Ceramics, week 2

Now we are actually in week 4, but I missed week 1 and had no camera with me in week 3 - anyway we spent most of this session glazing previous work, then left it to be fired during the week - results are eagerly awaited next Monday!

These (made in what for me was week 1) had come out of the kiln, fired to biscuit stage - some slip marbling, black on white, and some sponging. The sponged piece has now been glazed with "Dora Billington", a matte clear glaze, then sponge-printed with a shiny clear glaze -

Items made the previous week include some silkscreening onto paper, laid on tiles, which came out of the kiln all crumble; a slap printed with alphabet blocks dipped in slip; some thin slabs screenprinted with a pattern; and a stamped slab formed into a sort of bowl shape -

The misprinted tiles have had some "interesting" glaze treatments - just how "interesting" remains to be seen...

Proud mum

My son is a practical sort of guy who really enjoys building things and solving how-to-do-it-best type of problems. I've probably moaned a bit too much about him using my studio for his carpentry, but I'm thrilled to see him putting his skills to good use as a way of making a living. He's had some big jobs recently and as a result has three people working for him, but the economic climate being what it is, you never can be assured of a steady stream of work.

So in steps Mum to do what she can, and the result is a website for "Tom and Team" -

Do go have a look - tomandteamcarpentersdecorators.co.uk - especially if you live in north London and need some work doing!

I had to do some mildly technical stuff to link up with the domain name, which had me quaking in my boots (well, slippers...) - so I'm doubly thrilled that everything has worked. 

When you think back to only a few years ago, what it took to set up a website was overwhelming and you really did need an expert - or to spend weeks learning Dreamweaver or some such program. Now, you still need to have your photos on hand and to have thought about how to organise the site, but in only a few hours the new site can be up and running - and you can do all the updating yourself, quite easily. Marvellous. Truly "Vorschprung durch Technik" - even for the non-technical.

Amid destruction?

Tammam Azzam "Freedom Graffiti" 150x150 Archival Print 2012 Edition of 5 (image via here)

The tentmakers of Cairo

My splendid cushion was obtained in the Street of the Tentmakers, Cairo, by a friend after I told her (based on what I'd read on the internet) how to find it. She got another for herself, and I feel right at home when I see her "twin" cushion on her sofa. This beautiful work, with its long history, brightens my day - but it saddens me to think that it is under threat.

Jenny Bowker got to know the men during her years of living in Cairo and has been championing the continued survival of their craft - and livelihoods. There is no historical documentation of the men and their craft, but now a film is being made. The film maker, Kim Beamish, is having to fund this himself, and is asking for donations via a crowd-funding site, http://www.pozible.com/tentmakers  - where you can make a donation, or rather a pledge, as no money will be collected unless the target amount is reached. (He also has a facebook page https://www.facebook.com/CharehElKhiamiah?fref=ts.)

This is what Jenny wrote on the SAQA yahoogroup - I've put in some photos found on the internet to show off the gorgeous work.

''The Tentmakers are a group of men in Cairo who make spectacular applique. Nowadays most of what they make is intended for the walls of houses or on beds, but in Pharaonic, early Islamic, and Ottoman times it
was intended for the inside walls of tents. With canvas behind it which formed the outside wall, the rich appliqué glowed with light on it, and was intended to amaze visitors to a leader's tent. Did you know that Cairo was originally called Fustat - which means the big tent? In pharaonic times the tents were appliqued leather, now all the work is cotton.

The art has been slowly dying. Big pieces of cheap, badly registered, printed fabric made in China have poured into Cairo and people buy this rather that the real appliquéd pieces. On top of that disaster - tourism has stopped with unrest for the last two years. Without the work sold in the exhibitions that I have been arranging in other countries they would all be gone by now - instead - stitchers who left are coming back and young ones are learning again. I am thrilled with the progress we have made and very happy with the AQS who committed to them for three years. But - it is still hardly documented at all. There is not one piece in the Cairo Museum or even in the Cairo textile museum. The best article I have ever found is in the Uncoverings magazine and there are no books. Older stitchers are dying and no history has been written.

Kim Beamish is an Australian friend who - when I took him to visit the street on his third day in Cairo - picked up the baton I offered and ran with it. He is making a film about the Tentmakers in these difficult times. He has given most of five days a week for the last seven months - or more. He has paid his own way to shows in England, and has had to pay for three more that have not even happened yet in France and two in America. He has become part of the street and the men are used to him and his camera. He has two young children and a wife who works in the Australian Embassy in Cairo. They have to pay a nanny so that he is free to film. He is, like I was, a trailing spouse. He did not choose to live the 'cocktail parties and bridge' life, but has chosen to go out on a limb
to tell a very moving and necessary story. I know that at the moment he is on the bones of his behind financially and simply cannot afford anything else.

