Kintsukuroi, part 2

The "repair" of porcelain with lines of gold (lacquer) is an ancient oriental technique. It makes a broken item even more valuable, through the time and skill spent making the repair. (A salutary attitude for our own time of wanton wastefulness.) Historically, repair has been an important skill, as shown by this stapled-together mug:

(image from here)

Contemporary artists are using not just the idea of intentional repair, but also the kintsukuroi-look - for instance, Nancy Selvage uses epoxy resin and imitation gold powder -

"Global porcelain set" 2009 (image from here)

Jeanne Williamson's latest "construction fence" series uses the gold line too -

"Fractured Fence Repaired #1" ©2013 Jeanne Williamson

Lee Ming-Wei's "Mending Project" was part of the 2012 Sydney Biennale -

"Artist Lee Mingwei wants to fix you up. as part of his artwork the Mending Project. He'll lurk in the MCA's lighted corners waiting for you to bring in over- or under-loved garments in need of repair and fix it while you wait. Part of the bargain is that you pay Lee with talk (or by being teased) while he stitches your pieces anew. Resurrected clothes will hang on the cavernous walls on MCA level one until the end of the Biennale. Leaving it probably best to bring your summer threads along to hang out in public until September.
Lee will be providing his services on a drop in basis during the Biennale. The MCA also suggests you arrive early in the day for Lee's performance, in case he runs out of thread."

Nina Katchadourian mends spider webs -

"#19 - Laundry Line" (image from here)

She says: "The morning after the first patch job, I discovered a pile of red threads lying on the ground below the web. At first I assumed the wind had blown them out; on closer inspection it became clear that the spider had repaired the web to perfect condition using its own methods, throwing the threads out in the process. My repairs were always rejected by the spider and discarded, usually during the course of the night, even in webs which looked abandoned. The larger, more complicated patches where the threads were held together with glue often retained their form after being thrown out, although in a somewhat "wilted" condition without the rest of the web to suspend and stretch them."

Lisbon Doll Hospital might be said to mend a broken heart or two along the way -

(image from here)

More prosaically, there's a lot of this sort of thing about -

(image from here)

More mending inspiration can be found on this pinboard.

Found art Friday

Found at lapappadolce.tumblr.com

Double sided embroidery

Amazing work from China!

"Lotus rhyme" by Liang Xuefang measures 300x100cm

Yet more of the glorious textiles that are part of World Eco Fibre and Textile Art, showing at the Brunei Gallery till 23 March.

Life meets art

"Red Presence"

The sculpture is by former fellow student Jukhee Kwon, showing as part of "The World of Extraordinary Objects" at the October Gallery, till 13 April.

Two Argentine artists

EduardoStupia

Jorge Sarsale

Click on the images (from a google search) to enlarge; click on the names to learn more about the artist.

What appeals to me about their work: black/white; lines; marks. Were they made in a "no-mind" (zen: wu-wei) state? Stupia's works have that quality of having used the artist as an intermediary, rather than the artist being in control of what happens on the page. (I'm in two minds about whether that's a good thing, though!) Sarsale's series seem to have arisen out of rules he laid out for himself. (I can relate to that...)

"Area de resonancia" from jorgesarsale.com

Stitching old photos

The photos I got out to use aren't all that old - dates on the back are in the 1990s. Back then, I was quite systematic about labelling and sorting them - and took almost as many as I do now. But oh my, the quality of these is definitely less good than now - after all, you pressed the button and hoped, and saw how it turned out only when you got the prints - and the quality of the prints was at the mercy of the machine doing the printing, and what you happened to have on the film.

The box on the left is one of six, and holds nearly 2000 photos, many of plants and flowers. I chose a few on the subject of "spring", with vague thoughts of "quilting" them -

The glossy finish makes them hard to photograph, as there is always a reflection of some sort. Having taken a photo of possible layouts, I lost interest in the project (or rather, was simply daunted).

But I did want to try stitching, somehow, and plunged into that without much thought ... letting the hands do the thinking -

It could be interesting to have wadding under the fabric, as the fabric would be sculpted by the stitches and the photo would be stiff enough to stay flat. The "web" of thread over the clumps of flowers isn't right, but useful for something else another time (flight of the bumblebee??) - and the green "contour" lines aren't right either.

Next time - covering some of the photo with fabric? adding stitch that's not a replica of the photo?... in that case, why use a photo at all? ... for the shininess and the flatness, perhaps ... for a layer of colour ... as a starting point ...

Ceramics, week 5 (or 6?)

On Monday the first of my "clay books" came out of the kiln -

 The oxides painted on paper didn't transfer very strongly -

 but the monoprints (pigment mixed into glycerine) worked well -

More of the same this week; I stamped both sides, and covered both sides of some of the "books" with slip. This is what has gone to the kiln -

A closeup (love that number stamp) -

Also, the realisation that the clay has a drying effect on the fingers. Next morning, perhaps "helped" by the two days of handstitch and some stubborn stitches, the tip of my thumb was split ... it's taking a long time to heal.

Poetry Thursday - Thread by Jonathan Galassi

Thread

BY JONATHAN GALASSI

Heartworn happiness, fine line that winds   

among the tapestry’s old blacks and blues,   

bright hair blazing in the theater,

red hair raving in the bar—as now

the little leaves shoot veils of gold

across the trees’ bones, shroud of spring,   

ghost of summer, shadblow snow, blood-

russet spoor spilled prodigal on last year’s leaves . . .   

