It's all happening in Finsbury Park

"The John Jones art building" has been going up over the past year or so, behind its shiny black hoardings - it's nearly attained its full height now -

The view at the end of the road

One side ready, one underway, one-and-a-half to go

At one corner of the site is Godfreys Butchers, who decided not to be part of the building, so no shiny fence, no rebuilding; they're keeping the bricks and have now done a bit of landscaping, putting down astroturf to suppress the weeds, planting some new shrubs and trees, and adding some strategic advertising. Hopefully they'll keep on top of the rubbish that gets tossed or blown through the fence.

The building is across the street from the new Park Theatre, and less than a stone's throw from the tube.

Park Theatre reflected in the shiny black fence

It's changing the skyline, and who knows what will change on the ground. The new buildings will contain the framer and other offices, and student accommodation and other residential. So Finsbury Park will have something to offer culturally, as well as the amazing hair shops.

"Changes" exhibition by Thirteen textile group

Last year the group exhibited, also at WAC Gallery, 14 Baylis Road, SE1 7AA (waterloo tube station) and I wrote about it here.

This year I had time, at the opening, to take only a few photos and those don't do the work justice (it was crowded, and the lighting tricky). If you're nearby, do drop in - hours are 11-6, Mon to Sat - but it closes on 26 Oct.

by Rose Chapman (nuno felt)

by Britt Proudlock

by Sue McKay

Poetry Thursday - Candles by CP Cavafy

Candles by Achilleas Droungas

Candles

 

Days to come stand in front of us

like a row of burning candles -

golden, warm, and vivid candles.

 

Days past fall behind us,

a gloomy line of burnt-out candles;

the nearest are still smoking,

cold, melted and bent.

 

I don't want to look at them: their shape saddens me,

and it saddens me to remember their original light.

I look ahead at my burning candles.

 

I don't want to turn, don't want to see, terrified,

how quickly that dark line gets longer,

how quickly one more dead candle joins another.

 

From a blog post of an exhibition, in Greece, of artists responding to Cavafy's poems. See the rest of the paintings, and some more poems, at a-place-called-space.blogspot.co.uk/.

Candles by Costas Tsoklis

Cavafy (1863-1933) lived in Alexandria for most of his life, and wrote his most important poetry after his 40th birthday. His archive is at cavafy.com. Best-known among his canon (of 154 poems) is probably Ithaka, given in four translations on the site. 

Dogs in quilts

The other day at the National Gallery we were noticing the various dogs in the paintings - and sure enough, in the bookshop was a big fat book about dogs in art! (And it's not the only one of its kind...) Then this pooch romped into my inbox -

"Mendelssohn" by Franki Kohler

so I went looking for some other dogs in quilts. First, some portraits, then some abstracts and/or some patterns...

This is Sammy (via this blog)-

This block pattern can be customised to your dog or your friend's dog -

Two pets remembered - and many more dog quilts here -

From the colour distribution, this could be a heat-seeking dog ... I like the idea ... (from here) -

Strangely little is required to make individual personalities (from here) -

How to piece a bassett hound? now he needs ears (via) -

Scotties are probably the cutsie dog par excellence for quilt patterns -

Getting much more abstract, here's another pattern -

And another abstract rendition (from here) -

I had honestly forgotten that I contributed to this plethora of pooches with "Yappy Dog", made for the Little Gems raffle in 2008 -

So, enough already! Besotted dog-lovers might want to visit this pinterest board, which has some excellent portraits.

Seen in store

Amid a day of going to exhibitions (Michael Landy at National Gallery; Australia at the RA; Thirteen Textile Group at WAC Gallery) we visited Anthropologie on Regent Street.

"Still" is an exhibition made of 3589 feathers

Close-up, with lighting changed in Photoshop (Control+Shift+B)

There were some enticing things I didn't really need, like these embroidered teatowels ("too good to use" - at £18) -

We're used to seeing extra buttons supplied, in case one falls off ... here's some further thoughtful customer care, a charming little spool of thread in case ... of what? seams coming apart? snags needing repair? -

And for the Christmas season, squirrel nutcrackers, feeling very solid and, hopefully, ruthlessly efficient -

What's in your drink these days?

Soft drinks - fizzy drinks, sodas, pop - are generally known to be bad for you. Yet the shops are full of them - we're obviously addicted.

Now, the EU has done a daft thing by endorsing fructose as the sweetener for soft drinks, saying it has a lower glycaemic index than sucrose, therefore will help fight obesity.

But when it comes to putting on weight, it's all about glycaemic load, not glycaemic index per se - as is explained in this article -

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/21/fructose-poison-sugar-industry-pseudoscience

It's scary to think that fructose causes seven times as much cell damage than fructose! But, because fructose does occur naturally in fruit, it's ok when eaten "with fibre" - ie, in fruit, as fruit. 

Fructose gets a lot of blame for all that's wrong with Western eating habits - but surely it's short-sighted to blame just one thing, even though fructose occurs in most if not all processed food (check the label). Blame could just as easily fall on food advertising targeted to children, on profit-maximising food manufacturers, on the food/agriculture lobby - or on individuals for not changing their behaviour.

Meanwhile, it's a good idea to stick to drinking water - though someone is sure to tell you that there's some reason it's bad for you.

Monday miscellany

Check out the sound sculptures of Swiss artist Zimoun (I came across one on itsnicethat.com, a blog with many fascinating posts, but you can see more elsewhere, eg here) -

still from Zimoun: 97 polysiloxane hoses ...

