Snow fences, real and imagined

They appear in short bursts and clusters in areas prone to drifting -

(via)

The old ones are wood; the newer ones harsher, metal -

(via)

Other types of prairie fences are buck fences and barbwire fences, but those don't do much to stop snow drift.

My February journal quilt is titled Snow Fences - but the title is an afterthought. Or rather, a midway-thought, helping to shape something new out of something old -

The blue and white (you have to look hard for the white) hand embroidery is from a larger, longer piece that was abandoned goodness knows when. But it was just the right height for a High Horizon - needed just some machined quilting lines and some dry grass poking out of the snow. And some of those wispy prairie clouds.

Museum labyrinth - week in review

Having decided to focus on feet and floors, and to use a 4x3 "spiral" grid for printing and folding the book's pages, I laid out some of the series of photos in InDesign. My printer, which had been given up for dead, sprang back to life (a miracle!) and permitted the printing of several versions -

The little book made from another printout of the two series from the V&A, with two different floors, when joined together "reads" like this -

The  line of black stitching at the bottom of the page is to help with orientation. When it's absent from the bottom of the page, or of half a spread, that's because the photos have turned a corner (their orientation has changed in the original layout) - and the book has to be turned in the hand to have it right-way-up. So the reader is physically taking part in the journey through the museum, not just by turning the pages but also by turning the book.

I also tried putting the images onto acetate (tracing them), but that turned out to be a dog's breakfast in this format -

Utter jumble and chaos. Also, this acetate is very springy, especially when thoroughly creased - it doesn't want to sit still, the way paper can.

In sum, the book format is starting to happen, but many aspects need sorting out. Which photos - anything other than photos (eg thread line) - how many pix/pages - what kind of paper - colour print or monochrome - what to put on the back, if anything.

This one uses Victorian tiles from the corridor outside what used to be the textile rooms -

Legs (and mosaic floor of Renaissance sculpture gallery) on one side, Victorian tiles on the other. A difference not just of texture but of scale.

Walking to work

Before the machine age, some processes that are now taken over by whirling components in machines were performed by people walking. Two that come quickly to mind are spinning, and making rope.

Spinning with a walking wheel in the 14th century; from the Luttrell Psalter (via)

Before the spinning jenny - indeed before the flyer spinning wheel, worked with a treadle - was the "walking wheel" or "great wheel" with its driven spindle. The spinner had to stop and "wind on" after each "make" of yarn - pulled in a long draw from the rolag of fleece - was complete, walking as far back as possible during the making and then right back to the spindle. It is said that a skilled spinner could walk up to 30 miles a day doing this!

See the wheel in action here - or with commentary here.

Today in Myanmar (as in many traditional societies), warps are wound by someone walking the thread between sticks -

Linda, who took the photo, explains: "Each of the spools (on the rack on the right) hold a strand of  finely spun silk. The woman is holding one strand from each of the spools and is walking back and forth to wind the strands around the wooden sticks at the front and back of this device in preparation for weaving. She had to walk at exactly the same pace over and over, back and forth, so that one spool didn't move faster than the others and tangle. She couldn't stop until all the spools were empty. "

In Ghana, warp is laid out for kente weaving between two sets of pegs; it's wound from a rack of spools and the cross (which determines the sequence of threads for transfer to the loom) is hand-picked at the end -

As you can see, a lot of walking is involved.

The process used in Orissa, India, is somewhat different:

"Portable warping racks are anchored to the ground 15 meters apart. Thicker rods anchored to the rack hold the warp, which is slipped on painstakingly bunch by bunch. The warp is doubled, starting at one end, spanning to the other and then wrapping around and back to the first. This length of warp is 5 sarees, or 30 meters. The cross is kept and propagated at many spots along the length with bamboo lease sticks which are used to spread the warp threads out evenly over the 20 meters of stretched out warp. These bamboo sticks will be wound up with the warp on the loom and help to maintain the spacing of the threads during weaving. " (info and photo via http://www.sarisafari.com/tour/barhamboy.html)

The ropewalk - for laying out and twisting ropes - could be very long indeed, and workers would latterly use carts. The quarter mile long  Ropery at Chatham Historic Dockyard is still working, in fact you can have a go yourself -

Sailing ships needed as much as 30 miles of rope each. This ropewalk was working in Yorkshire in 1910 -

"Hemp fibres were tied to a hook attached to a wheel which was slowly turned whilst the rope maker walked back down the rope walk, feeding out additional fibres from the supply he carried. Groups of yarn were later twisted together to the desired thickness of rope."

