Monoprint and handstitch

It's been an exciting three days in room 305 at City Lit, as we printed and bonded and stitched. Where to start? With Amarjeet's samples -

and the aims of the course -

The first day was all about printing, using binder and pigment, mixed and spread on acrylic plates ... and making marks additively, subtractively, or with drawing on the back of the paper/fabric ... not to forget stencils and ghost prints - 

My theme started out as Labyrinths ... and was modified by whim and "found marks"

Monoprints on paper

... and on fabric

A collection - I was trying to be adventurous, starting with the light yellow, and found
 it needed a lot of "layering" to knock it back

Layered favourites

At home that evening I tried out my idea of glueing paper to linen to make a concertina book, and did some digital prints of "feet" from the V&A series to make a small maze-book. I also found some local maps to be cut and used as stencils. So by lunchtime on day two a lot of yesterday's results were overprinted, with greys and some black (I was getting back into my comfort zone) -

The drawn marks are a loose adaptation of the maps

They worked really well on some deconstructed linen trousers

Technical stuff -

After the stencils have been laid on the rolled-out ink and printed on paper, they are lifted off and the fabric printed

The brayer helps transfer all the remaining ink to the fabric

On other prints, using my hand to smooth the fabric onto the ink resulted in some
mysterious dark marks - which turned out to be caused by my ring

Following on from a maps-grids-hatching sub-theme,  the "lazy Sunday afternoon" drawing was scanned, front and back, and printed out at various scales -

Nice heavy paper will make this useful for endpages of the floppy books

Other favourite prints -

A roomful of people getting on with some stitching -

On the final day, a group session looking at works in progress - some  of my favourites -

Wolfgang started a scroll

Michelle combined forest-inspired prints into a book

Lisa printed onto sleeves ...

... and bravely grappled with insertion stitches

Jeannie's delicate piece is based on poppy stems with their tiny, glowing bristles
- it brought to mind a print by Gego in the RA's "Geometries" show

Planning two books to use every scrap of the grey-on-yellow print -

The papers are bondawebbed onto fabric

At the end of the course, this collection of books - some are ready for a bit more stitching -

The sequel

Next day I got out all the papers and planned more little books for "the feet suite" -

Lots of pages ready to add to fabric, or to both sides of "mazes"

The newest book includes mazy stitching on the supporting fabric, and awaits more stitch -

The "adventurous" yellow, so disastrous at first, is working out ok!

Poetry Thursday - Walking in the City by Yvonne Rainer

(via)

Yvonne Rainer: Walking in the City

I can still love this time of day

east from Chelsea

south to St. Marks

a toothless moon

clearing the autumn towers

each aglow in the sun's spent light

As long as I can pass tattoo parlors

palm readers, Greek luncheonettes, bodegas

there may still be room to breathe

in this devouring town

Keep moving

(via)



Born in San Francisco in 1934, Yvonne Rainer [dancer, choreographer, film maker] began training as a modern dancer in her early twenties at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in New York City. By 1960 she was taking experimental workshops at Merce Cunningham’s nearby studio, where Robert Dunn was applying John Cage’s chance-based compositions to dance. The same year Rainer started choreographing her own work, and by 1962 she and several others had founded the Judson Dance Theatre. Though the troupe had disbanded by 1964, their performances at the progressive Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village gave rise to an influential new style that resisted the showy virtuosity of ballet in favor of more commonplace movements, such as walking, running, and speaking. Rainer developed a philosophy of performance that, like the minimalist ethos percolating simultaneously, eschewed hierarchy. No single element—moment, body part, form, person—should appear more important than any other. Moreover, spectacle, which generated detached and unengaged viewers, should be avoided. (source)

Of her Poems (2011), a reviewer said: "the fact that Rainer has been stealthily writing poems can’t be too much of a surprise. She is, famously, an acute observer of behavior and condition. While the physical in her stage work is neighborly with text (sources for the piece at BAC included Rousseau, Lydia Davis, and William James, among others), so it is the other way around in Poems."

Ancient trees

From Nineveh - murals from the palaces of Sennacherib (630-620 BC) and Ashurbanipal (c.645BC); now the Assyrian reliefs are in the British Museum.

 Outside the museum, trees look much as they always did -

Marbles

The British Museum is famous for housing the Elgin Marbles. Rather less well known are the marble columns that are part of the staircase in the extension at the north side of the building (King Edward VII galleries), opened in 1914 -

Huge columns, sparsely - and mysteriously - veined. How many times have I walked past them and never seen them? I noticed them after spending a little time drawing the profuse veining in this marble jar-

Minoan, 2500-1800 BC; about 10cm high

Monday miscellany

Suzie Chaney often uses plaster and burnt paper for her sculptures (via)

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Love this "diamante poem" by a 6th-grader (via)

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If you like to see a city from "up high", here's a guide to viewing points for London. Last but not least comes Greenwich Park - great view across to Canary Wharf, and it's free.

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Coming soon to the Euston Road - these electronic eyes will be on the Wellcome building.

"The Wellcome Trust has set up two massive pairs of eyes in the windows of their London headquarters to watch over Euston Road and react to people passing by. The artwork, ‘Eye Contact,’ by Peter Hudson is a video installation made from real footage taken from the eyes of 68 volunteers. The giant screens then recreate digital eye-scapes that consist of over 650 coloured pixels, lit by 16,000 LEDs. These are programmed to change throughout the day — rolling, staring, flirting — before they close at sunset when the building goes to sleep. And if that’s not weird enough, the eyes are set to pop open if anyone passes by at night."

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"The Bartolomeu de Gusmão Zeppelin Airport located in the neighborhood of Santa Cruz in the western outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, inaugurated on December 26, 1936 by President Getúlio Vargas.  Before this day the rigid airships were docked at Campo dos Afonsos, where probably Le Corbusier landed [when he visited Rio for the second time, in 1936]. 

"Between 1931 and 1937, Deutsche Lufthansa had regular flights between Germany and Brazil, operated by Luftschiffbau Zeppelin using its rigid airships Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg. As a consequence to the Hindenburg disaster on May 6, 1937 at Lakehurst Air Naval Station in New Jersey, USA, the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin requested to the Brazilian Government on June 17, 1937 the suspension of services. 

"The hangar is the only original surviving example of structures built to accommodate this kind of airships in the world."  (source)

Art I like - Shelagh Wakely

"An influential British artist" is how Camden Arts Centre describes Shelagh Wakely. And she has done many public commissions, including designs for buildings in Knightsbridge. Yet her name, her work, was unknown to us.

What a treat to discover it! She worked in many media - glass, gilding, thread, wire, unfired clay, plaster, ink on cloth, video ... and drawing, many working drawings for the interesting objects and grand ideas.

Working drawings, and a display of unfired clay objects

Ink on unprimed canvas

Gilded fruit and "ghosts" of cherries

Silk jackets in which fruit was left to dry

Gilded fabric on floor, freshly gilded fruit on trolley (a melon has exploded)

I bought the book and look forward to reading it ... and returning to the exhibition. Too much to take in all at once.

"Art is about adventure, not about making objects to decorate museums," she said. Nor are her objects to be found in museums - everything was packed up in a shipping container, and it was the task of the gallery team to unpack the container and arrange the fragile objects. And to remake the "turmeric floor" -

Curcuma sul travertino, Rome, 1991 (via)