Lisa MacLean Artist

See pictures here.

For more information on the Book of Hours, click here.

Feeling that the usefulness of my over-life-size female mannequin had more or less been exhausted, I decided to remove her hands, which are actually quite beautifully crafted, and place them in various locations, holding blue, purple and yellow crepe paper ribbons. First, I placed them inside the house monument tomb with what remained of the two painted mannequins (one torso had been removed and dumped in the Lycian rock tomb lower down the hill), then I moved them to the Kas amphitheatre, the hill above the theatre, and then to the large, canoe-like tomb on the hill close to my apartment.

Yesterday, on a boat trip to Kekova and Simena, I took the pair of hands with me, just in case I felt like photographing them there. Simena, called by the Turks Kalekoy (Castle village), is the site of a 15^th century castle built by Sultan Mehmet I, and a Lycian necropolis. The castle is accessed by a set of steep stone steps through the village and up the hill. There’s not a lot of it left except a small – very small – stone theatre hewn from solid rock facing the sea (it held 80 people), and battlements. The necropolis lies outside the castle walls and holds about 30 stone sarcophagi, some of which are in very good shape, and has a beautiful view out over the islands and ocean. All the Lycian sarcophagi have long since been looted – Lycians, like Egyptians, interred people with their “stuff” so that they would have it available in the next life.

I enjoyed placing the hands on the castle battlements, watching the ribbons dance in the brisk wind, and in two of the Lycian sarcophagi.

See pictures of the entire mannequin project here and more pictures of the hands around Kas here.

I just found out yesterday that the Internet Explorer version of this site had been compromised, likely due to a java update. Since I use Firefox, and had been editing and updating my site in that browser, I wasn’t aware of the problem because in Firefox, there was no problem. But some of my posts for the last two and a half months were missing from or corrupted  in the Internet Explorer version. I imagine you can understand the enormous frustration that I felt in finding that out … and the amount of time it has taken in the last two days, with the help of Ty, to fix it. AAARRRGGGH.

Anyway, since I realise that many of you – well, however many of you there are out there reading this – will have been accessing this site through IE, I have now fixed the problem so that my previous months’ posts can be read in their entirety … “O, joy”, I can hear you say. So, if you do have time one of these days, check them out!

Ruination apartment projection, detail

Having decided to do another apartment projection, while I still have the energy and the found objects, I decided that I needed a bouquet of flowers. I took some money along, in case I couldn’t find any suitable wildflowers, but, remembering the profusion of flowers growing wild in and around the cemetery, I made my way there and collected two big bunches of daisies, tiny yellow and purple bearded irises, and a couple of other varieties of wild pink and purple flowers. Too bad that the irises there are mostly all finished – it must have been beautiful at the height of their season. I arranged the flowers in two glass containers and positioned them on the two small tables and, as my friend Cec says, “Bob’s your uncle!” (What does that mean, anyway?)

This piece is called Ruination and consists of 24 images, to represent a human and cosmic lifetime, projected in sequence on the wall in front of a still life consisting of over-lifesize plastic female mannequin (with a necklace of tiny red peppers from the Dalyan market), wooden mortar and pestle, wine glass half full, candles (2 burning, 2 extinguished), crepe paper ribbons, moderately wrinkled, a glass bowl of pine cones picked from the Dalyan cemetery and Iztuzu Beach, and two petrified pomegranates from a field near Ortaca.

See pictures here.

The objects in this piece take part of their inspiration from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a play I love and that we teach often in Liberal Studies. Lucky has the central speech of the play, several hundred words shouted out in response to Pozzo’s command “Think!” It is too long to quote in full, but here is a representative sample:

“Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattman of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell . . . one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die … they give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant and then it’s night once more.”

Seeing the large wall above one of the couches in my apartment living room, it seemed a perfect spot on which to project images. Wow – I was able to find everything I needed in the apartment itself to make it work – amazing. By putting a small plastic table on the lounge chair, I was even able to compensate for the lack of tall tripod for my camera. And the curtain provided to close off the living room from the kitchen was perfect for my purposes.

