Wounded Knee sketches

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee

Nebraska, 1868, The Great Father Ulysses Grant had signed the 'worthless' Black Hills over to the Indians froever, unaware of their richness in gold that grew from the grass roots down.

By 1972 however the miners were back, storming about searching the rocky passes and clear-running streams for that yellow that drove the white men crazy.

Soon enough the 'White Eyes' (Americans) wanted to buy back the Black Hills from the Indians. But the Black Hills were sacred - the home of the Gods and the place of visions and dreams, where the Great Spirit 'Wakan Tanka' was.

Following an attack by greedy American soldiers many of the Indian tribes fled to the Rosebud River. Soon the Hunkpapa tribe held their annual sun dance to bring in clear skies and sunrises from the east and cast away the black evil and danger that threatened them.

For a long time the brave Sioux warrior Crazy Horse had been waiting to test himself in battle again. He knew from a young age that the world men live in is but a shadow of the ‘real world’. To enter the ‘real world’ he had to dream. He had often been into the Black Hills to seek visions and ask for secret powers from the Great Spirit Wakantanka. Crazy Horse called these visions and dreams his ‘medicine’. In his dreams his horse seemed to dance as if wild or crazed.

The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories

A Split Fig












Beauty





The Wolves



Puss-In-Boots

The Sound of Drawing

We just finished a week long project where we had to translate a music score and the sound of the music into a graphic representation. We had to show every single note.
My group got Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' - the 1st movement.



Listening to it i didn't feel any particular emotion, other than i just wanted to lie there and carry on listening. It reminded me of watching Space Odyssey 2001 or one of the old Windows screensavers of a starfield - not much goes on but you go into a trance and can't tear your gaze away.

So above is one of my sketchbook pages - where i realised that the dynamics and visuals of constellations and the universe are very similar to musical notation. I used the below passage to organise the different notes by pitch and length - by translating the cosmic vocabulary into musical vocabulary.



This is a sketch from above of a downward spiral of all the bass clef staff notes. I chose mountain shapes because if you listen only to the bassline the notes carry through the whole bar usually and you are lead along - it's like letting your eyes wander over a mountain range - you don't jump from peak to peak, you follow all the conoturs in a long sweep. This is how the bass notes present themselves to the listener.
Where one mountain is shown to be inside another represents chords. The white solid mountains represent sharp notes.

I chose a spiral because for a few reasons:
1.it's continuing repetitive shape, and the piece of music is a continuing repetitive sound.
2. it encourages a trance-like gazing reaction from viewers.
3. it's a common feature within the cosmos, in arrangements of stars and galaxies and is a recogniseable shot in many space films.


In the workshop on the final day of the project we grouped together and my group made an installation. I assigned a colour to each note of the bass line and made every single one into a paper mountain. We used a blue/grey space colour scheme overall.

Waiting for photos...