margaret-cooter

More letterpress

2012-02-03T08:11:00.000Z

The paragraph of text is now all set - with a small problem, running out of As and Es - for the moment I've used italic -

That proof will help me find them to replace them, as they are now upside down -

I'm having difficulty keeping the lines in place ... in future I shall be paying more attention to getting it right in the composing stick, before transferring it to the galley. With one print, the paper had too much packing and the force needed to print actually dislodged the (powerful!) magnets holding the type in place -

Great effect - barcodes having a party?? - but not something you actually want to repeat - putting the lines of type back together took a surpisingly long time.

Why show the "I"? That just kinda happened with the first few lines of type - I was finding the punctuation and spaces weren't interesting enough, and knew that more Is would appear in the rest of the text. In speech, "I" is much used and little heard, so foregrounding it seemed a reasonable thing to do. However, next time I'll turn the Is upside down and see how that works ... it will change the look/importance of the row of dots through the black ... after all, rows of dots ... are so appealing ... and so useful ...

Eventually, and gradually, the black squares will be replaced by the text - simply a matter of turning each letter over.

I was hoping the punctuation would be more visible ... this was the most punctuation-rich bit of text I had available at the moment it was needed, but the next phase of this project could be to use another bit of text with commas, quote marks, etc all over the place. And ampersands. Such variety in ampersands.....

Fun with erasures

2012-02-02T13:53:00.000Z

Wave Books obligingly supplies texts that you can erase on screen - what fun!

It's almost a poem ... after a bit of editing, even more of an almost-poem ... yet it won't be an "erasure poem" without the erased spacing.

Insects

small and contemptible,
we wonder and discover
as much as
we can imagine

different parts
with the power of action

the work of the hand
capable of pleasure
as well as cruelty

Have a go at wavepoetry.com/erasures/index.php

Letterpress project

2012-02-02T08:20:00.000Z

My first idea for a project involving letterpress was to set one of my poems but by the time it came to starting I wanted to do "something with punctuation" - taking out the words and leaving just the commas, dashes, quote marks - and the spaces, for spaces are as important in the flow of words as the pauses signalled by stops, semi-colons, etc. When I ran the idea past James, the letterpress guru, he suggested turning the type upside down and printing with the bottom of the slug - brilliant!

The text is a paragraph from an article on erasure by Mary Ruefle that happened to be in my handbag. I decided to leave the first person pronoun, as I occurs several times in the text. Here's the first proof of the first three lines -

I really enjoyed getting to know where the letters can be found in the type case (this is Times 18 point) and seeing the lines fill up. It's slow going, though - imagine setting an entire book!

At the end of the (short) day there was more type and a proper proof -

That's about half the paragraph. The "mistake" of the T being right way up has me thinking about how, by turning the type over, letters and words could appear along the lines, gradually revealing the text.

Advice to writers/artists

2012-02-01T21:26:00.001Z

Henry Miller's Commandments are stolen from here. Worth taking notice of : Add no more new material; stop at the appointed time. Work on one thing at a time. Work with pleasure. Concentrate - narrow down - exclude...

Wordless Wednesday

2012-02-01T08:30:00.000Z

Assessment, before and after

2012-01-31T21:03:00.001Z

Before the assessment - my three sections - reflection (the notebooks and the blog posts); resolution (the 'journey lines' laid to rest in the form of a book and as screenprinted bags); and regeneration - the ashes of past projects.

Not all that much 'work' to get 'feedback' on - unless you count the blogging as various books with a specific kind of content - they do include narrative, sequence, structure, after all. But for the assessors to make a "story" out of this presentation would take a little work on their part.

Sometimes you get too wrapped up in your idea of what's needed, and miss seeing the wood for the trees. Never mind, it's done and dusted - this is what I found on returning to collect the work -

Valuable for me in terms of the review involved - the salvaging of things that are still relevant - the desire to do "something else" (still related to everyday journeys and/or travelling on the underground) - and now, being free to move on.

We have to wait a couple of weeks to get our feedback - the assessors have to write up their notes...

Sketchbook Project 2

2012-01-31T20:30:00.000Z

Two views, under different lighting conditions, of the Sketchbook Project book that went into the mail yesterday. Of course it was a bit last-minute - it had to be scanned in before sending off, for possible future copies in a limited edition.

The title page reads:

ALONG THE LINE

Eleven London Underground lines

Bakerloo line, Central line, Circle line, Districtline, Hammersmith & City line, Jubilee line,Metropolitan line, Northern line, Piccadillyline, Victoria line, Waterloo & City line

extending

from Epping in the north to Morden in the south

from Upminster in the east to Amersham in the west

and at the end, the colophon:

twice 402 km of track

at an alleged average speed of 33 km/hr

a timeline of 24.5 hours of travelling

extended by time spent at stops

270 stations

visited and revisited, duly noted

margaret cooter

london, uk

july 2011 - january 2012

margaretcooter.co.uk

The maps inside the covers (important for non-Londoners, I felt) are different versions - April 2011 and August 2011 (another kind of time-travel - about the same span of time as it took me to finish the project). Looking carefully will show that more stations have step-free access, and that a new connector is under construction.

Pencils on the bell curve

2012-01-31T08:38:00.000Z

Harriete Estel Berman asked people to send her their used pencils - and this is what she did with them -

The project is written about in American Craft magazine; read more about it on her website. It'll be on show in Palo Alto, CA, in March.

Her whole family got involved with the project - which is about marking and standardization, and what a superfluity of measurement is doing to education.

Assessment preparation

2012-01-30T14:46:00.001Z

With rather less than 24 hours to go till the "curated" work and reflective journals lie ready on the table for the Unit 1 Assessment, I am feeling almost ready - almost but not quite! So much more could be done... but it is always thus. There comes a point when you have to tell yourself to STOP. (For me, it's usually about 10 minutes before the deadline.) However with some hours yet in hand, I'm using this blog post to think-out-loud about what's done and what still needs doing.

The reflective-journals bit wasn't difficult - it's taking ages, though. First I made subject files from the blog posts over the past 16 months. Some files ran to over 200 pages, so they ended up as several "books" (held together by clips rather than proper binding (it's quicker...). Printed two pages to the sheet, they become a manageable size -

The larger categories are Artists & Exhibitions (6 books so far) and Book du Jour (2 books) - Reading&Research is also ongoing and only just fits into one clip. Some of the finished projects are japanese-bound: Structure project, Text project, Place-encounter-time project, Skybirds, Black Books, Screenprinting, the Route book. Other ongoing projects are Un-writing; What the camera sees; Materials project. This year I've not been diligent about recording "this week at college" - there are notes in the notebooks but very little on the blog, in comparison to my extensive reports of lectures and seminars in the first year of the course.

Still to find and print - Travel Bags project (which includes some of the screenprinting, and the pre-xmas pop-up shop). Estimated time: 1 hour.

Also needing printing - January's additions to the ongoing blog books. Estimated time: 1 hour.

Another part of the reflective journals are the notebooks, in which I write "everything" in chronological order, making a non-alphabetical index as I go along. (If there is time I will cut up the photocopied indexes to have all the categories from the books together (eg, lectures; reading; exhibitons... Retyping it all to amalgate the indexes would be a waste of time and energy.)

In the bottom two books you can just about see the little red dots folded over the edges of the pages -- these mark useful passages, things that have relevance or interest for me at this point. IF there is time, I'd like to go through yet again and write some of these into ... a book ... or onto a scroll ... They'd made an inspirational collection, something that might help me keep focus. But first, the other books need tidying up (loose papers gluing in, etc) and marking with dots. Estimated time: 3 hours.

So much for reflective journals - and I really have tried to be reflective (and critical), to make myself think and analyse when looking at exhibitions or having an idea for a new project. A big part of doing a course like this is to get beyond "I like/don't like that" (after all, who cares?) and to have more useful things to say than "that's nice" and "that's lovely" - !