However, I am actually the last person who should be working with technology in her art projects. My problem is that I can never seem to do things the same way each time they need to be done. That kind of routine work must be anathema to me, even though I know it needs to be done. The results of that incapacity are that, always, as in these projection projects, something is not right. For example, say that I get the lighting right, then I realize half way through the exercise, that the computer screen is being included in the image – which of course I don’t want. Then, when the lighting is right and the computer screen has been removed from the camera’s view, I don’t photograph all the slides – for some inexplicable reason, when I review the pictures, one slide is missing from the set … sigh. Then, when going through the second set of slides, my camera battery, which seemingly goes forever, dies right in the middle of the proceedings. You get the idea. What should take a relatively short time turns into something more onerous.

Other than that, yesterday was spent photographing the Kas cemetery, a beautiful little spot overlooking the west-most harbour, and wrapping coloured crepe paper ribbons around three trees on the hilltop next to the theatre. I also hung two of the pieces of cotton headscarf material on a small clothes line I erected between two of the trees, allowing the shadows of the trees and leaves to dance across the white surface as they flapped in the breeze. These made beautiful dark blue patterns on the white, reminding me of Chinese ink drawings of landscapes. I could not have painted them so perfectly.

See pictures here, here and here.

Self Portrait with Six Skulls, detail

Last night I packed up all my gear and headed back to the House Monument Tomb for one more kick at the projection can. This time, mindful of the darkness inside it, I brought candles to provide a bit more illumination for the piece and a flashlight to help me navigate through the rocky hills in the dark. I really like this venue a lot, but dragging all the stuff over there and being a bit worried that someone will come and bother me, means that it’s not the most comfortable experience. And, as darkness falls, the exposure time gets longer and longer (up to a minute each) and it is more difficult to get photos that are in focus. Even so, I love seeing the inside of the tomb and its contents lit up in the candlelight as darkness descends and the lights of the town, which can be seen out the tomb’s narrow doorway, get brighter and brighter. I worked for an hour and a half with two different projections, another version of Beyond the Flesh Dress and Self Portrait with Six Skulls.

Self Portrait with Six Skulls, detail

Self Portrait with Six Skulls was the last thing I did at the Babayan Culture House in Ibrahimpasa before I left. Since I had become very enamored of my six silver skulls, and it had been a beautiful sunny day there (wonderful after the cold and snow), I wanted to do one final, final piece with them at the ruined cave house. From the many pictures that I took there I selected 24, to represent the 24 hours in a day (signifying a life time) to use for this projection. The series of 24 is divided into thirds, the separation between each section indicated by a photograph including an empty chair. Each of the three sections represents a third of a lifetime, youth, middle age, and old age. Since the photographs represent a passage of time, and were taken over a period of time, you will notice that the position of the sunlight and the parts of the objects illuminated change throughout the piece. When born, we emerge from the darkness and nonexistence; when dying, we descend into darkness and oblivion. Also, as the cliche says, with age comes wisdom. In this piece, wisdom is illustrated by an illuminated oil lamp.

The prone mannequins in their stony tomb remind me of Masaccio’s Trinity (1425) in Florence’s Santa Maria Novella church. For information on this fresco, click here.

See pictures of projections Self Portrait with Six Skulls here and Beyond the Flesh Dress here and photos of Self Portrait with Six Skulls here.

