Monday miscellany

Writing with light - chandeliers
(how to do it: use "night setting" and don't hold the camera still)

Diners at the Serpentine cafe risk being sucked up to the sky?

A moment in the life of one of Mark Wallinger's Labyrinths
 - Highbury & Islington station

A new pair of socks - interesting how the disparate
colours override the matched patterns

Sad summary

What to do with this discovery of JQ and bookwrap offcuts?
(possibly that's a rhetorical question...)

The joy of grids

Going on from the simple structural drawings from one of the early galleries in the sketchbook walk

Charcoal mirrored on the opposite page, simply through closing the book

incorporating the "cages" that were part of Susan Hefuna's "Cairotraces" show -

I started cutting through the layers in various ways. Joining printouts of various magnifications of my drawings, for instance; cutting through sections, putting coloured paper behind the cutouts, looking through the holes -

Blowing up photographs, cutting out the various layers separately (with plain sheets under the top copy)

 which leads to grids that can interact with each other -

 and with other drawn grids -which can be photographed and printed out and cut through ... on and on (perhaps) -

Plan A is to use them as monoprinting, as for the cut-out maps in the Monoprint and Handstitch course last summer. It might be sensible to "seal" the flimsy papers with a coat of acrylic paint (=plastic) before finding the hard way that they tear all to readily when lifted off the almost-dry plate. 

Plan B is to enlarge the grids and translate them into textile layers ... not sure how (or if) this will happen.

Yet another plan is to keep drawing and try to get some real depth happening. The holes in the centre of each side really help with this. It's those holes that caught my interest in the first place. As though something could wind in and out and around and back in again, an endless ribbon tying itself up in knots. A path that crosses and recrosses [a badly-walked maze?]. Something to think about during insomnia.

A lot of these units, joined, could make a nightmare labyrinth - small holes high up to crawl through, the meshwork-layers making the path totally unclear. Something NOT to think about during insomnia.

Motoi Yamamoto's salt labyrinths

The choice of salt as his art material is a response to the death of his sister from brain cancer at a young age. See more of his work at here and on his website.

As well as loose grains of salt, he uses bricks of salt - Utsusemi (2003) measures 2.8 x 7.5 metres -

Prize surprise

Surprises - that was one of my hopes for the "Developing practice for makers through museum collections" course. I was thinking along the lines of finding exciting work by new-to-me artists, or starting to work in a different way on a new theme, things like that (which seem all to have happened, how good is that).

For some months I've been developing the "museum-maze" idea, in response to the "Inspired by the V&A" exhibition possibility, and  a few weeks ago was surprised to be selected for the show.

Last night was the "opening party" and the prizegiving, which was held in the auditorium at Morley College (the show is in the Gallery next door).

In the distance is the principal of the college extolling the virtues of adult learning - bending the ear of a government minister who was present.  And then came the prizes. I was flabbergasted to hear my name and the word "printmaking" and found myself joining a group at the front of the room. After being given certificates we were herded into place for a group photo. I'm so glad I wore pink shoes -

and then it was out to the college's secret garden for drinks - how lucky we were with the weather -

After a while I was hoiked back into the gallery to have my photo taken with my work, and encountered another printmaker taking photos (probably wondering why it qualified as print?) - and had a chance to babble on about how interesting the floors in the museum are, made by female convicts etc -

The gallery decided to show my "book" on a lightbox -

Earlier, just as I got to the gallery everyone had decamped to the auditorium for the bar and speeches, so there was a chance to get some general views -

The show is on till 19 June; nearest tube station is Lambeth North. On the V&A website are winners from previous years, when the museum itself ran the show.

New in the notebook

This came out of nowhere one evening when I was listening to catch-up radio, a programme called "500 years of friendship" in fact. Seeing a nice blank page, my pen started writing down words and it developed from there, with the words written in all directions, concentrating on grouping words of the same length and starting new groupings here and there, now and then.

This leaves you with only the vaguest idea of what the programme was about (because you're concentrating on catching the next usable word, and thinking where to put it) - and reading the finished item isn't much help, because the words have been put all over the place rather than in sequence.

But it gives you the illusion of paying great attention, and not leaving the hands idle. Those were 15-minute programmes - The Verb is 45 minutes -

Looking at the negative space, I'm seeing ... not a house plan ... more like a maze ... (and it somewhat resembles the work of Gabriel Lalonde) ...

More "constructive doodling" - while hanging on the phone trying to get a PAC code, with music playing (9 songs) that I'd rather not have been listening to! After a while it got almost interesting - a chance to extend the mark-making repertoire -

(This post is linked to Off the Wall Friday - where you can see what lots of creative people are up to.)

New under the needle

Continuing from the museum-maze idea - and from the stitching on this "flat" version of the maze -

combined with the discovery of senninbari, "thousand stitch belts" from WW2 Japan - specifically the back of the stitching on this one -

... which has led to a desire to make french knots in a grid, moving from one to another to make a "maze" on the back.

Rather than printing a grid of circles, as in senninbari (you can see them through the cloth in the example above), I used what was on hand - some printed linen napkins.

the front

the back

thinking ahead to get a "meaningful path" and leave no empty squares

...but if you set out to leave squares empty, other types of mazes become possible ...

dotty, isn't it!

