So we discussed where the work would hang and then we left. It still took hours for me to leave, partly because I wasn't sure if I should or could help and because the people were so nice. However Tama told me it was 'soft' waiting rather than 'hard' waiting because he could do things.

One the first things Tama did on entering the gallery was to leave his footprints in an area of freshly laid concrete! I never really understood what this piece was about, although it was clear that the two guys making it, did it with great care and effort.
They put thin layers of concrete on an area of the floor between the two gallery spaces and during the opening had pieces of cardboard around it, indicating that it was still under construction, but it was hard enough not to leave any footprints.

Then we took the tube to Picadilly Circus to go to Maaori club which was as uplifting as ever and this time, everyone seemed new. But I was wrong there were 3 people I had met before.

And then we went to Sandy's where we were to sleep to the next two days. It was a fantastic place, so quiet, full of plants with a garden and ... a toy room. Here Tama is playing with one of the toys. The keyboard behind was fantastic. Dave and Sandy had customized their own sounds for it. She also had the Matisse Picasso catalogue of the current exhibition which I poured through mulling over those images I'd spent hours analyzing and redrawing as a first and second year art student 20 years ago.

Left to Right: Althea, Alexis, & Tama.
Tama was not allowed in because he was under 16
and so Alexis waited with him while I was lead through a maze of corridors and construction. There I left some copies of Arts Dialogue and bought a couple copies of the MAKE Women Artists magazine and left.

Then we went to visit Alexis chatting about fellow New Zealand artists, mad parents, websites and new media, and so on. Then she led us to the WASL (Women Artists Slide Library) offices which are now in the St Martin's Art School complex and now is known as MAKE, the organisation for women in the arts.

Tama further along Charing Cross Road.

We then then headed for some galleries in the Hoxton area.

In the end, one closed early and we were too late for the others, however I thought this Boutique was worth a photo.

Pre - MOSS

Then I turned and Tama was doing this. Yes, he is a live work of art.
Two days later he came up with the idea of MOSS, the Ministery Of Silly Stuff, and went around inviting people to join.
We now crossed to the other side of central London to meet Vince in Brixton.

Brixton Road, outside the tube
on a Thursday night at 7 p.m.

I dragged Tama into Woolworth's here to buy some sunglasses. I told him of my childhood memory, when Woolworth's and McKenzies were the two toy shops in Hawera. He was unimpressed.

Vince in their studio. As you can see he is a musican and Tama tried a few of instruments out. Vince is a member of the band, Praying for the Rain and Arts Dialogue ran an article on them, so that is how I came to meet him. His gentle and serene manner inspired me.

Friday

First we took all our junk over to Kath and Sean's and they fed us.

Then we took the crutches and our stuff for the performance to the gallery. On the way Tama trained me so that I learnt the text out of my head.

Here Tama is taking the crutches up one of the underground esculators.

About an hour before the opening. Jenni Grove is spreading icing on the wall and on the right 2 guys are assembling the bathroom door.

The bath (with green water) game, beyond Tama on the right was a wall installation of texts and photos by Andy Rafferty and on the floor a metal mat inserted at a diagonal into the floor. Poetic texts were silkscreened onto the blinds on the backdoors by the printmaker, Danny Flynn. Called "Circles and Spirals", the texts described circling and spiralling water.

"A Friendly" by Tim Flitcroft.

When we arrived the place was still in chaos and a Jenni had put icing over the wall where I was to hang my wrapping. Jo was obviously stressed dealing with other people's work. I didn't know what to do. Anyway I adjusted, a pity, now I couldn't walk along the work so much, but not a disaster.

I didn't realize that the video player was still in a box needing assembling until about half an hour before the opening and Jo probably didn't realize that I was capable of assembling it if he had asked me. So I quickly bored a hole through his bench and balanced the player on a pile of water bottles underneath, however I couldn't work out the monitor channel settings before the crowds came so I left it.

