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Sunday 27 January 2013

meaningofmaterials


The decisions around the choice of materials have been really important - the use of utility papers and materials that are usually used within a hidden context, for example within the lining of clothes, has supported the thinking behind my making. The tracing, glassine and baking papers have a quality that hides or 'knocks back' the papers that are behind it, creating its own sense of the hidden but when folded reveal and in fact present the fold by showing the layers of the materiel used. The moment I realised that I had to work with these materials - that this had-to-be - came from seeing an example of shadow ribbon at the Costume and Textile collection in Norwich – found within the ‘fabric manipulation handling box. 
The blackness of the interface material and dark glassine has come to represent the opposite and I feel presents a deadening atmosphere (referencing my thoughts and connections to the long dead owners and users of the materials and objects I’ve been looking at and working with).

Saturday 26 January 2013

linesintheclothandlandscape



The connection between the lines in the ploughed field and the detail in the smocking on the smocks worn by the people ploughing the field is something that I've been thinking about. Did they consciously recreate the world they inhabited within the clothes they wore? Is it inevitable that humans create patterns or seek to find pattern and so order? Which arrived first? I am reminded of the moment, after a move from an urban to a rural area. I realised that within the sculptural books I was making I was recreating references to the landscape around me – ploughed fields, horizon lines and the gills of mushrooms – subconscious or did I just find the motif because I was looking for it? 

Thursday 24 January 2013

scalingupbymultiplying


2 days of thinking and reflecting has actually got me a long way – there are 5-6 finished ideas/pieces emerging from the mass of notes, photographs, drawings, samples and test. Really exciting to get the pleating back from – I will have to live with the samples for a while before I work with them.
The balance when making work inspired by other work is always interesting - between looking at objects and then making work that is verging on pastiche or being inspired by an object and trying to make something that references it but is creative in its own right.
I'm approaching the scaling up of the work from the smaller samples in several ways – the multiplying of a motif relates well to the nature of page within book and is the most appropriate way of working so far.  I am also working on the idea of many different elements becoming one piece of work.  

Wednesday 23 January 2013

newspaceediting


The new space I'm working in has great light and this along with a lot of reflective thinking I have realised that a lot of the original samples are in fact pieces of finished work! This editing process is interesting and the four piles – finished piece – good idea but needs remaking either in the same or maybe different materials – useless now but still of some value and the objects often change from one to the other!

Monday 14 January 2013

theobjectnessofobjects


Another thought - When is an object an object? An idea of objectness. Research has led me to Lord Krishna.... Any object is known by its four characteristic features: name, form, qualities and activities. The absence of these four features in anything denies its status as object. For example, impersonal Brahman is formless; hence it is not an object unto itself, but simply a distinctive trait of the Supreme Lord. So maybe this thinking is a way of explaining my route through the collections. Maybe! (Shrila Haridasa Thakura, Harinama-Chintamani, Ch2)

Sunday 13 January 2013

edgesofbooks


I promised myself that I wouldn't get involved with the Norwich Pattern books – there has been so much work on them that and they are well known – but Lisa was showing some students one the other day and I popped down to see – it was a large fairly worn one – the edges of the pages were glorious and generally it was a riot of starting points it was difficult to control my excitement. The sections were random and thrown together with a number of shorter pages created to balance the space of the fore edge created by adding thick textile swatches. This reminded me of another great edge I've seen on/in a book – it was the ledger for St Audreys Hospital that I saw at Suffolk Record Office – it was being looked at my members of the team working on the St Audreys Project. http://staudrysproject.wordpress.com/history/the-collections/

Saturday 12 January 2013

onetransparenttwodenseandimpenetrable


Trying again to think about categorization – after successive days at The Suffolk CC Archive, MEAL and then The Costume and Textile Collection – thinking about the idea of using tags to access the work and that each object has to have a unique set of tags to be able to distinguish it for any other object and then of course to find it within a collection. Eventually you have to have so many that you would have a direct copy of the object and then you would have to have the object.... which reminded me of Borges - On Exactitude in Science...In that empire, the craft of cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province covered the space of an entire city and the map of the empire itself an entire province. In the course of time, these extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a map of the empire that was of the same scale as the empire and that coincided with it point for point. The following generations, less attentive to the study of cartography, came to judge a map of such magnitude cumbersome and quite useless and it was abandoned it to the rigours of sun and rain. In the western deserts, tattered fragments of the map are still to be found sheltering an occasional beast or beggar; in all the land, no other relic is left of the discipline of geography. Thinking about ordering these collections and rethinking how to access them sometimes feels like this. The Mourning Crepe I recently looked at has the most extraordinary qualities, one layer its transparent two it becomes dense and impenetrable. 

Wednesday 9 January 2013

buyingpaperinthepast

An hour in Shepard's in Victoria, London buying paper - sticking to the rule of only working with materials including papers that are 'invisible' or 'hidden' for the project was hard as Velum, both mock and real was to hand. The range of papers for printmaking is extensive but I came away with acid free tissue, glassine both black and white, a form of tracing paper that is used within photo albums, some brown kraft Jute wrapping paper and the marvel that is Tyvek - not quite fabric nor paper. I can't wait to start layering these up, folding and thinking about the hidden. 
Meanwhile I have been looking back at the images I'm collecting of cloth, specifically folded cloth within paintings.- Durer Self Portrait.

Tuesday 1 January 2013

sortingandenhancing


Sorting and enhancing the photographs from MEAL has thrown up a few surprises – reminded that whilst handling the images in the collection they came out of plastic sleeves in random order – often upside down.  This has presented new ideas around display and possible structures.
The process of photographing photographs highlights their ‘objectness’ – one damaged photograph was creased in a position that highlighted the imagery within the frame. This is an idea that I want to explore in the project - folding images of folded work.