Now to the actual works to be shown. Looking through my boxes of "little books" has made me realise how truly little they are --- fun though it was to make them, and however valuable the experience was, I don't want them hanging around and being a drag on future projects. So -

The phoenix phenomenon -

The projects like the "panacea bags" and the screenprinted fabric and papers didn't get thrown into the flames; they may have a different sort of reincarnation.

One outcome I'm very happy with is the resolution of the "journey lines" in two ways. First, the "travel bags", which explain what the lines and words are all about, if the viewer does a bit of reading and thinking. And the latest Sketchbook Project contribution, Along The Lines - the 11 underground lines, written in their entirety, in both directions - in alphabetical order (Bakerloo, Central, Circle...Victoria, Waterloo&City). There wasn't time for DLR and Overground - that would have added another 95 stations to the 270 underground stations, and goodness knows how much track length to the 402 km (x 2) already covered. The book is filled - just the title and colophon to add, and into the post it goes. A replica, reformatted as a concertina book, will be one of the works at the assessment.

Than again, it might be the only work, apart from the ashes ... and the reflection ...

Illuminations

2012-01-29T12:11:00.000Z

The latest exhibition at the British Library (till 13 March) has many, many wonderful illuminated manuscripts (about 150). Quite apart from the beautiful pages spread open for view, there is the intrigue of "what's in the rest of the book", and hints at its binding. Such riches - too much to take in at once.

The books on show belonged to kings and queens of England during the period from Alfred (871-899) to Elizabeth I (1558-1603). They offer, says the exhibition blurb, "unique insights into the lives and aspirations of those for whom they were made".

Photos are from the exhibition website

At the start of the exhibition is a brightly lit section with some technical explanation - and samples of vellum and parchment that you can touch - the best way to understand the difference between them! Then you go down the stairs into a darkened room with red walls where the light shines into the vitrines and onto the books - so dramatic - the people leaning over the glass cases become silhouettes, ephemeral among these very old books that took so much time and skill to make.

Erasure poetry

2012-01-28T22:00:00.000Z

There is actually a genre called erasure poetry, says Wikipedia, is a form of found poetry created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem. The results can be allowed to stand in situ or they can be arranged into lines and/or stanzas.

Among its examples it includes Jen Bervin's Shakespeare sonnets, Nets -

Doris Cross's dictionary columns (1956) were among the first examples. 'Doris Cross starts her work with columns from a 1913 Webster's dictionary. She then adds and subtracts elements using pencil and white paint, simultaneously creating and excavating meaning from the once-neutral pages of words and definitions. "Found words then comprise the statement" Cross writes in her opening statement, "words as objects, textures, movements, spaces, sounds; words supporting words, even as a column is built of mortar and stones." '

Other examples are Janet Holmes' The ms of m y kin (poems of Emily Dickinson)-

But the practice of erasure was most famously realised by the British artist Tom Phillips in his book A Humument and later, by the American poet Ronald Johnson, who erased Milton's Paradise Lost into a book called Radi os.

Version held at Patrick Spencer Library, University of Kansas

See more work by yet more people here. Probably the earliest example is Man Ray's untitled work of 1924 (found here) -

It looks easy, it looks fun - perhaps too many people are doing it - or perhaps erasure poetry is a good way to get people involved with manipulating language.

Book du jour - re-written pages

2012-01-28T19:30:00.000Z

Pages torn out of a book (the rest of book, a "travel journal" - what was I thinking, I don't do that kind of travel! - went on to another life via the charity shop). I'm writing on them in four directions, so that by the time they are "full" they'll be completely illegible.

"Why are you doing this?" someone asked me - and I really had to think about it!

First of all, I'm doing it because I want to see what the pages look like when they've been written on in four directions. Another reason is the possibility of varying the format of the writing in another set of pages, and getting different looks ... maybe having the lines more visible - I have lots of ideas for this (exploring nuance). These pages provided a challenge in that they had wide-apart lines and writing in that kind of spacing was a difficult at first, though I'm enjoying making all those large loops now. It started out as a finite piece, just a few pages to fill - a containable project - with the prospect of using handwriting as a medium for a kind of drawing; something enjoyable to do.

Apart from the process of writing, I wanted to have a portable, and private, place for putting down my thoughts. The crossing-over provides that privacy, especially when I'm working through something that's troubling or difficult. I find that getting the thoughts out of my head, through writing, is useful -- and that it's not at all important to re-read them; in fact, they're better not re-read, and sometimes you have to write the same things many times before they leave completely. Will the content give the pages an "aura" of some sort?

These pages thus kill two birds with one stone - something visual is made out of something ephemeral. Plus, they re-use something that would have been thrown away - just a few sheets of paper, it's true - this bit of recycling won't save the world! - but it's yet another level of care that goes into the work.

The notion of erasure, over-writing, re-writing - deletion, cancelling, obliteration - is rattling round in my brain a lot at the moment, especially given the reaction to my "un-written" journals in the studio show at college. Why would anyone take so much time to cross out what has been written ... if getting rid of it is the aim, why not just burn it?

Pictures from an exhibition

2012-01-28T10:16:00.001Z

The book arts and printmaking one-day show in the studio yesterday got an influx of visitors in the late afternoon - was it the wine and nibbles that drew them? It was good to chat with people from other areas of the college, and to see our work in a different situation. As someone said, having it on display really changes it, and how you yourself look at it.

Most of the exhibitors were on hand for a group photo -

Left to right: Xizhi, Misa, Di, Abi, Tian, Margaret, Janet, Jian, Victoria, Estelle, Mariane, Maya, Katherine, Jo.

Art I like - Pip Culbert

2012-01-27T16:30:00.000Z

The late lamented Fiberarts magazine featured the work of Pip Culbert in Nov/Dec 2010 -

She cuts away fabric and leaves just the seams - arguably the most important part of the garment or other textile structure (without which it would not exist) - but often disregarded in terms of its function ("the invisible support").

As well as garments and bags, she does flags and tents -

See more photos here

and quilts -

From Joanne Mattera's art blog

Posters

2012-01-27T11:30:00.000Z

Peeling back the layers of old posters at Warwick Avenue station.

Setting up a show

2012-01-27T09:12:00.000Z

Book arts and printmakers are getting together to show some work in the studio - thanks to Estelle getting things going.

"A chance for students, technicians, teachers to to know each other and about their idea, question, experience."

We set up yesterday; the get-together is today at 3pm, a great way to end the week -

Janet and I have combined her gold books and my black ones, and I'm showing some "erasure" and some "line as text" -

Works by printmakers, with whom we share the studio but hardly ever see (they are in the print rooms, working!) are interspersed with the book arts exhibits.

Double vision

2012-01-26T08:00:00.000Z

Wordless Wednesday

2012-01-25T11:19:00.000Z

Coffee shops of London

2012-01-24T23:43:00.000Z

Much as I love going to the Algerian Coffee Stores in Soho, it would be much handier to buy fresh ground coffee close to home. Camden isn't too far away, though. I've not been inside this shop, but am told it's very old fashioned. Must go soon, before the economic exigencies of the 21st century catch up with it...

London view

2012-01-24T21:19:00.002Z

Looking across the Thames to St Pauls, from Tate Modern - through a plantation of birch trees. Round about dusk, of a winter's evening.

I had a look at the Artist's Room with pieces by Joseph Beuys, including his huge bolt of lightning, and on the way to the cafeteria found another room with "Objects of War" - some vitrines and some tv screens, on which people were telling the stories of the objects, with English subtitles. This is by Lebanese artist Lamia Joreige. Headphones are provided so you connect with the person through their voice, but I merely stood watching and reading till the particular story ended - how the young woman's identity card lost one of its pages. The words - translation - are out of synch with the speech, but gave a different fascination to watching her tell her story about this object that is important to her - but is now in a museum. She told about coming fact to face with Israeli soldiers for the first time, and about her friend searching the mutilated bodies of other soldiers to find their identity cards, so that the families could at least know for certain about those men. It ended up being quite a "heavy" afternoon in terms of looking/thinking, so taking a landscape photo was a bit of light relief!

