Across the street

The view from the window along Stroud Green Road - a supermarket, a betting shop, three restaurants, a pub ...The view 15 years ago, as painted by a visitor, Sylvia from Montreal - it's been hanging on my wall ever since -
At that time the supermarket was half the size, and there were several sweatshops making garments, mostly dresses in synthetic fabrics, presumably for export. The banks had only just closed, and there were far fewer restaurants. Fortunately we still have a number of useful shops - a locksmith, pharmacy, hardware store, even a place that makes window frames. The nice "home" store has closed, but recently some clothing stores - fashion! - have opened. The carpet shop is long gone, as are the local fabric stores.

Waiting

When the bus doesn't come and doesn't come ... you might as well get out the camera ...

Stamps

Wow. Just found out - after a bit of searching - that a first class stamp costs 46p and second class is 36p. For the "small" letter.

Ah, I remember when second class was 19p, and you didn't have to worry about the thickness or size of the envelope!

Book du jour - more tunnels

When the chain of 1" squares didn't fit easily into the 1" holes, I tried making a chain with 3/4" squares - but they were too small -With a little urging, the 1" squares squeezed in -
and now sit there quite happily -
Here's one I made some weeks ago, from plain white paper, with a few squares previously cut from black paper added in -
There could be scope for using the colours (and stations) of each tube line -

This week at college

The main event (for us part-timers) was our midpoint review. I was pleased with how my "newspaper" had turned out, so it was a surprise to feel really, really nervous when people started looking at it -Another surprise was to hear it compared to "a medieval document" - because of the paper being like vellum. Newsprint + wax = vellum, that's good (do the writing first though)! I need to find a nice context for displaying it - train station waiting room, or in a cafe ...

In the afternoon, a variety of things -- looking at the library display of books from NIVAL - the National Irish Visual Arts Library, which are part of an exchange - Camberwell students' books are on display in Dublin.
Talk turned to how difficult it was to display books - is this something we should be thinking of when making them?
Then to the South London Gallery to have a look at the plinths - the fulltimers are thinking about getting their show together - September will soon be here -
Some of us stayed in the gallery cafe and had another chance to see Karen's project. The bear is made out of a chapter of Winnicott's "The child, the family and the outside world" and was presented sitting on the book, with the cut-up pages loose among its pages. Perfect.
Wednesday's "lecture" turned out to be a workshop on "professional practice" - we got into small groups and discussed Ambitions and Obstacles. Interesting that some groups made mind maps, some made lists, and a couple didn't write anything down but either drew (a sheep, why?) or just talked.

I didn't take notes but the words confidence and courage (and cowardice) stick in my mind. So does the idea of "getting your work out there", taking chances and opportunities - and making challenging work ... though whether you want to challenge the viewer, or challenge yourself, is up to the individual.

Screen printing was busy as BA students prepare for their show.
I printed more "waste" sheets of newsprint - for another newspaper perhaps, or for some magazine supplements? - and also quite a bit of fabric to make into bags. The idea is obvious really - it just took a long time to arrive. What helped was happening to hear a talk on the radio which mentioned how theatre directors and composers and probably other artists as well see the people they are working "for" as, for example, "the people on our street". The eternal question of who is your audience ... it came to me that my audience, for this project, is people who use public transport in London. Another obvious insight - but clarifying this (along with the talk about ambitions and obstacles) is helping other things fall into place.

The little bits were used as resists - I have many of these now, and love to sort through them -
One of the first bags. The branding is "mc-lines" -

Book du jour - tunnels

Playing with "tunnel" books - concertinas with a hole in the centre, and various things going through that tunnel.

Though the plan was to use the printed sheets, I found myself punching little squares out of tube maps, all along the District line, in fact. The remnants make a kind of mad city-scape -
A sheet of A3 paper becomes a five-section tunnel concertina, and catches the early sun -
Another sheet of A3, folded over before punching, is sturdier but less successful -
It was too early to start sewing the little squares together (my sewing room is right over my neighbour's bedroom) - something for tomorrow?

Whole lotta weather going on

Cool dudes

Ain't it great, what you see from the bus ...

Hackers still with us

I'm still getting emails from "Gmail Response Team" and similar -- ie, the hackers.

FYI, here's an example. It's from "Gmail" and the subject line is "Action Required":

There was an invalid attempt to access your Gmail account from an unknown computer or mobile device. For the security of your account, kindly Re-Login Below

Validate [this was a clickable link]

Gmail support team [also a clickable link]

Don't be fooled into responding to emails like this. Gmail has better things to do than contact individual users.

Here endeth the lesson; now for an (almost random) photo of something completely different....

City = desert

The serendipity trail brought me to this blog post, about the work of Melbourne artist Damon Kowarsky. Of course I'm always looking for art or writing or ideas that relate to my "journey lines", and in reading this I realised that "my lines" aren't just about the journey, or even the time taken up by daily travel (or time lost to the need to travel), but they are also about being an individual in a crowded city.

[From the Pakistani writer Quddus Mirza:] “The social setup of big cities – with minimum personal contact and huge crowds of unknown people swarming in the shopping malls, streets, parks and other urban places – aggravates the feeling of loneliness.