However the space is amazing and Jo had put a lot of effort and money into making it work. There were little touches everywhere from forms stuffed under the sink, little messages in drawers to teabag sculptures.

I liked the bath sculpture the best. You played by spraying numbered ducks with water for them to move the ball to your goal. One goal was labelled "artists" and the other "critics". During the opening people crammed around the bath to watch or play. Tama informed me that one person was the referee and that he cheated all the time.

Janita brought Rob, which was a blessing because he took lots of excellent shots of our performance.

It was incredibly busy and people were shoulder to shoulder most of the time. Our performance "Movement for Mother and Child" was the first on the programme.

It went well, mainly because Tama did his part with total concentration and I knew my text well. The crutches were perfect. They allowed me to get into my role and to stop and start and to concentrate on this sense of inhibited movement.

Photos: Rob. Tama and I moving into place to start our performance.

This shows the very start of our performance.
As you can see, we had to move over the icing sugar and there was also a briefcase in the way below me and around the corner there was a t.v.

monitor on the ground too.

I think these 'things-in-the-way-of-a-mother' who moved along close to the images suited the piece. Tama, who moved at a greater distance from the wall didn't have these obstacles.

I began by moving slowly and stuttering the text "I, I, I, I am, I am, Iambic, Iambic doubt, Iambic doubting gait.." (at that point I turned to face on of the baby images) Tama did his own thing of ballet steps along and beyond me.

Photos, above and below: Vince.

Photo: Rob.
On the floor behind me is the metronoom, ticking at about 40 times per second with Tama's Viking recorder.

I continued with: "This is a law of nature the strong survive", while gazing at the image and resting on the crutches.

I turned and moved while muttering, "no, no, no place, no place, it's no place, no one place."

I then turned to another image with the text: "Darwin had it right, but now...
now it seems that it is survival with the least amount of change."

Now I turned at the doorway with this text (which was the same text on the baby image at this point)

"Prune and cut,
prune and cut all deviations
they distract."

"it's their world

I thought

I thought it was everyone's world

in a few years you can join in

They yelled at me because I was carrying a baby"

Photos above and below: Rob.
Slide projection on the door
on the far right is by Sadia Ur-Rehman.

"I was bad because he was not at home

The world is hard,
cold
involved
and it's no place
no place for a baby."

Tama then stopped the metronoom and picked up the wooden flute standing poised until I started saying the following:

"Go,
(Tama started playing music, walking towards me on the other side of the wall)

said the bird,
for the leaves
were full of children

Hidden excitedly,
containing laughter

Go, go, go, said the bird, humankind cannot bear
very much reality."

Tama stopped playing music and tip-toed behind me.

I whispered: "For the leaves were full of children."

Photos: Rob.

(I looked at Tama saying slowly:)

"Seeing Red is for the simple.

Life is civilized now you know,

we are no longer beasts of the field.

Decisions and revisions.

Let us go and make our visit."

Tama repeated "make our visit" while I put the crutches on the ground and picked up the piles of postcards.

We then walked through the audience giving out the postcards, gradually walking towards the door. I was amazed at the silence. I had expected that people would start talking but they didn't. Then they all clapped. What a buzz!

I decided to do a review about the show and so go here for more about the show.

Photo: Tama.

And it wasn't over yet!
I had to move the cloth because someone else would do a performance in that space. So I did the re-hanging during the opening and in a sense that was a performance too.

Photo: Jo

Jo had tuned the monitor by now and I took turns on the player with an artist-duo because one player had not arrived. So at times the Wrapping video was on show while I was doing the hanging. It took me about an hour to hang it, mainly because I kept having conversations in the middle of it all.

The lamp on the left is part of the performance, "Corner" by David Collins, where he spent hours meticulously lifting slithers of wallpaper with a fine knife.
On the wall to the right of the monitor is the work, "Wrappers" by Jenni Grove, on which she has changed words for the candywrappers to titles such as Fat Fat (for a Kit Kat wrapper).

