Fossils4Africa

I blogged about these guys before and they now have their own website - check it out - www.fossils4africa.co.za

no comment from the couch.....

.....but do have a brilliant weekend!

2 of my fave things.......

I was lucky enough to spot one of these babies down and under construction, near Safal Steel(www.safalsteel.co.za) in Cato Ridge, South Africa. You generally spot them upright, carrying high voltage cables.....Managed to capture two of my favourite things at once, Hot Dip Galvanizing & my car...how shallow am I..... :-)

Sometimes lunch can be interesting....

.....and not only for the food, which by the way was delish! Bellevue Cafe in Kloof, Durban, South Africa. Love the Hot Dip Galvanized accents and the vivid green. Bellevue Cafe 031 717 7280

Cheviot Court

Nothing to do with Hot Dip Galvanizing, but this has to be one of my favourite Durban buildings. Cheviot Court on Musgrave Road, Durban South Africa. I have dreams of one day occupying an entire floor once the kids have left home. Just me, my cats and my laptop – writing all day long whilst savouring the views.
Durban has many Art Deco buildings, but sadly many of them have fallen into disrepair and neglect. What a pity…..

Gratitude

Anni Ramkisson, great friend, mentor and industry role player is on the mend after a serious medical condition. I am filled with joy and gratitude. Get better soon Anniroodh!

I

I threw this one in, because it reminds me of you :-)

Desiring Machine - Simeon Nelson

This stunning work of art was a head’s up from a friend in Australia – thank you Woody for the link!

Desiring Machine – Simeon Nelson – also see http://www.simeon-nelson.com/

Desiring Machine is a fallen tree/tower lying by the roadway. It is a crashed relic of machine-age desire putting down new roots into the earth and unfurling tendrils from it's architectonic radii and sections. To motorists speeding past it is an indeterminate blur, a silhouetted filigree that might be a decaying windmill or other piece of obsolete agricultural machinery - a relic of the struggle of humans to co-exist with nature.
The cause of this optical confusion is a vegetal motif, a floral border from a 19th century pattern book that has been adapted to form the base unit of the modular system of this sculpture which is composed of three repeated modular units generated from the 'original' pattern. Desiring Machine's recursive plant-like structure unfolds from a single stem five units long that branches into four stems, three units long which in turn branches into nine stems, two units long and finally branches into sixteen stems, each one unit long.
It is too mechanical and perfectly symmetrical to be a tree and it is too ornate to be an industrial artefact. In Desiring Machine a collision of abstraction and ornamentation is played out. It appears vaguely utilitarian, logical; it could have been left behind by the road builders or be a collapsed electricity pylon. If so, its structural logic is obscured by intense ornament as if it had been infected by net curtain, lace doily or other item of domestic frippery. These stereotypical oppositions are a playful critique of various forms of techno-industrialism that have objectified nature as passive and mechanical, a 'thing'to be controlled and made useful.
Paradoxically, Desiring Machine suggests a pre-modern, Aristotelian conception of nature as an animate plurality filled with purpose and desire.