MILES HALPIN

HELLO! and welcome to my new site with a new URL and domain name - for the few of you who may have links to the old site please note the change: www.mileshalpin.com The old site was getting a bit ... erm ...old, and I no longer liked the look of it and - as some of you know - it was a huge and lumbering monster with hundreds of pages, and the thought of having to change it all to give it a facelift... well, life is just too short. Much better to start afresh. And as I have begun my long-delayed photography project and made some music I thought it would be an ideal time to get the whole of my stuff on one site - all the products of halpin industries megacorp in one handy location, under one big roof ... oh, it's so convenient !
( I have included the old site within this one so you can see all the previous work from 2000 onwards. Click on 'sculptures' above and then 'portfolio 2000 -2005')

It's been useful to ally all three forms of expression and I think/hope that each reinforces the other. For me they all these different expressions originate in the same place - the pictures are of things that may show you how I see the world - the things I tend to notice, the highlights of my experiences in the visual world - these are the things that make me think of sculptures as an extension of the world, filling in the missing blanks.( I remember being quite shocked when someone first described my sculptural work as "abstract"... I had always thought of it as being directly representational.) On the other hand sometimes the pictures are just of things that pleased me or that I thought were striking images - the pictures perhaps most obviously in this category would be the "screamers" series of photos. They always make me feel something strong but I wouldn't say they inform any of my other work.
The pictures are often of small things close-up, things one might normally miss, and I especially like images where you can't really tell what it is; its size and nature. In particular, I find the silt pictures like this - some of them remind me of views from planes at 30,000feet (especially the Australian interior ) rather than four feet from the ground. "as above - so below". I've developed a bit of a thing for cracked roads and tarmac, and I found that even small grubby things can be enchanting with a bit of digital magic; click a button and suddenly the most startlingly beautiful landscapes appear. I like the beauty in mundanity, or is it the mundanity of beauty? the fact that actually we are utterly surrounded by beauty; that we bathe in oceans of it and yet sometimes are so unaware of its small intrusions into life.

Part of the joy of making the photographs has been an awakening of that sense of ubiquitous beauty.

Which segues me nicely into talking about the music.... I now find myself going everywhere with a camera for all the small and wondrous sights of the world, and a small voice recorder for all the small and wondrous sounds. There's not much that I miss these days.(it would be great, if overwhelming, if there was such a thing as a smell recorder). And all these noises add up to being the soundtrack to the story of life, the background music to Being. There's all sorts of sounds in the music - lots of them are from my workshop which is where I make most noise, but many are from elsewhere in the world: theres a factory chunking away in Tasmania, there's crows in the trees, children in playgrounds, ice on ponds, trams in the city. Also I have bashed and plucked and scraped and dragged my sculptures to get some of the noises - I even learned to play big sheets of steel like a violin with a 6ft steel bar. The music is an echo of the sounds of the shapes that I dream of and work with my hands, a shadow of the feelings associated with the sculptures.

I hope, then, that each expression somehow illuminates the others. Like some game of aesthetic Scissors, Paper, Stone; each can be both subsidiary and primary in its relationship with the others.

well, that seems like a good place to stop for now.... just when you're wondering "what is he on about?"

I hope you enjoy the pictures and the music and all the new sculpture... let me know what you think. Its always good to hear from you.
email: miles(at)mileshalpin(dot)com ....sorry for the faffing around but I use this form throughout the site to evade the spammers:
please insert @'s and .'s in the usual places. you can also use miles(at)sculptures.freeserve.co.uk

thanks,

miles

PLEASE NOTE THAT ALL CONTENT ON THIS SITE IS COPYRIGHTED TO MILES HALPIN
I'M A SUPPORTER OF 'COPYLEFT' AND I'M OFTEN HAPPY FOR YOU TO USE MY MATERIAL... BUT I DO LIKE TO BE ASKED FIRST - THANKS