A 66th anniversary

Opening up Google today brings up a little game - to celebrate the 66th anniversary of the Roswell UFO incident reporting.

Roswell - on my wall

For almost two years, Cornelia Parker's "Missing: Roswell (New Mexico)" has been hanging on my wall, purchased almost by accident after hearing her talk at the Whitechapel Book Fair. The story of the work is that she "located" places where meteorites had not fallen ... though other things might have happened there. She burned the meteorite misses into the pages of an atlas (carefully chosen) with a bit of  old iron meteorite that she had heated on her stove. (She's also been doing other "meteorite landings" - video and an interview are here.)

The series, "Meteorite Lands in the Middle of Nowhere (The American series)" was made in 2001 and consists of six sites, in an edition of 20 each. The other sites are  Bethlehem, North Carolina; Paris, Texas; Baghdad, Louisiana; ("Hitting"); and "Missing": Waco, Texas; Truth or Consequences, New Mexico (see them here). Below, from the same website, is "Meteorite Lands on Wormwood Scrubs" 2000.

Of these burned-with-a-meteorite works, the V&A's website says:

"One of the devices used by artist Cornelia Parker is to subject familiar everyday objects to extremes of temperature, pressure or force. The resulting transformations retain a residual trace of their original form and seem to invite the viewer to reconsider their own relationship with history and mortality.

"For the suite of map works called ‘Meteorite Lands in the Middle of Nowhere: The American Series’ Parker heated a tiny meteorite and carefully scorched six selected place names in the USA on as many maps. Some of Parker’s meteorites make direct hits, others are near misses, but the associative power of the place names she has chosen is self-evident: Bagdad, Louisiana, Paris, Texas, and Bethlehem, North Carolina, are all hits; Roswell, New Mexico, Waco, Texas, and Truth or Consequences, also New Mexico, are all misses.

"In another series Parker has meteorites landing on sites in London. The work plays with the almost obsessive place meteorites now have in the popular imagination, given their potential capacity to completely annihilate the earth. Parker suggests that by displacing fear onto this external threat, meteors distract humanity from the dangers it poses to itself."

Let's save the plangency of meteorites for another time, and find out what happened - or didn't - in Roswell 66 years ago. "Since the late 1970s," says wikipedia, "the Roswell incident has been the subject of much controversy, and conspiracy theories have arisen about the event."

In 1947,  an airborne object crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. The US government attributes the crash to a US military surveillance balloon, but the most famous explanation of what occurred is that the object was a spacecraft containing extraterrestrial life.

About 30 years later, speculation was rife in UFO circles, and the National Enquirer got involved. In 1989 a mortician claimed that alien autopsies were carried out at Roswell air force base. The air force released two reports in the mid-90s - to quote wikipedia:

"The first concluded that the reported recovered material in 1947 was likely debris from Project Mogul. The second report, concluded reports of recovered alien bodies were likely a combination of innocently transformed memories of military accidents involving injured or killed personnel, innocently transformed memories of the recovery of anthropomorphic dummies in military programs like Operation High Dive conducted in the 1950s, and hoaxes perpetrated by various witnesses and UFO proponents. The psychological effects of time compression and confusion about when events occurred explained the discrepancy with the years in question. These reports were dismissed by UFO proponents as being either disinformation or simply implausible. But at the same time, several high-profile UFO researchers discounted the possibility that the incident had anything to do with aliens."

So that white frame hanging quietly on my wall holds more than an atlas with a burn mark - it speaks of "innocent transformation of memories ... and the psychological effects of time compression" as well as "displacing fear onto an external threat, thus distracting humanity for the threat it poses to itself."

Anno's Alphabet

The Anno books take me back to reading them to my son - not that there's much to read, it's all about talking about the pictures and finding the details. Anno's Journey, for instance, starts in medieval times, or even earlier, and progresses to the present. 

Anno's Alphabet has cleverly constructed wooden letters - and objects representing the letters. The borders contain further alphabetical discoveries.

Anno taught mathematics in an elementary school before starting his career in children's books.

A little taste of bloomin' Kew Gardens

Snow in summer (or something that looks like it!)

A pineapple, growing ...

Deep, dark, delicious ...

... poppies

And there are roses ...

... roses ...

lots of ...

... roses

Watching Wimbledon

On the way to the Saatchi Gallery - this is the scene at Duke of York Square - a big screen has been set up and the square is filled with people watching the tennis. Was it Andy Murray playing? By the time I left the gallery the square was definitely crowded. And it's perfect weather for Wimbledon.

How long does it take?

After the previous bookwrap-making session, seven were left lying beside the sewing machine, waiting to have their bindings sewn on. Here they are, with glimpses of their inner pockets (carefully chosen fabric for the pockets). It took 2 1/2 hours to bind all seven, and that was with the pockets pinned in and the binding ready - just over 20 minutes each to sew on, turn, pin-baste, and topstitch. After some practice, I consider this quick, and it's just one part of the making; gathering and cutting the fabric for pockets and binding can take from 3 to 20 minutes per item, and the time spent making and quilting the main part is also variable, and can amount to hours.