Photos: Jo

Tama found this a bit tiring because there were the ducks to play with in the bathroom.

It looked good high up and going across the kitchen area.

Jo, the gallery owner is in the white and the other two are Jon Purnell & Miklos Kemecsi, whose work was a 7 minute video of slap-stick kitchen comedy of a couple of guys in drag in the kitchen.

The work on the wall on the right is Microjade by Roy Amiss. Ten jars, each with a white flower, reflect the text: "This is many things, but definitely not an oak tree" through the clear liquid.

Richard and Vince.

Richard Dedomenici performed "Charm Offensive", an experiment with toilet paper and marbles to demonstrate the strength of a brand of toiletpaper. He was witty and produced a booklet about his letter writing compaigns.

He wrote of his work as:
I am a one-man subversive think-tank primarily dedicated to the development and implementation of innovative strategies designed to undermine accepted belief systems and topple existing power structures.

He gave me a booklet which showed some of his other performances. In "A Party of One", he blew up balloons to fill a telephone box, for the Queen's Jubilee on June 3 & 4 he travelled anticlockwise on the London Cirle Line for 43 hours calling this performance the "Well Rounded Individual".
I found his comment that if you complain companies will respond immediately but if you send a letter complimenting them, they don't respond. We then discussed the issue of there being complaints departments but not compliments departments and how this affects attitudes towards production.

Meanwhile Tama was stealing the show.

Below: Fabrice Arfi is doing his performance. I only saw it in snatches and never found out what the text was that he was writing. This is what he wrote about it:
My work stands at the crossroads of performance, installation, and painting. Its goal is to challenge the perceived role of the artist in the west as the maker of objects rather than images and situations.

Choose another month

There were a number of works in the spaces around the side and back of the gallery as well.

"Only if you are willing too" by Emma Donaldson were some instructions inviting visitors record in chalk on the wall what they could hear around and to giving visual form to the auditory.

Tama eating some sugar off Jenni's dress.

Jenni's "Fairy Cakes" performance was more about sweetness than food. Dressed in white she spend most of the evening pouring icing sugar on herself. Tama was the only one who dared to eat the stuff!

Visible through the door behind them (and in the image on the left) is "Camp II" by Stuart Mayes. He used cane to create a tent-like structure and then sewed shirts together to cover it. The teatowel shades and shapes around the coathanger hang lamps were by Saul Branson, while the net lace by Racheal House, hanging in the doorway was very subtle. Tiny patterns had been cut out of the curtains.

Tama in East Dulwich with Arlette's crutches

After a leisurely morning with Kath and Sean we met up with Dave at the Finsbury Park to return keys and crutches.

So after a full and fruitful day, we left the gallery at about 10.30. The first train towards London Bridge was delayed, then cancelled, then when the second came up with a delay sign at now 11.15 we headed for the buses. The underground system stops at midnight, so I was worried about getting back. Well seconds after finding the busstop the bus took us straight to the Oval tube station! It turned out that we needed to take buses the following day to get back and in fact buses seemed to be quicker than the underground, once I knew where I was going and Tama got a buzz out of the views.

Tama at the Oval station.

Dave's mobile

Tama, Finsbury Park tubestation.

Tama's walks got sillier and sillier until...

Tama in the underground near Islington.

A silly lean.

... he came up with M.O.S.S.
The Ministery Of Silly Stuff

So I videoed him doing some silly walks and runs in "Highbury Fields" among the groups of picnickers.

By the time we had walked to the Florence Trust exhibition in St. Saviour's Church in Aberdeen Park (the photo shows the entrance), he had thought up his goals, (to bring humour into the Netherlands), the need for members (who were incharge of their own department) and what they needed to do (do silly stuff).

The Florence Trust provides studio places in this church (in a beautiful location - there were trees all around) for 10 months of the year with a month for the exhibition for about 20 artists.
Here is a silly Tama with his first member of M.O.S.S. who has setting out a grid for placing a sculpture of 100 windmills for his wife.

