Found in the rain

Wondering why I find this irresistible; wondering what might be done with it; wondering if it will languish in a cupboard for years....

Memory ball finished

final bits of fabric, final cone of yarn

different ways of winding

Now my memories of the weekend are held in the "orderly tangle" of thread.

Held safely? Held impenetrably? How can I get at these memories now ... could you get at them, if you wanted to? Unwinding the ball of thread, can I share my memories with you? Would either of us want to make that effort? Would the ball itself - its surface - be sufficient for us to be able to connect with each other, with the place, as we talk about it and what it holds? How is living different from remembering? How is remembering a part of living? Do we only have an identity because we have a memory?

How, you may well ask, is this a book? Well, it has sequence and it contains a narrative. Not text, but a narrative just the same. It can't be opened and "read" ... but I did document its making, and running through those photos allows for the construction of your own narrative. 

Found art Friday

Random rust

Rushing in to college for Symposium 2, a day of presentations about our practice and work, I had to stop briefly to photograph the time-scarred back of a portable road sign. I would have liked to take it home to ink up and print....

Exhibition catalogue - making the pages

The rubber stamps of our names and contact details have arrived, so it is high time to be getting on with making the pages for the catalogue of the final show. The team has nicely provided templates for placing the stamp, and is on hand for three days to give individual help.

The book will end up 24cm square, with a fold-out flap that holds only the stamped details; the artwork is on the oblong page beneath.

I was impressed by Di's screenprints, and the 85 cinnamon-filled bags she made to put on the plates.

My own idea is much simpler - and I found some exciting paper in the Paperchase sale. The "simple" idea involves, first of all, cutting each sheet of paper individually (and accurately), and folding; that took three hours -

Next, practice with the stamp, and fiddling about with the template to be able to position the stamp easily. It was ever so slightly (but noticeably) wonky - in the gluing of text to stamp, so needed compensating for. Sometimes I think we can be toooo fussy....

Because I used white paint, brushing it -carefully!- onto the stamp, the stamping took two hours. I took out the ones that were utterly illegible (having cut extras, knowing some of the stamping would need to be discarded). Batches were laid to dry -

Then, three holes punched along the fold - which could be done in batches - and the start of the sewing and gluing. Four hours of that, and about half the pages are finished. The sewing is a pamphlet stitch (but there is no pamphlet, just the stitch) - and the ends of the thread are taken to the edges and carefully, delicately, invisibly glued down. This forms quadrants and the occasional kink and wrinkle that disrupt the shiny black surface suddenly look "interesting" rather than annoyingly ugly.

In progress - about halfway done -

This is sort of what it will look like in the actual catalogue - but probably the previous page will be white, and there won't be red thread on the other folded pages -

 Open the page, and there's nothing much to see -

Make of that what you will......

Quote of the day

"Try a thing you haven't done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time to figure out whether you like it or not." ~Virgil Thomson


A few more fear quotes (there's a lot of it about):

Always do what you are afraid to do - Ralph Waldo Emerson  ["always"?? Always beware of adamant instructions, more likely!]


To him who is in fear everything rustles - Sophocles


I understand that fear is my friend, but not always. Never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed. - Hunter S Thompson


Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear. ~Ambrose Redmoon

This week at college - "Symposium 2"

We each had exactly 7 minutes to talk about our current practice, so the talk had to be closely scripted (click to enlarge, if you want words as well as pictures) -

Even at the last minute - an hour before leaving home - I had second thoughts about what the topic is now, and had to change a slide and some of the wording. Until then, I'd been sure this work was about "the journey of growing older" - and that I was looking at the part that dealt with the loss of language and loss of memory that can occur in older age. On reflection, though, the work seems to be more about the difficulty of communication; perhaps age has something to do with it, but it can be any sort of cross-cultural communication (the culture of the retired person being raaaather different from that of the young student!).

Getting clear on this matters for two reasons: presenting a coherent final show, and writing a supporting statement. We have a few weeks yet - much can happen...........

Art I like - Jessica Rankin

White Cube, Hoxton Square, is showing drawings and "sewn pieces" by Jessica Rankin till the end of the week (7 July). I found it intense and satisfying.

