Sunbathing

A seasonal visitor outside the cafe, Amsterdam botanical garden - this place is so lovely in the snow, and has several warm greenhouses, including one with many species of butterflies -

Felted

Was it only Monday when we were having lunch at the Orangery cafe in Amsterdam's botanical garden? It's so good to be home - while we were enjoying the snow and the raspberry pie, we didn't know about the looong journey that lay ahead.The felt that lines the walls of this otherwise-echoey room is wonderful, and was installed mere days ago. It was commissioned from Claudy Jongstra, who has used silk, wool from her flock of rare Drenth heath sheep, and dyes from plants grown in her garden.
Called "Capitulare de Villis" after a proclamation of Charles the Great (747-814) on the cultivation of herbs and food plants, the work incorporates dyes from plants listed in the declaration.

Trying

Middle age is a good time to start reading Montaigne. He (1533-1592) was middle aged when he wrote his Essays (1580), and more than four centuries later they give a picture of someone who could very well be alive today. Not only did he start a whole new form of literature, but could he have been the world's first blogger? He kept revising his thoughts, throwing in the new ones regardless of contradictions.

A series of essays on his Essays, available on the Guardian website, includes this passage:

"More editions came out, and he left annotated copies for a vast posthumous one. He seems to have amazed even himself: "Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world?"

"He preferred not to repent of choices he had made either in literature or in life. His past selves each had their own voice, even if the new Montaigne no longer understood them. Thus, within a paragraph or two of the Essays, we may meet Montaigne as a young man, then as an old man with one foot in the grave, and then again as a middle-aged mayor bowed down by responsibilities. We may listen to him complaining of impotence; a moment later we see him young and lusty and bent on seduction. "I do not portray being", he wrote; "I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another … but from day to day, from minute to minute." His let his thoughts lie where they fell."

By middle age, you expect your personality to be pretty much formed, but Montaigne didn't view things this way. The writing continued to re-form his personality; by examining himself and his world, he was forced to live differently.

And so it goes with blogging: "I know what I think when I hear myself speak".

Child's eye view

Preschooler, in cafe of V&A: "That lady has a nice butt, mummy."

Mother to darling child: "Yes, she has a nice backside, dear."

End of term

After the Wednesday lecture there was to be a party and "exchange of gifts" - if you brought an artwork, you'd take one home in exchange. Throughout the day a team was putting up the works, and makers' names, on the hallway walls -The books were kept safely in a vitrine -
Lecture over ... party time ...
And finally the drawing of names and collection of work -
Before the pub, some group photography -
What will we all be working on over the holiday, I wonder ...

One exhibition, two museums

Tuesday = seminar day, and this week it happened in central London. First to the British Library for the Evolving English exhibition - many things of interest, with informative but not overwhelming labels, and low lighting (difficult for seeing) and also auditory input, not always through headphones. Quite a challenging situation for a group going round, sharing what they found of interest about "their" object (we each chose one). Later we headed to a less crowded place to have a general discussion -

Then a walk, including lunch, to the afternoon's venue.
On one side of Lincoln's Inn Fields is Sir John Soane's Museum, crowded with an 18th century gentleman's cabinet of curiosities.
On the other, the Royal College of Surgeons and its Hunterian Museum, with its glass atrium and hundreds of specimens in glass jars.
Our task was to look at the idea of the collections, the role of labels, the display of objects, and "how do the display systems inform the audience's relationship to the objects and contextualise the meaning".

A book ...

Puffer paste print on silver silk dupion -

Also on the printed strip, red and white -
And inside -

not only a different print (travel on the Victoria Line) but a layer of "subtext" underneath -

... and its cover

After a couple of rough attempts at folding a little case for the book, I decided to measure up and make a pattern -

Definitely an improvement! -
I used the pattern to make a version in tracing paper -
Next time I'll think about how the writing integrates with the visible contents -

Text project crit

Only the full-time students were presenting their project (last week), but some of us part-timers went along to see what they'd been up to. Such interesting work! - stacking boxes with false bottoms; walnut shells with typewritten contents; staples coming out of the spine of a book (not comfortable to hold/read). Many people used the amulets as a starting point - here are some Taiwanese amulets, lucky charms for good health, that informed one of the projects.