The movie will not be made without funding for the essentials - the long and boring stages when the filming is done and the hard work starts. Editing, top level translation and the rest has to be done by experts and paid for. Please help. Even a little bit from a lot of people will add up to a lot - that is what crowd funding means. The link is now open and working. If he does not get to his total he gets nothing. Kim will spend the month hovering over the site and biting his fingernails.The work is really special and the film is essential.

http://www.pozible.com/tentmakers - this is the link to support the film - The Tentmakers of Chareh el Khiamiah. If Kim Beamish does not get this money the film cannot be made. Even tiny donations will help and big donations will help more. Please.

If you use PayPal it will ask you to preauthorise. It sounds odd but it simply means that when the total is reached the money will then be taken from people's accounts so it has to be done this way. Kim gets nothing if he does not reach his total and that is the way that Pozible works. He is a bit worried at the moment as only about 29 have helped in three days.

I am hoping a lot of people will have read this far and be willing now to help us. PLEASE send this on to as wide an audience as you can reach. The moment the total is reached the project will be assured. Until then it looks as if it might be dead in the water.''

The tentmakers of Cairo were at Festival of Quilts and also at Art in Action, so you may have seen their work. A UK champion of the tentmakers is Barbara Chainey, who lectures on the tentmakers and has a workshop based on an Egyptian-style design. Two of her books are inspired by the tentmakers' designs.

Art I like - Linda Stokes

Linda Stokes has an eclectic approach to textiles - printing, dyeing, piecing, quilting, embroidering - as shown in these two transformed fabrics -

Above, a monoprint;  below, an ugly fabric transformed by stencilling spots over naff motifs and printing the background with plastic lace.

I also admire her freeform piecing, largely from scraps -

She lives in Australia and blogs at linda-stokes.blogspot.com.

Transform, change, disintegrate - II

On arriving at session two of "change, disintegration" I had these two pieces to show, made the previous evening -

both sides

Six hours later, the collection included experiments with washing paper (stitched onto cloth, and stitched onto other paper) and rubbing paper (stitched either side of a layer of stiff net). The ink on my sponged tissue paper ran, so I'm glad I hadn't had time to wash the pieces made the night before. (There can be advantages to procrastinating!)

at the end of the day

The gold-coated kraft paper proved to be very tough, and sunday-supplement magazine pages proved good for rubbing together - the layer behind came through, which is nice if the top is dark and underneath is bright colours. I needed to find out if the various sizes of grid made a significant difference - the answer is yes, but it also depends on how vigorously you rub. 

What was missing from the homework, and what didn't appear in the day's samples, was any sense that this was about loss of language. The session had started with looking at everyone's work and hearing what they were working towards - a finished piece, or some samples - and their theme. What emerged from that for me was the question, what do you mean by loss of language? physically not being able to speak? ... so I told how my german-first-language parents seemed to "lose" the english they had spoken for 60 years, which made it difficult for their children to communicate - we could understand the german, but not speak to them in cogent german - a problem compounded by not knowing what other cognitive changes might be happening. The topic feels very dark and negative to me (why then am I pursuing it!) - but I hope through working with it to find something positive. Or at least face up to those scary end-of-life things that we, quite understandably and perhaps wisely, would rather not think about. 

Louise had brought in some books and I spent some time looking at them - not so much for inspiration but as a change of pace.  Though you never know, things have a way of bubbling up later...

From Gwen Hedley's "Drawn Stitch", work by Roanna Wells - I was amazed to come across her Cloudscape in a show a few years ago; her use of handstitch is (if I may use another i-word...) truly inspirational -

Use of long stitches for portraits (sorry, the photo doesn't include the name and I've forgotten it now) -

Stitching based on a drawing, then mounted in a layer in front of the drawing -

And from "Lost in Lace" (catalogue of the recent exhibition) - the work of Naomi Kobayashi (see more pix of her work here)

The third book was about the work, in "stitched" wire and metal, of Julia Griffiths-Jones -

"Stitch and Write" by Julia Griffiths-Jones (image from here)

Moving ahead ... with just one Saturday left ... where will this go? Perhaps I'm too attached to the idea of using a "book structure" - though it was out-and-out fun simply adding bits of paper, keeping on stitching, and seeing what happened. Feedback and reflection have clarified that, to be "read" in the way I'd hope, there need to be some disappearing words (a pall of erasure falling on the work...) as the pages of the book move along. Or maybe it could be a panel with the words in a layer at the back, obscured by disintegrating layers - that sounds so obvious, but the effect would of course be in the way it was done. We'll see.