“In that sense, man rediscovers his self both in connection and confrontation with the city. [The] city assumes a great significance in the psyche of a citizen who perceives it as a combination of structures that are unknown, uninviting and unbearable. Perhaps, for him, roaming in the city is an experience not much dissimilar from moving in a desert, since in both places one tends to lose the sense of direction and gets an illusion of being lost.”

Mirza is not the first to draw links between the city and the desert. Francis Bacon [1561-1626] wrote “Magna civitas, magna solitude“ [A great city, a great desert], making clear the parallels between these places.

(Image from here.)

As John Cage said ...

The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

Burning books

Made (burnt out) with sunlight. It's by Remo Albert Alig, and I found it here.

Book du jour (sort of) again

There was enough waxed paper to make a small box with lid, following the pattern used yesterday. I made two carefully-folded strips, one for the base and one for the lid, and transferred the markings round the edges of squares of paper (which will perhaps be used to make other small boxes in future), then used that to transfer the markings to the waxed paper - keeping the grain on the diagonal, though it probably wasn't necessary on the waxed paper. But I liked the idea of the lines being on the diagonal...
I used the edge of the ruler (aligned with the marks for each square) and the bone folder to crease the paper - but be careful, or this will happen ----
(Some magic tape fixed it.) Here are the box shapes cut out
Turn them over to add the diagonal folds -
and it all folds up quite easily
You can see how the flaps fold inside, with the larger flaps going under the "skinny" one.
Base and lid -
The thumb-hole is so useful when it's a snug fit.
Next challenge in the box-du-jour - an origami box with hinged lid (video here). But I need to get back to actual books for a while...

Roses round the door

For the midpoint review

Crucial ingredient in my book for the review is ... wax. The paper is a byproduct of the screen printing - the sheets of newsprint that could have ended up in the bin. Instead, I saved them ... and rescued some sheets that other people had "used lightly". This accidental component, the happenstance, is an important component of the development of the project.

An easy way to wax paper is to have some sheets of newspaper underneath (to retain the heat) - iron the top sheet, and rub the side of a candle over it. The iron tends to "smoke" on contact with the hot wax, so do this by an open window -
Here's the finished "book" - it's a newspaper, complete with homemade newspaper stick.

If poetry is "news that stays news" (TS Eliot) ... then perhaps this is "news that never was news" - ?
Some pages are just lines, and some are from other types of travelwriting I did earlier in the year -
I was surprised to discover the puffer paste on the page on the left -
Even the skybirds get a look in -
At the mid-point review we bring one item, lay it on the table, and listen. The others talk about it for 10-15 minutes. I'm still at a bit of a loss myself as to what this "book" is "about" (it came from nowhere - or somewhere - or everywhere), so this could be very interesting!

Leftovers

Pages that didn't make it into the "newspaper from nowhere" - material for the weekend magazine? -It needs a heavier cover, and a stapled spine. Some possible page spreads -
I like how those "found marks" work with my lines -

Embroidered ... what ... !

Discovered on a virtual pinboard ...

Home sweet home

Sunlight through the flowers, and fresh baked bread. Stopping amid busyness and chaos to notice the important things.

Finishing the sky birds project

I knew the "scroll" would have to go into a box to protect it during travel, and decided to make the box into part of the work. Over the days of thinking about it, it evolved into a box that would unfold and be mirrored inside, with the poem that inspired the piece used ... somehow ...

When I started putting the box together, the first parts were easy - measure and cut the panels, and cover them with the cream silk printed with the flocks of sky birds. I used some of the silk for the hinges too -
Figuring out what to do with the base was more difficult - I made a tiny model to help. The panels are labelled to avoid yet more confusion - the narrow panel on the right has to be narrower than the one on the left so that the two fronts can overlap cleanly. The difference is 3mm - the depth of the card used for the box -
In the end I hinged just the central base to the back panel, and made a cloth to spread out under the "wings" of the piece -
The back section is ready to be joined in. It's a different colour because the piece of cream silk was the size it was - just big enough for the side panels. In fact the blue (a metallic dupion) wasn't really deep enough ... which called for the black at the bottom to be added, and black to be used for the bottom and for the embroidered cloth that unfolds from the bottom of the box.Mirror-foil lines each section -
The stitching was done from the reverse - I wrote the lines of the poem onto a piece of iron-on stabiliser, and then realised it had to be written in mirror-writing to be the right way round on the front of the fabric. Fortunately there was just enough stabiliser on the roll to write it again.

Finding a suitable bobbin thread and tension -
A fair bit of time was spent searching for the darning foot for my longshank machine, and in the end I had to do the stitching with an ordinary foot, feed dogs up, and very short stitches, stitching very slowly and using the knee lift a lot to swivel the fabric around. Blessed be the writers of short poems!
By the time I braced myself to do the stitching "the hard way" I was so rattled that I forgot to check that the writing fitted onto the obvious lines of the fabric. Hey ho, never mind!

The poet's name is hand stitched - here's the reverse, which was subsequently hidden in the hem. I hand stitched my own name onto a bit of cloth, and decided to place it onto that hem, directly behind the poet's name -
The back view -

Leaving the cloth square meant the mirrored "wings" could be adjusted to different angles if necessary.

It's a wrap!
"The Flocks of Sky Birds" will be in "Whatever Floats your Boat ..." exhibition at Slough Museum, 18 May to 11 June, open Weds-Sat 11.30-4pm. Twenty-eight members of the Thames Valley group of Contemporary Quilt are taking part.