Book du jour

A couple of experiments that saw light of day when I gathered various "little books" -
The transparent scroll might have some life in it yet, but the squares-going-through-holes idea is about to be abandonned.

Artist's book discoveries - Macy Chadwick

Found in "Masters: Book Arts" - "Letter by letter" by Macy Chadwick. Read about it here.

Her themes are memory, personal communication, and visual language systems - connections both human and conceptual; sparse narratives with room to breathe.

Book du jour

This dos-a-dos with punctures and stitched lines, made a couple of weeks agohad two spin-offs - a concertina, joined with zigzag, with a sort of morse code effect in stitch -

and a codex with some lines extending across the spread, and some of the stitching going round the edge of the page -

This introduces, or harks back to, that intriguing aspect of embroidery - the back of the work. Who can resist turning over a piece of embroidery to see the back? In a book like this, you're invited to do so. Something worth exploring, perhaps.

I now have several groupings of "books du jour". Although the aim is to make one every day, obviously it doesn't work out that way. Sometimes enthusiasm runs high and one just leads to another; sometimes it all goes very quiet....

In order to be reflective (and get some perspective on the project) I've gathered together all these posts. (It's much easier to flip through bits of paper than to click back through the blog!) They come to 110 pages - how many books, though?

Next step is to gather the books themselves and figure out what the groupings/categories/series are, and to see which seem to be going somewhere...

Artist's book discoveries - Martin Peulen

Some of the V&A's 3000 artist's books are online (though hard to access - you have to scroll through them all) and some are illustrated in the Visual Register - two big blue boxes that live on the shelf near the photocopier. As well as photos of some books, there are lists of book artists -

Martin Peulen's "string book" almost fits in with my "thread cloud" theme.

Peulen mostly does figurative drawings in his books - see more here.

Unrest

Book du jour - "accordion with tunnel"

This structure in Alisa Golden's book interested me -

Instead of cutting a "tunnel" I found myself cutting a series of doors. (Once you pick up the tools and get making, it can take on a life of its own...)

As I cut the doors, I wondered what the story would be. Coming to the bit of paper at the end of the tunnel, I found myself drawing a window. And panels on the doors. And then a house-plan of the doors and window - the corridor - suddenly it was about this long, dark corridor. I wrote the story, doodled a bit to 'picture' the corridor, and then decided I didn't want the plan in the book - so must re-do it. What emerged from the re-writing of the story was a nice clean version -

Draft on the left, second version on the right -
And the back and front covers of the first and second versions -
But when I ran it through the Domestic Reading Tester, it failed - simply because unfolding the tunnel structure is not an obvious "reading reaction" when you're holding this book to read it. This is a structure that's good for display, rather than a page-turner.

A corridor is a kind of journey line - it's defined variously as giving access to apartments, a covered passageway encircling a place, a strip of land connecting two countries ... and there's a corridor in many railway carriages.

This "corridor story" fits in with my project, sort of. (I'd done something similar at some point in the foundation course, working towards a sculpture idea; it probably comes from some deep dark place...) How to develop it? In a different format, first of all - concertina or codex, with doors pictured on or cut into the pages, with darkness behind them no doubt. I can imagine using gloomy photographs. An excuse to return to Peter Zumthor's pavilion at the Serpentine, which has a covered passageway running around the centre ... perhaps it was the photos I took there a while back that stirred the can of worms that became the little story and little book.

New on my bookshelf

Food for the imagination. I don't know which to delve into first....

Punctures

My two main "puncture" tools are the sewing machine and a tracing wheel, the sort with spikes. (Other puncture tools are lurking around the house, waiting to be found and tried.) These are particularly useful for making lines across paper ... and I'm using those lines as "text", playing with how it might communicate non-verbally.

One aspect of that communication is the "support" - the type of paper (or cloth?) that the line finds itself on. These are intended for experiments - stiff paper, graph paper, ordinary paper, tracing paper, patterned paper, all marked with punctured lines.

Rather boring as such! To take this forward we must consider other characteristics of lines:

spacing, density, "shape", flow, intersection, separateness, reflection, reticence, integrity, weight, conformity, individuality, timidity, boldness, visibility, randomness, intention ... there may be others ...

Things found as books

Is it a book, or just convenient packaging? In the boxed-in part on the left, envelopes; on the right, masquerading as a text block, tear-out greetings cards. Clever.
It comes in "traditional floral" and "contemporary floral".

Water rooms

What a brilliant idea, and don't the kids love the changing fountains! During London's mini-heatwave last week, this was the perfect place to be.

Lemonade

Roughly chop 3 lemons; put them in the blender with 140g (3/4 cup) caster sugar and 500 ml (1 pint) water. Whizz; strain into jug, then put the pulp back in the blender with another 500ml water and whizzz some more. Strain into jug and discard pulp.
Dilute somewhat with fizzy water or add an ice cube or two. The lemonade is cloudy and quite sweet; next time I'll use less sugar.

First visit to Freud Museum

On first visiting the Freud Museum - in August 2011 - it was delightful to find, in the "The Killing Pictures" exhibition, a work by Sharon Kivland, who is a Research Associate of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, London  -

The words in the notebooks on the music stands were written (with some financial inducement, it seems*) by her 14-year old son, and are taken from Freud's writings about mother-son relationships -

The house has two blue plaques (one for Sigmund and one for Anna) -

and one can have coffee of sorts in the back garden.

* She says on her website: "I have paid my son an enormous amount of money to fill old school exercises books with handwritten lines (as though it were a cruel punishment), which are the indexical references to mother/son relations in Freud's works, and these were exhibited at the Freud Museum in 'Les paris sont ouverts' in the summer of 2011."