More information about the goddess Leto, lover of Zeus, and her connection with Lycia, the wolf-land:

LETO & THE LYCIAN PEASANTS

Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses 35 (trans. Celoria) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
“Leto, after giving birth to Apollon and Artemis on the isle of Asteria, went to Lykia, taking her children with her, to the baths of [the River] Xanthos. As soon as she arrived in that land, she came first upon the spring of Melite and wanted very much to bathe her children there before going on to Xanthos. But some herdsmen drove her away so that their own cattle could drink at the spring. Leto made off and left Melite. Wolves came out to met her and, wagging their tails, led the way, guiding her to the River Xanthos. She drank the water and bathed the babes and consecrated the Xanthos to Apollon while the land which had been called Tremilis she renamed Lykia (Wolf Land) from the wolves that had guided her. Then she returned to the spring to inflict a penalty on the herdsmen who had driven her away. They were then still washing their cattle besides the spring. Leto changed them all into frogs whose backs and shoulders she scratched with a rough stone. Throwing them all into the spring she made them live in water. To this day they croak away by rivers and ponds.”

More information here:

http://www.theoi.com/Titan/TitanisLeto.html

The House Monument Tomb on the hillside here in Kas, dating from the 4^th c bce, is a perfect venue for projections. The only downside is having to haul all my technology over to it – my arms are still sore from mountain biking, kayaking, and carrying around mannequins. Last night I decided to give it a try and packed my laptop, mini projector, mini speakers, camera, mini video cam and all the other assorted cords and plugs in a beach bag and carried it, with a smallish long low wooden table, over to the tomb around 7 in the evening. I wasn’t exactly sure what time the sun went down but needed time to set everything up while it was still light enough.

Beyond the Flesh Dress tomb projection, detail

Once there, I set up the table on the side of the tomb facing the prone mannequins and put everything together. I tried projecting the images directly on the cave wall itself behind the lower mannequin but the resolution wasn’t good enough because the wall’s surface is rough. So I brought out one of the white pieces of headscarf material that I’d been carrying in my backpack and hung it up using two small stones to hold the ends. Voila!

Unfortunately, I don’t have a tall tripod here and I was using the octopus tripod for the small projector so I had to balance the camera on my knees. Fortunately, it was at exactly the right height to take pictures. However, it was a bit difficult, even so, to keep the camera steady as the exposure time got longer and longer the darker it became. I did manage to get one complete set of 18 good images, finally, by the time that it got completely dark. I encountered a few problems with the sound system; for some reason, the speakers stopped working right in the middle of video recording … sigh. So, I did try again using only the laptop speakers which actually weren’t too bad. Once again, though, without a tall tripod I’m not sure how good the recording will be – possibly a bit wobbly. Oh well, the whole project is about making do with what’s available …

See pictures here.

At the Babayan Culture House in Ibrahimpasa, I loved working with found objects and actually found quite a few bits and pieces with which to work. At Dalyan, while I had planned to continue in this vein, the poor weather and lack of available found goodies stymied me. Now, in Kas, I have found some objects, and the weather and ruined venues are congenial. A few days ago, while out riding my rental bike around town, I took a slightly different route back to my apartment from the antique theatre, and came upon the Hellenistic temple that I’d been looking for without success the day before. It is not actually much of a temple, more like a pile of stones, but a few meters of the foundation walls have been left standing. The temple is in what is now a local family’s backyard; their roosters and hens use it for a feeding ground. While I was walking around the temple taking pictures, I spied through a wire fence, leaning against a rock wall in what looked like the family’s not-yet-planted vegetable garden, mannequins – one full body female, complete with painted hair and makeup, two headless female torsos, two sets of legs (from different bodies), and three feet.

With my minuscule amount of Turkish, and many hand gestures, I asked the family, who had emerged from their home to see what I was doing, if I could have the mannequins. They seemed delighted to have me take them away. At first, I was only going to take the complete one but they persuaded me to take them all by giving me a long rope with which to tie up the legs for transport. Locking my bike up at the temple ruins, I carried the first plastic body through town and up the hill to my apartment, drawing many quizzical looks and stares from passersby. Next, I roped up the two sets of legs, and put the two torsos in my string laundry bag, and dragged the whole complex over to the Doric House Monument Tomb, a 4^th c bce gravesite on the hillside opposite the antique theatre. While walking slowly with this burden, my movements generated ferocious barking from a local dog who seemed outraged at my excess of body parts and peculiar motion.

