Mapwork

At the summer school workshop, Helen mentioned map symbols as a source of ideas, and recommended looking at foreign maps. Several days later, what should turn up out of a heap of papers but the book of map exercises -

It opened to the page of symbols - on US and Canadian maps -

This fascinating little schoolbook must date to the 1960s - this map shows a station on the DEW line in northern Canada - Distant Early Warning of attack from Russia -

Paean to a bus stop

Print by Martin Grover - who has also done other riffs on London's bus stop signs - among his "ephemeral scenes from the passing world".

Mission Control Central

In terms of "organisation", one of the most useful things I did was to gather files for two of my "projects" into these boxes - and label them.

They sit above the desk, and can almost be reached down in one simple movement of the left hand - were it not for the pressure of the leaning cookbooks etc.

Back to those file boxes though - the labels are important, in that they are a reminder to file everything that relates to them immediately. (CQ=Contemporary Quilt; ESE=European Science Editing, journal of EASE, the European Association of Science Editors). I had to check what was in the unmemorable unlabelled - and unused! - box - it is now a repository for the older leaflets from the overflowing "exhibitions" file.

It's interesting how taking a photo makes you see your accustomed environment afresh - don't we edit out a lot as we use the spaces every day! Obviously some of my books and papers need to be moved elsewhere - and are those folders full of pamphlets really necessary....

The basket behind the computer is right within my sight, constantly, but it's invisible because it's a hodgepodge of items that don't have places of their own. I do my best to ignore it...how much (unnoticed) mental energy is that act of ignoring actually using?

It will probably take all of 15 minutes to make a "home" for those bits and pieces; and having a proper place for them will probably be as thrilling as it was to put the labelled boxes on the shelf, in easy reach. That small bit of organisation has really made a difference to my efficiency (and peace of mind) ... now I can deal with CQ and ESE matters immediately - even if it's only putting bits of paper in one retrievable place to be dealt with later.

Thought for the day - significance

"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it." - Mahatma Ghandi

Book du jour - cases

Simple slipcases - there are some tricky bits, for instance, getting the flaps the right length, and allowing for the thickness of the paper when the flaps overlap. I'm still practising that!It's good to make many at one sitting - you do get quicker at it, and the results do improve. The biggest case was made first; the long one was the third - still not perfect, but definitely an improvement. (Background is screenprinting by Janet.)

A case for a long thin book - the top one is how not to do it -
and this is why -
All these books are from last week's replication of the Dieter Roth's Daily Mirror books.

The writing on the wall

In this case, the entire text of Thomas More's Utopia -written on the old Eastern Electricity building in Norwich in 2006 by artist Rory Macbeth - all 44,000 words.... The building closed in the late 1990s; it was used as an "art outpost" and was pulled down in 2009, taking what was left of Utopia with it. See more photos here.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world

Ryo Shimizu has used the strokes from japanese characters to make english words. See more of his work on his website.

Sketchbook project - the outcome

The "travelwriting" project submitted to the Sketchbook Project back in January has now been digitised and can be perused in all its continuity, here - "94 journeys on 42 days." At the end there are some maps that fold out to show the routes - but of course they don't do that in the digitised version, only when handled in reality. Before sending it off I made a photocopy of the pages but neglected to copy the maps - they were a bit of a last-minute addition.

On the bus

Eyes revisited

Moving north, upstairs in the British Museum, you pass through the crowds in the "mummy rooms" and then come to a corridor before reaching the back stairs. This Coptic scroll is in that corridor, and I always stop and have another look at those eyes...

Long and thin

My ruminations on the form of the book have started to include scrolls. Immediately you think of scrolls-to-be-read (especially religious ones) and the wonderful Chinese scrolls commemorating the journeys of the emperor. Not to mention Japanese scrolls and all that's involved in making them. Then you start looking at "long thin things/pages that can be rolled up".

One textile artist who has used the scroll format is Jilly Edwards - these are from High Cross House -A scroll by Valerie Campbell-Harding ... not quite what I'm thinking of, but interesting ...

Something a bit more abstract - "Elements of landscape" by Elizabeth Brimelow; see more of her work here -

Up my street - dinosaurs and maps

Quite a long way up my street - along the W7 bus route in fact - local landmarks make up the Crouch End dinosaur, by Andrew Council and Jonathan Edwards. More about the project is here.

This site includes a drawn map of Stroud Green by Michael, age 7. Which reminds me, must go see Hand-Drawn London at the Museum of London before 11 September.

Underground art

"Display your work on the London Underground" says the email.

They print the poster (if your image, submitted by 25 July, is accepted), display it for two weeks - and you pay ... according to station -

Not to be confused with the "official" Art on the Underground. But ... exposure is exposure, at any price ...

Book du jour

During the mark-making exercise at the CQ summer school, I put my marks (based on separate elements in Christo's Running Fence) on several separate sheets of paper - and when it was time to stop, realised that the result was ... a book ....


We then cut our sheets of paper into strips, and rearranged them in "strippy quilt" format. I doubt mine will ever get translated into cloth, but it was an interesting design exercise.

Also, it's given me a starting point for developing sequence in other ways.

