Yesterday in the studio

On Saturday I obviously needed to leave the studio for a while and get out into the world. By Sunday morning the idea of "sky boats" had been worked out in principle, ie, how to hang them up.

Noticing the shadows on Sunday morning's trip to the farmers' market, I got the idea of printing these and using them for some of the sky boats. Others would be plain papers of various sorts - especially transparent ones. Maybe even dipped in way. Or oiled. Aiming for an ethereal effect.

So many different kinds of shadows!



Printing onto tracing paper proved to be quite difficult - the paper curled and the ink ran. And for some reason, instead of getting black and white (on Tony's 8-colour inkjet printer), colours appeared - I really liked the effect, but much tweaking of printer settings went on and different effects appeared before we got something approaching "monotone".We also had some metallic silver paper, and tried printing in black on some dark grey paper -Out of this selection came lots and lots of little boats -
For hanging, we tried fishing line (too thick, too "curly"); thread (too obvious; but metallic thread might work) and finally found a spool of invisible thread. Threading up each boat takes quite a while -- and until you're hanging them up, you don't know how long the thread needs to be. Some will hang from a rod in the large windows, and some will hang from the ceiling in one corner of the room -
Thanks to a "what if" moment, brought on by finding some folded paper next to the sewing machine, I tried some stitching, ready to be combined with TravelWriting on my next journey -
Finally, the first of the "cargo boats" - it's made from the cuff of a recycled shirt, machined with variegated thread, and at the stern is one of the porcelain plaques. I was thinking about all the ships that carried china from ... China ... to Europe, and elsewhere (and about how important pottery is for the archaeological record) - and trying to make something "conceptual" along the line of how cuffs encircle the wrist the way ships went around the globe ... but mostly I enjoyed re-using something that would get thrown out otherwise.
The black boats show the tearing of the paper (it has a white core) and the gold boat is some wrapping paper with stitching added.