Art I like - Ana Hatherly

Part of my research for the writing/drawing essay is the work of Portuguese poet, novelist, essayist and visual artist Ana Hatherly. Her training is in music, cinematography and literature, and she's been publishing poety since 1958. Her work is based on continuous movement between the drawn and the written, which results sometimes in abstract calligraphic works and sometimes in visual poetry. She began her research into the field of concrete poetry in 1959, beginning to work with experimental poetry in 1965. The 1969 exhibition Anagramas (Anagrams) marks the start of her incursion into the domain of the visual arts. She calls herself "an artist of the written line." The Gulbenkian Foundation has 157 of her graphic works in its collection, both monochrome and technicolour, most with "writing" of some sort.

Untitled, undated; exhibited at the Drawing Centre, New York, in 1994 

More photos at http://librodeartista.ning.com/photo/una-conversacion-con-ana-18/next?context=user, including pages from one of her visual books.

It's not proving easy to find much written in English about her. http://thecribsheet-isabelinho.blogspot.com/search/label/Ana%20Hatherly has a discussion of "O Escritor", including this image, a combination of typography (code with no meaning) and handwriting (meaning in a personal code) -

Informative words about her role in Portuguese concrete poetry movement come from "The hand's own intelligence" by artist and art historian Ruth Rosengarten:

"Hatherly published her first book of poetry, Um Ritmo Perdido (A Lost Rhythm) in 1958. She began exploring the potential of poetry in the 1960s, joining the Group of Experimental Poetry, whose members were among the first to write concrete poetry in Portugal. Concrete poetry depends on the notion that a poem is, above all, ‘a constellation of signs on a white page.’ The reading of the poem is always underpinned by its visual representation, so that the poem is, in the first place, a kind of drawing. It was in this context that Hatherly began her arduous research into writing. Examining Baroque poetry and Alexandrine verse during her long and distinguished academic career, she has found in western culture an ancient tradition linking writing as an activity that produces meaning with writing as pictorial mark. During the 20th century, this tradition was again explored by Dada and surrealist poets, and later, in concrete poetry. Soon, Hatherly began to look further afield, away from western culture. In the 1960s, a friend gave her a dictionary of Chinese characters, both new and archaic. ‘I began to copy these drawings – to me they were just drawings, because I couldn’t read Chinese, and anyhow, their meaning wasn’t what interested me,’ she observes.

"The genesis of Hatherly’s pictorial art lies in forgetting what she knows and reinventing writing anew each time. ‘How do I do that? By making writing illegible. I always say that what is needed is to see the writing, and not what is written.’ She began copying the manual of Chinese characters: ‘I copied and copied, until my hand itself become comprehending, intelligent.’ It is, then, on the basis of the hand’s own intelligence that Ana Hatherly constructs her drawn and painted images. Her idiom is profoundly indebted to calligraphy, and if it appears to be governed by a certain unconscious drive, she never abandons a transfiguring clarity."

I wonder if works like this untitled one from 1971 (in the Gulbenkian collection) are based on the Chinese characters -

From her 2005 book "Fibrilacoes", here's a "fibrillation" of interlocked/interknit lines -

Seen only online, it's impossible to read, but the point is that this is visual poetry and thereby conveys its meaning - especially to non-Portuguese speakers - in that way. I feel the words would give a further clue to the shapes used ... which at the moment (influenced by the medical connotation of "fibrillation" - fast and erratic heartbeat) look to me like red blood cells clotting.

To end this post, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Invaded by Time", 1991 -

River names

Serendipity led me to this map of what rivers are called - it's on the "Strangemaps" site, which also has French wines set out like a map of a subway system, and much more.

Stream, river, creek, brook, wash, run arroyo, rio, fork, kill, swamp, slough -- and anabranches, distributaries....

The power of positive thinking

... and of negative thinking: negative expectations of treatment can be bad for your health outcome. This is the "nocebo" effect discussed in Penny Sarchet's Wellcome Trust science writing prize essay, which you can read here.

More generally: "If you think you can, or you think you can't - you're right." (Henry Ford)

Spare time

What do you do when you suddenly find yourself with time to spare? On the way to college this week I found that I was earlier than expected -- at last, a chance to visit the jolly-looking caf near Vauxhall station that I'd seen many times from the top of the bus -

It lived up to expectations - friendly and bright, and it had a nice heap of magazines to browse through over coffee and a sandwich -

The Italian fashion mag I was looking at had some great photos. Are those birds or are they locusts -

And just what is going on here -

Stopped in my tracks

...by recent round raindrops 

held by high humidity

ephemeral, and beyond capture.

Art I like - Abdoulaye Konate

The subjects of Abdoulaye Konate's work include the encroachment of the Sahel, deforestation, living under dictatorship, and the impact of AIDS. Originally a painter, he now works in textile installations.

