Glass houses

By B Jane Cowie, an Australian glass artist who lives in Singapore.

New shoes

No, not those!

These - sensible shoes -
Comfortable, fashionable(ish), and half price -- best of all, no tedious shopping (that day) to find Just The Right Shoes - they were impulse purchases, if finally finding what you didn't quite know you were looking for, after a couple of excursions to other shops, finding nothing suitable, can be called an impulse purchase. Impulse because I was walking past the shoe shop on the way to the olde worlde splendour of Martyns to buy coffee, shoes not on my mind at all....

This week at college - textile printing

Apart from the briefing on the research paper that we'll all be writing, there wasn't much going on officially at college this week - though I gained a lot from several conversations. Apart from spending time in the library looking at this 'n' that, my week centred on another day of textile printing. I wanted to print the "roads" and some background, trying out various colours on various fabrics, some half printed already.

These "stencils", meant to keep the roads already printed on the fabric from being overprinted, turned out interestingly - don't they look like figures running, running - across a landscape of words - hmm ...
I was mainly using a grey colour that included a bit of purple; it turned out better on some colours than others - the mustard silk was particularly good, but it's hard to see here -
More of the combination of screens - on black linen and on white cotton (next week - bigger roads and smaller background lines; and I'll use fabric not paper for the stencil bits) -
My favourite of the day is on cotton with a bit of (rather nasty) machine embroidery, which the printing transforms -
Some of the fabrics I'm using are from reclaimed clothing, with a view to - what, exactly? Maybe it's about getting something out of my system, and eventually moving on. Meanwhile one of the highlights is seeing what other people who come to print are doing - sometimes it's t-shirts as presents for friends, sometimes it's huge bits of cloth; it can even be printing on resin that has metal particles in it. Like the printing ink sitting on fabric, these ideas are sitting on the outer layer of my consciousness ... it will take a process like heat-setting to get them coming out in my work (or is that too much of an analogy?).

Taking flight

A wrought-iron gateway in Melbourne - thanks to Erika for sending the photo. We went to see it together about five years ago, but I'd forgotten... It's a great reference for my "sky birds" project.

As is the sequence with flocking seabirds in Suki Chan's film, Interval II - in fact the film has two sequences of flocking birds -

Found fabrics

Found among the five bags of "studio stuff" that were conveniently forgotten behind the chair in the bedroom - screen printed fabric, done at home several years ago with dye and thickener. Seems I was already enjoying "wavy lines" -

configured in various ways -
Some other prints in various colours (I don't remember how I did these, and didn't write it down) -
These are attempts at "breakdown printing" -
Nor can I remember whether the wet fabrics had to be "cured" for the dye to set, or whether heat is now needed ....

More found fabric

Some thin lutradur printed with carved erasers (potential book covers?) -

and batiked fabrics from Els van Baarle's workshop at Festival of Quilts 6 or 7 years ago -

One day I will take them to get the wax out.........

Random numbers

Why would you want random numbers? Well, for unbiased sampling ... if you're a researcher, say.

For a sequence to be random, no patterns can be recognized in it, no predictions can be made about it, and no simple description of it can be found (read more here).

Or discover the delights of books of random numbers in this video, one of a series of "improbable research" videos.

Reading: "Between Times"

Interesting collection of photographers. It does what it says on the box. Inside you can read things like: "images can produce a time that is immanent in them, a heterogeneous, creative and predominantly visual time, a speculative time that is sensitive to visual phenomenological and visual changes".

Once upon a time

Researching the history of the Piccadilly and Victoria lines for my current project, I'm finding fascinating old photos. This is Piccadilly Circus, 1960-65 (borrowed from here)- the signage looks so very quaint and old-fashioned now, the clothing so vintage... The line was extended to Hounslow West in 1933 and to Heathrow in 1977. Until 13 February the V&A has a small exhibition about Charles Holden's contribution to the architecture of the Piccadilly Line.

These research explorations always throw up unexpected things - did you know about "tubewalking"? You can tubewalk through history ...

A little job

Something I do every month is update the regional membership list for Contemporary Quilt, so that members living in the same area of the country can contact each other to set up local groups. But before a new member's details can be released, under the 1995 Data Protection Act they have to send in a form giving permission. I have files to keep the forms in.

Many people send in the part with the instructions as well, and they come in an interesting array of paper. I've saved the "impersonal" part to make into a little book of some sort -

The signed forms are in need of interleaving into the sequence in the folders -
CQ now has over 500 members, about a third of whom haven't returned their form. When they all do, we'll need some new folders to keep them in!

Please release me ...

Look around - you'll see a lot of pleats that haven't been released yet.

Adventures in film

As we didn't have a seminar today, I'm determined to catch up with my "academic" blogging. Last week at college consisted of the second day of "embedded book" seminars (Tuesday); the research practitioner lecture by the head of drawing (Wednesday) and some time to spend in the library before that; fabric printing on Thursday -- and the bonus, on Monday morning, of a session learning to process black-and-white film (that old-fashioned stuff).

So Sunday evening found us in the kitchen setting up lights and tripod, and I had to re-learn how to load film into a camera.

I wanted to photograph the surface of water, so the idea was to run water into a bowl at different speeds to make different kinds of ripples. Taking these pix digitally was possible only with a flash; I'm interested to see how a "real" photograph will differ from these -

On the day, fortunately we weren't doing anything that needed crucial timing when the fire alarm went off, and everyone spent some time milling around outside -

Back in the darkroom and we got through the process safely. For next time, the instructions are there to be read and followed:

After the baths in the magic chemicals, the film is hung in tall cabinets to dry. Other people took photos of sensible things -

In their protective sleeves ("dust is the enemy"), my bowls of water look a bit mouldy -
What will come out of this, then? I was too late to sign up for the printing workshop, so finding that out will have to wait a week or two...