Inside the tomb, carved along the top of the wall facing the entrance door, is a relief of 26 headless dancing women; unfortunately, it is barely visible now because the wall has been so blackened from people lighting fires inside the tomb. Having in mind this frieze and the caryatids at the Acropolis in Athens, those beautiful headless female statues holding up the roof of one of the temples, I positioned the torsos and legs in various ways inside and outside the tomb. Finished for the day, I left the mannequins stacked up in the corner on the stone benches.

Looking from my balcony, I can see the House Tomb on the hillside; the next morning I could also see that there were people clambering in and on the tomb. When I arrived tomb-side, four young men skipping out of school were already there roasting wieners. While they ate, I continued working with the mannequins. My original plan had been to paint the plastic bodies and move them around the hillside. However, while I was working, the four seemed very interested in what I was doing, so I asked them if they’d like to paint the figures. They agreed with enthusiasm. I said they could do whatever they wanted, with the exception that no “bad words” were to be painted and no paint was to go anywhere on the tomb itself or the grounds around it. The four guys worked in pairs, selecting the colours and patterns themselves.

(*note: I later found out, from Nils Filmer at the Gumusluk Academy, that the colours chosen are those of two Turkish football teams. The yellow-red combination represents Galatasaray and the yellow-blue Fenerbahce)

Later, I took the full body mannequin over to the theatre and took several pictures of it there; however, by then the wind was howling and it was difficult to position the body without it falling. I leaned it against a beautiful hilltop tree and enjoyed watching the multicoloured crepe paper ribbons unfurl from the mannequin’s hand and ripple wildly in the breeze.

Two days later, still intending to paint the headless torsos and legs I had left behind in the tomb, I returned to it to find that someone had positioned the bodies on the stone benches inside as if they were the corpses that had originally occupied the tomb. This person had also reattached the feet to one of them, albeit on the wrong legs. So, instead, I decided to paint their back sides, which the young men had left unpainted, and put them back on the tomb benches again in the same prone position to see what would happen to them next. I like the idea of other people coming across them and interacting with them as they wish.

After an hour or so of that, I hopped on my bike and rode down to the harbour where there were craft tables set up with merchandise for sale. I purchased a small Turkish doll, sort of like a Barbie, from the Busy Bees expat group; this group gives all the sale proceeds to handicapped children in the area. The doll has long brown hair, enormous eyes, bendable limbs and a rather cute pair of high heeled sandals – I decided to move her around town, too.

The next day, I carried the top portion of the complete mannequin, and the tiny doll, to the 4^th c bce Lycian tomb cut into the cliff face just down the road from my apartment and photographed them in it. Later, I took them to the Kucuk Cahil (Little Pebble) Beach, the beach and derelict rusted bathing platform at the edge of town, and the promontory overlooking the bay on which are Kas’ two helicopter landing pads.

In ancient times, this area of Turkey used to worship Apollo (the sun god), Artemis (the moon goddess) and, particularly, Leto, their mother. The lover of Zeus, Leto was commanded by Zeus’ wife Hera, to spend an eternity wandering from country to country and spent most of her enforced holiday time here in Lycia. Most of the temples in this area are dedicated to these three deities. In addition, Aphrodite, the goddess of love, is said by Hesiod to have been born from the sea foam generated by Oranos’ castrated genitals at Cyprus, not too far east and south of here. I thought about these ancient legends as I selected sites for my plastic goddesses.

Here is a poem dedicated to Aphrodite (called the “Kyprian” or “Kypris” because she was born on Cyprus) by the 3rd c bce Greek woman poet Anyte:

“Kypris keeps this spot”

Kypris keeps this spot.

She loves to be here,

Always looking out

From the land over

The brilliant sea. She

Brings the sailors good

Voyage, and the sea

Quivers in awe of

Her gleaming image.

See more pictures here.