Collaborative seminars - first week

Over two days, six teams presented hour-long seminars on various assigned topics. Our seminar presentation - on the book as documentary/commentary - was first on the agenda. As a result of the little exercise we set the class, we have material for making a documentary/commentary book of our own.

We set out a continuum from the objective, truthful, factual documentary to the subjective, fictional, opinionated commentary, and asked where various types of work fit (poetry, newspaper story, diary, travelogue, etc). Mi-Young presented various artists' books on the "documentary" end of the spectrum, including Sol Lewitt's Autobiography, Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document and the work of Hanne Darboven, and I chose "commentary" examples from a 1995 exhibition, Science and the Artist's Book, at the Smithsonian Institution, based on historical science books.

For the topic "text in the book and text of the book" we were given cloths with texts written at one end, which we were to read after covering our heads with them. People whose first language wasn't English had to translate their sentence and read it in their own language. Readings were orchestrated by taps on the head, and the voices ran around the room singly and in various combinations.
This is the view from under the cloth -
It felt rather disembodied to be functioning as a hidden voice, one instrument in the group.

In addition to considering the role of synesthesia, members of the group spoke briefly about artists who have influenced their own work - Kurt Schwitters (his Merzbau is on the right-hand page)
Zao Wou-Ki -
"Systems for making and systems for thought" brought up discussion on systems and games, and the role and desirability of systems - do systems kill spontaneity? Artists mentioned included Sol Lewitt, poet Kenneth Goldsmith, pop artist Ray Johnson, Dieter Roth, Fiona Banner.

The group got involved in putting stickers on the wall according to a simple system -
start from a dot, and leave no bar open-ended -

It looks spontaneous -- or were we evolving our own system?

Changeover

Today marks the changeover of notebooks. The one started on 19 October, my first day at Camberwell, is full - apart from completing the index, which I'll do on the way to college today (if I get a seat on the tube).

Losing this notebook would be like losing three months of my life - everything is written in it (well not the shopping lists) - notes from seminars and from browsing journals in the library; lots of artists and websites to research; things overheard and bon mots seen elsewhere; ideas and preliminary workings-out; and of course spasms of TravelWriting.

On to #2. I've stocked up on these notebooks - they come from Rymans and cost £5, and contain 150 pages of decent-quality, off-white paper. The covers and elastic are sturdy - and there's a bookmark.

But - as you can see from the amount of writing on the page - information is going to get lost. And it's tiring to read tiny handwriting. So in addition to the index, which lists page numbers for seminars, lectures, notes on reading, etc, and the list of pages containing the journey lines, I'll have to go through and highlight or otherwise mark things that are still relevant and/or important. As an aide-memoire, notebooks are a lot of work!

In #2 I'll try to be more spacious.

Painted shibori

Some samples, made with lots of running stitch, pulled up tight, and then painted with textile paint. The water seeps into the fabric (this is cotton) and leaves the pigment on the outside folds.

I pulled out the strings and reused them. Mindless busy-work!

Drawing with thread

Made in the Nui project, Kagoshima City, Japan. "Nui Project’s dazzling textiles and shirts, stitched by artists living with Down’s Syndrome, autism, and other mental and physical challenges, force viewers to re-examine their assumptions " - read and see more here, in Hand/Eye Magazine.

"Perfect imperfection" ... "pushing the limits of fiber".

For the sky birds

Some research towards my TVCQ "Slough piece" - bird silhouettes and flocks. The card was made as a Christmas card in the early 1990s - photocopied and coloured in with gold and red pen.

It's based on the Bird Tree by Guiseppe Lund, and on a poem by an Iranian poet called Mohammad Hoghughi:

The distant cloud takes to its wings from light.
The flock of the sky birds take to their wings.
I take my wings from rapture.

Urban archaeology

At second glance it looks like the building left standing was interconnected to the one that was demolished ...

A better class of graffiti

...in the ladies' loos at Wilson Road, Camberwell College of Art.

Sketchbook Project

My sketchbook went off to America late last week - just before the deadline of course. As much as a month ago it was almost ready - with an enlarged tube map in the back, and tracings of the journey noted in the book's pages, as well as a list of the stations involved -

All that remained was to list the bus stops and trace the bus journeys. This is the draft -
Tracing paper containing them went underneath the tube journeys, and an alphabetical (and numbered) list of stops folded out from the other side of the map -
In lieu of a colophon, some summary text:
94 journeys on 42 days

(22 June 2010 to 3 September 2010)

by tube, train, and bus

(31 stations, 25 stops)

all journeys included shorter

or longer walks to stations

and stops
where do we go (and why)?

how do we get there?

what do we remember?

Boro

Karen brought this lovely book in to college -

These repaired hemp clothes come from the north of the main island of Japan -
Worn and patched by the poorest people, they are now covetable and collectable -
This underskirt brings pojagi to mind -

It's rare that I include photos of friends on this blog, but Brent simply had to appear - we hadn't met for about 30 years, but did manage to recognise each other, even when meeting in the murky gloom - and vast expanse - of the Great Court at the British Museum, before a long chat over dinner and adjourning to a wine bar -

Brent brought, from the Moravian Pottery & Tile Works in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, these tiles, and also a quillow (made by Katie Lapp) -
and thereby introduced me to the life and work of Henry Mercer, who founded and built the pottery. He figured large in the Arts and Crafts movement in America. Trained as a lawyer, he never practised law but travelled in France and Germany for several years, then returned to Pennsylvania and became a curator of archaeology before apprenticing himself to a potter and going on to found the pottery in 1898 and run it until his death in 1930. Engineering and architecture were also part of his skills repertoire.

