The clothness of cloth

Work by Inga Liksaite - a flat piece, machine stitched to look 3D. To me the image embodies the essentials of cloth - edge, drape, flow; the incipient soft fold; eventual memory.

Book du jour - meeting the eye

Recycled tissue paper, made into a book consisting of double-fold pages, was perfect for over-writing. The guide lines slipped under each page, and I used a Muji 0.5 gel pen - they come in packs of 6, which is useful for longer writing projects ... one such is languishing because the pen with which I started no longer seems to be made!

The book has 14 sides available for text, and each side takes 10 minutes to fill. I wrote down some rules for this book, including: no paragraph breaks; cross through for mistakes, but don't insert missing words; break words anywhere without hyphens; if text runs out before book is full, start again at the beginning; be aware of posture; try to remember what's been read/written.

This was done over three days, and the writing at the end is much closer-together than it was at the beginning -

What was said of Vija Celmins' work in the article I was re-writing also applies to the re-writing itself: "[the images Celmins re-uses] ultimately offer a familiar vehicle for interrogating the subtle differences in pencil, in her own mood and in her handling of space." The article goes on to relate that she holds the viewer's interest by evoking infinite depth in her images "and yet they constantly remind the eye of their inescapable flatness." I'm not at all sure how these pages will hold the viewer's interest - through their almost-sameness, through the hope - as the viewer turns each page - that something different will appear? that the hidden secret will be revealed?

The article I copied (and enjoyed reading) is in the Spring 2012 issue of Tate Etc - More to Meet the Eye, by Katharine Stout. It deals some artists who'll be in the Contemporary Drawings show at Tate Britain, opening 7 May.

Spacing in text

While finding out whether Virginia Woolf actually had bookbinding skills (she did), I came across an article that tells of her development as a typesetter (and how this influenced her writing), in which this passage about the use of space seemed worth flagging up:

" Identifying space as verbal art is a technique used by Woolf; in novels like Jacob’s Room or The Waves, Woolf was in constant dialogue with the printer, ensuring that the spaces between scenes were of a precise thickness. The absence of words, or the space in between scenes, becomes another source of meaning; space becomes verbal art in the same way in which Woolf practiced a linguistic art."


The absence of words as a source of meaning .... "nothing is something". The words are a thing, and the space they occupy - or leave empty - is also to be "read" as a thing.

More than meets the eye.

Again, one thing leads to another, and in trying to find a picture to break up the run of words, I came across this:

Spacing imposed by the publishers of an e-book (boxes added). Segue to an opportunity for a rant on stupid hyphenation, but I'll spare you that. Nonetheless, it's a reminder of why carefully-printed (or re-printed) books are SO much more pleasant to read than the "flexible" electronic format - and gives me a chance to quote another bit from that original article about the Hogarth Press -

" Woolf’s use of spacing, variant punctuation, and emphasis on words as single, constitutive units, exposes the printed rectangle of text on the page as a form of meaning, one as important as the narrative itself. For example, Woolf breaks up the shapes of words in order to replicate spoken language—how stress is placed on single syllables. When Archer calls Jacob, he shouts: “Ja—cob! Ja—cob!” and when Mrs. Flanders summons the two boys, she calls, “Ar—cher! Ja—cob!” Woolf’s separation of their names in this manner renders it difficult for the reader to avoid the physical shape of words. Yet Woolf exposes the paginal skeleton even further: two lines of space separate these initial shouts, secluding these broken syllables from the rest of the textual body. Indeed, throughout Jacob’s Room, Woolf experiments with spacing; four lines of white space separate some paragraphs, while other paragraph separations are thinner. Woolf, therefore, in structuring the book according to the spaces between scenes, not only considers the visual composition of the page but also how the absence of words—as indicated with blank space—becomes another origin of meaning. "

Doorstep

Brompton Square (South Kensington).

Meteorites

(1) Cornelia Parker's meteorites - I've written about them before, and there's an interview with her about them here - where you can also see a sparkling video of an arty firework display -

(2) Famous English meteorites - two are on show in Patrick Keiller's show at Tate Britain. One fell in Oxfordshire in 1830 and the other, larger one, in Yorkshire in 1795 and is commemorated by a monument. Before then, stones falling from the sky were thought to be a fiction, and this stone, seen falling by several people, provided evidence that they were real.

This is neither of those - it's the Wigan meteorite - read about it and other historical meteorites here.

Wonder what Henny Penny would have thought of that one...

Image from here

Passengers

No, the dummy's not his ... she belongs to a tiny young lady, who was struggling down the steps with her at Finsbury Park.