Moan on Monday - continuing chaos

2012-01-23T12:03:00.000Z

While the bathroom work is underway, the studio is a dumping ground - bikes removed from the hallway so that boards can be stored there; fittings piled in front of fabric cupboards and bookshelves; some of the toolboxes kept here so that the builder actually has room to move -

Sometimes the workbench gets cleared, and usually my desk is accessible, so I mustn't moan too much -

Apart from the physical inconvenience, the insidious effect is the mental confusion that any sort of renovation entails. Entire cupboards are rendered inaccessible. Things get moved around several times and you can't find what you need. There seems no place to get away from the extra people in the house. You can't really settle down to doing any one thing, and even if you plan to, gathering up what you need can be a frustrating exercise. I am spending more time on the computer, when I want and need to be getting on with studio work in some sort of systematic way. Still, this could be a good time to do reading and research and thinking. Enough of the moaning, then!

But the infrastructure stages of the work seem to take forever! Maybe the job will be finished in January - maybe not ...

Selling well

2012-01-23T09:38:00.002Z

...at London Art Fair -- ceramics by Katherine Morling, priced at around £100.

Her degree show at the RCA in 2009 was striking - see it here.

Page du jour - coffee bag

2012-01-22T13:30:00.000Z

As my book arts course moves into Phase 2 - concentration on the final project - my task is to focus on the "lines" themselves (I'll worry about the structure of the eventual "book" later). So instead of making books, I'm making pages, trying out materials and how to make lines (visual "text") with them.

A coffee bag was lying on the desk and a dressmaker's wheel was to hand, so I opened up the bag, added more folds, and went at it from both sides to make a variety of punctured lines. Couldn't resist sprinkling a bit of thread on it, and adding coloured reflections -

Art I like - Rudolf Stingel

2012-01-22T09:00:00.000Z

This piece, happened upon in the quest for whatever-it-was, interested me because of its use of line -

It seems to be about .... nothing ... a monochrome - but with undertones perhaps?

Whereas there's definitely an agenda with this (large) untitled piece from 2007 (which, incidentally, sold for over £300K) -

Three such gold-on-gold paintings were shown at the Whitney Museum in 2007 - in a room with a mirrored floor. Stingel says: ‘Artists have always been accused of being decorators, so I just went to the extreme and painted the wallpaper.' He 'presents us with a lavishly influenced rococo painting done in gold oil paint, creating a visual effect questioning the perfection of the Damask pattern and the distinctive expectation of the medium. Texture, composition and design, all loosely yet meticulously rendered onto the canvas, make this a signature piece for Stingel's contemporary artworks.'

From what it says about a 1989 work on the Saatchi site, he can fall into the 'relational aesthetics' camp: 'Though Rudolph Stingel’s work isn’t presented on traditional canvases he is a painter in the purest sense. Through his instructional photographs and installations, his work explores the essence of making, gesture, and expression through questioning authenticity and authorship. Often inviting the audience to interact with his work, Stingel promulgates the artistic process, allowing his artworks to develop as public ‘collaborations’. Through reconsidering the appreciation of aesthetics as a relational experience, Stingel challenges ideas of cultural hierarchy, modes of production, and the mythology of the artist.' [a laudable agenda, I think!]

A recent article in Frieze magazine says: 'Rudolf Stingel has made a career dancing around the idea of painting. He skirts its authority by looking at its components, its physical identity, its visual language and its history. Representation, abstraction, process, pattern, performance, subjectivity and the audience are all his subjects.'

Shoe mystery

2012-01-22T08:00:00.000Z

Tree mystery

2012-01-22T07:30:00.000Z

Seminal work

2012-01-21T22:00:00.000Z

As one develops one's creative work, certain pieces mark big steps, or even turning points. One of mine was the making of this "Boring Box" in a course at City Lit about ten years ago. The project was to make a box that expressed an emotion.

"Boring" isn't exactly an emotion, but I really worked on eliminating its opposite ("interesting") through using elements that I felt were boring - columns of (meaningless) numbers, endless repetition, words that restated the obvious, and neutral colours.

This was the first time I used a subtractive process rather than an additive one. Later I came across the saying by Saint-Exuprey that "perfection is finally attained when nothing more can be taken away" (rather than nothing more can be added) - but now I wonder ... would this perfection actually be boring, rather than satisfying?

Graphite

2012-01-21T15:00:00.000Z

Some pages from my "graphite book" - experiments with darkness, 9B and 6B. The white areas were covered with torn masking tape -

On some pages, the masking tape is part of the "finished" page (but can make it too fussy) -

Incising lines before adding the graphite seems to have potential -

I loved the poster for the Graphite exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge -

And in the exhibition, the range of forms of graphite -

Along the lines - Metropolitan line

2012-01-21T11:10:00.000Z

For the Sketchbook Project I'm "writing the lines" - each of the lines that make up what used to be known as London Underground - in alphabetical order. I won't bore you with each one; this is an example. I started in July and have just one left to do - Waterloo & City line - which is just one stop.

One of the longer lines is the Metropolitan line (67 km - 42 miles, of which only 6 miles is underground). The first underground line in the world, its first section was opened in 1863. The line is now is used by about 190,000 passengers on a weekday (map from here) -

When I get to the end of each line (and some lines have more than two ends!) I take a few photos and sometimes leave the station to have a coffee or look for interesting shops. At Uxbridge, Frank's Coffee Shop, inside the station, was more interesting than the "chains" outside -

The station has a few "original features" -

One of the photos that is part of my "rules for this project" is the poster of train times. At each station along the line these posters give times for travelling to other stations. Producing them must be a small industry in itself -

Part of my journey was on the old-style cars (A stock) -

The new-style trains (S stock) have more standing room, and you can walk the length of the train - but they no longer are "metropolitan line purple" (real name: Corporate Magenta) -

The journey so far -

Hmmmm .... I started at King's Cross and dutifully travelled to the four western ends of the line - Uxbridge, Amersham, Chesham, Watford - but omitted going to the eastern end, Aldgate. With any luck, there will be room at the end of the sketchbook for a "Metropolitan line appendix" - it's only 5 stops.

New materials

2012-01-21T10:01:00.001Z

Exciting to see the work made by design team Glithero. The video of "Bench Mold" on the first page of their website gives me ideas about how to make my "lines" in relief, as I focus on trying out various materials -

Another process is shown in Burn Burn Burn - a flame travels along a line of flammable paint -

They developed the paint in their kitchen, but - "Don't try this at home."

What a difference a title makes (2)

2012-01-20T17:30:00.000Z

"The Desert Ablaze", 1953, by Jean Dubuffet. The title works on its own - all sorts of images and questions come to mind when I think about a desert in flames - what is burning? how does the fire spread? Is there enough combustible matter in a desert to support a "blaze"? How did it start?

Applied to this painting, was the title an afterthought or was it part of a concept that existed before Dubuffet started the painting? On the whole, his painting doesn't appeal to me aesthetically (too crowded, too "fiddly", too much impasto; ungraspable; the deliberate eschewing of traditional standards of beauty) -- but certain works on their own have that ineffable quality that causes me to stop and suspend judgment. But I like the reasons he abandoned traditional beauty - an authentic and humanistic approach to image-making (as exemplified in Art Brut). Even so, it's this human-free painting that I'd choose, for it's abstract qualities - and because of the intriguing - and perhaps arbitrary? - title.

