I haven't quite figured out how Kristin Prevallet arrived at the words that described each page - read about it here. The project (Merge) started when she found a copy of Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable sitting on a trash can outside a library, and dropped india ink on four of the pages ... letting the wind direct the flow of the ink. Or rather, she turned the pages so the wind could blow the ink along. A collaboration with the wind ... good ....
16 June 2011
An un-writing of sorts
I haven't quite figured out how Kristin Prevallet arrived at the words that described each page - read about it here. The project (Merge) started when she found a copy of Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable sitting on a trash can outside a library, and dropped india ink on four of the pages ... letting the wind direct the flow of the ink. Or rather, she turned the pages so the wind could blow the ink along. A collaboration with the wind ... good ....
Book du jour
Not finished...using wax on some thin paper, a roll of paper towels in fact -
The by-product, newsprint soaked in wax, cried out for some machine stitch experimentation -
with and without thread - (the lines are the edges of the presser foot) -
close-up against the light -
The by-product, newsprint soaked in wax, cried out for some machine stitch experimentation -with and without thread - (the lines are the edges of the presser foot) -
close-up against the light -
14 June 2011
Edgy
This year's journal quilts are all getting the same edge treatment - satin stitch. I've found that a cord is useful for making the edges lie flat, so before doing the dense stitching (always with black thread) I use a narrow open zigzag to add the cord, which is actually crochet cotton -
The loop at the corners is useful for two things. First, it allows the cord to be held taut to make the edge lie flat. Also, it helps with "turning the corner" - if you stitch right to the edge, then turn, the presser foot can get stuck on the stitching already there, so having the cord allows you to pull gently to move the stitching onward.There are always some tiny sticky-out bits, no matter how carefully you trim the edges -
To help the edges look dense, I use a black fabric pen around the whiteness of the batting (being very careful that the pen doesn't slip...).
To help the edges look dense, I use a black fabric pen around the whiteness of the batting (being very careful that the pen doesn't slip...). It takes nearly 20 minutes to edge each quilt, once it's been cut to size. The narrow binding is probably quicker - and uses less thread.
Relief printing
The joy of linocut and woodcut is that you don't need an etching press - they can be done at home. Screenprinting and monoprint are other domestic possibilities. The V&A website has a short, useful introduction.
In terms of actual imagery - where to start? ("Start anywhere" - the important thing is to get going somewhere, somehow ... the rest will develop!)
13 June 2011
New toys, new ways
As part of a consequential chain of family events, I have a new computer - a laptop intended to sit delicately on what was once a writing desk, which is currently occupied by a huge screen connected to a large, noisy hard drive. This monster will go to live in my son's room and replace his laptop, which has certain annoying, unacceptable habits which need not be mentioned here.
The writing desk might even be used for writing, the laptop easily set to one side....
Before then, though, programs must be transferred to the laptop. My domestic technie is finding that this is not straightforward, so I am currently without access to Photoshop - and I miss it. There's no point in downloading photos if you can't edit them for use on the blog, is there? I may have to resort to Gimp in the meantime.
Another consequence of a new machine - and the need to transfer files - is a certain reluctance to add anything other than what's currently needed. The joy of keeping an empty inbox makes me want to keep minimal files, all nicely organised of course. And that means looking at all the old files - deleting and archiving and reorganising. Which I have not yet done.
The compromise is to have an external hard drive with all that gubbins on it. "Out of sight, out of mind" - yet still within reach. The nice new empty laptop can accumulate its own files gradually, and they can be organised into a system that makes sense now.
With the new machine come new habits - getting used to the pad rather than the mouse, for instance. And (of course) - being able to use the machine away from the desk - I can take it into the studio and "listen again" to those missed radio programmes, how good is that!
Perhaps being away from the photos for a while will help me take fewer of them? It was somewhat alarming that over 23,000 were transferred to that external hard drive. (Almost as many songs as Thomas discovered he had downloaded over the past few years.)
The writing desk might even be used for writing, the laptop easily set to one side....
Before then, though, programs must be transferred to the laptop. My domestic technie is finding that this is not straightforward, so I am currently without access to Photoshop - and I miss it. There's no point in downloading photos if you can't edit them for use on the blog, is there? I may have to resort to Gimp in the meantime.
Another consequence of a new machine - and the need to transfer files - is a certain reluctance to add anything other than what's currently needed. The joy of keeping an empty inbox makes me want to keep minimal files, all nicely organised of course. And that means looking at all the old files - deleting and archiving and reorganising. Which I have not yet done.
The compromise is to have an external hard drive with all that gubbins on it. "Out of sight, out of mind" - yet still within reach. The nice new empty laptop can accumulate its own files gradually, and they can be organised into a system that makes sense now.