Racheal (with pink hair) was Tama's 2nd M.O.S.S. member.

Tama and I returned to the gallery to pick up my tripod I had left behind and just as well, because the Wrapping had loosened itself in one corner.

Left to Right: Jo David (the gallery owner) and Racheal House.

Tama was able to keep himself busy with silly stuff while I was brouwsing in the
ICA bookshop.

Tama decided that the car wasn't silly enough to be part of his ministery.

We then caught a tube to Picadilly Circus, and came across this car on the way to the ICA bookshop on Pall Mall.

We then stopped in at a bookshop near Goodge Street before racing to the Union Chapel where Vince had a brief appearance on accordian in a musical choreographed by ....

"Those who drink the sun" sung by her choir of 50 or so, was based on the life and writings of the Turkish poet, ... Being upstairs in the church was stunning and most of the music was magical. It was a little on the long side for us, but we had also had a long day.

Tama was itching to get back to playing with Sean.

The next morning was another leisurely time with Sean and Kath working out what their part in M.O.S.S. would be. Kath had given Tama a lesson in playing tunes on the harmonica and Tama worked in this as well.

Then we rushed out to buy some books and I gave Tama a spin on the millenium bridge.
I'd asked about the tube out to Liverpool Street being assured that everything was working.

A M.O.S.Sian workout on the millenium bridge.

We huffed our way there to find that whole line was not working and so had to make a detour taking an extra 20 or so minutes. We arrived at Liverpool St. train platform right at the time the train was due to leave. It had just left!
Fortunately two others had also missed the same train and we decided to travel together and share the taxi from

Colchester but we still had to run to meet that train. While on the train we worked out, with the help of a fellow passenger, that leaving from the village Maningtree was about half the distance again (now a 30 or so mile trip). The first taxi couldn't take us for another 20 minutes, and so I rang around the 4 taxi companies and finally one who wasn't working agreed to come because we would miss the boat otherwise. That was just as well, we just made the boat without having to run.

So that was rather exciting and we got to experience a piece of rustic Constable landscape.

Our trip was still not over.
It was the final evening of the North Sea Jazz festival, an international do in The Hague and so when the train stopped there, it stopped for a good hour before the staff decided to add a carriage to take all the masses northward. On the one hand it was very frustrating (at 1 a.m.) because we only had another 10 minutes to travel, on the other hand, the crowd was unusually chatty and cheerful. It must have been a great festival. Tama can sleep anywhere and so he did. He was incredible. He slept and when we got to Leiden was able to get up and walk, almost as if programmed to. Sen was there to meet us and so now we were home.

Tama on harmonica with his mother.

July 16th & 17th:

I had work and so barely saw Sen who then left on the Tuesday morning for Finland and his brother's wedding.
Tuesday was a sunny summer's day. I took Toroa to the Dental Nurse to have two teeth pulled out. He insisted on going straight back to school, so I guess they must be doing something nice.

Then we met an old mate of mine from my 1980's Dunedin days, Tim and his partner Vanessa.

Tim and I saw each other a lot in '81 and 82 mostly in connection with the University folk club. It was neat to see him again.

We ate dinner on a boat on a canal and then had to race away because Toroa had to be on stage in the school musical at 7.30.

The actors and singers were his class. At the end as graduates, each were awarded with a certificate and present at the end.
It was a fun show and some of the girls were so good! Toroa did his lines well as father in the "Perfect Daughter" sketch, and afterwards there was a party, which Tama and I didn't stay around for.

The "Perfect Daughter" sketch, left to right: Toroa (father), Yasmin (daughter) and Arsu (mother).

Two more dance sketches. On the left Toroa is lying on the floor, before they get up to dance.

