Quilt inspiration

Although I don't use "people" in my quilts or other artwork, seeing this work by LA-based artist Phoebe Beasley suggested a way of doing so -- or rather, a starting point.

"Aunt Sue's Stories" was used as an illustration in a book of poems by Langston Hughes.

Sculpture as book as sculpture...

Work by Montana sculptor Kate Hunt. She uses "basic materials which are first cut and compressed, then tied and coated, and finally ordered into grids or decorative sconce-like forms. The compacted, sheared newsprint can assume the form of a flag as readily as an abstract geometric form." (Image from here.)

The High Line, a lifeline

In 1934 trains ran along the High Line through Manhattan, bringing carcasses to the meat packing district. With the increase in road transport, it became abandoned - but recently has come to life again, as a park. The tracks and weeds were left, and railings and paths added. The second section has just opened; when complete, it will be 1.5 miles long - an artery for nature in the city. See the photo story here.

Danger signs - Africa

This is from one of those collections of photos that's making the rounds by email. The mind boggles...

Art I like - Ann Hamilton

photo ©2011, Fredrik Marsh. All Rights Reserved

Raised lettering on the cork floor of the William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library, Ohio State University. It's a permanent installation called Verse and it's by installation artist Ann Hamilton. As it says here:

"The text is an alphabetic intersection of three different accountings of world history, which are arranged in a literary concordance. The spine along the north-south axis is composed of 299 words, A to Z, adapted from a White River Sioux story entitled The End of the World. The east-west lines intersect this story with prose fragments from A Little History of the World by E. H. Gombrich (1936) and Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone by Eduardo Galeano (2009).

"According to the library’s press release, Verse in its form and woven organization is a reflection of how the reader intersects with and culls information and meaning from the library’s collection."

The text is in the form of a mesostic (an invention of John Cage) - vertical phrases intersecting horizontal text.

Cork, though? - won't readers' feet wear down the raised letters, over time? Will that make pathways, desire lines...?

See more of Ann Hamilton's work here and on her website. Her 2009 installation human carriage at the Guggenheim sounds wonderful -

'Her formal description reads “Installation of cloth, wire, bells, books, string, pipe, pulleys, pages, cable, gravity, air, and sound,” and the Guggenheim Museum described its working thus: “Hamilton devises a mechanism that traverses the entire Guggenheim balustrade, taking the form of a white silk ‘bell carriage’ with Tibetan bells attached inside. As the cage spirals down along the balustrade, the purifying bells ring, awakening viewers. The mechanism is hoisted back up to a post at the uppermost Rotunda Level 6, where an attendant exchanges weights composed of thousands of cut-up books that counter the pulley system that propels the mechanism itself." '

Ghostly

A photo from the 1840s, from the excellent and varied blog of the graphics collection of the Princeton University Library. This calotype of St Andrews was taken by David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (1821-1848), pioneers of photography.

Fairy tales told in symbols

The Swiss graphic designer Warja Honegger-Lavater (1913-2007) created the first of her fairy tales told in symbols, William Tell, in 1962. Parisian publisher Maeght supported her work for the next 30 years. (Image from here; see more of her work here.)

Un-writing (Brian Singer)

In crossing out text, San Francisco artist Brian Singer has left - and thereby has highlighted - what some might wish to scrub out - contentious words, from Catcher in the Rye (above; image from here) and from Huckleberry Finn ("212 Slaves" below; image from here).

One of these contentious words was so at the time, in literature at any rate; the other was common parlance. Their roles are reversed today -- that's how language changes.

Which of today's commonly-used words will be banned or abhorred in 50 or 100 years? Probably ... words that pass our lips every day now, and we don't give a second thought to ...

"12 months in Shanghai"

The artist is Caitlin Reilly. The dimensions given are 42cm x 26cm x 6.5cm.

Current reading

The library books include Antony Gormley's drawings.

Floored

Came across this work by Gordon Matta Clark - Bronx Floor - which was in the recent exhibition at the Barbican art gallery. One of the original "earth artists", Matta Clark is best known for works in which he opened up and tore apart houses. He died in 1978 at the age of 35.

It's no surprise to learn that his degree was in architecture. There's a long article about the 1974 Anarchitecture exhibition, and his relation to Le Corbusier, at the Tate Papers site - here's a short excerpt -

"One of Le Corbusier’s prime aims was to abolish the hidden infrastructure that lay beneath the streets, along with its unofficial inhabitants, making conduits for all services easily accessible. In contrast, Matta-Clark saw the underground as one of the last repositories of history in North America that had not disappeared under parking lots, and worried that it was now under threat from the ever-deeper foundations of new buildings. Working within the influence of the surrealist tradition, he celebrated the unconscious, the irrational in the urban environment. When the forces of control break down – most noticeably in the case of 1970s New York, the garbage disposal services – the rat, a denizen of the underworld, emerges into the light of day. Instead of causing us to recoil in horror, Matta-Clark suggests with dark humour, the rat, along with the shadowy unexplored regions it inhabits, should be cherished."

Roof lines

(From our africa)

Collection

"Egg-cups in the shape of birds" emerged from a dusty box at the back of the cupboard ...
... and were returned to the box to gather dust for a few years more ....

Unregarded randomness

A wonderful accumulation of marks on the cloth covering the screen printing table.

Jubilee line, end to end

After a morning at college, I spent the afternoon on the Jubilee Line, doing some TravelWriting. The Overground connects with it at Canada Water, one of the "new" stations, added between Charing Cross and Stratford in 1999.