Another occupation that required a lot of walking was tin mining in Cornwall, mainly because the deposits were in areas under the sea, so miners would have to walk long distances to the rock face, sometimes as much as three miles.

Consider, also, how far a messenger boy might have walked (or run) in a day, before the bicycle, telephone, or fax - or vehicular courier - came on the scene.

As the machines have replaced the tedium of the walking, walking has become a leisure (or spiritual) pursuit ... Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust is a history of walking (and this short history goes as far as 2001).

Poetry Thursday - When the Light Shifts by Thomas A Clark

"trembling / raindrops on birch twigs" (photo by Annie Japaud)

when the light shifts

countless trembling
raindrops on birch twigs
fade to a clarity that seems
the temper of the day
until light returns
to the shining tree

when a breeze blows
through grasses or branches
light touches the harp
there are no witnesses
only musicians, dancers

Thomas A. Clark

from Yellow & Blue (Carcanet Press, 2014); found on scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk

Thomas A Clark's poems are based on walking in the Scottish landscape; they are attentive to the form and experience of walking. Born in 1944, he's been called a minimalist Romantic poet. I'm excited to read that he consciously " treat[s] the finished book as imaginative space, the page a framing device around an image or a phrase, and the turning of pages a revelation or delay".

Looking for something else (a particular print by Kate Whiteford - and with walking+art much on my mind) I was intrigued by a book cover and thus stumbled on his work, a few days ago.

That big online bookseller lists many publications by him, often collaborations. Books to spend time with, by the look of it.

More information from the scottishpoetry website:

"In 1973, with the artist Laurie Clark, he started Moschatel Press. At first a vehicle for small publications by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Cid Corman, Jonathan Williams, Simon Cutts and others, it soon developed into a means of formal investigation within his own poetry, treating the book as imaginative space, the page as a framing device or as quiet around an image or a phrase, the turning of pages as revelation or delay.

"From 1986, Laurie and Thomas A Clark have run Cairn Gallery, one of the earliest of ‘artist-run spaces’, specialising in Land Art, Minimalism and a lyrical or poetic Conceptualism. After many years in the Cotswolds, the Clarks moved in 2002 to re-open the gallery in Pittenweem.

"In addition to his books and smaller publications, Clark has also made site-specific installations in galleries, in gardens or in the landscape, and has many works in permanent collections world-wide."

A poet, a publisher, an artist (land artist, book artist...), a walker - and a blogger - it doesn't get better than that.

And so easy to buy those books with 1-click...

Clearing the decks, a bit

With only four weeks to go till the HOFS book fair on 15 March - or rather, less than four weeks to go! - it's time to get on with some book-related making.

I'll be taking the little clay books, and Binders Keepers ... but find my stock of the latter is seriously depleted. Or else there's a dozen or so lurking in "a safe place", resistant to being found ... in any case, more are needed.

Before I left the house yesterday morning, the studio was ready for action. Shortly after I ran the errands and got back home, production was in full flow, with fabric and ribbon decisions being made for several BK at once -

It's the decisions that take the time - the sewing is quite routine by now. With Radio 4 purring away in the background, the great danger is of being caught up in a programme and not realising that work has stopped....

Labyrinth du jour

Walk it yourself in the Sensing Spaces exhibition at the Royal Academy (till 6 April; download the teachers' guide here, or read the blog of the show here) -

The flooring is acquiring a footprint-effect; the window shows the way out -

It's by Li Xiaodong, who has also used twigs for the walls of a library on the outskirts of Beijing ... letting light in gently to provide "the perfect reading ambience" -

...and has built a "bridge school" connected to historic Hakka houses in Fujian province, southwest China -

Big ball of tights

The ball makes a statement - the nylon that tights (pantyhose) are made of isn't recyclable, it goes into landfill - imagine all the tights that are thrown away every year, and imagine how big that ball could get - perhaps not as big as the earth, but huge nonetheless.

"Of all the objects we crafted re-using tights, people seemed to be particularly attracted to our growing ball of tights – they were in awe, touched it, hugged it and reflected on it. The ball attracted a lot of spontaneous interest whilst illustrating the environmental impact of un-recycled tights: the ball may become as big as the Earth!