On Wednesday I worked on the poem game in flash, and Toroa took his violin to school to play for his class.
I suggested that he prepare 3 pieces but he insisted that he would only play 2 pieces and so only practised those.
By his smile I could see that he had felt good in his little performance. He had ended up playing 8 pieces because the class had asked for it and had showen a few how to play it, impressing them even more when they couldn't produce the sounds he did.

On Thursday I took Toroa to work and we had our very first "department socialtime" after our first dept. meeting. It is a good idea and I hadn't realized that our new manager, was shocked to see a child at work. So I apologized and that is the end of taking my kids to work.

Paul Simon concert
at about midnight near Helsinki.
Tony and Sari are on the right.

It starting to get dark at 12.30.

July 16 - 22
Sen in Finland

Sen flew to Helsinki to attend Tony and Sari's wedding.

On arriving Sen got to go to a Paul Simon concert at the the Pori Jazz festival.

Sen decided to get hot air balloon tickets for Tony and Sari as part of our wedding present.

The instructions sounded like something out of a spy movie: you go to the florist near the department store in the centre of the city, visible in the background of this photo, and ask for

information on "hot air ballooning". You will be handed two plain envelopes. Take these to a certain bank, and they will know what to do.
I hope it works.

Sari and Tony live about a 30 minute walk away from the centre of the city.

-> The city Cathredal

Then I took a boat out to a group of five islands which have the largest naval fortifications in Europe.

I only went to two of these for about an hour, because I had to be back in time for Tony's stag party.

A World War Two submarine.

The slender masts
were apparently untreated pine.

The Stag Party began with ambushing Tony and taking him on a boat to a resturant on an island.

Tony had thought he was just having dinner with Sari and I.

Chris was dubbed an honorary male for the occasion.

On Friday 19th: Tony's children arrived from New Zealand.

Tony, Sari, Elizabeth, and James.

Then Tony took Chris, James and me out for a flight over the area.

more to come

...text to come...

Above and right:
The Orthodox Church.

Above: The Cathedral viewed from the Orthodox Church.

And one of the harbours!

The Wedding!
Was in this grand hotel
in the city.

The Ceremony

With attendant NZ and Finnish flags.

24 and 25 July

I spent those days scanning photos of me and my siblings from the seventies from Oom Jan's photo collection and I sent off subsidy applications to do with Oxford.

On the left is my Aunt Bertha, at 89, she -like my uncle Jan- are both lucid and both live at home. As a child, she was an inspiration for me, because she put herself through study (as a midwife) with no support from her parents.

So we didn't leave for our holiday until July 26th, driving eastward to visit my eldest aunt in Deurne. She 18 months older than her brother Jan.

She enjoyed looking at Oom Jan's photos and told me some stories about some of them.
She also made cuppa soup for the boys! Her daughter Perry arrived just as we were leaving and she led us out of Deurne onto the road towards Nijmegen. We wanted to see the exhibition in Sint Anna in the neighbouring village of Venray. St Anna is a famed psychiatric institution with a long history and my grandmother lived there for the last 15 or so years of her life. However we couldn't find any signs and so gave up.

We then arrived at Oom Jan's farm an hour later. He went out in his electric wheelchair giving the boys rides and racing them.

Tama insisted that we take the skateboard so it travelled with us for the next 6 weeks on top of the van.

Toroa and Tama took turns racing Oom Jan down the driveway.

It was close

Toroa wasn't too good at steering.

The winners who finished.

Then it was Tama's turn.

And then Toroa's.

And so it went.

A corner of Oom Jan's bedroom, his father (Albert) is in the photo on the right.

Toroa held up his medal. A CBE for his long membership on local town council.

We then left the Netherlands earlish on the 27th, heading for Kassel and arrived there that evening. We were very lucky finding a parking space just around the corner from the main museum and to discover that we could leave the van there the following day because it was a Sunday. Well planned!

It also had trees and a view over a park. So we had the luxury of returning during the day to eat our lunch in the shade.

To Documenta on July 28th
or
To another month

Enroute to Kassel: Toroa being a chicken in the doorway of our van.