When your yellows, greens, and yellow-greens,   

your ochres and your umbers have evolved   

nearly to hemlock blackness, cypress blackness,   

when the woods are rife with soddenness   

(unfolded ferns, skunk cabbage by the stream,   

barberry by the trunks, and bitter

watercress inside the druid pool)

will your thin, still-glinting thread insist   

to catch the eye in filigreed titrations

stitched along among beneath the branches,   

in the branches where it lives all winter,   

occulted fire, brief constant fleeting gold . . .

Jonathan Galassi, “Thread” from North Street and Other Poems (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). Copyright © 2001 by Jonathan Galassi. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: North Street and Other Poems (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2000 2001)

One to watch

Suddenly thread is cool enough to be used in a music video - http://vimeo.com/58893010. Flip-side things happen -

needles thread themselves

words ravel into readability

a bit of burning goes on

and there is thread

lots of thread

Indigo

shibori from Nigeria

shibori from Yunnan, China

woven in China

"woven air" 

Some of the glorious textiles that are part of World Eco Fibre and Textile Art, showing at the Brunei Gallery till 23 March.

Rawan's vision

Two stills from a video of a "read-in" that happened after Al-Mutanabbi Street - the street of the booksellers in Iraq - was bulldozed by the government for the second time, after trying to rebuild itself after the 2007 bombing. 

"Within twelve days of the attack [on September 17, 2012], people were able to organize a peaceful book festival event that was held on September 29, 2012, with the title: I AM IRAQI, I READ. Private citizens brought book donations to the festival where people gathered on the green in a peaceful demonstration and a defiant public-read-in, to say we will continue reading in public, defying the abhorrent official political attempts of organized suppression of freedom of thought, reading and knowledge in Iraq. We are doing this for our children to enable them to rebuild the future Iraq."

Watch the video, and hear Rawan's stirring speech (she is one articulate kid!), at youtube.com/watch?v=nALIE5MGNU0

Digital discovery

This photo came out of the camera looking totally black. I used Levels, in which the histogram showed some acitivity on the far left and a vast blank space on the right - even less activity than this, in fact about a tenth as much, all over on the far left -

By taking the "white" pointer on the right and sliding it towards the "black" pointer on the left, the image was revealed ... not very well, but there's definitely something there.

What is it, you may wonder. It's shadows on a bedroom wall, cast from the street lights outside. Usually I don't see them because I don't put my glasses on when getting up in the dark middle of the night, but in winter it's dark enough in the morning for such shadows still to be there. I've used this bedroom for nearly 20 years and (incredibly) not noticed this phenomenon before - the tree branches waving in the wind in one triangle, the fainter shadow of the other. Triangles because of the sloping roof and dormer window. They are orangey because of the sodium street lights, but sometimes a car turns a corner and its lights cast a bluish shadow, moving upwards at left and onto the ceiling, then it's gone.

They do say digital cameras can be used without flash in low light conditions.

Kantha

Some of the glorious textiles that are part of World Eco Fibre and Textile Art, showing at the Brunei Gallery till 23 March.

Daily journal of Richard Purdy

On the website of the Textile Museum (Toronto, Canada) are summaries of many of their exhibitions. In 1998, "Small World" included the work of Richard Purdy -

 (images from here) "Richard Purdy (Montreal, Quebec) has been keeping a daily journal since 1975. Three “chapters” of his diary are included in this exhibition, including a dhoti (cotton loin cloth) and a silk jacket from retailer, Le Château."

Handstitch course, week 1

The course is at City Lit, tutor Amarjeet Nandhra. We were given instructions for making a number of stitches, and shown how, and got on with it. First a bit of practice, then on to making "resolved samples" in which we experimented with the stitch. (I started out with grey, my "usual" colour, but quickly branched out into jollier shades.)

Here are some "experimental" things you can do with stitches to develop and push your technique -

• change the thread, fine to thick, smooth to wooly, etc
• overlap thick and thin stitches
• make stitches very big
• graduate from large to small stitches
• make the stitch wide
• make the stitch very long
• mix wide and long
• mix small and big
• overlap sizes of stitch or colour of thread
• create shapes
• work stitches close together or far apart
• wrap the stitch
• layer different stitches
• use different background fabrics

The day included some "timed exercises" for those who like that sort of thing - a few minutes of doing the stitch of choice, then an instruction, eg "elongate the stitch" - and a few more minutes before the next instruction, eg, "use it to couch something down" -

Lots of colours of thread to choose from. Note that we worked with hoops - I got to like having the hoop to hold, and to be able to turn it around the do the stitching from the most convenient angle.

I took my sample home and spent the Sunday stitching ... all day ... listening to Radio 4 ... bliss ...

Detached woven picot (and detached buttonhole bar); bullion knots; french knots

Buttonhole stitch, or is it blanket stitch?

Vandyke stitch - in my hands it resembles various insects

The day's work, with cretan stitch in progress -

Couching - and bokhara/romanian couching - is still to come, and then I'll feel ready for the next installment (three classes in all). 

Stitchadizzical

This started as a leftover from last year's journal quilts (A4 size), one of the "false starts" which nevertheless I spent hours and many stitches on, for no particular reason (other than the pleasure of hand stitching).

Now it's destined to become a bookwrap - no, two bookwraps, A6 size - for the tombola at Festival of Quilts.

I added a grey wool backing and put it under the machine needle and gave it a thorough going-over with variegated threads, using various patterns, to hold the handstitch firmly in place. Some of the machining will show on the inside, hence the different colours for bobbin threads -

One strip, the darkest one, needed "a little something" so I retrofitted a line of french knots in two shades of purple.

Later in the week I'll cut it in half (to a size of 10.5" x 7") and add a narrow binding, incorporating a 3" wide strip to make a pocket at each end, into which the covers of an A6 notebook will fit. A button-and-loop will hold it together.