Melting and Migration Blank: How to Make a Trumpet Out of Ice. (…)certainly no braver than our Trio, but more fortunate: Hector was excused the insult of having his valor covered by television. Worth going to see? I can well believe it. Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert (…) —Moon Landing by W H Auden Using an ice trumpet sculpture and a body of works on paper this show explores how we become more aware of what we see through the alternation of the dimensions of what we are looking at. Being aware of our own seeing, we construct our present, past and future. The ice trumpet’s appearance and operation depend on how it’s used. The ephemeral trumpet ice - not quite a thing or its appearance, nor its function – can change from appearance to function. One minute it is a beautiful ice sculpture melting into non existence, the next a musical instrument. The ice of the trumpet tunnel melts and as it melts new sounds can be made. No image can be completely read. As with the alternating state of the ice trumpet, my drawings use seeing and not seeing as a way of reading, drawing, and a means through which we become aware of what we read into seeing. My drawings start as site specific before detouring into invention in order to talk about the site. Some contain the word “Nope” hidden within the marks on the paper, while the other “grey field drawings” have a corresponding field of discontinuous patternations which go some, but not all the way, to mirror or represent the corresponding drawing. Alternating between seeing and not seeing, I equate the “blank” with something bigger than art, with re-imagining, with the difficult-to-see. The poem Spherical DVD looks at the people arriving at our borders who we see as spectors, non-people or blanks. Exploring the so called ”blanks” in our lives – in the social, physical, personal, and political worlds around us – as a place where people think nothing exists, a tundra, is instead a positive opportunity to imagine, name and act. We construct what we perceive we alter. Thank you for listening.