Works on Paper art fair

Some of my favourite pix at the art fair held at the Science Museum.

self-portrait by Stephen Spurrier (1878-1961)

a storyboard of clouds, drawn; sorry, forgot to note the name of the artist

Glimpse of Sea by Gerry Dudgeon

you could lose yourself among Edward Bawden's trees ("where the wind...creaks like an ark")

Nagib Karsan uses found-paper collage

by Prunella Clough (1919-1999)

architectural details and landscape forms by John Piper (1903-1992)

near-lifesize chooks by Emma McClure

Large, and mounted with silk in the traditional way, by Wang Ye

 The one I covet -

Separate plates in one print, by friends Raymond Arnold and Ian Westacott - a "stereoscopic collaboration"

 Tony's choice -

Watercolour by Mary Fedden

Envelope art

Until 28 February you can, if you happen to be in or near Freiburg, Germany, see an exhibition of art made from discarded envelopes. It's at Basler Str 61, im Viktoriahous, 79100 Freiburg, Germany - further details here, from which this photo comes -

detail, Judith Mundwiler

This photo, Fenland Landmap by Cas Holmes, comes from the SAQA bulletin -

Other artists are Els van Baarle, Jette Clover, Beatrice Lanter, Sophie Maechler, Gabi Mett,  Helga Widmann und Monika Schiwy-Jessen.

Consider the inside of envelopes - such a variety of patterning, so collectable! Erika van Horn's "Envelope Interiors" calendar comes to mind - a different snippet each month. She uses them for installations too (image from here) -

Erika van Horn installing envelope interiors

Consider envelopes in their various shapes and sizes, and the papers they are made of. Especially those with the "twiddly ties" (image from here) -

Margaret Mellis has done many "envelope drawings" -

by Margaret Mellis

Old envelopes can be very useful!

January JQ - Olive Interchange

The first of the 2013 journal quilts is ready - only one day beyond "its" month.

Before starting, I used an A3 piece of heavy paper to make a frame and template for the 12" x 8" size.

The fabric for this one is hand-dyed poplin left over from "With Every Hertbeat" - perfect olive colours, but I remember that the poplin was a beast to hand-embroider - I planned to use machine stitching throughout. After adding fusible web to a strip of the fabric, I cut out some olive shapes and played around with "pimento" -

Those little red dots were fused onto some more of the red fabric, and subjected to machine embroidery -

then cut out and applied, with more machining, to the fabric. I had put an extra layer of fabric underneath the part that would have "pimento" on it, so the machining would distort the fabric less.

While I was stitching round the olives themselves I realised that the extra layer meant they could be stuffed -

Not with pimento of course, but with a bit of wadding poked into the slit, and then the slit sewn closed.

After that, a layer of wadding, and stitching some more olive shapes. These ghostly olives cried out for more pimento, just in outline. The already-stitched olives also needed going round again to attach them to the further layers behind. Here's a close-up of the finished effect

The poplin simply wouldn't let itself be stitched with the slightly woolly red thread I was using - maybe because of the number of extra layers at this point - so I used the sewing machine to make holes for the outlines of the pimento and then hand stitched into the holes, which got round the problem of pushing a needle through that obstinate fabric.

Faced edges, and this is the result - tricky to photograph under artificial light -

"Olive Interchange" 

Mending

This is type of mending is kaya -

Kaya image from srithreads via here

Rather like Chunghie Lee's pojagi, isn't it? And yet, very different...

Chunghie Lee kimono image from here

Kaya is more in the boro line of things -

Boro image from here

Mending is darning, mending is patching ... it can be necessary, or it can be perverse ...

Lots more mending at http://pinterest.com/clarabellacraft/mending/

Mending preserves memory, adds to memory, intensifies memory.

Found art Friday

Through a block of ice

Playing

Do go to Steve McCurry's blog and look at "Power of Play" - marvellous photos interspersed with thoughtful quotes about play.

By the time I came to the end of Steve's blog post, I wanted to play immediately! What struck me about this photo

taken in Australia by Steve McCurry

was the calligraphic quality of the space between the two central figures, which I have tried to draw out with a few manipulations in PhotoShop (Levels, and Mode-Greyscale) -

Playing with the players in a part of the image

I went back to each photo, looking for similar negative space. In another photo, with some manipulation of Levels and especially Blue in the Levels, a blue angel appeared, celestial robe trailing in the slipstream of his flight -

Playing at flying

This is the original, which with the other figures and the setting is so much more interesting -

taken in Mauritania by Steve McCurry

I will definitely not be using these images, however thoroughly manipulated, in my own work ... because they are not "my" work; they derive from someone else's work (the originals are published with permission).

I'm showing a possible way to bring out the ideas that are lurking in a source, such as someone else's photo, that has instinctive appeal.  "Calligraphy of action" is a new thought for me (linked to the current textiles course), but flying figures have often appeared in my sketchbooks.

And negative space ... ah, that holds more than we know ...