Book du jour - yet more inky books

Lately I've been preparing the pages of the inky books separately - here's some stitching in progress -

The ones with the wax-dipped edges speak to me ... but what are they saying?

Perhaps the white area, showing the ends of the lines (journey lines, written while travelling and screenprinted onto paper which is then saturated in ink), indicates the ends of many little journeys - ? Or maybe I just like black and white stripes!

In the recent batch are some little books (about 2"/5cm square) with stitching added before inking -

Although I'm really enjoying making these, it's time to call a halt. Enough have accumulated for a piece for the upcoming exhibition at college, which will look something like this -

The current title is Memory Overload -- brought on by a combination of our "information age" and the mere fact of increasing chronological age, with the perils that brings.

Moan on Monday - editing artspeak

With a couple of decades of critical engagement with (medical) text under my belt, I find it difficult to read "artspeak" without wanting to use slash and burn tactics on it in an effort to extract its meaning. (Though the possibility that it's meaningless has also crossed my mind occasionally.)

"The LCD screens used in the exhibition serve not only as transmitters of a digital content, but also function as material devices which are constitutive of the artwork itself. Each of the slideshows present a cycle of digitally rendered documentation stills. These cycles display a wide variety of material, including images of sculptures made by the artist, video stills and digital elements, shown in complex configuration with one another. Throughout the duration of each of the slideshows some aspects remain fixed whereas others vary from one image to the next in a seemingly arbitrary fashion."

Here's what I think it means -
As well as showing digital images, the two LCD screens are part of the artwork. The slideshows are sequences of photos of the artist's sculptures, stills from videos, and other digital elements, shown for various lengths of time, so that images on the screens seem to interact with each other.

Stripped of the buzzwords, of course it sounds less impressive. And it's so easy to get caught up in using buzzwords...

Maybe editing artspeak is like editing poetry - query the misspellings (they may be deliberate) but don't change anything - ?

Apostrophe

The greengrocer's apostrophe has made its way to Japan - as shown in this selection of Japanese signs. Delight in further punctuation schadenfreude here.

Storage idea

Seen while flipping through a magazine - and I can't remember which magazine, so can't credit the designer. Beyond being a magazine rack, something like this could help with filing and finding the right sort of paper, and could function as a print drying rack ... it needn't even make that elegant curve at the top, just as long as the wires were angled upward a bit. [Hope my resident carpenter is reading this...]

Book du jour - more inky books

An easier way to apply wax to the edges (easier than painting it on) - just dip! 

 When the pages are painted with ink, the printed lines show through the ink -

 The stitched lines in neon colours look rather like the wires inside the telephone junction boxes on the street* you sometimes see opened up for repair - conduits for information (and this project is about information overload, so it sort of fits in). As the wax pot was available, I dipped them in wax -

The newspaper underneath is getting dense with ink, as each page in each book is painted on both sides. Painting them, and letting them dry naturally, works better than dipping them in ink and then having to pry apart the pages and dry them with a hairdryer. So the books get stitched once all the pages are ready.

(*For information about British street furniture - of any sort, from signs to bollards, and traffic wardens for that matter - try this website. Finger posts, warning posts, street name plaques, traffic lights, war memorials, cattle troughs - clocks, hydrants, litter bins...)

This week's exhibitions

As there was no lecture at college this Wednesday, the afternoon was ideal for seeing a few exhibitions "downtown". First, Mira Schendel - a Brazilian artist active in the 60s and 70s, "in conversation with" several other artists of the time - Bridget Riley, Roman Opalka, Naum Gabo, Sol LeWitt, Max Bill, Agnes Martin.  The big white painting that on close inspection showed faint numbers turned out to be by Roman Opalka, whose lifelong project was to paint the numbers from one to infinity. (He began in 1965 and reached about 5.5 million before he died last year.) This picture is from earlier in his career - it's quite high contrast, and the numbers are in the 27,000s - the one in the gallery must be one of his last works - 'Detail 5558756 - 5564164'.

