Found grids

Gouged into wood as a by-product of carpentry

Barred windows in a former gaol

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.

Blackfriars Bridge

Coming...

…and going

Blue ice

Even in the days of unheated bedrooms in the Nova Scotia winter, I loved the ice crystal patterns that formed inside windows. Somewhere in my boxes & boxes of printed photos, there are probably some photos of those patterns...

They can be much more easily found on the internet - here are a few, inspiration for hand stitch - feather stitch??

image from here

image from here

these grew in Antarctica (image from here)

Found art Friday - red & white

These photos followed one another when downloaded from the camera. The summer pudding couldn't be more different from the dilapidated shop along the bus route - but the colours, and the rhythm of the elements, tie them together.

X marks

Ever wonder why we cross fingers for luck? The internet tells us ....

"Crossing one's fingers, by curling the middle finger over the index, is thought to bring good luck. This dates back to when crossed fingers were used as a gesture to ward off witches and others considered to be or possessed by evil spirits. It is also seen as bad luck to cross your fingers on both hands.
"Some believe that the gesture originates from pre-Christian times, due to the fact that in early European cultures, two people were required to use their index fingers to form the sign, one to make a wish and the other to support it. It was believed that the cross was a symbol of unity and that benign spirits dwelt at its intersecting point—to wish on a cross was a figurative way of securing the wish at the intersection until it came true. Over the years, the custom was modified so one person could make a wish on his/her own."

This line of inquiry led to some musing about using the X or cross as a symbol. It has many meanings ... various Christian crosses, of course, but others besides ... cross cercelée in heraldry; the Jolly Roger pirate flag; the summit cross (Gipfelkreuz); the Nordic Cross of Scandinavian flags....

And there's cross stitch, counted and otherwise. Old dictionaries of stitches contain many varieties of cross stitch; these are from a 1934 edition of Mary Thomas's Dictionary of Embroidery Stitches, with clever pictorial puns by Miss Margaret Agutter, who also did them for Mary Thomas's Knitting Book. (Apologies for the splodges; my camera desperately needs its sensor cleaning.)

Cross stitch on canvas; cross stitch (on material) "also known as sampler stitch"

Chevron cross stitch; crossed corners cross stitch (see Rice Stitch); diagonal cross stitch; double cross stitch

Half cross stitch; long-armed cross stitch;  marking cross stitch

Montenegrin cross stitch ; oblong cross stitch; reversed cross stitch; two-sided cross stitch

Two-sided Italian cross stitch (also known as arrowhead cross stitch, italian cross stitch and two-sided italian stitch)

Some modern uses of cross stitch - click on the links to see photos -

Evelin Kasikov (there's an article on her in the July-August issue of Embroidery magazine)

Doug Jones, cross stitch combined with ceramics - http://www.thebirminghampress.com/2011/02/17/brotherhood-of-the-saints/

cardboard - http://www.rebeccamaevemanley.co.uk/projects/cardboard-cross-stitch/

geeky cross stitch anyone? - http://www.neatorama.com/2011/03/09/30-great-geeky-cross-stitches/

or, urban cross stitch ... kits with a difference - http://www.urban-cross-stitch.com/

Plenty of subversive cross-stitch sites are listed at http://www.xmarks.com/site/www.subversivecrossstitch.com/

My mother loved to do cross stitch, and I love this "silent" cuckoo clock she made at my request -

Getting going on a new project

Seeing this bark painting -

White Painting by Nyapanyapa Yunupingu (image from here)

made me get out some woolly fabric and perle thread and try to replicate the criss-cross effect. But the fabric and thread seemed to have a will of their own - or was it that the second layer got too "floaty" -

Having a few pens at hand, I started to draw criss-cross sets of lines with a Lumocolour pen (it soaked through to the back quite nicely) and then used one of the little pens, found scattered on the pavement outside a betting shop, to draw some "ravelled patches" -

The erratic nature of the blobby ink of the little pens enhanced the wobbly lines of the patches.

A short train ride gave me a chance to try these drawings with my non-dominant hand - which was hellish awkward, and added further wobble -

and also to jot down ideas for the next steps with this "memory maintenance" piece - translation from drawing to textile. Today's task is to experiment with sewing down thin strips of newspaper (as used for the "Journey to the Studio" piece) by machine and hand in the criss-cross pattern.

Having started with the idea of doing rubbings of bark and "mending" the gashes shown on them, this "memory maintenance" idea has evolved, in a few days of constantly revisiting it, via questions like: What shape is memory? does it even have a shape is or it something undefined? How are memories connected? How do we rehearse memories, how do we retrieve them?