With the new machine come new habits - getting used to the pad rather than the mouse, for instance. And (of course) - being able to use the machine away from the desk - I can take it into the studio and "listen again" to those missed radio programmes, how good is that!
Perhaps being away from the photos for a while will help me take fewer of them? It was somewhat alarming that over 23,000 were transferred to that external hard drive. (Almost as many songs as Thomas discovered he had downloaded over the past few years.)
Pixellated
A video made with dice -
3 minutes 17 seconds at 22 frames a second = 4334 frames x 1000s of dice = madness!
But it sure looks good - enjoy it here.
3 minutes 17 seconds at 22 frames a second = 4334 frames x 1000s of dice = madness!
But it sure looks good - enjoy it here.
11 June 2011
Book becomes book
Enzo Mari's rendition of Georg Perec's Life, a user's manual. Each sinuous book is one chapter, and they fit together into a special box, which comes with a small illustrated book in which Mari traces his work and relationship with the Perec book.Image from here.
Mari is a Milanese architect who has also made wooden puzzles (and a few other things).
10 June 2011
Quilt inspiration
Although I don't use "people" in my quilts or other artwork, seeing this work by LA-based artist Phoebe Beasley suggested a way of doing so -- or rather, a starting point."Aunt Sue's Stories" was used as an illustration in a book of poems by Langston Hughes.
09 June 2011
Sculpture as book as sculpture...
Work by Montana sculptor Kate Hunt. She uses "basic materials which are first cut and compressed, then tied and coated, and finally ordered into grids or decorative sconce-like forms. The compacted, sheared newsprint can assume the form of a flag as readily as an abstract geometric form." (Image from here.)
The High Line, a lifeline
In 1934 trains ran along the High Line through Manhattan, bringing carcasses to the meat packing district. With the increase in road transport, it became abandoned - but recently has come to life again, as a park. The tracks and weeds were left, and railings and paths added. The second section has just opened; when complete, it will be 1.5 miles long - an artery for nature in the city. See the photo story here.
Danger signs - Africa
This is from one of those collections of photos that's making the rounds by email. The mind boggles...
Art I like - Ann Hamilton
photo ©2011, Fredrik Marsh. All Rights Reserved
Raised lettering on the cork floor of the William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library, Ohio State University. It's a permanent installation called Verse and it's by installation artist Ann Hamilton. As it says here:"The text is an alphabetic intersection of three different accountings of world history, which are arranged in a literary concordance. The spine along the north-south axis is composed of 299 words, A to Z, adapted from a White River Sioux story entitled The End of the World. The east-west lines intersect this story with prose fragments from A Little History of the World by E. H. Gombrich (1936) and Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone by Eduardo Galeano (2009).
"According to the library’s press release, Verse in its form and woven organization is a reflection of how the reader intersects with and culls information and meaning from the library’s collection."
The text is in the form of a mesostic (an invention of John Cage) - vertical phrases intersecting horizontal text.
Cork, though? - won't readers' feet wear down the raised letters, over time? Will that make pathways, desire lines...?
See more of Ann Hamilton's work here and on her website. Her 2009 installation human carriage at the Guggenheim sounds wonderful -
'Her formal description reads “Installation of cloth, wire, bells, books, string, pipe, pulleys, pages, cable, gravity, air, and sound,” and the Guggenheim Museum described its working thus: “Hamilton devises a mechanism that traverses the entire Guggenheim balustrade, taking the form of a white silk ‘bell carriage’ with Tibetan bells attached inside. As the cage spirals down along the balustrade, the purifying bells ring, awakening viewers. The mechanism is hoisted back up to a post at the uppermost Rotunda Level 6, where an attendant exchanges weights composed of thousands of cut-up books that counter the pulley system that propels the mechanism itself." '
08 June 2011
Fairy tales told in symbols
The Swiss graphic designer Warja Honegger-Lavater (1913-2007) created the first of her fairy tales told in symbols, William Tell, in 1962. Parisian publisher Maeght supported her work for the next 30 years. (Image from here; see more of her work here.)
07 June 2011
Un-writing (Brian Singer)
In crossing out text, San Francisco artist Brian Singer has left - and thereby has highlighted - what some might wish to scrub out - contentious words, from Catcher in the Rye (above; image from here) and from Huckleberry Finn ("212 Slaves" below; image from here).
One of these contentious words was so at the time, in literature at any rate; the other was common parlance. Their roles are reversed today -- that's how language changes.
Which of today's commonly-used words will be banned or abhorred in 50 or 100 years? Probably ... words that pass our lips every day now, and we don't give a second thought to ...
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