There is a growing link between clothing and the environment; tights strongly revealed how environmental hazards and risks are getting closer to us. There is no easy way to re-cycle tights and every week millions of pairs of ladies tights are littered. However, we also discovered that environmental campaigns do not need to show dramatic images of pollution and environmental disasters and/or gloomy statistics to make people realise the importance of adopting more sustainable behaviours – it does not need to be scary to touch people profoundly.

A large number of tights contain nylon, a non-biodegradable material that often ends up in landfills. Why don’t we produce biodegradable tights?"

Thanks to Linda for the link.

Monday miscellany

A little local library in London
(see unexpected pix of other London libraries here, and library/archive info here)

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Nadia Myre is a visual artist from Montréal, Québec and a member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg. She has beaded over all 56 pages of the annotated Indian Act (with the help of more than 200 participants) between 2000 – 2003. (In 2005 she started The Scar Project, an ongoing ‘open lab’ where viewers participate by sewing their scars—real or symbolic—onto stretched canvases and write their ‘scar stories’ on paper.)

A monograph featuring a richly illustrated collection of Nadia’s installation, photography, sculpture, prints, beadwork, drawings and video work from the last fifteen years is available. 

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London by water (via mappinglondon.co.uk)

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Another lovely comment on a blog post - "I just now cannot go away your web site prior to suggesting that we incredibly relished the normal details someone supply in your guests? Shall be back again continually to examine new discussions" ... can't figure it out, can you?

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Agave lace (also called aloe lace) - it's made from fibres taken from this cactus, by Benedictine nuns on the island of Hvar, Croatia. At last report, 13 sisters were still making the lace, each with her individual style. Legend has it that it was based on a sample of lace brought back from the Canary Islands (specifically, Tenerife) in the 19th century - hence the name "tenerifa", the netted variety - the sample above is filet crochet (more info here). The agave in Europe produces a finer fibre than that in the Americas, which is used for rope-making.

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Spineless Classics - pages from the book (perhaps one you've not read) are now available as an evocative poster.

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Braided rivers are, says New Scientist (pp 39-41; photo via NASA Visible Earth), "a tell-tale sign of a landscape with little or no life". Here's how it works: deep-banked, meandering rivers depend on plant roots to slow the erosion of their banks and keep them from spreading. Without those roots, rivers cut through their banks and become a network of braided streams. These are seen at the foot of glaciers or in deserts. During the Permian mass extinction, aout 250 million years ago, rivers abruptly changed from meandering to braided.

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Is there a Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Fabric? (via)

Stitching faces - using stitch as line

Detailed stitching of faces might involve cross-hatched areas, as in this drawing by Gwen Buchanan -

Engravings usually use cross-hatching for shading -

Detail from an etching by Barocci (via)

or parallel lines, or lines of different weights -

Van Dyck (rendered by Lucas Vorstermans) (via)

Here's how Audrey Walker uses cross-hatching in stitch - very densely, built up in layers -

Detail from Beach Woman, 1995 (via)

And in this self-portrait (via) she uses lines of a different sort -

More stitched faces

Amazing, how many approaches there are to stitching faces, or making them out of fabric - and how many, very different, outcomes.

Sampling, by Gina Ferrari (via)

Self-portrait, by Julie Mackinder

"Emmy" by Laura Pierce (rug hooking) 

Alice Beasley has many portrait quilts on her website (from saqa e-news)

embroidery by Audrey Walker (via)

goldwork and shading (via)

by Deidre Scherer (via)

by Georgie Meadows (via)

Sophie Strong was trained as a sculptor but now works in machine embroidery (via)

The next three were in the "Pricked: extreme embroidery" exhibition (and book) in 2007-8, so they're a bit more ...adventurous... than you might find comfortable -

Morwenna Catt's stuffed toys have resurfaced in unsettling forms over the years

Kate Kretz embroiders with hair - her own or friends'

Maria E Pineres uses needlepoint - here, to stitch "mug shots"
of celebrities (of the time) who have been arrested

A couple that I find skillful but outside my own aspiration -

quilting on fabric faces can be tricky (via)

a da Vinci angel - in blackwork? (via)

To end with, some machine-stitched faces on old envelopes I did years ago (from photographs of friends ... oh dear ...) - the postmarks say 1995 -

Agonised looks apart, they were quite a departure for me, even then ... an idea that came out of nowhere. Each is done in one continuous line of stitching - which doesn't mean the machine was going continuously - there were definitely stops and starts to check the photo and to start breathing again.

(The previous post about stitched faces is here.)

Update - couldn't resist adding an example of the work of Ulva Ugerup - see more on the QuilteQunstnerne website -