Where on earth is this?

Kalahari desert, Namibia - one of 30 abstract images chosen from the 400,000 images taken by the Landsat 7 satellite, and displayed at the Library of Congress in 2000. The website is a bit slow to load, but worth visiting.

update (2016) - that website seems to have disappeared, but the "earth as art" exhibitions have been held several times. Try this one instead, from 2005, or this more recent one.

A love of patterning

An explosion of threads

Imagined and real

We carry around "visual schema" - how we think things appear, relying on how we think the world is organised - they come in handy when we're asked to "draw something from your imagination". Here's a visual schema of a forest -and here's one possible reality. Not so tidy, in fact it looks a bit chaotic, but it has its own organising principles.Hence the importance of stopping to draw - a photograph is useful too, but the looking and thinking of making the drawing is so much better!

Using precious silks

In this silk quilt, the wide dupion strips are stamped with Chinese characters - flower, beauty, spirit, words like that from a set of commercial stamps, emulating the four-character idioms so common in Chinese. Narrower strips are cut from my extensive collection of dupion, and the "pictures" are precious bits of vintage silks, most passed on to me by Sally (thank you!).

I used a combination of strip piecing and foundation piecing - chunks of curtain interlining did double duty as foundation and wadding. Here it is, taking shape on my design floor:This is a view of the inside. The base fabric is cut into smaller bits to use as foundation for each section, then these are sewn together and the seams held open by simple, invisible-on-the-outside stitching. And sometimes when the silk seemed to be fraying a bit much, I added zigzag "just in case" -
The "chunks" allow the vertical strips to be sewn in easily.

The backing is on, and it's pinned on the wall beside the computer, catching the odd glance as I decide what sort of quilting it will get -
Hmm, one side seems to be longer than the other! The colours are mujch more vivid than in these photos - perhaps too vivid?

Ah, Paris...

Found this in draft form in the Posts folder. A few more pix from the Paris trip, now 6 weeks ago.

There was some rain - The kiosks all seemed to be advertising only the film Sex and the City. Which by now has come and gone. But graffiti is eternal, self-renewing -
Is this jolly paininting graffiti too?
And here's a big mural, trompe l'oeil on a public art scale -
Of course I can't resist collecting pix of "dames & dawgs" -

More, better bobbles

After un-knitting the wide tubular scarf, and re-knitting it narrower, it looks like this. About 1/5th done, being carried everywhere and pulled out at odd moments - and people doseem to think it's an odd bit of knitting. I'm not happy with the thick stripes, so have made the bobbles smaller and less frequent, and am now combining orange bobbles with pink ones - with a view to gradually making the bobbles purple, and then green and big again at the other end of the piece. It's an experiment, ok?

Photobooks

A small exhibition at the British Museum, of Japanese photobooks. In addition to the actual book in its vitrine, and background information, there's a book of laminated pages to interact with.

Photobooks are sequences of pictures, bound together to tell a story. The British Museum website has a slideshow of one of them, by Hosoe Eikoh.

Quite apart from the images, and the history, it makes you think about how to really use those many photos stored (and invisible) in the computer. The exhibition is on until 10 August, and makes an interesting counterpart to the American prints at the other end of the museum.

Quilting by the Lake

In the QBL quilt gallery you'll see some fabulous work, including this piece by Pamela Mostek, which fills me with awe and envy. Hurry on over to the QBL website, find your favourite, and report back!

Even better, hurry on over to New York for this two-week quilting event - it sounds wonderful.

Dragonfly eyes

"Dragonfly eyes" are multifaceted lenses set in an eyepiece, usually found in toyshops. Look through them to see the world transformed. Twist them a little, move them slightly, and you get ever changing views.
They're great for discovering different combinations and proportions of colour. Or general inspiration for patchwork shapes.

Also in the designing vein -- who'd have thought soap and a scrubber could be a quilting inspiration for quilting patterns?