What a difference a title makes (1)

2012-01-20T17:00:00.000Z

A painting by Barnett Newman; the date is 1954. It can be categorised as Colour Field painting (a "direction" in Abstract Expressionism) -

Simple fields of colour, nice proportions, interesting juxtaposition of colours. But unless you knew it was by a famous painter, you wouldn't look twice, probably. It's deceptively simple - subtle. Needing patience.

Wikipedia says of Colour Field painting: Color Field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favour of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself." Colour Field painters "sought to rid their work of supefluous rhetoric" and to use colour in a pyschological way.

Although not lauded as a painter till late in his life, Newman (1905-1970) wrote various influential articles in the 1940s, and perhaps his writing skills (or verbal fluency) helped him with the title (or concept?) for this painting - he called it "The Gate".

En passant

2012-01-20T12:26:00.002Z

You know how it is - you're looking for something on the web, and come across other interesting stuff... I've been looking at this site, which presents a variety of art works with the minimum of information.

This painting by Avery Preesman speaks to me in its use of dark colours, restrained texture, simple shapes; the different directions of the lines, and qualities of those lines; a certain mysteriousness... It feeds into my experimentation with graphite -

His paintings have been called "experientially generous". He is self-taught, and also makes sculpture.

Ropes and beads

2012-01-20T08:48:00.002Z

Brazilian artist Maria Nepomuceno uses ropes to make nets, hammocks, and other space-occupying structures. She allows her materials to obey their own organisational logic. The spiraling is central to her process. She describes rope as a line, an umbilical cord, and every bead as a fertile point and a possible beginning that can be multiplied infinitely.

She says: "I like to do a lot by myself because I have many ideas during the process. I sometimes say that think with my hands, because I do very simple drawings before starting the sculptures and then during the process it changes and has its own development." The work is colourfully appealing, but it's that description of process rather than any resonance of the materials or shapes that makes me look twice at it.

Photos from here and here.

False start (shades of red)

2012-01-19T21:31:00.001Z

After gathering all my red, yellow, and blue scraps, I started with the red ones - ironing, tearing into strips. It made sense to lay out a few at a time, and after an hour or two this layout had evolved -

Even as more and more pieces joined each layout, I was getting the feeling that more wasn't what was needed. So it's back to square one - back to the blank canvas....

My original idea was to hold down the strips with handstitch, and then add machine quilting across the piece. The quilting is supposed to make a major contribution -- not get lost among busyness.

Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman

2012-01-18T19:00:00.000Z

Went late in the day (less crowded); lingered, and saw only half; will be going back. Loved the exhibition -

Bought the book -

This is "map of truths and beliefs" -

and there's so much more. Rather than making work based on the British Museum's (vast) holdings, Grayson Perry made work and then found objects that related to it. It makes for a very cohesive show. What he says about the works really draws you in - perhaps museums are like that, whereas work shown in art galleries seeks to shut you out (just call me cynical!) ...

Object du jour

2012-01-18T13:00:00.000Z

This beautiful object, the shower mixer

This beautiful object, the shower mixer, will be hidden in the hole in the wall -

If the lights are in, can the bathtub be far behind?

Desirable door

2012-01-18T08:00:00.000Z

Woburn Square, Bloomsbury.

The pleasure of notebooks/journals

2012-01-17T22:39:00.000Z

Domestic upheaval (of the bathroom-renovation kind) means that the stack of "morning pages" notebooks that have been languishing underneath the spare towels for about a decade have again seen light of day.

I won't be opening them to read all that boring stuff! At the time, the daily dumping of negativity was a real help, and later this daily writing session turned into a way to practise generating ideas, which is a good skill to develop. Over the years, as the ideas became more plentiful, the writings became much more positive - and so did I. (It does take a while.............)

Some people are lost without their smartphone or ipad - and some of us are lost without our companion notebook, recording the chronology of the tiny events that make up our lives. Or our grand thoughts (which are arguably the same thing). We'll have these bits of our histories to look back on, when memory has failed - "the palest ink is lasts longer than the best memory".

Choice of notebook is crucial, and it can take half a lifetime to find the right one. Having avoided the Moleskine craze (overpriced, undersized, yet so very trendy) I found a generic notebook at the local branch of a big stationers and bought what may be a lifetime supply. It has quality paper, sturdy binding, flexible cover, a resilient elastic round the middle; I number the pages and index them as I go along (but haven't yet used the indexes to find stuff!).

As Robert Genn wrote recently, about notebook-keeping:

"Understanding that we become what we think, advanced Moleskiners avoid three main negatives--nostalgic regret, adherence to outcome, and fearful anticipation. These sorts of thoughts, common to all humanity, are banned from the tiny pages. Proper Moleskiners stick to a positive, optimistic outlook.

"I find mentioning things that no one else must know about, even if I have to erase it right after, to be particularly valuable. For example, last night I wrote, "Three square inches in the lower left centre of that 11" x 14" are rather excellent." But I wouldn't want this sort of flagrant boasting to get around. Keep it under your bonnet, eh? And even though I erased it right after, I wouldn't want my journal and all that positive erased info getting into the wrong hands."

One possible project that would make use of the daily-writing books is to continue the "erasure" - overwriting, un-writing - of the words, sentences, thoughts in my old journals. It was the thinking, the mulling over (and the chain of thoughts, one leading from another) that was the valuable part of the process. The words, the sentences, can be released. Hopefully some of the tired old topics that constantly got rehashed will be released too.

Coffee/tea shop

2012-01-17T19:13:00.000Z

My travels to the ends of the tube lines landed me in Cockfosters, northern end of the Piccadilly line. No charity shops, but I found the Jamaica Plantations tea and coffee shop (and health food store). It's been around for about 60 years, and some of the coffee containers look to be original -

In the window, a selection of mad teapots - the garden chair (with little table); the steam train; the golf bag; the kitchen mixer; and the speeding motorcyclist -

...or, for someone who has everything - "Teapots through the ages" -

Journal Quilts 2012

2012-01-16T13:22:00.003Z

This year Contemporary Quilt's JQ challenge is "Shades of..." and involves using 75% or more of a colour in the monthly A4-sized quilt - red for Jan-April, yellow for May-Aug, blue for Sept-Dec. This morning I had an idea for a series and before leaving the weekend studio had time to rummage for strips and scraps of the appropriate colours, ready to start next weekend. There looks to be enough for half a dozen small pieces in each colour....

Even while I was collecting fabric, the idea was evolving ... goodness knows what will actually happen when I get started. As with all my current work, it will be rather abstract (though perhaps tending to landscape rather than "figurative") - and needless to say, "journey lines" are part of it.

On the Piccadilly line

2012-01-15T10:17:00.000Z

How did they do that?

2012-01-15T07:00:00.000Z

"Northampton squirclamshell" from here (originally from here somewhere, which has lots of interesting folded things to look at...)

Art I like - Marian Bijlenga

2012-01-14T19:30:00.000Z

Large work from small elements, carefully disposed -

The evolution of the work over time (and space) -

Marian Bijlenga's work has been described as "a calligraphy of shadows" -

Some of her materials are cotton, paper, horsehair - as in this "pojagi grid" -

and fish scales (from here) -

Her book Written Weed was published in 2010. Images made of dried leaves, grasses, and seeds look like exquisite writing (photo from here) -

Gesamtkunstwerk

2012-01-14T11:02:00.001Z

New art from Germany at the Saatchi Gallery (till 30 April) - see it online too. Without knowing anything about the artists, I found the works largely opaque and aesthetically unappealing. Should have splashed out £1 on the gallery guide - but it you look online, all is revealed. It all explores a wide range of contemporary references, etc etc etc...