Strips of cotton - a readily available medium - have become his signature style, as in the window installation at Rivington Place, London, 7 Dec to 3 Jan, which "communicates global diversity issues directly to the street"  -

"These large expanses of fabric play host to stiched and woven symbols and swathes of colour employed to powerful effect. Here he reflects on the relationship in Africa between power and religion and the position of Christianity and Islam within political and cultural life."

Konate studied in Bamako (Mali) and in Cuba, and lives and works in Bamako. See more work here.

This week at college

Just the one thing for us part-timers, a seminar to discuss our current work with a visiting tutor. We went to the library and looked again at all the work, discussing among other things how context and presentation can change the feel and "reading" of it -

and then back up to the seminar room to talk about our work in the exhibition, and anything we might have brought along.

I'd made yet more changes to the Route book, but it didn't seem to make any sort of sense to anyone, so I guess it wasn't much of an idea. Or, maybe just an idea whose time hadn't come... Or, maybe its context and presentation needed to be different...

A bus across Vauxhall Bridge

to Chelsea College of Art, where muralist David Tremlett was in conversation with Andrew Wilson and Stephen Farthing, beneath a slideshow of Tremlett's work -

Tremlett's murals are made of pigment rubbed onto the wall and sealed with a coat of resin. In a short film about the making of the "Drawing for Free Thinking" mural on the Manton staircase at Tate Britain he explained the process in detail.

Light at the end of the tunnel

I have a space to work again. An hour of macro-organisation (including a lot of dust removal) has reclaimed it from among the spread of carpentry tools and heaps of fabric and papers.

In other parts of the room ... avalanches of chaos, many bags and boxes needing micro-organisation. But at least I can sit at a clear table, and not have to see it. Bit by bit, it will be reorganised into boxes and cupboards. Things relating to bookmaking and bagmaking will be kept closest at hand, as these are the projects currently on the go. (That's as far as I've got with an actual plan for taming it all.)

Meanwhile, in the other room, the lily among the ornamental cabbages on the gilded breadbox has burst into bloom -

Book du jour - "Route"

The college has a great letterpress facility and I was thinking of giving it a go ... but after spending all (all!) of Sunday on the computer making an eight-page book(let), I'm having second thoughts. Every page needed a thousand, or million, typographical and layout decisions - and attentive checking, not least of the list of streets against the atlas.

12 iterations later, it might be nearly there (but while uploading these photos, I've seen two further things that need correction).

Random inside pages - from versions 1, 2, 7, 9 - in some versions you could start at either the front or the back, then turn the book upside down and read it in the other direction

At one point I found myself moving a block of text 0.15 cm (would the technical term be a smidgen, or a tad?) to get it perfectly aligned on the page..... there is great danger of getting toooo fussy, of not knowing when to stop.

But the point about letterpress, or rather this little exercise, is that I have a greater respect for the skills of book designers and the patience of typographers!

About a year ago I had the idea to map some car journeys Tony (and I) make repeatedly. Finally it's happened.

I traced the route for the weekly grocery shopping from the A-Z -- not a long route, but it fell on several pages of the book; at least it fit easily on an A4 sheet.

Home is at lower left, Finchley Road on the right. The book lists the side streets in order, with "directions for travel" interspersed - location of traffic lights, when to turn left and when to turn right.

Because of the "organic" way roads evolved in England, there can be more sideroads on one side - so the directions to turn right, or whatever, fall at different points on the page

The route map literally stretches across the centre page, between parking the car and setting off on the return journey

Again because of the eccentric evolution of the city, one list is longer than the other

So the words give a different picture from the map - they are more like the "map" that a nomad might carry around - a nomad's map might be a story-menomic or even a song, or might depend on recognising certain natural features, perhaps the shape of hills on the skyline.

Without words on the map, and as it is a route without a context, my map is hardly "modern". Yet you could find your way from A to B simply by counting the side streets, and turning where shown.

There are implications for gender differences in map reading and navigation. I vaguely remember a tv programme where the people who were given verbal directions for getting through a maze did better than those who were given a map, and the programme also dealt with gender differences. 

There's a basic contradiction, a "reading difficulty": In the list, the roads that go off to the left are on the left side, and those that go off to the right are on the right side of the spread. But put yourself in the car. You are travelling forward - left to right, in this case - but you are reading "backward", ie down the page, away from the direction of travel.

This idea of showing the left side and right side of the road comes from coaching maps - for example this one from 1782 - which shows mileage and turn-offs between Melton Mowbray and Wakefield. These maps operated on a simple premise - when you are in the coach, the road stretches out in a straight line before you. Thus a map could be shown as a basically straight line, showing towns and landmarks passed en route. You start at bottom left and read up and over.

Now I'm thinking of how this fits into my "journey lines" project....

The idea resurfaced because the Road Rug is now finished -

The rug started as a fanciful compilation of parts of "real routes" - car journeys to the DIY store, to the grocery store(s), to various museums and galleries. Often there are roundabouts and other intersections, and often the route has a way there and a different route back, making a loop -

I chopped up an overlaid these for the design of the rug.


