Danger signs - Finsbury Park bus station

Ceramics, week 1

It's so good to be back in class again! Wednesdays are ceramics - there are eight of us from the foundation course at one end of the room, and six City & Guilds students at the other.

The basics - types of clay, which we'll get to know all too well, in their raw and biscuit-fired states: crank (with grog, for texture); terracotta; St Thomas; and at the front, Draycotts white. The saw-like implement is called a harp.We started by making pinch pots - make a ball of clay, stick in your thumb, shape the inside bottom, then work up the sides. You quickly find there are quite a few variations (Elspeth Owen has been making pinch pots for 30 years, and still finds new things, Robert told us) - and the different types of clay behave differently.

To keep the bottom round, store them on their rim. The bottom row are waiting to be reassembled, harlequin-style. I started working quite large, but soon preferred smaller pots -
You can mix the different types of clay to get colour variations; or marble the clays; or inlay to make patterns, beating them together and thereby making the walls thin -
After lunch, the AHA moment. An accidental breakthrough. And some non-accidental breakthroughs. Lots of them....
This series has a different colour clay inside -
By next week they'll be fired. I'm thinking about whether to dip the bases in slip, or glaze the whole thing, or........

Exquisite Bodies

The Wellcome Collection on Euston Road has a nice caf, a tempting bookshop,a Gormley sculpture (and other artworks throughout the building),
and changing free exhibitions - the latest, Exquisite Bodies, shows wax anatomical models. Public displays of anatomy were, in the 1870s, open to women on separate days from when they were open to men, and there was widespread feeling that such sights were not fit for ladies' eyes.

An example, from the exhibition brochure, is in my Imagined Interiors book along with other aspects of the interior of bodies -
I'm always struck by the clarity of the anatomical drawing when compared with seeing the flesh-and-blood reality (that red stuff is a tummy-tuck operation, by the way; the green and brown are animal eyes). There's a distancing in the depiction - the drawing refers to "bodies" - but, somehow, not to "my body"; that is something I experience entirely differently, even though I know a bit about what's where and how the different systems work. The rational and the personal are different spheres.

Other people's houses

One type of "imagined interior" is of course the house - they are everywhere, in such variety, and have many clues that lead you to speculate about their owners and their history. Quite apart from the nosiness factor - and/or the fascination of looking into lighted rooms (which are usually empty) - lighted rooms that reflect themselves in the windows, so someone outside is invisible.

My personal history consists of about 20 domestic spaces, and I've been "my very own little flat" for some 15 years. Where you live is so important ... and so is where you'd rather be living! A turret room ... the south of France ... the middle of the city ... away from it all - usually it's the environment you choose; your personal environment seems to come with you - how you live is as hard to change as your basic personality. (And many of us struggle.)

But I digress. As an 11-year-old, in a house that was still being built even as we lived in it, I envied Ella's tidy split-level in a new subdivision, which looked a bit like this, except for having a deck on one side -

but even more I loved to go to Judy's big old farmhouse, after school. It had two stories, a basement, an attic (!), a verandah all the way round, a big central staircase,a piano, and willow trees in the front yard. You went in to a kitchen with a wood stove for cooking, and there was a couch where her dad read the newspaper after coming in from the barn, which was on the other side of the railway. It was built in the 1920s, but in the early 1960s they "modernised" it, taking the top off and adding bedrooms out the side. Now, it's gone; the railway yards have expanded. Its plan was something like this one:
While looking for house plans I found this overview of history of housing in America, an online book on various "ordinary" houses in Australia, and a link to the tiny-house movement. The smallest "real" house seems to be 900 square feet - big enough for a small family -
The most important source of my love for house plans is my father, who was building our house, bit by bit -- and when that house burnt down in 1973, built another - and then finally built a "retirement house" on the same property, where the family has lived for over 50 years. We had plenty of house-plan magazines and I loved to imagine what it would be like to live in those houses, and to draw plans of my own ideal houses.