Approaching Stanmore, I looked up and saw all these lovely lines of cabling -
The western, or is that northern, end of the line -

Stanmore station (opened 1932), not very busy in the middle of the afternoon -

Along the stairs, "Linear", a work by Dryden Goodwin as part of "Art on the Underground" - he drew portraits of 60 Jubilee Line staff. You can watch the films of the portraits being made here.

The highly visible and rather colourful cables on the open-air sections of the line are a nice counterpoint to the grim-encrusted cables along the underground sections -

Sixty minutes later, the other end of the line - Stratford, gateway to the 2012 Olympics -
Beyond the lines, Tube Lines offers "skills training" (but didn't deliver the 2010 upgrade of the Jubilee line in time) -
The result - Willesden Green to Canary Wharf, printed and ready to make into bags -

This week at college - textile printing

No seminar this Tuesday; instead, a trip to the V&A with Karen to see all the current exhibitions (South African photography; Yamamoto; The Art of Beauty), not to mention a close examination of the shop. That, and all the coffee, had my head spinning!

Back to printing on Wednesday - using it while it's still there - the textile studio is closing this month, which I'm more than sad about. So - some more printed envelope interiors -
In conversation with one of the BA students, I said I drew my lines while travelling on the tube, and she said she does tapestry while travelling. Both our projects incorporate elements of chance or randomness. While clearing up I was surprised to see her reappear, bearing this leaf - she explained that the tunnels are made by miner weevils, who are trapped inside the leaf, and thought this might relate to my project. Thanks, Dee! -
On Thursday the studio was full of BA students finishing off their projects ... bags, wallpaper, teeshirts ... the place was awash with teeshirts -

I settled into my favourite place and between printing fabric for bags, did some more single-sided "pathways" -

Some bags-to-be, drying -

The range currently consists of Northern, Jubilee, Piccadilly lines, bus route 6, and the Overground -

Grid 3D

"Notepad" - a fine bit of laser cutting by Sarah Sze (from here) -
Reminiscent of her "Fire Escape" (from here) -
Sze links small bits of "information" into a complex network.

What's that again?

The mirror trick

In the old loo at the V&A. Wonderful tiles!

Book du jour - unfinished

The most recent book follows on from the workshop with Ellen Bell on Saturday - and isn't quite finished - I want to record my thoughts on why....

Ellen works by cutting words from carefully selected old books, and compiles them into images, often from family photographs. See her work here. We were to bring "a book" to the workshop. I brought an A-Z - nothing precious - to cut up, thinking to combine the maps with the printed envelope interiors.

Ellen worked with each of us individually, helping to tease out what we intended to do and (importantly) why. It became clear to me as the bookmaking progressed that I wasn't clear on the why of this combination - so, how could the reader be sure of what they were looking at, and why would they bother continue looking?

The envelopes quickly fitted together into "a book" - with interleaving possibilities, and even pockets with windows. At first the windows were intriguing - but in the end I found them distracting. Also, I switched from using road maps - which had nothing to do with "my lines" and the names of tube stations - putting bits of the tube map under the windows instead. Nor did I follow up on the suggestion to have a tangle or roads (or tube lines) spilling out of the pockets. (Something for next time?)

Instead of using the roads in the A-Z as planned, I ended up using the list of areas of London, cutting them into alphabetical blocks to cover up the names of the tube stations. Now that I'm using tube maps instead of road maps, it would be good to intersperse names of tube stations. There is scope for this - I just need to do it -

Elements of the cover come from both road book and tube map - too confusing -

At first the book structure was "messy", with raw edges of envelopes and even torn bits (though I tried to be careful when opening up the envelopes) - so, tucking those in and gluing them down was an improvement, though it did away with the "blank" pages between the printed ones.

The contents aren't right - not what you'd expect from the cover.

It's all very confusing. I might come back to this later, but for now, it's been a valuable lesson. I didn't start from the right place - the envelope isn't the right vehicle here.

Doubly dangerous

Notting Hill tube station.

Art I like - Jane Dalton

Jane obtained her BA in drawing in 2009. Above is "Light Material", 2010; read about her "Dark Matter" diptych here."Jane Dalton’s drawings are concerned with the repetition and symmetries found within the natural world. The blank ‘page’ is transformed by her slow accumulation of small, repeated marks. Each mark is meticulously placed, distinct and separate – there are no collisions. The painstaking work invites a slow reading. Time is needed to unravel and interpret the ambiguous surfaces."

Also, she says on her website: "My aesthetic is austere. I often use a very small dot or line. This references both the Islamic Geometers initial mark - a symbol of 'source' or 'origin' and the unimaginably small point or 'singularity' from which the universe expanded."

Yet another thing to do with old books

Use the pages for "tonal" collage - selecting from a variety of sources, paying attention to typeface, size of type, and leading/spacing. Graham White explains how he uses this as an "semi-automatic" form of drawing here.

Close encounter of the Miro kind

To Tate Modern to see the Miro exhibition (you can just about see the posters for it) -Inside, plenty of works assembled from all over.The concise guide did a good job on the political context of the works, and stylistic developments, and it was instructive to see the development of his personal vocabulary of images. For me, the Barcelona series of 50 lithographs was terrific (some were shown on transfer paper and after printing), and the triptyches were wonderful -

Another favourite was a late, large painting - Fireworks. And a few simple drawings.

On the way home, these Miro-like markings on the road -