In the "Leather Forever" exhibition, which was really a glorified advert for expensive leather goods - albeit handmade, and with craftspeople showing how the work was done - this sample case for a shoe salesman was intriguing -

Walking up Bond Street, we were too late to pop in to Sotheby's to check out the works in the upcoming sale, but did stumble upon a photographic exhibition -

Being print-aware people, we couldn't help noticing the compressed setting of the second paragraph - almost illegible! (click to enlarge) -

"The eight international artists selected for the exhibition resist the normal parameters of the photographic medium by inventing their own cameras, appropriating and re-presenting photographs via an alternate process, subverting the purpose of the camera, wilfully destroying it or creating unique camera-less photograms. In each of their distinctive practices, the artists experiment with the boundaries of photography and subvert the central dominance of the camera." Steven Pippin's shot-in-the-back cameras made some arresting images  (photo from the exhibition review here; read how he did it here) -

Finally (elsewhere), an interesting project by Jamie Shovlin - generating covers for unpublished books -

These are titles in the Fontana Modern Masters series (1970s) that for some reason were scheduled for publication but fell by the wayside. Shovlin set up a classification system for the titles already published, based on arbitrary criteria, and used this to generate the colours for the covers - rather an astonishing concept.

The gallery bookshop had a little book from one of Shovlin's earlier exhibitions - Aggregate - which came home with me and proved very satisfying.

Book du jour - inky books

For the joint exhibition of printmakers and book arts at the college next month, I'm working to produce a critical mass of inky books. I hope there'll be a little crevice or hole somewhere in the exhibition space they can seep or cascade out of. The books are mostly palm-sized or smaller, and I'm trying to make them unique. A long afternoon yielded the five on the right, which aren't yet stitched together -

The latest batch is made from papers I screenprinted last year. Before inking individual pages (on both sides) I add graphite frottage -

The graphite shows through the ink, as does (faintly) the printing -

 Some books have edges dipped in melted wax before inking -

 These await the next studio session -

Book du jour

More couched landscapes - in my cupboard I found some "black" paper that's actually dark grey -

 There's scope for twisting the thick thread, or perhaps doing more with the thinner thread -

 All these books are about half the size of my first attempt - about 8cm high, and with fewer pages.

The thread ends can be taken to the spine and hidden there, under endpapers perhaps. By the time I get all the variables sorted, I'll be tired of making these!

Cow Tower

Cow Tower, on the riverside in Norwich, is one of the earliest purpose-build artillery towers - it dates to about 1398 (a time of changing military technology, arrows giving way to guns) and had to be built high enough to see over the hill on the other side of the river -

Turning around after looking in, I saw this - public housing for birds -

The big picture -

Mbuti bark cloth

The textiles show at Raven Row included this display of Mbuti bark cloth from the Congo. Here are some details -

Men prepare the cloth by pounding bark, and women paint it. It is used to wrap infants at birth and to form a tunnel through which boys crawl to be 'reborn' at puberty as an initiation rite.

I've long believed that the marks are a sort of 'mapping' but this source puts a different slant on them - "The paintings are evidence of the Mbuti perception of the forest as the spiritual and symbolic core of their culture. The artists combine a variety of biomorphic motifs (e.g. butterflies, birds, leopard spots) with geometric patterns that give an impression of motion, sound and shape within the forest landscape: light filtered through trees, buzzing insects, ant trails, tangled vines. Cross-hatched squares, perhaps representing the texture of reptilian skin, are shorthand for turtles, crocodiles or snakes."

Further: "Visual “silences” or voids in the patterns are especially valued, consistent with Mbuti concepts of sound and silence. Silence in Mbuti thought does not imply lack of sound – for the forest is always “talking” – but quiet (ekimi), the absence of noise. Noise (akami) is conflict. Sound has spiritual and magical properties. It is integral to the Mbuti world, not only as an acoustic backdrop, but as a means of heightened communication with other people and with the forest itself."

