"You are here"

Subtitled "Personal geographies and othermaps of the imagination", this book by Katherine Harmon is rich in cartographic diversity.

Back cover art - Through the 1940s Dell Book built highly successful line of genre fiction paperbacks by incorporating maps on the books' back covers, depicting a central location from each plot line - 552 in all -
Doggy whimsy - including a placemat from Bob Murray's Doghouse restaurant, Seattle; Neera Tetreault's "Cyrus's Squirrel Map of Spring Creek, Noting All the Choicest Hang-Outs of Those Elusive Critters, the Chasing of Which Gives Such Meaning to Life"; and John Held, Jr's "A Dog's Idea of the Ideal Country Estate" (1920s) -
Edwin Morgan's "Chaffinch Map of Scotland" 1965 (showing the geographic range of various Scottish names for the bird) and Nina Katchadourian's "Austria" 1997 (connecting the geographical and anatomical) -
Ellsworth Kelly's "Fields on a Map (Meschers, Gironde)" 1950 - one of the works in which he began to develop his reduced geometric forms - and a navigation chart from the Marshall Islands -
Along with the amazing John Held Jr, other names of note include Guillermo Kuitca, Ernest Dudley Chase, Sharon Horvath, Joyce Kozloff.

Threads

Enough for miles (days, weeks, months) of stitching....

How not to make felt!

Holding the finished felt up to the light shows its imperfections. I will try again...

This is made quickly with some roving, wound into cops (is that the right word?) that had been through the de-mothing process (freeze, thaw, freeze again) -- I teased it off the cop in chunks and laid it at right angles as evenly as time would permit, stitched it between two layers of net, and put it in the washing machine on the usual cycle. The plan was to make felt insoles, and with some careful placement, the irregularities mean that the thickest parts can go at heel and toe (hopefully). Also, it will be lovely to handstitch into.

Stitching on paper

Work by Nicholas Hlobo, from this website.

Hopscotch

School playground being used for a farmers' market, Queen's Park.

Shadows, Chinatown

Long low light at 4pm. Soon it will be equinox, and the clocks going forward.

Footfall

Finsbury Park station, before the floor was tiled.

Book du jour

Looking at my book through someone else's eyes...

"Protect" was made in November for part of the text project, which we part-timers present in a couple of weeks. The other part is still in gestation, and involves these "Goa stones"

Despite much experimentation with silk paper, hair, newspaper... I'm not at the point of coming up with "a book".

The label on the small stone says "... against Plague".

Things found in books

Things found in books

Two quilt artists

The speaker at last year's AGM of Contemporary Quilt, Ann Smith, brought her quilts and told us of how she works - what a breath of fresh air, she simple knocked our socks off -

This Saturday CQ meets again in London; the speaker is Jo Budd (see her at work in this video). Wish I could be there, but I'll be at Leeds Artists Book Fair (do drop by if you're near the University of Leeds - it's free and will be interesting).

Glyphs

By Australian artist G W Bot - see more work here, and read about her 2007 artist's book Black Swan here (the British Library has bought a copy).

"Good" artists, good art

Michael James, a quilt pioneer, has an article in a recent Surface Design magazine that looks at what is already out there that can be defined as art. Here is a list of the artists he considers "good".

Jo Budd

Dorothy Caldwell
Michael Cummings

Diana Harrison
Tracey Emin
Laurie Fendrich

Ai Kijima

M Joan Lintault

Linda Macdonald
Terrie Mangat

Clare Plug

Ursula Rauch
Lynn Setterington
Susan Shie
Anna Von Mertens

His criteria for "good" are: " that it works, is thoughtful and/or inventive, demonstrates seriousness of purpose, and seems to arrive from a process of inquiry that is both intellectual and emotional." [Your mileage may vary...]

Art I like - Ann Shostrom

An artist new to me - Ann Shostrom lives and works in New York, and her educational background is painting. She "paints" on cloth, and stitches sometimes too. Her sewn and dyed constructions combine formalist abstraction, social content, and handmade craft.

Large works made up her recent show:

Book du jour

It's known as "the naughty book" - not only does it refuse to stay closed, but as you can see there are a lot of gnaughts inside -

The materials are sequin waste base for the hooked cover; black wool; strips of thin clear plastic bag; pages of thin clear plastic bag; black cotton thread. The plastic may be biodegradable? It needs some sort of jacket or container - probably lightproof - yet its main quality is the tactility, the squishyness, so the container might be a bag of some sort.

Book of (photos of) books

A discovery in the library - "A Book of Books" by Abelardo Morrell. "Abelardo Morell's camera transforms the recesses of the world into something even more shadowy. The fact that what he finds in these shadows is quite ordinary - books, kids' toys, a paper bag - makes the results magically disorienting and precarious" it says on hiswebsite - and also "Morell thinks big by keeping his focus small ... Morell has a mocking, adventurous spirit that shows no sign of being jaded by the remarkable strangeness of being here on earth".