Also from itsnicethat.com, these tree forts by Patrick Dougherty -

A video about the work of Kew's Herbarium and the evolution of plants -
http://richannel.org/collections/2013/kew-gardens#/beyond-the-gardens--the-plant-family-tree

Using our imaginations should be obligatory, says Neil Gaiman in this year's The Reading Agency lecture - read it all on theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/. "Our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming." Literate people read fiction; fiction is the gateway drug to reading, and once you discover that reading is pleasurable, you're on to reading everything. Anything that children enjoy will move them up the reading ladder into literacy; there's no such thing as a bad book for children, he says. Also, fiction builds empathy, allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals - and it shows that the world can be different. (That's why China has lifted the ban on science fiction - to encourage innovative thinking.) Treating libraries as a shelf of books is to miss the point - they are about more than that. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg; libraries help people navigate the information world, giving everyone equal access. Without literacy and numeracy, people are more easily lied to and misled. Our responsibilities to the future include the obligation to read for pleasure, to support libraries, to read aloud to our children, to use the language - and writers' obligations go beyond this - but we all have an obligation to daydream, and to make things beautiful.

Witches Head nebula, photographed by David Malin (via)

"The Witch’s Head nebula [IC2118] is 800 light years away from Earth in the constellation
of Epidanus. As the colloquial name suggests, this heavenly dust storm has
the pointed nose and crooked chin of a fairytale crone. In reality the nebula is quite blue,
glowing in light reflected from the super-giant star, Rigel. "

supervoid - an area of space empty of rich superclusters (galaxies). Voids were first discovered in 1978. "Voids appear to correlate with the observed temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), due to the Sachs–Wolfe effect [says wikipedia]. Colder regions correlate with voids, whereas hotter regions correlate with filaments, because of gravitational redshifting. As the Sachs-Wolfe effect is only significant if the Universe is dominated by radiation or dark energy, the existence of voids is significant in providing physical evidence for dark energy." Wow ... physical evidence for dark energy!

Ragged Cloth 2

After being "closed for refurbishment" for a while, Ragged Cloth Cafe - a blog by and for textile artists, for discussing textile art and art in general - has reopened.

The archives are full of thought-provoking posts, and you're invited to leave comments on them as well as the new posts, which a team of writers is adding weekly. 

I've just posted my thoughts about artwork that is made to be destroyed - which was set off by seeing this photo -

preschoolers rolling around (with permission!) on the work of "salt artist" Motoi Yamamoto. I was rather horrified at first, and am still not comfortable with this type of destruction - are you?

Things found in books - Northern College library

The library - or rather, the bookshelves - in some of the grand rooms of Wentworth Castle  has many volumes of parliamentary papers from the 1970s. Here they are a backdrop for Yvonne Brown's work.

Elsewhere, though, are five or six bays filled with venerable books [the sort charity shops are only too happy to bin as unsaleable]. They were once the library of Reginald Gaimster (1897-1978), "Citizen of Barnsley & USA", obviously read and loved -

I was tempted to take this book away for bedtime reading (Sir Sydney Cockerell, who had to leave school at age 10, was a manuscript collector and museum curator, friend of William Morris and John Ruskin, and expanded the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge during his long directorship) but subsequently found Virginia Woolf's "The Common Reader" and dipped into that instead, discovering Dorothy Osborne (1627-1695, known for her 77 extant letters to William Temple) and the intense friendship between Jane Carlyle and Geraldine Jewsbury (thank you, Reginald Gaimster!) -

Also amazing was this 1946 publication -

It's listed on Google Books but an ebook isn't available.

Starfish "mosaic" cushion finished

As soon as I got home after the Mosaic Quilts workshop I carried on with finishing the project, adding the rest of the squares. What started out as basting to hold the layers together ended up as big-stitch hand quilting, and thus it languished for nearly a month, the stars having been picked out with machine quilting -

A recent flurry of studio reorganisation not only cleared enough space around the sewing machine for further work but also turned up the bondawebbed fabric from which the squares had been cut -

The next step was to make some piping -

and to put on a backing - hey presto, one cushion finished, one UFO vanquished -

Piping improves a cushion, imho, and next time I'll round the corners more. The spots of colour make a subtle but important difference -

As for the design as a whole - next time I'll pay more attention to the tonal value, rather than just the colour, and to the negative space.

Camera obscura

It helps to have a bright sunny day (via)

Camera obscura - darkened rooms that give views of the outside world - have long fascinated me, and I've visited many (Edinburgh, Bristol, and Eger, Hungary among them), and would love to step inside one of those built by Chris Drury, cloud chamber, star chamber, sky chamber.... 

Chris Drury's Wave Chamber in Kielder Forest, and how it works (via)

In the 19th century, fashionable homes had a small camera obscura, like that at The Vyne, and they were a useful tool for artists before the age of photography.

It helps to have a bright sunny day (via)

Artists continue to use the camera obscura, darkening a room and making a pinhole to project light, upside down, onto a convenient wall, or onto photographic film. Examples include Zoe Leonard at Camden Arts Centre and Hannah Leighton in Cloth & Memory.

Zoe Leonard's ephemeral panorama, Observation Point

Hannah Leighton's Windowless Shed, a series of camera obscura

In photography the pinhole camera is a version of camera obscura - in fact any camera is - but some photographers go the whole nine miles and use darkened rooms to capture images, or build specially large cameras on site. One of the former is Edgar Lissel (who has now moved to the other end of the scale with "microbial" photography); one of the latter is Richard Learoyd, whose cameras produce unique gelatin silver contact prints of the English countryside, up to 80 inches wide.

Furniture blocks the light in Edgar Lissel's obscured rooms

Unique prints by Richard Learoyd (from the video here, which also shows
the portable room he uses as a camera)