I plan to use black fabric, various threads, and strips of newspaper. Wax and ink may make an appearance, as may other types of paper, and old photographs. Using newspaper is appropriate because of its place in time, and because of the way it will yellow and crumble; similarly, ink (used for the dark bits, perhaps) could run or fade - these would be part of the history of the piece, in the way that the memories are part of the history of an individual.

In many ways, this period of information-gathering, when the final form is still fluid, is the most exciting part of a project. It acts as a filter - you focus on information that's relevant to the project, rather than getting overwhelmed with a lot of exciting possibilities for projects-as-yet-unborn. Also, it's interesting to take what seems to be a brilliant idea and actually try it out - even if it doesn't work as planned, if you're open to surprises and critical about what's going on, it will lead to new possibilities. By "being critical" I mean assessing the success of things - keeping in mind your own criteria for what might happen further down the line, and what you originally intended - and also stepping back to assess what someone else will see in what you're doing ... is there a blatant connection that you've overlooked, that makes the piece "mean" something entirely different. Making samples is fine in terms of figuring out techniques, but it's not the only thing going on.

Yet to come:  choosing the materials - grappling with composition of the piece - and deciding its size.

Next lot of journal quilts

To fit in with the "stellar sunrise" theme for this year's A4 journal quilts, I have a list of names of constellations for the blue set -
Pavo (the peacock); Eridanus (the river); Cygnus (the swan); Cetus (sea monster).

Will they be reproducible? The quilts have strips of fabric into which the black circles (the stars) nestle - the fewer the stars, the fewer the strips needed... So far I've not tried to depict the configurationof the actual constellation.

Lepus looks a bit less formidable than Eridanus, for a start - 10 stars instead of dozens -

Found art Friday

Found art Friday

Mere minutes after preparing this photo (a wall at Leigh-on-Sea railway station) for this blog post, I followed a link from Judy Martin's blog and came across this image -

This 2011 painting by Toronto artist Nicole Collins is called Lunar Caustic - it measures 72" x 96", and consists of oil, aluminum leaf, wax and pigment on canvas on board.

Would the painting have made such an impression if I hadn't seen, and photographed, the cracked wall - and had time to look closely at it while cropping my original image? (People sometimes ask, "What do you DO with all those photos?" - well, they seem to come in handy for delightful surprises...)

In any case, the "translation" of the cracks and the areas they define, into a surface of applied sections, makes me think about how these found-art photos could be a basis for further work.

Photo find

These five photos go back to the pre-digital era ... a (winter) holiday in Cornwall ... poking around little harbours ... much excitement to come across this combination of shapes and colours (the blue isn't quite right - blue is a difficult colour for cameras, still). The shapes and colours have dwelt in the back of my mind ... and may have to stay there a little longer ...

Bird motifs from the Pergamon Museum

Seeing those reminded me of what fun it was to make the coasters for Hooked in London's "chicken challenge" - I might have to make some more... You can see the various hooked chickens on the group's blog - hooked-in-london.blogspot.co.uk

Found art Friday

Quilt inspiration

These marvellous medieval mosaics are in the Bode Museum in Berlin. From its description (sculptures, coins, medals, Byzantine art), you might be tempted to give it a miss, but its collection contains many wonderful things!

Via the magic of photo manipulation, here are closeups -

London views

Two different views of the London skyline, taken about 12 hours apart - looking downstream at dusk from the National Theatre, on arrival at THE leaving-do of the century, in terms of the BMJ at least -

The view of "downtown" includes St Pauls, the Gherkin, and closer to hand, the Oxo Tower. The gaggle of revellers are my former colleagues ... it was great to see them again, and I was amazed to realise that it's nearly four years since my own farewell.

The next morning found me&camera at Greenwich Park, looking upstream in the morning light -

"Downtown" is way off to the left; the tall buildings are Canary Wharf/Docklands.

Two things intrigue me about city skylines - the familiarity and reassurance of the skyline of the city one calls home (hence, another layer of distress for New Yorkers when the twin towers disappeared); and the relation of the buildings from changing viewpoints. Cities seem to have their "official" skyline diagrams, showing off iconic buildings.

This view of the London skyline during the Blitz comes printed on a teeshirt -

This next is pretty much the usual 21st century version, with the Millennium Wheel, Big Ben, St Pauls, NatWest Tower, BT Tower, Gherkin, Tower of London, and London Bridge (no Shard yet) -

This version has clarity and wit -