Bird artist

Robert Gillmore has illustrated over 100 books in the last 50 years. He draws his inspiration from the wildlife and distinct countryside of his North Norfolk home and his prints capture the intimate behaviour of birds and mammals in this landscape.

I was very tempted to buy this bookin which he talks about his working methods - he uses linocuts - and the inspiration behind 90 of his prints. Here's a sample page -
but a couple of cards will have to do for now:

It's good to garden

"To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves."

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

Putting seeds in the earth and seeing them grow is marvellous. Making a garden is satisfying. Growing vegetables is wonderful. And making compost is magic.

Even having a window box makes a big difference! Can't find my windowbox photos, so here's something rather grander - Kew Gardens, no less....and The Manor, Hemingford Grey -

Out of Africa

Recently I got to meet another internet acquaintance -- Glenda, whose Amafu hand-dyed fabrics are well known in South Africa and indeed in UK, came to London and brought these along ...Thank you, Glenda -- this colourway complements the discharged pieces I did at Bob Adams' workshop at FoQ last year; I'm really looking forward to working with these fabrics and finally starting to use the discharged pieces too ... the combination is set to generate some creative sparks.

The "little traveller" is made by people affected by HIV in South Africa. By making these, women have been able to support their families and send their children to school. An inspiring initiative.

Brightly bobbled

Hanks of hand-dyed wool are too tempting, the beautiful colours changing from one end to the other. But I'm finding them disappointing when knitted up.

This is half a hank that went from blue-green through plum and terracotta to raspberry, and looked so gorgeous when it was a hank -The different patterns are due to fewer or more stitches on the needle (the overall numbers change inexplicably when I knit lace patterns) and also to starting out on impossibly small needles. It's nearly finished and I'm fed up with it! And in the middle, it gets very slushy....

But there is still half a hank of this delicate, part-mohair wool to use up. While winding it I had various thoughts about how the multicoloured feature of such wool could be used to advantage. With this one, the lengths dyed various colours are fairly consistent. Pick one colour and showcase it by literally pulling it out of the background. Raspberries, anyone? Here's a closeup, on circular needles:
But by the time you read this, it will be pulled back, and rather fewer stitches cast on. The idea is to make a tubular, double-sided scarf, and 120 stitches will make it too wide.

It'll be interesting to see how many stitches are needed to get the bobbles falling into a pleasing pattern.

Wandering and looking

"I like the ease at which I can waste whole afternoons looking at things" says the narrator in one of the videos by Simon Martin that are showing at Tate Britain's Lightbox until 27 July. They deal with making art and looking at art. One is an "exploration" of an ostentatious bookcase made in 1981 by the design group Memphis; the other is a musing on the experience of visiting museums (etymologically very good places for musing) (or for amusement).In Wednesday Afternoon ("a minor masterpiece of poetic discretion", says the New York Times) "a male narrator with a neutral mid-Atlantic inflection ["an anonymous Canadian" - who better?] muses on the experience of the contemporary museum visit. Accompanied by a sequence of lingering shots of artefacts and interiors from the British and Victoria & Albert Museums ranging from the Elgin Marbles to casually dressed visitors - the narrator comments he is 'less interested in endless amounts of stuff pressing into the moment than in the unforeseen combinations of objects and people, the lashes of feeling, the semiotics of tourist leisurewear'." - so says the leaflet accompanying the exhibition.

Apart from the thought-provoking commentary, it was pleasurable to see scenes and artefacts and think "I know where that is" and "gosh, must get back there soon and look at that again".

What better way to "kill time" by wandering around museums -- places that transcend time.

Similar simultaneity, and other opportunities for using time in unscheduled ways, exists on (in?) the internet. Where to wander, what to look at? Click on a link and be surprised ... thus it was that "The Birth of Adam" by prolific Israeli artist Ron Gang caught my eye -Another kind of aimlessly creative looking happens in magazines. I photographed these in the Tate Britain shop because of wanting to remember to look up the artists, Dod Proctor (1892-1972, worked mainly in Newlyn, Cornwall) here -and several of the ceramicists listed on the cover of Ceramic Review -
You can see Carolyn Genders' work here.