Everyone making bookwraps for the tombola is contributing their materials and labour. And skill. No-one making a bookwrap, were the time spent being paid for, would "earn" anything like the minimum wage. They are worth more than that, and I hope the recipients of the hundreds of bookwraps that will be raffled will t

As I've said before, I'm making so many because it's a great way to re-purpose the unfinished and unwanted projects that are gathering dust or hidden away in cupboards. My own hidden agenda is that this purging will, subtly, reinforce the idea that getting rid of things - even fabric! - is possible. In rummaging through my stash again and again, I'm subconsciously noting fabrics that no longer appeal ... I've considered having a "discards" bag handy, but that would divert from the first purpose. The weeding out of fabrics comes later.

Meanwhile the pile of finished bookwraps is growing satisfactorily. I was aiming for 30 - and discover many more ufos waiting for treatment. Here are a few "before and after" photos.

From a workshop at least 10 years ago

the subject was banksia

Using tiny scraps of hand-dyes for a possible cot quilt
- but after six or seven years on the wall, the colours had faded

For these there are no "before" photos -

what was I thinking #234

ikea fabric from shortened curtains
(it never did become cushions)

abandonned around the time of the "River" exhibition, 2003

Advanced Textiles Course exhibition at City Lit

The show is in the vitrines and corridor cases inside the City Lit's building. The pix are of the work of my favourites among the group - apologies for the blobs, that's a camera fault (or rather a camera owner fault, for delaying on taking the camera to get it fixed...) The show finishes tomorrow.

better - and more - pix are on Emma's website

Poetry Thursday - The Cat of Cats by William Brighty Rands

The Cat of Cats

I am the cat of cats. I am
The everlasting cat!
Cunning, and old, and sleek as jam,
The everlasting cat!
I hunt vermin in the night-
The everlasting cat!
For I see best without the light-
The everlasting cat! 

William Brighty Rands

A jolly short poem (encountered here) by an author with a jolly irresistible name. His dates are 1823-1882. Mostly self-taught, William Brighty Rands worked as a reporter in the House of Commons, wrote several volumes of children's literature anonymously, and published under various pseudonyms, including T. Talker.

The (two-tailed?) cat in the 18th-century woodcut is said to be a sort of portrait of Peter the Great.

Spinning straw into gold

The "straw" came from someone else's scrap basket, and was probably offcuts of pieced strips -

At some point I had pieced the pieced pieces into a rectangle big enough for a bookwrap for an A6 book (10" x 6 3/4" - after quilting - is my template). At the right you can see the start of the quilting - it's just parallel lines, nothing fancy, but I did think carefully about what colour thread to use.

After all the "spinning", here is the finished object -

Not too bad, considering. Functional, and cheerful. 

This next pair was started in February (see the "before" pic here) -

Finally for today, this was an early journal quilt - I had had a good time appliqueing the circles and stitching all the french knots -

Waiting for their bindings are seven more, cut from three different UFOs. And there's still lots of "straw" in the cupboard.  

Object of desire

The Pentel brush pen comes with ink cartridges - it's "a truly portable brush pen". I hadn't realised, until seeing and trying the one owned by my friend, that I needed a truly portable brush pen, and needed it immediately - well, tomorrow at the latest!

This review points out that it needs to be used slowly, and it isn't suited for English calligraphy, but rather for flowing  non-western scripts. Its price, on the manufacturer's website, is £13.65, with refills costing £5.76 for a pack of four.

Drawing course - final week

Part two of our big drawing - certainly the biggest (and most sustained) I've yet done. This is how it looked at the start of the day -

To which I added shading -

and then tackled this tricky bit, following the suggestion to look at it in terms of dark and light, rather than the line -

With the shape in place, it was time to "do something" about that huge uninteresting area at the top and left. Charcoal would have competed with the interesting area in the foreground, so pencil was suggested. First I added some charcoal squiggles to rub back, then used pencil for shapes resembling the positioning marks on the floor.

starting some "textural diffusion"

charcoal rubbed back, pencil shapes over top

finished?

Alas that's the end of the course. What have I gained from it - the pleasure of working with charcoal on an easel, neither of which are practical at home; a regular time-slot for drawing; practice in replicating the positions of objects in relation to each other; other ways of looking at the possibilities within a drawing. And that perseverance thing - keeping going even when it's not working, breaking through to a point where it does start to work, even if it means rubbing it all out and starting again.

A 5:2 diet for the computer?

Yesterday, a computer-free day. No long stretch at the desk, lingering over emails and clicking far too many links on blogs. I was busy elsewhere - in the studio, outdoors in the sunshine, trimming the hedge -

Not much of a garden, but I have Great Plans for it.
(The blooming parsley at right sowed itself in the windowbox.)

At the 11th hour I tried to do a little blog post on the ipad, but it had trouble connecting to our flaky internet. The post was about the possibility of putting my computer use onto a 5:2 diet -- for five days of the week, you "eat" as normal, and for two days, you "eat" very little - which in computer terms would be checking for essential emails, perhaps looking at the electronic diary, but without replying to email, surfing, etc.

Having sat at the machine for three hours ... having had coffee and toast, at the computer, during that time ... I think another computer-lite day very soon is a great idea!