The poppy-head balloons are by Thomas Zipp and are part of a larger installation that includes framed drawings that you look at with your back to the black objects -

Favourite was by Romanian twins Gert and Uwe Tobias, who moved to Germany when they were 12 -

They print woodblocks (shapes inked in colour) onto paper and then glue the paper onto canvas. Their work shows evidence of folkloric traditions (and 1920s Russian suprematism and constructivism), and they parody and recyle all sorts of styles and quotations ... turning the primitive into the contemporary. "A collision between outmoded skills and a knowing postmodernity" says this article. One of their typewriter drawings is included in this article -

A coincidence of "woodcuts"

2012-01-12T22:04:00.002Z

Mere days after seeing a work by Gerhard Richter that uses lino printing ink as a "drawing" medium, I've come across the woodcut "paintings" of twin artists Gert & Uwe Tobias.

Richter made the work in 1957 and left them in the safekeeping of a friend in the GDR. When he saw the 31 monoprints again, almost 30 years later, he gave them the title "Elbe", the name of the river that runs through Dresden. They are the result of Richter's experiments with an ink roller during a printing course ... they look like abstracted landscapes, and some are almost entirely black, more like a night sky. See the entire set here, and a video here.

The works by the Tobias brothers are in the current show at the Saatchi Gallery. The large "paintings" are made with shaped wood blocks printed in coloured ink onto paper that is then glued to canvas. In following up the images that appealed to me, I found this poster they made for a recent show in Berlin - the black prints in the middle of the circle are coincidentally like those Elbe pieces.

Mended ceramics

2012-01-12T08:30:00.000Z

See the work that lies behind Janet Haigh's mended ceramics here. She's done a lot of research on mending...

Wordless Wednesday

2012-01-11T16:35:00.000Z

The fascination of windows

2012-01-11T09:15:00.000Z

Something about this (Piter 4 Triptych, by Natalya Aikens) grabbed me when I saw it in a SAQA newsletter, and I'm trying to figure out what....
The subject matter is ordinary , the addition of colours seems arbitrary but is probably the result of accident, inspiration, or considerable thought, and the framing and splitting into three also either inspired or carefully calculated. Whatever is happening, the piece works for me - it makes me look at my surroundings more carefully as a starting point. It also made me think about windows as liminal spaces - between being inside and outside, between looking in and looking out, privacy and revelation, speculation and the "truth" of seeing with our own eyes. The glass as an invisible but real barrier.

Ghosts of long-gone wasps

2012-01-10T09:31:00.000Z

One of the surprises of the bathroom renovation was finding these two small, fragile, beautiful wasps nests under the rafters when the ceiling was removed -

An older - or at least, greyer - and larger nest was high up in the corner - it broke when I tried to take it down, revealing a lot of honeycomb cells inside -

Wasps have no methods of storing food for the winter, so most colonies don't last beyond the autumn - the pregnant queen finds somewhere sheltered to hibernate until spring, when she'll start to build a nest and lay her eggs. In April to mid-June, she'll be busy raising her first 20 young of the year. By autumn, the nest grows as the colony grows and workers make more of the paper bands and more cells for laying eggs.

Colour chart

2012-01-09T09:25:00.000Z

A wikipedia article on colour (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colors) has a useful chart of shades - this screengrab, for example, is of blue and violet -

Also useful is the (long!) list of colour names, with recipes for mixing them on screen -

Art I like - Jan Owen

2012-01-08T10:35:00.000Z

Calligrapher Jan Owen uses Hollytek, a translucent synthetic material, in 'Brush Palimpsest', which includes text by Octavio Paz. I'm intrigued by the interaction of the different layers of the text, becoming less readable and more abstract.

She also uses tyvek - for instance to interweave as 'seeds' of the sunflowers (images found here) -

Of her work 'Requiem', written on handmade paper already bound into a codex, she says: "Writing the book was a challenge; the rough pages and folds excluded guidelines and each sheet had different texture and absorbency. It was like working with something, not on it."

Book du jour - graphite experiments

2012-01-06T10:43:00.000Z

In early December I started experimenting with graphite in a small notebook, first using just the graphite and lately, adding other materials - wax and ink -

Incising, scratching, burnishing are some of the tortures that the materials have had to undergo -

Of course the graphite transfers to the facing page, especially if the back of the page is worked on.

Once the booklet is full, it will be transformed into a concertina book - so the "mirror" (transferred graphite) pages will no longer face each other.

The perfect combination?

2012-01-05T12:30:00.000Z

A fabric store with coffee and cakes - Ray Stitch on Essex Road -

This map-of-Paris fabric was veryvery tempting -

Book du jour

2012-01-05T10:28:00.001Z

Three small (A6) sidebound books (japanese binding) made with recycled paper. Covers are screenprinted "travelwriting", folded double.

Wordless Wednesday

2012-01-04T13:08:00.000Z

Glimpses of Paris

2012-01-03T08:00:00.000Z

Photoshoot in front of the Madeleine at dusk...

...and the view from the steps

In between rainy interludes, grand gilding reflected in a puddle

Chinese porcelain at the Musee Guimet

Tang dynasty dancers among other wonderful chinese ceramics

We each approached the Guimet in our own way - and spent a long time there

Trompe l'oeil ceiling in the ornate cafe of Musee Jaqumart-Andree

Rainclouds over the Louvre

Originally published in English; this small, landscape format is congenial

Rue Rivoli from the Musee des Arts Decoratifs

Getting around the decorative arts museum is quite confusing, and we found ourselves in all sorts of strange places

Canal St Martin - further along was a bustling street market

Ile de la Cite, with the Sainte Chapelle in the background

Traditional bakery in Montparnasse

Oven for baguettes is at the back

Traditional flour and traditional baking trays

How to fit a lift into the staircase of an old apartment building. Lift holds three at a pinch.

Our rule for wine was that it had to have a 'house' on the label - one bottle slipped through the net

The local coffee shop - fresh roasted and ground beans

Les chiens sont everywhere

The view from the Pompidou

A 'cloth' by El Anatsui is the first thing you see on entering the modern art display at the Pompidou Centre

Airport-style check-in at Musee d'Orsay results in long queues outside - it took us an hour to get in, and the line was no shorter by the time we came out again

Behind the clock at Musee d'Orsay - with a view to Montmartre

Typical street corner, possibly Blvd Strasbourg, in typical rain

Patterning of Art Deco building in Montparnasse

Typical boulangerie in Montparnasse, seen from typical brasserie

A flash of sun along the Seine

And finally - an early-morning view from 'our' 4th floor flat

The perfect kitchen bookshelf?

2012-01-02T20:00:00.000Z

And the cutting board slots into the back... From here.

Tabletops

2012-01-02T14:26:00.000Z

...in the Museum of European Photography, Paris. The museum always has several exhibitions at a time - we saw Albanian photography 1858-1945, portraits of sculptures and painters by Martine Franck, William Klein's photos of 1950s Rome (including the fashion shoot below), and square-format greeting-card self-portraits by Andreas Mahl.

Build your own bookmobile

2012-01-02T07:43:00.000Z

No electronic gadgets needed, once you have the hard copy. By Bob Staake; found here.

2012 has arrived

2012-01-01T08:00:00.000Z

Very best wishes for a healthy, creative, peaceful (and dare I say prosperous?) new year!

Hair du monde

2011-12-31T19:00:00.000Z

In Paris, we were staying in an area that surely has the world's highest concentration of hairdressers - from the flat we could look down at "Star Elegance". It was fascinating to walk past the shops (slowly) in the evening and see what was going on - so lively, such social centres! They were jam-packed with men and women having haircuts, extensions, etc - and having their nails done, of course. I wanted to stop and stare, like this lady -

Dithering

2011-12-31T14:05:00.001Z

Instead of xmas cards I like to send out New Year greetings, usually in the form of a little book (like these). What with being out of town before xmas, and then being ill and listless and lazy, the little book hasn't happened this year. However, a trawl through the photographs (still part of the ever-ongoing organisation of photos) found some candidates for attaching to an email greeting. I can't decide which to use - they appeal to me for different reasons, so perhaps writing about them will help with the decision process.