With the rug finished, and having read and thought about maps in the meantime, I decided to revisit the routes and finally make a book... and then to tell the story in the most jumbled way possible....

Language maps

A detail from "Land and Language" by Chris Drury, resulting from a canoe trip around North Uist in the Hebrides and exhibited there in 2010. "Language and meaning and history are embedded in this now sparsely populated place," says the description of the exhibition.

Drury's mushrooms, too, use words - written rather than printed - to form the visual image. Poison Pie (2000;  82 cm square) consists of words related to the effects of poisonous fungi (see more here).

Other work containing writing is based on the ice sheets of Antarctica, following a visit in 2006-7 - Everything Nothing (88x78cm) consists of handwriting over an inkjet print.

I like the way Drury moves from macrocosm to microcosm, and uses a variety of media. And he works in a variety of places - installing "cloud chambers" here and there, making art in/of Antarctica, dew ponds, carbon sinks, and most recently with the San Bushmen. He operates on the borders of many disciplines, not the least of which is science, making unexpected  connections.

"Usually each new work has to start from zero and it may mean that I end up using a process, medium or material for which I have no prior experience, so I look for experts to help me. My work therefore has no particular style or medium. Its cohesion rests in the connections it makes," he says.

Art I like - Sylvia Heyden

A recent film about weaver Silvia Heyden could be available on DVD soon - The Tapestry Life of Silvia Heyden, a film by Kenny Dalsheimer; read an article about it here and see a trailer here - "a year of weaving inspired by a river".

Weaving has, for Heyden, an interesting relation to drawing: "She believes strongly that tapestry exists as its own art form which should not be compared to paintings or created from drawings or photographs, but which should instead evolve by looking at the world through “weaver’s eyes”. Tapestry designs should be composed using motifs that communicate movement, unlike other art forms such as painting, and she describes her creative process as a reversal – not weaving as she draws but instead drawing as she weaves, filtering out anything “unweaveable”. The technical realities of weaving are not impediments, but are challenges that stimulate creativity."

Intriguing

No idea what this is - something that turned up during an image search - but I find it very intriguing and full of book-possibility. Developing the idea might have to wait, though - the studio is still in considerable disorder, pending shelves being built in the "empty" cupboard, allowing things to be moved off the workbench and floor. Soon, soon.....

Hares

The Barry Flanagan exhibition at Tate Britain shows his early works - up to 1982, when he was just getting going on the series of hares for which he is so well known - this one, for example -

 They were inspired by this book, which was first published in 1972 -

It's fascinating - not just the natural history, but the hare in mythology - the origins of its association with the moon and with fire, and why hare meat is held in low esteem...

It even has information potentially relevant to my writing/drawing essay topic:

"Auxiliary verbs come late in the development of language and all are derived from words of independent sense. The Egyptian 'to be' was associated with creation and had the sense of being, existing and persisting, which are in mythology often represented by the hare. Myths and picture-writing often use the same symbols.
"A symbol is a sign or object that stands, not exactly, but by association or resemblance, for something else ... as the art of writing develops the picture is adapted and used for abstract ideas."

Childhood reading

A German aunt sent me a copy of this "lustiges Bilderbuch", which is still in print  (originally published in the 1920s) -

It was a favourite of my formative years. I was fortunate to have lots of grownups who would read to me in those very young years when I had to spend a lot of time immobile.

She had no inkling that she'd grow up speaking a different language - just wanted to be able to run around again, like the bunnies going off to school -

"Kinder", spricht die Mutter Hase,

"putzt euch noch einmal die Nase

mit dem Kohlblatt-Taschentuch!

Nehmt nun Taffel, Stift und Buch!

Tunkt auch eure Schwaemmchen ein!

Sind denn eure Pfoetchen rein?"

"Ja!" - "Nun marsch, zur Schule gehn!"

"Muetterchen, auf Wiedersehn!"

Counting

Made of matchsticks by Julia Born; found here. Following the link in that post introduced me to a new term, subitizing: the rapid, accurate, and confident judgments of number performed for small numbers of items.

Book du jour - Black Book "Lucky"

"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." (Seneca)

Gilded wishbone, red silk thread, newspaper ("soulmates" and share prices) in clamshell box.

Art I like - Beatrice Coron

Beatrice Coron calls herself a storyteller. She cuts paper: "As my story is already inside the paper, I just have to remove what's not part of that story," she says.

See her TED talk here, or visit her website (from which these images come).

Her storytelling method lends itself to public art as well -

I also like her own story: "She has been, among others, a shepherdess, truck driver, factory worker, cleaning lady and a New York City tour guide. Coron has lived in France (her native country) , Egypt and Mexico for one year each, and China for two years. She moved to New York in 1985, where she reinvented herself as an artist."

Her "spelling spider" is a great concept ("a cousin of the spelling bee, but much more connected to the web")  it spins a bilingual alphabet, and knows where to put the adjective in relation to the noun in French and in English.

Is it any surprise that she makes artists books?