Turning the other way in the carriage, this sight -

And, on London Overground, on a sunny day -

Pieced paper

Where did the urge to sew paper together come from? It's been lurking for a while, and after seeing Matthew Harris's folded-over-and-stitched seams, I wanted to try that on paper. Which might have been fine if I'd stuck to just that one thing --like at the top in the photo-- but no, I started to add slivers of text and  before you know it, something like that gets out of hand and you wonder why you ever started. But following the advice of Idris Khan, I kept on till the end. Which brings us to the famous dictum: "Perfection is achieved not when nothing more can be put in, but when nothing more can be taken out." 

I wanted to "use" the seams, but on reflection, too much (pattern, colour, placement) was going on with them. The inserts - the intruders! - took over. I prefer the back -

This has possibilities for being double-sided, with some seams on each side. And interesting edges. Perhaps using slivers of colour, not text/texture. It's also interesting against the light.

The paper is japanese paper from a roll. When sewing paper, the seams much be absolutely straight - unlike fabric, the paper has no "give" to it. (Overlapping and gluing is easier!) So any hand stitching is best done as you go, before the area becomes unreachable. Thinner threads seem to work (look) better than thicker ones.

When it comes to sewn paper, Carole Bury's pleated tissue paper is superb - see her work here. I also recall a paper quilt by Margaret Anderson at FOQ involving squares (recycled envelopes?) with appliqued houses, with monoprinting and machine stitch, but my photo seems to have been lost in one or other computer crash.

Maps and kitakata paper used here.

Mike Cloud's Mick Jagger "paper quilt" (from here; he talks about it here) - this combination of found photos plus painting plus lettering has many possibilities -

Susan Stockwell's Imperial Quilt (from here) -

A collaborative Paper Quilt Project was shown in Berkeley in 2011: "This project revives the social and participatory nature of quilt making among contemporary artists who might normally work alone to join forces in a shared experience."

This is NOT from the house quilt I've been searching for - it's by Mirjana Farkas -

It came up on my seemingly-endless paper quilt search, and seems to be a sign that it's time to stop searching...

Sky - in woodcuts

 So skillful!

 Some closeups -

Can't remember the artist's name - couldn't find it even though I looked and looked (and looked - there are some wonderful woodcuts on google images!)

Book du jour - a punctuated journey

In the sleepless reaches of the night I had an idea about taking the words out of sentences, paragraphs, pages, books... and leaving only the punctuation. These examples are from "Owl" by Desmond Morris.

Towards the end I was thinking about how to space out the punctuation - or rather, include the word spaces as part of the punctuation. And then I started thinking about how different authors - or different genres, or different literary eras - might have different "punctuation journeys". And that sent me to sleep...

The idea seemed worth a try, so I took a book almost at random, which happened to be A Stranger at Green Knowe by Lucy Boston, and opened it almost at random and started reading/writing, using 6B graphite -

Unfortunately, rather than starting on a nice clean sheet of paper I was trying to combine two experiments, the other being whether the coloured ink would show up under black ink at all. The idea was to cover the sheet with ink and rub it to bring the graphite through.

Too faint!

To cut a long story short, it didn't work - the graphite lines were too thin, and the writing was lost. But the reading was most enjoyable!

Inky

A comparison of chinese ink, kandahar drawing ink, indian ink, japanese ink -  over splodges of coloured ink and graphite lines. The line shows through the ink, to various degrees, and can be "polished up" (middle lines). Japanese ink is the densest, and left to dry is quite a golden colour. The drawing ink is insipid. It and the chinese ink smear when wet.

 But look what happens when you spray the drawing ink (and quink) - pattern and texture -

Watching ink dry

Making this little book (as yet untitled) involves spraying the pages - one by one - with water, then touching the water droplets with ink. Some spread into each other, others have just about dried before you get to them. Then the ink has to be left to dry, and this can take hours (using a hair dryer risks spreading the ink). So I've been doing a page every morning, and have nearly come to the end of the book.

 Some previous pages -

The idea started out as "flocks of birds, swarms of insects" but at the moment it's feeling more like microbes. The pages need something adding to them - words? stitches?

Constellation charts

Corvus

While looking for star names (for the "Solar Sunrise" series of quiltlets) I stumbled on these constellation charts and got very excited. Great names, great shapes - it's a whole 'nother universe...

Eridanus

As for star names, a useful list (if you ever need one!) is here. Many popular (as opposed to scientific) names come from Arabic, and certain stars are used for navigation and listed in the Nautical Almanac. That too is a whole 'nother world.

And as for star charts - so many different ones! This is from here  (so many astronomers...) -

Colour balance

The photos were taken in the same location, within minutes of each other. The camera has adjusted for the colours by "tinting" the background, which is off-white. The quiltlets were perfectly square when I cut and bound them, but suddenly have managed to look rather skew-whiff. Another attempt at photography is obviously needed....

Rain poem

Seen (from the bus) in Manchester - one of Lemn Sissay's Poems as Landmarks that are dotted round the city. More about them here. (The people in the seat behind us were excited about it too.)