Mourning pages again

My first volume of the "Mourning pages" is in the Hidden Spaces exhibition at college, and work is proceeding on the second.

All last week I was throwing salt water at the pages - several at a time were spread out drying -The salt made interesting stains on the tissue paper that was sort of absorbing the drips. I might use that for wrapping the books in -
The ink lines can be broken by the runs of "tears" -
The moisture makes the pages buckle and the book open out -
Press it closed and it springs back open. Resilient - c'est moi.

(This links into the "imagined interiors" that I was interested in, about a year ago. A different sort of interior...!)

Hooking progress

Update on what I posted a week ago - the rug is looking rather like a dragon rampant at the moment:This was the state of it a week ago -
Written 11/01: Saturday was the first meeting, at Craft Central, of Hooked in London. I started a piece based on our usual car journeys, tracing them off maps in the A-Z. This little rug is a conglomerate of several bits of these maps, with roads outlined in strips of dark wool, to be filled in with light wool (I had to try that out here and there). Of course it would be fabulous as a room-sized rug with roads wide enough to drive a Dinky Toy down - but as this might be part of my "journey lines" project, it needs to be finished in months rather than years. So I'm sticking to bathmat-size.

Progress is always fastest at the start, and this is the result of a couple of nights' hooking while watching television. It's a weekend project, and I hope to have quite a lot of the white filled in by the time of the next meeting on 5 February.

Will the roads be neutral, or coloured ... that's a decision for later ...

Making rag rugs is a great way of recycling woollen garments, especially those attacked by moths (I have a fair few of those). But you must put the affected wool into the freezer first, to kill any remaining moths/larvae/eggs. Three days in the freezer (in a plastic bag), three days out, and another three days in. Then you can start cutting strips ... and get hooking!

Choosing the right food

Food of the right colour, that is, to go with what you're wearing...

Paper string nest

One page of the British National Formulary makes about 14 feet - 4.5 metres - of string; that'll make a 'nest' the size of a walnut. Empty, it weighs hardly anything. Add a capsule of ibuprofen 200mg and it becomes ... not a book, exactly ...

Is it a book?

Do we "read" colour? Would it be a book if it wasn't on the wall?

Jen Stark, Square, 2007, handcut paper, 12 x 12 x 3 inches - seen on this art blog.

When is a bed a book?

Bed Book, 2005, by Susan Stockwell, consists of Mills and Boons books squashed into used, rusting bed frame.

Another bed book - with a ghostly imprint - is on show at the Florence Nightingale museum in London.

Stockwell's recent work includes dresses made of maps of the Scottish Highlands, and "A Chinese Dream" was in the V&A's quilts exhibition.

Making paper string

You cut thin paper into narrow strips in a zig-zag, and roll the strips between your fingers. I'm using pages from an old copy of the British National Formulary, which in nearly 1000 pages provides up-to-date guidance on prescribing, dispensing and administering medicines. The book is only a few centimetres thick, and the paper is lightweight yet opaque, along the lines of bible paper.

Various kinds of paper can be used to make paper string - these are made of newspaper -

Update 6 March: using a lightweight spindle makes the spinning go faster -

This week at college

The week started with a visit to the National Art Library at the V&A - what a wonderful place! It has 2 million items (the catalogue is online) and anyone can apply for a reader's ticket - they are free. The library is open Tues-Sat, 10-5.30; you take a seat number and order the books you want to see; they are brought to your seat.

A selection of artists books was laid out for us; here are a few. The slips of paper are the cataloguing information about each book.

Gabberjab by Walter Hamady was the first book I looked at - quite thrilling to be able to page through and look at something that appears in many books-about-books only as a photo of one page spread.
This is "Poesie de mots inconnus" (1949) - mainly futurist Russian and dadaist poems in a wonderfully tactile parchment case -
"Giving fear a proper name: Detroit" (Susan kae Grant, 1984) was made in an edition of 15, each page with pins, thread winding, little 3D objects -
Ken Campbell's "Father's Garden" (1989) strikes out lines of the text in different ways to gradually reveal the story -
"Terror terror" by Ken Campbell (1977) is fridge poetry on a grand scale -
I enjoyed turning the pages of Kenneth A Smith's "Book 91", but some people got very frustrated by the way the strings resisted -
The pieced-together pages of "Aunt Sallie's Lament" (Margaret Kaufmann, 1988) can simply be turned, or can be extended - an example of paper engineering which started out as quilt designs and ended as a chair, it says here -
Next day, more project-proposal crits, along with people bringing in books they had mentioned, like Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes and "love letter no.7" that came from a Hayvend machine -
Work was put on the table, passed round, talked about -
Lots of interesting deconstruction -
I idly discovered a method of embossing using fingernails and the tubular elastic around my notebook - might be useful, simple technologies and all that...
Also this week - research practitioner lecture by sculptor Bob Pratt, who's interested in the spaces between things and what's in empty places; textile printing; and the Hidden Spaces exhibition.