The exhibition is called "Skyfolds 1941-2010" and draws upon maps of the sky and constellations, stitched onto organdie or drawn on huge sheets of paper. A book is available but doesn't show the current work, so I didn't buy it, but looked long and hard and took notes -- and thought about how these configurations and methods of depiction, and what lies behind them, ties in with my current work. The stitched circles are so much like the "memory holes" that developed during the winding of my memory ball, for example. The stitching on transparent fabric looks effortless, with long thread ends dangling at the back, and blocks of colour made with long stitches. The connected stitching that forms the writing is a technical lesson.

The working methods look simple and straightforward, but because of the amount of labour, the effect is rich and dense and various. Here it is described as "a tangle of language and images, slowly and painstakingly released by the artist's hand"

It's interesting to note that she was taught to sew by her babysitter! She's inspired by all sorts of writing, especially the Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara - which* make another reason to be grateful to Chance that brought me news of this exhibition this morning ... so glad I went, so glad to connect with the work of this artist. And with O'Hara.

*He wrote something I loved a long time ago and am delighted to re-encounter (read it all here) -

Mothers of America
                               let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won't know what you're up to
it's true that fresh air is good for the body
                                                              but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images 
and when you grow old as grow old you must
                                                                  they won't hate you

Wordless Wednesday

Memory ball - weekend at Alston Hall

It started with a box of fabric scraps and some cones of fine yarn. In the middle are stones from outside the building -

The pink thread represents Friday, the yellow and beige are Saturday, and the green is Sunday.

First the lumpy stones had to be padded out to make the shape more spherical. Then the words - written on slips of fabric, or cut from the schedule - were wound in. 

Same procedure for Saturday, incorporating sights and sounds from my morning walk and snippets of overheard conversation throughout the day. And the wrappers from cough sweets -

Each participant in the retreat session supplied a bit of fabric with her name written on it, and that was wound in -

We speculated on what it would look like if it were cut open -

Sunday's main memory is of winding in scraps of ever-increasing size as we travelled down the M6 -

I didn't intend it to be quite so big, but that very fine yarn goes a long way! (Plus, it's very satisfying to wind and wrap and make those nice round "holes".)

Moan on Monday - blog formats

When all you see on accessing a blog is a bunch of text, are you tempted to read further?

Much as I might admire the individual artist and be interested in their work and thought processes, this format really puts me off.  Call me lazy, but I'd rather see a photo and then be led on to read their words.

Possibly people with this format of blogs need to consider carefully just what to put in those first 100 or so words. It's like a news bulletin - important info first, then info of diminishing importance. This not only allows the end of the article to be chopped of to fit the page of the newspaper, but also takes into account that people will stop reading when they feel they "know enough about it".

Sometimes the title tells you all you want to know, and the block of words says to you "you don't really want to know any more" whereas the picture tells you "there is more to find out".

Even when I simply scroll down the current blog page looking at the pictures, occasionally stopping to read, I can easily be tempted to click on the "Older Posts" button at the bottom of the page.

And another thing - consider the potential of captions, to slyly insert information into the minds of lazy scrollers like me, whose eyes drift naturally to small, easy-to-absorb, bits of information -

this is not my cat!
the photo was part of a caption competition

Maybe next time I'll moan about silly things people do to mistreat their beloved pets...

Quilt retreat

The long-anticipated weekend at Alston Hall with CQ definitely did not disappoint. I brought along the "red repair" to finish

and had visions of stitching, stitching, stitching on The Journey to the Studio, but got only this much done (about 3 hours' work):

The reason? Something better came up! Sally-Ann brought a box of scraps and some cones of weaver's yarn.

Returning from a morning walk

I started to make a "memory ball", more of which later. Pauses for meals, and coffee in the conservatory, all took up time that could have been spent stitching...

The eight of us in the retreat session worked away on our projects

and  The Three Margarets  got up to some late-night-studio madness -

Elsewhere, the others were enjoying Sheila Smith's session on using their embellishers, and at the end we had a look round at their work -

A good time was had by all, I should think.

Things found in books - Century Atlas

  The maps are battlefronts of WW2, cut from newspapers -