My lunchtime reading -
The Lost Art of Walking by Geoff Nicholson: "the history, science, philosophy, literature, theory and practice of pedestrianism" - not entirely tangential to the project proposal that was under revision at the time. And very enjoyable.

This looks fun too -

Strange snowfall

Snow flurries outside the Serpentine Gallery - they rather mystified the child on the scooter, but turned out to come from three snow-making machines on the roof ... on both sides of the building at the same time. They rather mystify me too.

Glass at V&A

After I'd spent time drawing "Oranges", a Tiffany vase, one Sunday afternoon last century, I started to appreciate how clever the patterning was. And you know how it is, once you spend some time drawing something, you have a bond with it - so every time I go to the glass gallery I have to say hello to this vase -

Another Tiffany object -
And this one with the bubbles is by Maurice Marinot, who worked in the 1920s and 30s (not to be confused, even by people who don't take proper notes, with Maurice Martenot, the inventor of that strange musical instrument, the Ondes Martenot) -
While looking at all the different types of glass I kept wondering, "how can this relate to a book object" - and then came across this piece, Colourbox, by Jun Kaneko. Kaneko is one of my favourite ceramic artists and it's great to see his work in glass -
Maybe a little book-like, do you think....?

Yet more textile printing!

Get to the workshop early and you can have a huge bit of the printing table for a while -

Brian suggested I try printing on these japanese nylon samples; I found they curl up when they come off the screen. Still working on how best to use them -
Some prints made with the latest screen, drying on the heating pipes -
And after ironing at home -
In combination with an earlier print - to conceal an area of shoddy printing -
My simple fantasy is that these fabrics are used to cover blank books with lovely thick paper inside ...

Thinking about journeys

At the moment I'm thinking of little else ... wondering why the theme for my project is journeys, wondering where the project will go...

Interesting to come across these words while reading the V&A residency blog of Sian Bowen:

"If you were on a journey and asked to describe it, where might you begin? Maybe by stating your destination or would it be your point of departure? On the other hand would you simply want to look around and describe the view at that particular moment? Or would you want to go back much further in time in order to talk about why you decided to make the journey in the first place?"

I'm intrigued by her work

which also uses burning as a drawing technique -

Neighbourhood

Wednesday was a good day because I had a chance to get a haircut. I went to Blossom, just up the street. It has some funky retro and vintage furniture -
and a fabulous cash register in use -
Best of all, the owner was born a couple of streets away.

Art I like - Rosie Leventon

Land and installation artist Rosie Leventon uses many materials in her work - including baked sugar, recycled mobile phones, and books -

This is "A long way from the bathroom". She says of her work: "Beneath our too rationalised and civilised western world lie most of the things I am interested in - things such as archaeology, crop marks, iron age hill forts, long barrows. Also lost and buried watercourses, cisterns, and forgotten rivers. The piles of recycled paperbacks were piled up into stacks and the centre was hollowed out and carved into a saucer-like spherical negative shape."

"Dig", a pond in a wood, is one of those simple good ideas. "B-52" nearby is definitely thought-provoking. See her talk about both of these in the video at the end of this blog post.

Thought of the day

Thursday was my first-time-ever using Oval station. At platform level it looks ordinary, unrefurbished even (it opened in 1890, was rebuilt in 1920, and (conservatively) refurbished a few years back) -

The ticket hall has murals of cricketers, as befits the alighting place for that great sport venue, The Oval ("home of Surrey Cricket" says the website; and indeed it was the site of the first England v Australia "test" match, in 1880) -
Best of all, the station boasts a calligrapher on staff, and has a board with a "thought of the day" -
More power to his/her pen!

Thin green line

The line leads from Old Street Station
along the pavements
curving with the curve of the City Road
crossing the crosswalks
and mysteriously going past the entrance of Moorfields Eye Hospital.
My long-awaited appointment stretched and stretched ... to the very end of the day. So instead of leaving with a prescription for glasses that will work for me, I left with a date for another appointment. The good news is that there's nothing seriously wrong with these old eyes ... it's just that they're old eyes. The drops they put in make reading difficult for the next 4 or 5 hours, but the drops did magic things with the haloes around street lights and car lights - things that the camera won't capture - imagine dozens of twinkly tentacles around each light, with rainbows around some and further strong beams even beyond the rainbows. Magic! (But I'd rather be reading my book...)