Candidate A was taken from a moving train. I have many photos taken from the train, most of them deleted immediately, but many remaining, with the blurred foreground and glimpses of the distance. This one is somewhere in northern Germany, not that that matters -- to me it has a feeling of brushing aside the near obstacles to get the distant view, and I see that as an optimistic thing. But the overall darkness looks so gloomy -

Sometimes a crop improves a photo - this is less dark and still gives that "brushing away the cobwebs" feeling (to me, anyway!) - but there's less of a sense of clarity of the distant view.

Candidate B is full of light - autumn light - not strictly "new year" -- though even after being out of school for some decades, I still see autumn (the start of the school year) as the true start of the year. Perhaps my attachment to this photo comes too much from the circumstances of taking it: entering a museum to see the coffee shop straight ahead, with this long slit in the dark wall to let light from the atrium into the hall. The cakes were as amazing as might be expected from a place that takes such care over its floral display. Looking at the shapes and colours of the flowers, and the dazzling light, makes me smile.

In Candidate C, again it's the light that animates the scene - dappled light (like Hopkins' "pied beauty") - along with the cheery colours. On the downside, grafitti is grafitti... though the mural is clever, referencing its own making in giving the figure (a self-portrait of the artist??) a spray can. Is it suitable/meaningful for a greetings card, though?

And is it cheating to use a photo that was taken in 2009?

Puppy love

2011-12-31T09:00:00.000Z

A pre-xmas scene on the Victoria Line.

Pot-bellied chests

2011-12-30T14:37:00.000Z

First seen in a decorating magazine (by Marc Newson) -

... and later in the Musee des Arts Decoratifs -

Art I like - Margie Livingstone

2011-12-29T10:06:00.002Z

Seattle-based Margie Livingstone "makes objects out of paint" - layers of paint, no substrate. She cuts the paint layers into strips to make sculptural objects (from here) or even objects that look like particle board (detail from here) -

Previous work (up to 2008) consisted of gridded paintings of perceptions of space. She talks about her work in a video here. In her artist's statement she talks about "letting accident and discovery meet invention and experiment". Here's another object, from her website -

The writer's art

2011-12-28T07:42:00.000Z

By Fernando Vicente; from http://boek861.blog.com.es/

Book du jour - folder

2011-12-27T16:04:00.000Z

Made for a Christmas present, using last year's xmas-y (and sturdy) paper bag from the Tate Gallery on the outside.

Art I like - Laura Ellen Bacon

2011-12-27T08:16:00.000Z

When Origin had a focus on basketry in 2009 this "nest" by Laura Ellen Bacon hung off the edge of the cube that housed the show (in the courtyard of Somerset House).

Not only is her work large-scale and eye-catching, the way it perches on the edges of things gives it fragility - or vulnerability. I imagine her wrestling with the branches, literally bending them to her will and vision ... much determination and focus is needed to make work like this.

Also the idea of something as 'natural' as a nest in an urban environment teeters on the edge, full of contradictions and disjunctions. What sort of bird?-creature made it? Did they think it would be safe here? Were they intending to use it as a shelter, or was making it just the expression of the nest-building imperative? Instead of laying eggs in it, was there some other agenda, a one-upmanship in the pecking order of the species? Or more rationally - did the artist want to use the structure a way of enlarging something that could go unnoticed- perhaps that animals and birds are adapting themselves to city life? Was it a matter of "there will be nice sharp edge/corner, what will look amazing there"? Does seeing this strange object in this strange place make us marvel at new possibilities? What sort of balance is it achieving?

The longer I look at it, the more strange and wonderful it becomes...

Art I like - Daphne Corregan

2011-12-26T14:01:00.000Z

Daphne Corregan's semi-figurative "Breathing" (2009) joins two heads/bodies/jars/pots. It is not a small work - about 60cm high - and is part of a series. (Another of her series is "Twins".)

"Daphne Corregan takes pleasure in distracting objects away from their original function by distorting and stretching them to impossible dimensions in order to magnify them and make them playful. Ceramist and sculptor, her forms originate on paper. It is these drawings which will determine the technique she will need to create them." (Read the entire Ceramics Today article here.)

She also makes "dresses" in heavily smoked clay, giving a range of blacks and greys. These are 145cm high. (Image from here, where you can see more of her work.)

She says of how she divides her time: a third goes to teaching, and of the remainder, half is used in making work, a quarter in research, and a quarter in paperwork and photography.

Her sources are travel to places where people still live in traditional ways, folk art, textiles; some pieces are a response to events like the Rwanda massacres.

Graphite

2011-12-26T13:28:00.000Z

Lovely stuff - especially the 9B ... but it does rub off onto your hands and transfer onto everything else ...

I've been blackening entire pages of a notebook. Very soothing.

Glorious doors of NW10

2011-12-26T08:00:00.000Z

Dating to about 1905.

Musical interlude

2011-12-25T14:30:00.000Z

One of the nice little surprises during our time in Paris was this band in the Metro, making a joyful noise and trying to get visitor participation - we added our messages to the paper they had taped up -

Seasonal greetings

2011-12-25T13:12:00.002Z

Last week at college

2011-12-21T14:23:00.000Z

Last week of the autumn term, that is ... first week of December. On the Wednesday morning Karen and I met in the studio and did some "making" -

I had a yen to make a folder, rather like this one -

For the final "lecture" session in the hall at the Wilsons Road site, people from all the MA pathways mixed and mingled in groups that set out to define and report back on a task.

With groups in each corner of the gloomy hall, it was a bit of a madhouse. The group I was in moved to a table in the hallway and collaborated on a story/picture, representing ... what, exactly? Some people were uncomfortable with the "we don't really know what we're doing, but let's make something happen" idea of it, but others were more than happy to plunge right in -

In the short time available, it was starting to come together - and Lynn's presentation really brought the story together - even though we had made it without knowing what it was. The other groups had interesting outcomes too.

Afterwards, the graphic design group's term's work was displayed in the hall, and they had baked goods for sale towards the cost of their show catalogue -

Plus a chance to chat to the people we'd just met, over a glass of wine. Then it was out into the winter sunset -

However - even though the next week was "officially" Reading Week - taken at the end of term, before the holidays, rather than sometime in November in mid-term - we had a special lecture from Audrey Niffenegger, who showed and talked about her graphic work, and its relation to her writing. I took no photos, but did make a few notes in the darkness of the hall: how she was influenced by Aubrey Beardsley's work, and her admiration of German printmaker Horst Janssen; her appreciation for the high-school art teacher who gave her extra help to learn printmaking; the advantages of teaching printmaking ("you get to work on this huge range of problems"); Henry Darger and his "Vivian girls"; crows painted onto gold leaf background ("Elysian Fields"); how comforting it is to have a huge body of work; and, if I read my writing right, this quote: "it's always fuzzy at the beginning". Do check out her website; the FAQs are enlightening!

Found gloves

2011-12-21T09:24:00.000Z

Recently I've had to stop myself photographing various lonely gloves seen lying on the pavement or street. So it's a pleasure to see that Linda Stillman has been doing just that. She also makes good use of left-over paint from the palette used for her daily paintings.

Still looks fresh to me

2011-12-20T15:45:00.000Z

Katherine Westphal's "Interior with Dogs" was made in 1984 - and to my eyes, it hasn't dated. I like the knowing use of standard "quilting" techniques, given a twist. A lively composition and great use of negative space.

It's showing in Invisible Lineage at the San Jose Museum of Quilts until 5 Feb 2012. "Invisible Lineage showcases the work of four influential mid 20th century fiber artists — Mary Buskirk, Lydia Van Gelder, Mary Walker Phillips, Katherine Westphal— alongside works of four late century artists, Pat Abrahamian, Pam Moore, Karen Hampton, and Janice Sullivan."

Where do ideas come from?