Little square books

Making these is addictive. I have two sizes of punches, 3/4" and 1" -

Once enough squares have been punched, they're knocked up and go into the clamp to get covered in PVA glue, and then a piece of scrim is carefully laid on and gently pushed into the glue -

It's left to dry and the scrim gets a trim. Finito! This is essentially the same process as "perfect binding" used for paperbacks.

After punching the magazine has an entirely different character -

Results so far - look what a difference the type of paper and number of pages makes -
Royal Academy magazine 2003, 8 pages cut into 5cm squares

Times supplement, Dec 2005 - about 400 pages, 2.5cm square

Metro newspaper June 2011 -- about 600 pages 2.5cm square

Art Quarterly 1997 - 400 pages 2cm square, about 500 pages 2.5cm square

I have several more types of art magazine on hand to add to the "library". I wonder if they'll be identifiable in this small format.

Art and aristocracy

While I was making more "little square books" from various old art magazines, an article in a 1991 issue of Crafts magazine caught my eye. It's written by Peter Dormer about ceramicist/sculptor Michael Flynn, whose work I've come to appreciate over the years. Dormer says:

"Flynn is not an eccentric but he is a complex man - a sculptor, a ceramist, an Irishman, a lover of words, a reader of serious European novels and an explorer of myth and legend. He takes art very seriously - and indeed has sacrificed much for it - he has put his money, and perhaps, at times, his family and house on the line in order to study and work. In some ways he is aristocratic. He does what he feels he has to do, not what other people think he ought to do. He is naturally, not deliberately, at odds with conventional middle-class life. This is rare, especially in contemporary craft and art where the practitioners might pose as dotty individualists but are really middle class to the very core of their mortgage commitments."

Artist as complex person - that rather goes without saying; but artist as aristocrat - ? Both terms are so heavily loaded ... something to ponder.

CQ summer school

Venue: Belstead House, with views of the Suffolk countryside. My class was hand-stitch with Helen Parrott; other tutors were Jo Budd and Linda Maynard, doing exciting things with screens and colour and composition. Here's Helen with the class, showing some large work (awkward to bring) via her website -

And some of the many samples she did bring - a vocabulary of loopy stitches -

One of the exercises set was to choose images from a large selection. What to do with them was revealed gradually - first we laid them out, then we wrote about them for a few minutes, and then -interestingly- we went round and wrote down a few words, on post-it notes, about the images chosen by everyone else. This showed that other people saw our own selections with "different eyes" - some of the comments were certainly unexpected!

We used one or two of the images as sources for mark-making, and the results were torn in strips and combined to make, on paper, a design for a "strippy quilt".

But mostly we worked on our samplers, as Helen showed us a variety of approaches to stitching. Here are the different choices and individual results -
The first thing we did was to outline a quilting design, or leaves from the garden, with quilting stitches. (I added the french knots much later.) Then, more running stitch - to form ripples. I was determined to make my ripples look like sand patterns, and had to fill quite a few pages of sketchbook with "scribble" before working out how to do it.

Moving along - loop stitch, with different threads behaving differently. Then yet another loopy thread snaking between running-stitch spirals, which can be pulled tight to make a very 3D effect. My "radiant circle" has the knots showing in the centre, and finally, more loops in different threads, some cut to form knotted stitches.

The discussion sessions included a very useful list of ways to stay motivated about making work -

I got very involved with making the "sampler", especially those ripples, and didn't need to use many of the fabrics I'd brought along. But running stitch proved useful for putting together these tubes of my "tube lines" -- I tried out different types of fabric (satin, velvet) between the little rectangles, and different widths of tube. Probably if I carry this further, the main part of the tube will be plain fabric, with the printed areas occurring sporadically -A view of another classroom -
Closeup of the embroidery on the wall - a bed-hanging, probably -
Outside, screen-printed delights drying -
Why is it that as soon as you get home, you lose that focus?

Book du jour

Carrying on with the theme of gluing squares together, I used a square punch and the Metro free newspaper. The squares are 1" (2.5cm) -- and the stack of them measures 3.5cm. Again, pva glue and scrim form the spine.

The little book doesn't sit there quietly, it insists on fanning out.

The holey pages, even when trimmed, didn't make up into anything worth doing - but they did allow me to figure out how many pages are in the little book ---- at least 600.

On the road again

Sunshine and shadow

Road traffic incident

Skyline, Burford

Book du jour

Today's book is inspired by the little (2cm x 2cm) books Dieter Roth made by chopping up a copy of the Daily Mirror newspaper.But my book is 5cm square and comes from an image-heavy part of a copy of RA Magazine, 2000.

The shiny paper made the pages slippery to cut - and I knew that despite my best efforts, the edges of the book would be irregular. The strips butt up against the long ruler and the square ruler is used to cut along. It's all lined up on the grid.
Perhaps using the entire issue would have made a cuboid book, but this thickness will have to do for now. A rubber band held it together in one direction, and the pads of post-it notes make the bundle thick enough to fit into the clamp. PVA was applied to the edge and some scrim set into that.
With the glue dry and the scrim trimmed, the book is rather fascinating to look through -
(The paper clip is for scale.) It would be interesting to try this at different scales, and with different materials.