Book du jour - Thread Cloud 4

An unlikely start for a "cloud" -

I cut the grid into three strips and each of those into 4, then mixed up the pieces and layered them onto either side of a strip of tissue paper, zigzaging down the vertical seams. Still doesn't "do" the cloud thing -
Some circles lying around on the worktop made me wonder "what if...." so I punched some more out of an old envelope. Adding them introduced lots more of the drifty thread ends -
The circles are random, as are the square holes (and most of the stitching). Can this be developed in some more controlled way? Is there another idea, an intention, that this fits into? Does it "mean" anything as is?

If someone was seeing this as a book for the first time (which is very different from seeing it after you've made it!) what would they see as they picked up and looked through?

The threads would lie swirled in the palms of their hands, or fall between the hands; they'd notice some blue ones amid the white and cream. The pages on the left are shiny-white and on the right there is writing under the tissue paper. Some of the circles are on top, some behind; some are blue-patterned and some are white. Some have little orange markings, and one or two have black marks or writing. Some are reflective (cellophane). All are held on by lines of machine stitching - usually short, straight lines but sometimes long diagonal lines. There is zigzag stitch at the edges of the pages, and down the middle of the book as the pages turn. There is also zigzag, sometimes blue sometimes cream, along the bottom edge.

The reader might go back to the start to search for "meaning" or a pattern or a sequence, or they might turn the book over and look at it "from the back" and notice how some of the holes made by the stitching are more pronounced. They might read the writing through the tissue paper and try to determine what the original communication was "about".

They would hear the crinkle of the tissue and notice the contrast between the hard paper and the soft threads.

642 things to draw

An apron; an uneventful street; a glass of milk; presidential pets --- I would have loved this as a kid, because I never knew "what" to draw!

Things found in (tiny) books

More tiny books!

Ring-book, book-ring

Had to sew the book block onto the velcro - this was possible because the strip of gauze it had been glued onto could be glued to strengthen the first and last pages. I'm still trying to find a glue that works with the velcro - maybe it's just a matter of building up a "cushion" of the glue first...
It fits well into a large matchbox.

Book du jour - potential

Cutting up an old photo album for a spiral book - got started but didn't get very far -Also waiting to be moved on is this punctured strip, sewn together with invisible thread -
The sheet with holes punched out is destined to become another thread cloud. Maybe tomorrow, first thing....

Hook-and-loop tape

What a lot of varieties of velcro - to be stuck on or sewn on, in strips and as dots. And there's this one, which sticks to itself -
Perfect for adjustable rings and things, I thought -- but what glue to use? I rather expected pva to be useless for glueing on blocks of paper; nor does superglue work...

The garden shed at the end of the pier, and other stories

Going to see "Tracey Emin: Love is What You Want", I was in two minds about her work; after seeing it I'm in a mind and a half. Her messy life - and so much, if not all, of the work is about her life (she has said that life and work intersect "every day, every moment, every second") - makes me very uncomfortable; it's all over the place, even though there is a consistent theme. But the pieces in the last room, recent work, seemed more cohesive and approachable. The show had a lot of "memorabilia" including objects and text from and about her life - some of them strangely moving. The recent drawings in thread on sheets and blankets, is ... not exactly delightful, because of the subject matter, but striking and even beautiful - using lines of stitch masterfully (does she do her own stitching?) and not screaming at you the way the earlier "blankets" do (photo from this review).

The more recent blankets appear pale and demure but are actually quite aggressive. Even so, the monochrome draws you in to the point where you can get pleasure from the fabrics and stitching ... probably not what "art" is meant to do!

Once (and probably still) her drawing was in the form of monoprinting; now it extends to stitched lines. "My twin brain" (from here)

was my favourite piece - stitched on a very felty blanket with a bit of sheet added at the top, the imagery not toooo sexual for once. The quality of the line, made by variations in stitching, is so effective when seen up close.

Of the recent sculpture, the best part is often the plinths, made of old, weathered or painted wood, put together in interesting ways. I suspect that what seem like plinths are actually a meaningful part of the sculpture ... even last century, plinths were rather last century....

Wood is also used for the "garden shed at the end of the pier", one of the things that most appealed to me; lots of resonance there. It's called "Knowing My Enemy", from something her dad wrote, and she says, "I've often tried to make a place where I think my dad would be happy, or I would be happy."

Another of my personal "best in show" objects was the shawl she started crocheting when she was pregnant, and continued with for a while after the abortion. There's a big ball of yarn with a controlled bit of stitch and then a great tangle of yarn on a long, evil-looking crochet hook stuck through the untouched yarn. The female equivalent of fear of castration?

Of the neon works - every artist needs to make at least one neon work - in her very slanty handwriting, the ones with crossing-out stood out. You really did have to retrace the hand of the maker to "see" the crossing-out properly.

Another sculpture - under a jagged line of white neon - consisted of spiral "kitty steps" (photo from here) - which made me think of fan books - a structure to experiment with. So the exhibition has provided visual interest, food for thought and new ideas to try; it was definitely worth going.

Gallery of Words

Rosalind Wyatt's pop-up show on South Audley Street was carefully put together and made for rich viewing. (Can't photograph without reflections...)
As well as stitching, there was calligraphy (this time with deliberate reflections) -
At the back of the shop, a cosy space with sketchbooks relevant to the work shown -
Rosalind's "The Stitch Lives of Others" series incorporates text from family letters -

I was curious to see "the back of the work" -

At Art in Action, Rosalind was demonstrating stitching in the Textiles tent, copying Ann Frank's handwriting, dark-on-light and light-on-dark -