Collaborative seminars - second week

We arrived to find the table laid out for a paint-feast. The topic of the first seminar was "the book as self portrait", and yes we did paint a small self portrait - as a colour...

A performance element - "Mickey" came to life and was willing to answer questions about her/himself, but only with yes and no -
Beside the original Mickey, the "self portraits" created by the unused paint are gathered to make a group self portrait -
These are the painted versions -
Lots of interesting books circulated and were shown in slides, including Glenn Holman's memoir of making a model Spitfire with his father, the tale of Matthias Rust's landing in Red Square, Duane Michals The House I once called Home, Tracey Emin's desert journal, Hilary Judd's box of shoes, Michael Landy's Breakdown Inventory, John Coplans' photographic Body Parts, two collaborations (November 5, 2006 and Mapping Knowledge), and Roni Horn aka Roni Horn.

"Materials of the book" occupied the rest of the morning, in four chunks: content; the book in time; the book and the senses; books in different cultures.

Content can be linear, as in the codes (example: Helen Douglas, Last day in Kas), or interactive, in which case the book may need other materials in order to be read - for instance, a work based on barcodes would need a barcode reader.

Over time, the book is subject to various threats or processes of erosion or destruction (this wasn't the glossary used, but it certainly has a lot of library/book terms!) - biopredation and WAF (with all faults) were new to me. Have a look at the biblioclasm of Araki Takao's fragile Bibles

and Andrew Norris's Lijepa nasa domovina,or Angela Lorenz's Rags make Paper; for a palimpsest, look at Heather Weston's Read, made with heat-sensitive paper; as an example of marginalia, Sophie Artemis-Pitt's Title.

The books chosen to illustrate "the book and the senses" were Camille Scherrer's Le Monde de Montagnes (it's an interactive set-up in which the computer acts as revelator; see the video here); Masaki Fujihata's Beyond Pages; and books2eat, which holds events in various places around April 1 (the edible gallery is here). Also of note: the handmade paper of Aimee Lee.

Books in different cultures include the different formats and materials used in the past - scrolls, vellum, clay among them. Contemporary examples are Anselm Kiefer's large lead book, The Secret Life of Plants

Rosamond Purcell's Bookworm; Xu Bing's abstract concept of the book in Book of the Sky; Huang Yong Ping's Chinese and Western art books washed together in a machine; Cai Guo-Qiang's firework book (too dangerous to open); and the red paper cutouts of Lu Sheng Zhong.

In the final seminar, "iconic/symbolic books", our practical exercise was to quickly draw certaint concepts - peace, anger, religion, disney, etc - and try to decide if the drawings were iconic or symbolic. Tricky, given that a symbol can become an icon...

Iconic books include the telephone book, religious books, Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, Mein Kampf - and among artists' books, 26 Gasoline Stations by Ed Ruscha (regarded as the first "artist's book" and rejected by the Library of Congress for its lack of information).

With symbolic books, the reader has to work out the meaning. These might include Agnes Richter's jacket; Regenerator by Richard Falle (using the ashes of a burnt book to make ink for a drawing of the book); Little Museum by John Dilnot (9 photos of hands holding objects); Little Library by Todd Pattison; It's not a Popularity Contest by Jody Alexander (date due pockets from withdrawn library books); Pentimento by Claire Jeanine Satin; the poignant Keepsake by Angie Butler; One Life One Book One Time by Kathy Strother; Donald Lipski's constructions using books; John Latham's work; Alicia Martin's cascading books; and works by Brian Dettmer and Robert The.

These seminars are an opportunity to think about topics for The Essay. Several things interest me - the relationship, or boundary, between public and private worlds; why are artists books so hard to "read"; is the book still seen as precious - or rather, how are books valued today. For each of these, I have a glimmering of "the answer"/outcome - but that glimmer may be wrong - it would be interesting to see if something else emerges, something unexpected (perhaps disturbing?).... Or maybe a topic that's more compelling, more "right", will come up in the next wee while. Suggestions welcome...

Mapping space

By Chris Gray - available, along with many other maps based on the good old Underground map, here. (World maps, in various orientations, can be seen here.)

Read about the concepts behind the maps here.

Globalownercentric is kinda scary....

Art I like - Kebedeh Tekleab

While looking for something else, I found this painting by Ethiopian poet and painter Kebedeh Tekleab, who as a student was held in a labour camp for close to a decade. She now lives in the USA and for her MA (1995) did a series called "Humanity in Descent: Images of Human Suffering." Read more about her here.

They're going

Too bulky (yet too small) - and never watched. They've been offered on Freecycle, and will be out of here by the end of the week. (It'll be good to have the floor-space back!)

Fabric printing

Printing of the "roads" continues, in my Thursday-morning sessions in the textile printing room at college -

joined by some more blocks of "journey lines" -
sometimes on fabrics that already have printed patterns -
or even on stripes (experimenting) -
Just for fun -
And this combination definitely has potential -

Dawn light

The sky was already getting light - a lavender sort of effect - when I hit the studio this morning. The studio faces southeast and has a big window. A few minutes later it looked like this, and I went to find the camera -

but when it got a bit lighter, the camera couldn't cope with both the extra light and the getting the focus -
In between jumping up to look at the light show, I sat at the (clear!) workbench carrying out my usual morning practice -- un-writing those morning pages written so many years ago, while getting my daily dose of music (something I realised had gone missing from my life) -
The spotty bits are a stamp that has lots of rubbery points - dipped in diluted (permanent) ink, the dots obscure the writing sufficiently and make the un-writing (re-writing? over-writing?) go more quickly - I do seem to be in a hurry to move on from all this moaning! It's good to come across an account of a dream; I usually write those down in my current notebook.