2011-12-19T10:30:00.000Z

Shaun Tan and Neil Gaiman discussed this -

"ST:...if you get two ideas that are completely unrelated ... and connect them together, suddenly it clicks.

"NG: That is often the answer to "where do you get your ideas from" - two unrelated things come together and suddenly it produces something new. Two or more things...

"ST: Yes, a minimum of two. It seems that they have to be unrelated, because otherwise your brain forms an existing association that's very hard to get away from. It's almost like you have to displace the emotion to examine it. If it's in its nice little gift-wrapped box, if it's packaged in the way that emotions in everyday life are so often packaged, we can file it away. But when emotion is attached to something that is completely outside of experience, it makes you examine it, as though it has no wrapper on it."

Here's a little exercise you can do in your next sleepless night: pick two unrelated things and try to connect them or 'grow' them into an idea.... you'll either get bored very quickly, or get so enthused that you won't be able to lie in bed any longer.

Beats counting sheep! (For the record - image from here)

Book to page to ...?...

2011-12-18T10:30:00.000Z

The evidence is that I bought this book in 2007 to keep track of the various quilting and editing committees I was on. My time on these committees has come to an end, so the book is being repurposed. It's too heavy and awkward for taking on my minimal travels, so I tried it out as a receptacle for Morning Moans - nope, that wiry spine gets in the way. All pages with writing have been torn out (about a dozen) and the unblemished book is now in the charity-shop bag. Someone else will be able to put it to the use for which it was intended.

The half-used, torn out pages are receiving my Morning Moans, and will be used and re-used ... because it's not important to re-read this sort of writing, and because I'd rather it not be read. By criss-crossing the writing, I'll have a rich surface to use in some sort of book structure ... or jewellery - like Devi Chand's perhaps

Or Megan Dunn's -

Or plain-old paper beads...

Xmas on Oxford Street

2011-12-17T08:00:00.000Z

Poetry takes to the streets

2011-12-16T19:00:00.000Z

Traffic safety haiku on posters in New York - bold colors and clever words take signs that would otherwise fade into the background into the forefront."There's a lot of visual clutter all around us," John Morse, the artist, says. "So the idea is to bring something to the streetscape that might catch someone's eye."

Book du jour

2011-12-16T15:00:00.000Z

Daily bookmaking has been a bit ... missing ... lately - and this isn't really a book, it's a card - the only xmas card I'm sending this year. With any luck, ew-year cards will be emailed in due course - and daily bookmaking will resume.

Orange wrappers

2011-12-16T07:30:00.000Z

About 200 orange wrappers from the collection of Lothar-Gunther Buchheim are on show till 26 February at the Buchheim Museum, not too far from Munich (but rather farther from London). As a collector of orange wrappers in the 1990s, I'd love to see these examples from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s - such amazingly cheerful graphics.

Alas, these humble, everyday objects are now rarely seen at the greengrocer or market.

The wrapper idea used as an advertising postcard here -

Art I like - Susan Collins

2011-12-15T09:18:00.000Z

I encountered the work of Susan Collis by chance at the De La Warr pavilion in Bexhill in 2009 - a show called Seascape. It took me a while to understand what she's doing, but now it's very relevant for my "journey lines" project.

As her work builds up, each pixel is a moment in time. I do the same, in a less discrete way - ie, with less separation of individual moments - while writing my lines: each line represents the duration of a journey, so each point along the line represents a moment in time. This is present time for the writer; past time for the viewer.

Collins' work is described thus: "Susan Collins' gradually unfolding, classically romantic landscape images are harvested and archived over the course of the year. They encode the landscape over time, with different tonal horizontal bands recording fluctuations in light and movement throughout the day and with broad bands of black depicting night-time. Stray pixels appear in the image where the moon passes through or a bird, person, car or other unidentifiable object passes in front of the webcam as the pixel is captured. The work is intended to be slow, a reflection on the ever increasing speeds we demand from the internet. Poised between the still and the moving image, the lens and the pixel, the prints explore how images can be coded and decoded using both light and time as building blocks for the work."

The picture above has been "written" over a number of hours, pixel by pixel, and transmitted from the site of the camera to the site of the screen, miles away. The pixels build up line by line - the light on the water is thus not the light from the sky, because the sky was written earlier. Once the screen is filled, the pixels start at the top again - hence the darkness, because by this time the sky is dark. A wonderful way of bringing the past and present together, and making us pay attention to the invisible workings of a medium we take for granted.

Wordless Wednesday

2011-12-14T15:30:00.000Z

Post-essay thoughts

2011-12-14T09:12:00.000Z

"The liminal area between writing and drawing" continues to nag at me - which is perhaps as it should be, given that we had free rein to choose an essay topic and that we were told to choose something that's of interest to us. For months I researched and pondered the nature of drawing and of writing; then came a rather frantic period of setting down my findings and thoughts. Of course the moment that the "work" went to be evaluated, I had some clarity about its shortcomings - mainly, I used too many case studies and didn't restate my main findings in the conclusion - left them in the discussion of the case studies. So, it falls short in technical terms. And that's a disappointment, because I could have followed the "rules" and done it "right" - but instead I let myself get carried away with something I discovered very late in the writing, namely the "invisible support". After decades of dealing with scientific papers that (often unnecessarily) end by indicating the area in which "more research is needed", I fell into that same trap.

Originally the analysis was going to rest on social anthropologist Tim Ingold's work (2007) on traces and threads, but in the end this took up just one paragraph. If I'd thought to check whether he'd published more on this topic since, I would have found this book, published this spring -

which I bought recently. Opening it at random (to p 224) I found this:

"Drawing is a mode of description that has not yet broken away from observation. At the same time that the gesturing hand draws out its traces upon a surface, the observing eye is drawn into the labyrinthine entanglements of the lifeworld, yielding a sense of its forms, proportions and textures, but above all of its movements - of the generative dynamic of a world-in-formation. In recent anthropology, however, the potential of drawing to couple observation and description has been largely eclipsed by an overriding dichotomy between the written text and the visual image ... What interests me is that the visual anthropology for which [Anna Grimshaw] calls should be understood as alternative to anthropology in writing. Do we not use our eyes to read and write, just as we do to observe a work of calligraphy or of drawing? Why else does almost every scholar wear spectacles? What does the characterisation of writing as non-verbal tell us about our understanding of vision?"

Interesting questions. It's going to take me a long time to read this book! The dilemma is - where to start? At the beginning ... or with the "drawing making writing" section at the end ...

Art I like - Tim Head

2011-12-14T08:53:00.000Z

My sudden interest in dust has led (back) to the work of Tim Head (this is "Dust Flowers") - an accretion of computer "noise", which - by using the physical element of the medium to form the work - he has generated.

The site where I ran across the image says: "For Tim Head, the elusive and contrary nature of the digital medium and its unsettled relationship with both ourselves and with the physical world forms the basis for recent work. Computer programs are written to generate unique events in ‘real time’ on screens, projections and inkjet prints that focus on the intrinsic properties of these digital media. The programs operate at the primary scale of the medium’s smallest visual element (the pixel or inkjet dot) by treating each element as a separate individual entity. The medium is no longer transparent but opaque."

But Head doesn't work only in "high'tech"; he has done various drawings of horizontal lines - it was seeing these in a gallery that got me interested in his work. This is "Slow Life", from his website (where you can see a detail) - it measures 59x84cm -

Everyday processes

2011-12-13T09:16:00.002Z

"Dead Legs" (from here)

Celia Pym works with processes and ways of recording activities -- the holes in people's clothes, and the stories that accompany them; the ways of going about daily life.