The books in his book range from the ordinary (made extraordinary) -
via children's books - a story seen all at once, needing closer examination and/or deconstruction -
to glimpses of the strange things that happen when pages open to reveal what's on them -
and when book meets book -
"A Tale of Two Cities" - tells itself -
Sometimes it's the camera and what it can do that's the star of the show (or is that hand moving faster than we can see?) -
In the introduction, Nicholson Baker says: "In the old black-and-white TV series, Superman, when he needed to pass through a wall, would put his palms against it and lean, frowning. Gradually his caped form would merge with the plaster, pass through lath and two-by-fours, and then reappear in the next room. It wasn't as easy as flying, apparently, but it could be done.

Reading works in a similar way. You press your mind, your forehead, against the beginning of a book, the cool cover of it, appreciating its impenetrability. It is rectangular and thick, heavy enough to stop a bullet or press a leaf flat. It will, you think, never let you through.

And then you begin to lean into it, applying a little attentive pressure, and the early pages begin to curl back with a soft, radish-slicing sound, and you're in. You're in the book.

...

"Pages, for the most part, live out their long lives in the dark, keeping hidden what inky burdens they bear, pressed tightly against their neighbors, communicating nothing, until suddenly, like the lightbulb in the refrigerator that seems to be always on but almost never is, one of them is called upon to speak. And it does."

(Morrell's camera obscura work is interesting too!)

Book du jour

Another "audible" book - a whisper of pages turning ...
The static caused by the rubbing of plastic on plastic picks up little bits of this 'n' that - which gives rise to a whole new train of thought.

This week at college

Tuesday: the midpoint review for the fulltimers. We had a few minutes to look around at the various books ("one item each") and then each was discussed in turn. The maker wasn't allowed to say anything, and everyone else was encouraged to contribute to the discussion.

Some common themes: who is the audience; what did the maker intend; does it need more information attached to it; consider cultural aspects; how will the audience engage with the work; what form does the idea need to go into; is it doing what it wants to do; where will it be installed, what is the context, will that affect the meaning; how can the display be informed by the idea of the piece; how important is process, eg where you were when you did it; what's the most important element; do the materials support the subject matter; do the images enhance or distract from the text; what is the audience being asked to do.

Afterwards, a cup of tea ... or something stronger -
Wednesday: some screen printing in the morning, mostly using pale grey -
Building up the background sheets -
Some closeups of my favourite bits -
Karen was teaching simple binding, and inspiring people to make tiny books - sewin into a matchbox, for example -
Or with a matchstick piano-hinge -
The lecture was by Faisal Abdu'Allah, who has a sideline in barbering (a performance art??) and draws on the subjects and physical properties of the barbershop space. His "Heads of State" piece deals with gun crime, and "Goldfinger" with the big men in organised crime. His work evolves from the interface of photography, the printed image and lens-based installations. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1993 in printmaking; his work "appropriates iconography from popular culture to constantly reposition values and ideologies pertaining to representation".

Thanks to a scratchy pen and low lighting in the lecture room, my notes are almost unreadable - but on looking at his website after hearing him talk, I must say it makes a lot more sense than when I looked at it before. It's not just that "we" (anyone new to a certain format of art, or to the work of a new-to-us artist) like to hear the story about the piece - we need that background, that bit of context, before we can pull our own meanings out of it.

Another view of the talk is on Chris's blog.

Thursday: a longer session of screen printing, with these premixed colours -
The wallpaper effect! -
The sheet on the right is probably finished - I need to go through and identify the ones that still need more doing -
These are still looking a bit sparse -
Overprinting some tube maps with "journey lines" - these will travel to the Leeds Artists Book Fair next weekend, where Camberwell has a table -

Book du jour

At about 3" square, the needlebook Sue made for me is a tiny treasure - thank you, Sue!

Crossed Structure Binding

In July, while attending every possible workshop for making books, I went to one on crossed structure binding - a technique invented by Carmencho Arregui in the early 1990s. (Somehow we think that because books/codexes have been around for so long, so have all the possible ways of binding them.)

The finished look of my results owe a lot to accident, and I haven't used the structure since then.

Do have a look at Carencho's website - http://www.outofbinding.com/index.htm - she's invented other interesting structures as well!

And I love the idea of using "parchment croissants" for a four-hole sewing, which you can see here. Also on that page - the idea of protecting a paper cover with a strip of fabric glued on the edge. And a double cover, hiding the sewing. Simple ideas to get the mind racing...

Calico pattern

While writing about Calico pattern blue-and-white china, in regard to Paul Scott's lecture, I remembered this casserole, bought in the late 70s. It was on a high shelf and felt strangely heavy ... you can see why. Memorable stones, waiting to be put in the garden - or failing that, window boxes.

The Calico pattern is similar to the Laura Ashley wallpaper in the bedroom in 1976, in the little house in Holmbridge (Yorkshire), with glossy white woodwork - including the wooden ceiling. Finally we found a dark blue carpet. The room looked lovely - especially with my first patchwork quilt on the bed - many shades of blue, darkest round the edges (a bit like life, really...).

Scientist vs. artist?

You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were and I say, 'Why not?'

--George Bernard Shaw

Image is from here (look closely).