What they wore

The jacket (blouse?) on the left is from 16th century Italy - part of Seth Siegelaub's textile collection, which was on show at Raven Row recently. It was beautifully displayed in the rooms of a 17th century house. I fantasised spending some time there drawing - but had only half an hour to see the show before catching the train.

Still life with pillar drill

You daren't go away for a few days lest you come back to find the studio has been repopulated....

The wooden objects are stands for displaying bracelets in shops - and on getting the commission for them, the resident carpenter simply had to have a pillar drill to make them. My studio has become his carpentry shop! We do have dust covers, and he's meticulous about cleaning up. And most of the time I'm not in there anyway - but still...

The main problem, out of sight in this photo, is the repopulation of my work table under the window ... with my own heaps of paper, and projects in progress.

The more space you have, the more stuff comes to fill it! Something's gotta go - lotsa somethings - bracelet stands, for a start...

Art I like - Liu Dan

The British Museum's show of modern Chinese ink painting has a section with Liu Dan's work. This artist is new to me and I'm bowled over by his skill and especially the size of his Dictionary -

81 x 121 inches

According to the interview with the artist here, it took him five months to paint -- and is his first watercolour.

The dictionary is one belonging to his family and is from the pre-communist era. It opens  naturally to the page on jade; the other page shown is for water, and the combination sums up a lot of cultural history.

Other works on show are a huge painting of a poppy (this article puts it in context)

and some of his exquisite "portraits of stones". Here he is at work on a scroll -

He lived in the US for many years, and in 2006 returned to Beijing. The exhibition at the British Museum runs till September.

Life skills - making giant paper flowers

Imagine these blooming in your window boxes ... though they'd droop in the rain -

The freestanding version has a paper cup full of cement at the base of the stem -  you also need wire, tissue paper, and cable ties. The tutorial is here.

Quilt details

A while back, when looking for a particular paper quilt seen at Festival of Quilts, I went trawling through some of the photos saved onto CDs. These, from 2009, still appeal, probably because of their sparseness; unfortunately I don't know their makers (apart from the one by Pauline Burbidge).

 

The final one looks like it might be a paper quilt.

Wordless Wednesday

Book du jour - text about to seep

 While waiting to hear whether the author of the text I used for my trial "blank text" (erasure) book (see here, here, and here), so that I can do an edition, I've written some text of my own and set it, upside down dna sdrawkcab, ready to print as soon as I can get back to the letterpress studio. As with the other book, the individual words will be turned over gradually, line after time, eventually revealing the entire text.

While working I became aware of this on the wall - click on it to enlarge and read.

I'm currently using Univers - the Lithium of typefaces, it seems.

Aspects of the sonnet

The sixth of the ten sonnets I'm writing/rewriting/memorising is Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen - in the book I'm using for the source of the sonnets, Poems on the Underground, there's a facsimile of the manuscript of the sonnet -

My method of memorising is to start with the last line and add one line after another, which means that the final line moves down the page, and is the only legible line. As a result the (better-remembered) ends of the poems are the bits that are slushing round in my brain, the rhythm of the lines giving them a sort of music.

One of the things that's hard to remember is the punctuation - the breathing in the poem - so I cut some punctuation marks out of erasers and used them to replicate that aspects of several of the sonnets -

The lines of the poem seem very short, written this way - how to make them more like the poem itself? This led to thinking about the rhythm of the poem - da dum, da dum etc (iambic pentameter) and how the words might have contributed to that - but when you look at the words, most are just one syllable, very plain!, rather than what you might expect of a "poetic" word... As the punctuation falls in the spaces between the words, I decided to indicate the words and spaces to show the role of punctuation in the lines.

After some hours of embroidery onto squared paper, here is "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part"  - beside it is the scanned version of the stitched page, which is intended to have printed on the reverse not the "wrong side" of the stitching, but the words of the poem -

Here is the reverse of the stitching - after a bit of practice, four-sided stitch settles into a regular rhythm of its own -

However I don't like the look of the punctuation marks on the stitched page, and will think about what to do next....