She says: "I started knitting in 2001 as a warm up activity. To get me settled in my studio I would knit to ready my fingers and get thinking. I soon discovered that I would knit for whole afternoons. The warm up became my main project. The wool I had decided to knit with, at that time was red since the most exciting wool in the shop was red coloured. Since there was a red line on the subway system where I was living I would knit the red knitting riding the red line. After the red knitting, the next idea was to measure a journey around Japan. I was sponsored by the Gardner fellowship and made a journey to collect yarns from all over Japan, to knit everyday and to climb mountains. And in my everyday knitting I measured out the journey I was making. I work with process and ways of recording activities. Now I darn and am looking for holes in people’s clothes and the stories that accompany them; repairing these holes and returning the mended garments. It is a way to briefly make contact with strangers."

Two aspects of her work resonate with me: measuring a journey, and representing going about daily life... "making the invisible visible" in yet other ways...

Also, the idea of having a warm-up activity in the studio is really useful - obviously you do have to be careful it doesn't take over.

Art I like - Robert Breer

2011-12-12T21:41:00.000Z

Avant-garde animation legend Robert Breer (1926-2011) made "A Man and his Dog out for Air" in 1957. For nearly two minutes, lines move over the screen, to a soundtrack of loud, synthetic birdsong -

Eventually you see, briefly, the man and his dog -

Watch the entire film here, and read more about Breer's animations here. You might enjoy his 1980 animation "Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons" here - or "Eyewash" (1959) - or "Fuji" (1974)

House dust

2011-12-12T07:45:00.000Z

... or rather, dust house -

We had to move some really heavy furniture, and behind it on the skirting board I found a lovely line of dust - can dust be an art material? Seems it can...

Pic above is from here, whereas this one (seen here) is made by Paul Hazelton - carefully collected, wetted, shaped, dried -

A book and its background

2011-12-11T07:36:00.000Z

One of my ongoing personal research projects concerns the different ways that artist's books are presented on the internet, and indeed in print sources. In a book, you might see the book stood up with pages spread to give an intriguing glimpse of what's on the edges of the pages, or laid down and opened up to one spread, or perhaps unfolded to show the structure. The internet, of course, offers many more possibilities - a clickable sequence of pages, a video of the book being "read" - and web pages that let the reader delve into the history and components of the work, as here - you can watch an animated video clip, see the studio sketch and the finished page, as well as click to read the text and the colophon -

Not quite as good as handling the actual book, but "it's all there". Completed in 2009, "Fabulous Fictions / Peculiar Practices" is the result of a collaboration between artist Tony Calzetta, writer Leon Rooke, and master printer Dieter Grund of Presswerk Editions.

Nine texts and drawings are housed in folios inside a slip case. One of the drawings and its text was re-imagined as a paper sculpture and attached to the front of the slip case. Ten texts and drawings are published as a separate project--a series of black and white broadsides presented in a red clam box.

Art I like - Shawn Quinlan

2011-12-10T07:29:00.001Z

Shawn Quinlan's latest quilt is "Tears for compassion". I like his themes (subliminal stories often with political undertones) and the non-regimented way the surface is built. Not to mention the skill involved - and the fabulous improvisational backs of the quilts! See all that and more on his website, www.shawnquinlan.com.

2011-12-09T10:01:00.000Z

While I was scrolling through a set of images on can't-remember-what, this image caught my eye (and continues to intrigue me) -

It's by Patrick Pound and is called Writing in a Library. It was part of a small exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne, "Order and disorder: archives and photography", written about here by photographer Marcus Bunyan. The review raises questions about the kinds of memory held in archives and the role of the institution as custodian (and interpreter). The exhibition, held in 2009, did not mention in the catalogue "the crisis of cultural memory that is now permeating our world ... how are digital technologies altering our re-assemblance of memory, altering photography’s ability inherent ability to record, store and organise visual images?"

Some text that was taken from NGV website (but no longer on the site):

“Archives contain elements of truth and error, order and disorder and are infinitely fascinating. As both collections of records and repositories of data, archives are able to shape history and memory depending on how, when and by whom the materials are accessed. Their vastness allows for multiple readings to be unravelled over time.
" Photography is naturally associated with archives because of its inherent ability to record, store and organise visual images. With this in mind, this exhibition brings together artists drawn largely from the permanent collection of the NGV who explore the idea of archives as complex, living and occasionally mysterious systems of knowledge. Several of the selected artists act as archivists, collecting and ordering their own unique bodies of photographs, while others create disorder by critiquing the ideas and systems of archives.”

The photograms of Penelope Davis are wonderful -

She makes resin casts of the books and puts them directly on the photographic paper - they become "liminal images that hover between what is known and what is imagined". Davis has said: “Most people assume that when they look at a photo that they are looking at the thing photographed – but they are not. They are looking at a photo. Books and photographic images and archives are enigmatic – you can’t be sure of a singular definition or meaning.”

But to get back to Patrick Pound and that intriguing image - he has said "I am an artist working at the categories of things. Whether categorizing thousands of newspaper cuttings in albums by subject, or photographing people taking photographs, I am an artist who reads the world as an endless series of overlapping lists. From a collection of Lost Bird posters culled from the streets to a collection of early postcards of a single street I am copying the world in the form of the index. These works call into play the limits of description and the description of limits. From the collection of 365 unremarkable brown things, to twenty-six pieces of evidence lifted from my street and placed in bags, my work has the look of being made by someone who upon trying to explain the world, and having failed, has been reduced to collecting it."

Xmas pop-up at Artisan till 23 Dec

2011-12-08T19:50:00.001Z

17 artists are exhibiting - tapestry, photography, glass, ceramics, knitting, jewellery, cards, lamps, even furniture -

and the gallery looks filled & festive -

The bags and t-shirts have "a certain presence" -

The unisex t-shirts are organic cotton, available in white or grey in sizes S, M, L, and sell for £22. The bags are priced at £25 - each is unique, with comfortable handles and inside pockets.

Art I like - "Truism" by John Squire

2011-12-08T18:59:00.001Z

'Truism' (16" x 14", lead sheet on board) was (it says here) part of the 'Heat Light Death & Industry' series which consisted of massive-scale sculptures based on smaller scale cardboard packaging and paintings that centre around the flattened out maps of the packaging and euroslot packaging hole.

For this series, John Squire taught himself to weld the huge rusting steel structures, which are large-scale versions of cardboard boxes, unfolded.

The inscription on Truism reads - much was decided before you were born.

Impressionistic

2011-12-08T14:36:00.001Z

Display "wigwam"

2011-12-08T08:34:00.001Z

My London Journey bags will be part of the "Xmas pop-up" at Artisan galley (8-23 Dec). My idea for display is a mix of beanpoles and seasonal symbolism, and is made out of bamboo from the garden centre. We painted the sticks red first, then gold ... which took ages but was definitely worthy it.

If you're trying this at home, don't depend on ribbon to hold the sticks together. Tape is a must, especially at the top - the ribbon is mere embellishment.

Flamboyant

2011-12-07T07:33:00.001Z

The Stinging Rose caterpillar - its colours announce how dangerous it is (this is called aposematic coloration - who knew!) If you touch it, the tips of the spines break off and venom enters the skin.

See more toxic caterpillars here (but don't click on links on that site - they are embedded ads, unfortunately).

Graphic impact

2011-12-05T16:11:00.001Z

Quote of the day

2011-12-03T10:58:00.001Z

"We imagine in the shape we know ... metaphor leading us backwards" - from Jan Bervin's "clouds" book, which is actually titled A Non-Breaking Space.

This is one of the early spreads -

There are 27 spreads - do go look at them all at http://jenbervin.com/html/clouds.html#

She says of the book: "I determined from the start that this book would be scanned and viewed online through Ugly Duckling Presse. This allowed for a certain abandon in making it—no editioning process, no worries about whether the materials or methods were archival, and no production budget. I wanted it to be a free book, one called up on screen by demand—for it to exist as needed. When I give readings from this text, I bring the paper book for everyone to handle. I like to think that the object will eventually die from touch."