This has led to fantasies, while in "interesting" meeting rooms or other spaces, of converting them into places to live - bed lofts under high ceilings, or murphy beds when space is tight ... and just how small can the kitchen be ...

Inside (outside?) looking on

This view of an old-fashioned office - a bank? insurance? - is on my "enigmatic" page of the Imagined Interiors collection book. I find it fascinating ... perhaps because it brings to mind those addresses on letters we wrote to penpals as teenagers - name, street, city, province, country, North America, The Earth, The Solar System, The Galaxy, The Cosmos... The office workers are tiny cogs in the wheel of industry, of the life of the nation, of the world -- yet each has a personal cosmos that is invisible in this picture.And, bouncing off that huge interior of a building, this one - the title is Sears I and it's by Katherine Westerhout - a digitised photograph woven into a tapestry 7 ft by 9 ft.
It asks all sorts of questions. As does this abandonned library in Ukraine -

Sampling again

This was actually the first sample towards an idea for Breakthrough - it's based on that card (David Austin, The Stars above the Sea) and on the celestial drawings/prints by Vija Celmins
I wanted the light to break through the dark areas, like a night sky - maybe with the odd constellation - and ended up looking in an astronomy book and finding a page about the search for the invisible, undetectable stuff called dark matter, how when scientists find it - or are sure that it doesn't exist, or know how much of it there is, one of those options (it's all a bit mind-boggling!) - then they'll be able to figure out how long the universe will go on expanding. That would be a breakthrough, but how much "practical use" is that knowledge ...

Indian paintings at the British Museum

Extended till 11 October and well worth seeing, Garden and Cosmos shows 56 paintings from 18th-century Jodhpur, in north-west India. Colourful and detailed, each needs close looking at. If you can't visit the British Museum, do go to the website, where you can see details of a few of the paintings and listen to some extracts from the audio guide. The posters show the monsoon rains - and give you an idea of the intensity and variety of colour -The garden paintings are beautifully detailed - and did I mention colourful? The "cosmos" paintings are wonderful in a different way. They are often triptyches, and start with "the unknowable Absolute" - rendered as a pure gold space, a depiction that these artists invented. Then in the second panel figures appear - and in the third, more figures - showing, for example, the universe divided into consciousness and matter. In contrast to the many greens in the garden paintings, the colouring in the "cosmos rooms" is gold, silver, orange, flesh tones, red, ochre, blue, and black.

The captions in the exhibition are very informative, but the printed guide to the exhibition is the most useless I've ever seen - it doesn't even have any of the basic information from the main explanations, the sort of information you might need for refreshing your memory. Perhaps the audio guide is meant to replace the written guide, or you're meant to go to the website for helpful information?

In Room 3, a small room near the front entrance of the museum, is this large painting on silk, showing 200 different trees. It was shown in an exhibition about 20th century items in the museum, a good 10 years ago, and I have a catalogue of that exhibition ... somewhere ... Searching for it has turned up all sorts of interesting things. Is this distraction why it takes so long to write a blog post? (Dear gods, make me focused - but not just yet...)
This current exhibition is called Imagining the Forest and is on till 4th October.The trees are copies from manuscripts in the Orissa State Library, and the painting was done about 1980 - it was commissioned as part of an official scheme to enable Indian textile artists to continue practising their skills..

You can see one of the original manuscripts here - it's on palm leaves - five strips - and shows Krishna with the gopis (female cow-herders).
The Garden and Cosmos exhibition has a series of marvellous paintings of the story of Krishna and the gopis - in one they are wandering in the forest searching for him, one or two brightly-robed women appearing between the trunks of each carefully-delineated tree - those paintings are about a metre long, and on paper.