And here (from his blog) is the painter (signwriter Gerard Brown) painting another -

Lemn says: "Poetry is part of the emotional architecture of any cosmopolitan city. Art in the city is the heart of the city, architecture the body, and the people its soul."

Book du jour - reusing a dictionary

Needing a book without pages - just a cover and spine - I took most of the pages out of an old school dictionary. (More about that later, perhaps.)

While I was tearing them out, one by one, the headwords continually caught my eye. My first attempt at recycling the dictionary words uses the page TIGRESS to TITAN. The words look a little lonely on the page, a little purposeless without their definitions. The cut-up page is not without interest, though...

To stick the words onto the page - they are tiny! - I sprayed the back of the dictionary page with 505 (repositionable) spray, then cut them with a scalpel and lifted them into place with the tip. The sheet of paper had been scored with parallel lines to help placement.

Rather than doing more "big pages" like this, I'll fold them in half and do a dozen or so to make a "proper book". My original plan came from the "line as text" idea, and was to sew through the middle of the words with fine thread to hold them on the page. That might be tricky with words on both sides of the page, as I envisaged when thinking of a "proper book" ... but having the words just on the right-hand page means that the left-hand page really would have "lines as text".

(Two days later....) The words are glued onto graph paper, which makes it easier to align and position them. One dictionary page fits onto one graph-paper page -

The temporary adhesive is not to be trusted, so, using the finest thread I had, and bobbin thread to match the graph paper, I ran a line of machine-stitching through the lines of words -

The stitching makes them almost illegible - is it some kind of subconscious erasure? And ... what to do with the thread ends, to keep them out of sight?

They tend to cling to each other when brushed into the middle - hence the title of the book - Combing the Alphabet -

It comes in a plain brown wrapper.

Art I like - Idris Khan

 The Devil's Wall is the name of Idris Khan's show at the Whitworth in Manchester (till 13 May). The three dark round objects represent the three pillars that Hajj pilgrims throw stones at; words in English and Arabic are sandblasted into them, falling into the centre. Sandblasting: an aggressive act, leaving delicate traces -

The words are stamped on (that's a lot of stamping!) with oil paint - again, this represents the throwing of stones against the pillars - using stamps to stamp out feelings -

The lighting throws unexpected shadows -

Close-up of the overlaid music

Waiting for the artist to appear and tell us more about his work -

He started by saying his work was about loss, abstraction, repetition, and appropriation; about bringing everything to the surface. The run-through of his work and career, and his stories about the pieces, was edifying;  one thing led to another, and everything knitted itself together into the overall "story". On doing an MA: "you think you come in with a good idea, and leave with another [different!] one". More underpinnings: returning to the same thing every day (eg prayer rituals, music practice). Returning to a certain  point in life.

Some of the meat of the evening was in his generous responses to questions. What sticks with me is: to keep making work you believe in - understand what it is before you show it - take it through to the end, even if it doesn't work. Also, he believes that "the first thing the viewer wants to see is a very beautiful image." Yes!

"Lines of thought"

In a warehouse beside a canal is the Parasol Unit, a foundation for contemporary art. You ring the bell to be let in and find a nice place to sit and read the catalogues -

 Out back, shared with Victoria Miro gallery next door, is an oasis (complete with crow's nest) -

and pond with Yayoi Kusama's floating mirrored balls, which drift in the wind and clink together softly -

The Lines of Thought show, which is on till 13 May, has works by 15 artists from the 60s to today - Helene Appel, Hemali Bhuta, James Bishop, Raoul De Keyser, Adrian Esparza, Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Jorge Macchi, Nasreen Mohamedi, Fred Sandback, Conrad Shawcross, Anne Truitt, and Richard Tuttle.

Partial view of ground floor; image from here

The exhibition continues upstairs -

My favourite piece, by Jorge Macchi, who has also done some tricky things with maps and words and suchlike -

Image from here (..."poetry and mystery meet")

It's hard to put into words why I find this piece so satisfying -- but hey, that's why I'm blogging, to know what I think when I hear myself talk!  So here goes...

What I see [let's start with the easy bit, the description] is a postcard of two equal-sized blue rectangles - presumably the sea and the sky. Immediately their meeting point becomes the horizon. Metal springs hold the piece to the wall -- suspend it in tension, hold it in suspense against the wall, both extending the horizon line and making it finite -- but because the springs are coiled, they hint at the infinite extent of the horizon, if only they could be drawn out far enough to make them as straight as the line they are joined to. The horizon connotes a definite demarkation, yet an unattainable place -- it's always moving ahead of you. Sometimes, for instance when you are in a forest, it disappears. The horizon could be seen as a non-place (you can't actually go there), and yet it's not nowhere. The metal springs seem to me to be torturing the very concept of the horizon, putting it on the rack, making it fit the rack-master's idea of truth. Alternatively (or perhaps, "also") the message could be that a horizon can be as wide as you want. It's up to the viewer to decide.