Working title: "Finding your way". These might lead to smaller pieces that become pages in a book.

(This post is linked to Off the Wall Fridays.)

The story of "museum-maze" finishes a chapter

They do say: Read the rules carefully! - which I hadn't done ... so it's no surprise that, on revisiting them, I noticed the emphasis on "inspired by the V&A's collections" - and the need for an item number that the submitted work was inspired by.

Some panicky online search found this - museum no. A.3-2010 -

a mosaic panel by Jesse Rust, made most probably as a trade sample by the owner of the London Vitreous mosaic company, sometime between 1860 and 1890. It shows the kind of motifs that were used in the mosaic floors - and in the tiled floors as well.

Jesse - might that have been a woman? Mosaics were considered "a suitable job for a woman" - and it was a woman who founded a paving-stone company ... or invented a non-slip material ... in the 19th century ... which unfortunately I can't find details of, but remember this factoid from years ago. No, Jesse is male, and the company was located in Battersea.

Undaunted, I carried on - printing the eight pages of photos on the laser printer and waxing them carefully ... but too much of the toner came off and the pages look splodgy.

Tried printing on our inkjet, but it has "issues" and left white lines

... so splodgy it will have to be, for now, and if this gets accepted for the show, I'll have time to print, wax, and stitch again. The stitching is a simple line along the bottom of the pictures - of course when the book is folded up, the stitching appears and disappears in various directions.

Attempt at a photo setup -

too gloomy! It needs to be light ... and what should come to hand but an offcut of perspex, which fit perfectly into the bottom of a picture frame and could be propped up with a stick -

Now the filling in of the form... "Tell us why you chose this piece and how it inspired you":

The motifs in the panel are related to the mosaic floors of the museum, which have an interesting history - many of the mosaic floors were made by women in prison and brought to the museum in sections.

Visitors walk over the floors without really noticing them, concentrating on the displays or on finding their way through the maze of rooms, their destination often the shop or cafe ("a museum is more than its collections").

"Walking the Museum Maze" brings together the floors of the V&A and their current users, linking them to their designers and makers and the many people who have walked through the museum throughout the years.

The book is a complex leporello format, needing turning in the hand when read page by page, just as a museum visitor's path will twist through rooms and along corridors. Photographs were digitally printed and the paper then waxed; the transparency of the book (and its perspex shelf) evokes the way that floors, however decorative, quickly go unnoticed. The thread path acts like a map to orient the reader/viewer.

This work is one of a series of books and animations set in London museums, examining movement in or between them.

200 words exactly - the submission form makes sure you can't write any more than that.

Three photos - this and two detail shots- are attached, carefully avoiding showing the splodgy bits.

And off it went - a day before the deadline!

Alas, dear readers, this isn't entirely the end of the story ... to quote myself: "This work is one of a series of books and animations set in London museums, examining movement in or between them." It's a plan for the work for the rest of the course.

On coming across this image (by Palestinian artist Khaled Hourani, from here)

I reconsidered whether the "maze" could be represented in 2D, on a flat sheet. As I now have time on my hands - and  there were leftover printouts - I patched them together ("magic" sellotape on the back) and used the dressmaker's wheel to draw in the "path".

Not worth the effort! ... still, it's nice to be able to act on an idea instantly.

Moving on to something else now. [Sighs of relief all round.]

Sequencing the museum-maze photos

With over 50 photos chosen, and the file organised in photo-number order rather than in any way corresponding to the museum itself ... where to start?

At the entrance - that page was easy enough to put together, but it quickly became apparent that some sort of system was needed. The photos needed to be grouped by type of floor so that they could make some sort of sense, should anyone actually "read" the book.

First I tried putting them on the Desktop, in order to be able to move them around manually - but found they were too small to see! -

Next bright idea: put them in a folder, fiddle around with icon size to make it all fit on the screen, hit the PrtSc key, go into Photoshop to put the screengrab into a new file, and print out, with the photo numbers underneath. 

Fitted onto one page,  again it was too small to work from -

More fiddling around with screen size to get the icons large enough, and then printed out on four sheets of paper -

The missing file numbers added manually ... the sheets cut up ... the images already used taken out, and those left arranged by type of floor -

 ...then put into sequence for each page, and the images numbered by page and position, and these numbers written onto the page of thumbnails -

... and as a check, each page was given a colour and the thumbnails colour-coded. I got to use my neglected Prismacolour pencils (love their waxiness) -

Next step: moving the correct photos onto the right page, in the right orientation.

It quickly becomes apparent that instead of cropping the photos to 1600 pixels by 800 pixels, I should have cropped them to the measurements of the boxes on the InDesign page 160mm x 80mm. Duh. This could have saved a lot of resizing!

But then I discovered that you can use a previous version of the "filled" template [remember to save it with a new file name first!] and Ctl+D to "place" each new photo. Clicking on where you want the photo, then "placing" it, magically makes it the right size and orientation!

With the colour-coded sheet of thumbnails, finding the right photos and putting them onto the page is going quickly.