Nature's bounty

This year the vegetable garden (such as it is) has yielded lots of runner beans, this one courgette, and some teeny tiny tomatoes. The swiss chard and rocket are ongoing.The apples simply fall off the tree - to be turned into lots of apple crumble, and several jars of apple & lemon jelly -
These tomatoes from Jean & Brian's garden are the best I've had for a long time -
We'll try growing them next year, in the sunniest possible spot.

Summer homework again

In the week before the new term starts, I'm finally getting to grips with summer homework.

It started with an orgy of cutting up magazines, and many have gone to the recycling, all but a page or two. Some pictures, the really resonant ones, have ended up in the sketchbook/scrapbook - the others are in a big box that might get sifted through now and then. And others are still lying about ...One type of "imagined interior" is the forest - the deep, dark, Teutonic forest (my ancestors are German, after all) - a terrible place in fairy tales, though nowadays, or was it 20 years ago, one Sunday pasttime is to walk through the forest to a nice restaurant in the very middle, and have a jolly lunch. These two images are almost benign - it's not that dense growth. And at the bottom is a stamped response ... the sort of hedge that grew up to protect Sleeping Beauty -
Some other categories are the interiors (or contents perhaps) of vessels; the inside of a person's head (not always like Mark Quinn's self-portrait filled with his own blood); fruits and seeds and seeds and fruits; sculptures with visible holes, or hollowness; mirrored spaces.
And there are the interiors of things like vegetables. The stamping is not with a cabbage, but with a lettuce - variety, Little Gem.

Exhibitions seen - and missed

Coming across the Tate's publicity booklet, now out of date, was a good reminder of recent exhibitions at Tate Britain and Tate Modern.

As a collector and sorter-into-categories type of person ("once a librarian, always a librarian"), I really enjoyed the "Classified" exhibition - but have raher a hazy recollection of it, apart from the ticking metronomes around the edges of the fist room, and Mark Dion's display cabinet of objects found on the Thames foreshore in the centre, with drawers that pulled out to reveal a collection of bits of blue-and-white china in one and a neatly arranged rainbow of plastic objects in another...

The video on the Tate website is interesting - a few people, and the exhibition curators, talking about their collections and how they organise them. I like the idea of subcollections ... and that we all have collections of treasured possessions through which we relate to other people, and accumulations of things that hold memories, in no obvious order, that relate to our biography. (But is this way of looking at things a matter of turning them inside out, or living backward, somehow?) Definitely the value and meanings of "treasured objects" changes - the smooth stone I've carefully chosen to carry on my walk across Hampstead Heath becomes just another pebble in a plantpot when I get home.
Also in the exhibition were Damien Hirst's Pharmacy (believing in medicine is believing in immortality, says the note in my notebook); the Chapman Family Collection - subverting traditional cultures into the Macdonalds ethos, or vice versa; and works by Simon Starling, Gillian Carnegie, Rebecca Warren, and Fiona Rae, among others.

On the same day we went to see the Richard Long exhibition. It opens with the hexagrams for Heaven and for Earth filling opposite walls of the same room - painted on in mud. At the end, there's a video of Richard Long painting with mud - fabulous! (And you can buy a tshirt with "mud splatters" - for a mere £25. Some of us will be making our own...)
More recently I visited the Futurism exhibition at Tate Modern (took the riverboat to get there on a sunny day ... but that's another story). The pictures by Severini, and one by Bomberg (In the Hold), looked ready to be made into patchwork, though why would you want to!
A large painting by Fernand Leger called The Wedding was my favourite - it's light yellow, uncluttered areas were a contrast from the darkness of most of the other works. You can see it here, but be warned, that website comes with a blast of music (or vice versa).

