Reception Space presents:
6, 180 milligrams of the Evian mountain
Alistair McClymont

RECEPTION SPACE
17 - 25 CREMER ST
LONDON
E2 8HD
OLD STREET
click here for a map
Opening 6-9pm Thursday 23rd February 2006
Open 11am – 6pm 24th -26th February 2006

It’s been a very busy week, but its all set up. You can get a blurry view of the whole show on the webcam here

http://www.atkinsongallery.co.uk/webcam/cam.html

i’ll post up the rest of the images of the show in my portfolio very shortly.

As you’ll find out - the webcam updates in a very random way which is frustrating - but if you have the patience you’ll see my work.

I’m sitting down pretty much for the first time today after a 6am start (it didn’t help that it was a mates birthday last night). I’ve just managed to get about 3-5 tonnes of tarmac to the gallery, now its sitting on pallets outside the door.

Its been a mission, but the good people at Bardon aggregates have yet again given me a load of old bits of road. (not that its really that valuable anyway, but its very kind of them to even be interested) .

All i’ve got to do now is get some unlucky friends to help me carry it all inside the gallery and help set it up, oh and get some new trousers, just torn these ones - nothing a bit of gaffa tape didn’t fix, but it looks wierd.

I’ve just found this on google, they must have updated their satelite imagery, as it is incredibly detailed. This is where i got all the tarmac for my After the Rain piece. After asking a few road workers where i could get as much free old tarmac as possible I was directed to a depot in Greenwich. It was hard to find but i saw this black mountain as I approached the area. It doesn’t look that high from a satelite photo, but it is huge, as is the digger you can see perched ontop of it.

Had to get up at the crack of dawn today to give my work to a man in a van. It’s on route to the Atkinson Gallery in Somerset. I’ve made about a hundred calls to all the tarmac folk in the west country, and i’m vaguely assured that I can get what I want. Now i’ve just got to cross my fingers and see what happens on monday when i get there. With a bit of luck i’ll have a new After the Rain piece set up in a week

artfo.com is a new website i’m developing. The problem I have leaving the Royal College of Art is that its hard to keep that community going strong. At the Royal College you see your collegues every day and talk about exhibitions and competition etc, so it’s easy to keep track.

So i’ve made artfo.com as a surrogate for the art school. To begin with its just a blog, but it will grow into an entire environment for promoting and discussing art.

Have you ever experienced nature comming so close and so dramatically as this. Somehow with the BBC covering it live and seeing images such as these gave it much more gravity that it otherwise would have. Virtually everyone who saw this was captivated, thousands of people lined the banks and bridges on the Thames as the barge passed. This is possible the most incredible display of humanity i’ve seen in a while, perhaps more so because it was in aid of an animal, not another human.

It’s strange how witnessing the death of a whale so publically can be more moving than seeing human death and tragedy on the news. This must tell us something quite important, though i’m not sure what.

Calyon (Credit Agricole) now own 2 of the routed wooden drawings.

I’m off to see some head honchos at Calyon (part of the Credit Agricole group) later today. They’re interested in one of the routed wooden pieces from the Honey and Almonds work. I’m not sure what to expect, but i’d like to sell one, it would be a first and would definately help sort out that overdraft.

I’ll let you all know the result.

I’ll be having a solo show at the Art Reception space at ACAVA studios in Cremer St, London on the last Thursday of February 2006. (have a look here)

The work will develop from the project I started at the Hull Art Lab, in which I looked at Evian mineral water. The central piece will be a glass containing powder created by evapourating many litres of Evian water. The residue left behind is detailed in the ‘Composition in mg/litre’ section on the back of an Evian bottle. A litre of Evian provides about 309 mg/l of solid when evapourated.

This solid is the physical remains of the mountain depicted in the Evian logo.