If you keep your eyes open, you never know what you'll see. A few days ago, this postcard was lying in the street, waiting to be rescued:The painting is called Meadow and it's by Kitty Stirling (another of her works can be seen here). "Meadow" seems to cry out for some stitches in the foreground....

Street jewellery

Several views of my new neckpiece by Linda Hughes, an up-and-coming Melbourne jeweller who makes amazing pieces in laminate. Along with the necklace - a birthday present, thank you Erika! - came a little book showing more of Linda's work - pendants, bracelets, brooches too - The essay by Sarah Jane Ross starts: "Historically the stripe has always been the naughty cousin of the polka dot. Not so cute and innocent, stripes have always been located in the margins of society." A thought to think on, on...

The essay continues: "the stripe is also menacingly draconian, dictating an edict but daring us at the same time. ... The stripe as an urban symbol reassures us, satisfying our society's obsession with safety and control."Even circles can be stripey, full of "trickery [that] renders the viewer unable to distinguish the background from the foreground."
Here is the vocabulary of the stripe, (not so) "subtly present in our urban environment" -
Once you see Linda's work you really start to notice the "jewellery of the streets".

What's in a book?

Hurry to the V&A to see Blood on Paper, a display of artists' books. It's been on since 15 April and has only a week left - finishes 29 June.

Is a projection of shifting words on a wall a book (commission by Charles Sandison)? How big can a book be? What does a wallfull of splattered plaster snowballs (installed by Not Vital) have to do with books, anyway? Can a suitcase (Francis Bacon), or a cabinet (Damien Hirst), really be a "book"?

It was Anselm Kiefer's books that really grabbed me. Not just because they're so big, but because they're so beautiful. The pages would be hard to turn (you're not allowed to touch them of course) - that would make "using the book" an important matter indeed. Then there's the method and materials question - how did those particular marks get onto the paper - and is it paper anyway?Looking for a picture of a book by Kiefer, I found this 1.5m-wide spread from one of his Secret Life of Plants volumes on the blog of woolgathersome - amid a treasure-box of diverse and haunting images, poetry, and music recommendations. So much to follow up on there. And for the image-hungry I'd also like to recommend theartofmemory - which is opening my eyes to narrative via film stills. How about "pictures in search of sounds" then?

Hmm we seem to be moving away from books... Another favourite was the Spanish sculptor Chillida - this image is a 1995 print, Ibiza -
Also memorable: Cai Guo-Qiang, "the fireworks guy", was shown on video making a"suicidal fireworks" volume -- inserting a firework in a big book and exploding it. The finished book is lying meekly in a case, and there's a pic of it happening on the V&A site.

Reductionist collage?

London Underground is updating its posters. When they get roughly torn off, some interesting abstracts emerge, don't you think?

Dyeing

Some discussion of using a restricted palette in painting - even just two colours - and how this might translate into working with fabric, somehow fed into a couple of dyeing sessions, both based on turquoise. In the first I also used scarlet as the second colour and also a bit of indigo in some of the mixtures. The fabric is salvaged from some "vintage" German duvet covers; it's done with Dyrect dyes in the microwave -The fabric for the next session turned out, in the light of day, to be curtain lining rather than sateen, which may account for its rather muted colours (compared to what I was expecting). Rather more scrunching of fabric, and the second colour is black. These are procion dyes, and I found some splotchy scarlet bits to overdye -
Having found some threads that might work in whatever emerged from these fabrics, I was delighted to run across this pic by Klee in a 2002 patchwork magazine -- this was in the memorable Klee exhibition at the Hayward -
Looking through my books on Klee also turned up these inspiring paintings --
But I've designated the rest of June as Nothing New Fortnight and won't be starting a new piece with the new fabric just yet.