And there were, or are, some smaller exhibitions at Tate Modern - Stutter (which I missed) "explored ideas of the unexpected within the processes of thoughts and language in both written and spoken forms ... these artists create a space for error, interruption, transformation and difference which suggest that an excess of ideas can paradoxically render us inarticulate or mute." It includes works by artists not known to me - Sven Augustijnen, Anna Barham, Dominique Petitgand, Michael Riedel, Will Stuart. Reading about them (and the others for which I've added links above) is giving me Art Overload -- and that familiar "why bother?" feeling ... which probably fits right in with the show's stated purpose.
In the Scale exhibition (seen that - it's on till 24 Oct), there's a sign in the room with Robert Therrien's table and chairs saying "Please do not climb on the artworks". Overheard in that room: "I don't get it - but I like it." Other artists are Pierre Roy, Magritte, Claes Oldenberg, and Giacometti.

The "Annalee" exhibition is on till April 2010 - she is a Manga character brought to life by various artists "in a range of animated videos, paintings, sculptures and other art works that question the nature and ownership of authorship and representation." For copyright and related reasons, no doubt, there are no images on the Tate's webpage.

And in the restaurant, a panoramic painting by James Aldridge, exploring "his interest in the ntural world as well as the ideas and imagery of extreme heavy metal music" - "In this seductive landscape, crows exhale smoke in a scene rich in decorative flowers, yet loaded with sinister overtones."

Important things

"The aspects of a thing that are most important to us are hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity." - Ludwig Wittenstein

Along Willesden High Street

The sign says ... Open ...The end of a late-summer day -
unexpected reflections -
a bit run-down -
But a lively place - at 7pm the barbershops were in full swing - there's lots of photo potential there.

Paper city

Seeing this on the ragandbone paper arts blog (http://ragandbone.com/blogger/) brought some of my book making to mind - little books made from photocopied drawings of buildings. I used them as part of a project in term 1 of the art foundation course:

Along Oxford Street

A bus ride on a fine morning, with the shopping accomplished and nothing to do but look around. Where did these buildings come from? Why haven't I noticed them before?


Just haven't bothered to look UP, I guess!

Treats!

The excuse was a birthday at work. But who needs an excuse...

Journal quilts

Because of going to Canada and then the Festival of Quilts - and then picking up the pieces! - I got a bit behind with the latest batch of journal quilts for the Contemporary Quilt challenge. This year they're 6" x 12", and I'm using the theme of the moon - based on folkloric names of the different months.
So here we have May - Flower Moon; June - Rose Moon; July - Thunder Moon; August - Grain Moon. The first two have a lot of hand stitching - couching, stem stitch, french knots - and the final one uses fancy machine stitching, which took much longer than I thought it would! Thunder Moon might look "thrown together" -- it is in reality a resonant amalgam of considered juxtapositions (translation: bits from my scrap bag that I quickly auditioned, and went with gut feeling).

imho the quilts should help "move you on" somehow, whether trying a new technique, combining new colours, using different sorts of fabrics - but how are these moving me on ...

First of all, working with the one theme all year - and having at least the moon shapes "fit together" so that the total will be a frieze. Learning point: plan the colours too!

New techniques? May is backed with a flower print, and I put down the coloured fabrics on the front before machining round the flowers on the back, then cut back the fabric. The black edging is hand couched - a narrow zigzag on the machine didn't work out.

July - how to quilt thunder? I thought a series of boxes that sort of grew out of each other - but when the fabric hit the machine, that turned into a sort of greek-key design, rolling across the sky.

August - I idly asked Tony how he'd represent a "grain moon" and he thought of loaves of bread made from grain ... flour ... mills -- so that's why the moon is quilted like a millstone! The ears of grain are done in various variegated threads, over layers of sheer fabrics, sort of like the "clouds" in Thunder Moon. The sheer layers, and the shapes of the "ears of grain", reminded me of the "Fantasy Forest" pieces I was making ten or more years ago -
very fiddly, all those little bits of fabric!

The secret life of surfaces

While tube stations are being modernised, there are some visually interesting areas that will
soon disappear - like these layers of posters -
A slip of the finger while resizing it in photoshop, and I discovered how to invert the colours -Does it look like mould, discovered using a secret technique or sophisticated camera system?