Ink and wax

Silk threaded with soft cotton; ironed on to freezer paper; text added with brush and japanese ink, waxed, more ink added, and then some blue dye that happened to be to hand.

Ironing out the wax, I noticed that the cotton left strong lines of wax, and rewaxed them (by running the side of a candle over hot, ironed fabric) to use elsewhere, on a bit of paper that's collecting the "leftovers" of ink -

Repurposing?

Found these in a shoebox - in May 2010 they were the "sky boats" hung in gallery windows. Now they threaten to become book objects of some sort.

Photographs of shadows have been printed out on various papers - some give a colour cast, some have been converted to grayscale.

The shapes is nonetheless boatlike - like Petter Southall's "dory shelves" in the One Tree project -

Or the boat bathtub by Weiki Somers (from here; seen and coveted at the V&A "Telling Tales" show in 2009, in rather a more atmospheric setting) -

Or Lindisfarne boat sheds? -

No, perhaps not ... I digress ...

Paper and ink

Guanghwa was my source of rolls of  moon palace paper (made in Japan; left) and rice (xuan) paper, and japanese and chinese ink. Not sure what the difference between the inks is; this is all with chinese ink, both "straight" - it's very thick - and diluted. Some of the words show through the ink in certain lights - the graphite especially.

The rice paper is unsized and very absorbent. It seems very delicate. Grass and mulberry bark papers are available too.

I bought liquid ink but ink sticks are available too, of which the website says:

Traditional ink sticks are mixtures of soot and glue, prepared with preservative a fragrance. The two main types used are oil soot and pine soot.

Oil soot creates the blackest of inks, giving a warm rich colour. It is ideal for general use.

If a colder, bluer and less shiny colour is required, ink prepared from pine soot is ideal. It also has less glue and is ideal for painting in the Meticulous style.

The "Meticulous style" definitely isn't the one I'm using! Perhaps further ink experiments will be less unbridled. I'm looking to have the writing covered with ink, but still visible in certain lights - this goes back to a (large!) work by Claude Horstmann I saw some years ago -

Sewing Sunday

Trying to bring my "journey lines" into small-quilt format, I spent most of Sunday making these, aligned on a sort of horizon line :

They're approximately A4 size -- too large. Unsatisfactory. But I did enjoy the sewing!

The quick drawings came closer to what I wanted them to end up like. Rather than spending all that time sewing, it was more satisfying to scribble down some marks, cover them with wax, and put ink over that.

 The blue lines are ink drawn across wet white (acrylic) paint.

Freezing textiles

A couple of years ago I was given a ticket to an event at the V&A called "Craving, collecting and caring: quilts" - it was being run in conjunction with the big quilts exhibition. Recently I found the handout about dealing with insect infestations (think moths). This is a summary.

- fold or roll the textile so that it's small enough to fit into the freezer, padding folds with tissue. Wrap it in tissue or calico

- now wrap in strong plastic and tape shut with strong tape - you want to shut out air to decrease the likelihood of condensation

- place in a freezer* with a temperature of -20 degrees centigrade. The textile needs to freeze quickly, otherwise the insects may merely become dormant

- leave in the freezer for 7 days

- on removing the package from the freezer, don't open it till it's completely thawed - which may take 48 hours for a dense item

- open, inspect, and vacuum away debris; dispose of the vacuum bag  "as dead insects become food for other pests"

*Chest freezers are recommended, not just for size but for the lower temperatures. I've been rotating my woolens through the upright freezer to reduce the possibility of moth recurrence -- but this could merely be superstitious behaviour and not actually doing any good! btw, costumes with glass, bone, ivory, shell decoration or buttons should not be frozen.

Recommended publications:
National Trust Manual of Housekeeping
Preserving Textiles: A Guide for the Nonspecialist

Frottage

Rubbings - frottage is the arty term for a simple process. Getting texture from one surface onto another. Graphite is good - so is a wax candle, and then adding ink, paint or dye. What prompts me to write about it is seeing this -

by John Wolesey (seen here), which in its scritchy-scratchy marks - little incursions of time, or a map being formed - is so delicate, in comparison to this -

a rubbing of the smashed car mirror I found on the street the other morning. [Breaking a mirror is, traditionally, seven years' bad luck... is there a superstition about finding, rescuing, a broken one?] I think of the black rubbing as stifling the reflections, trying to mend the cracks - but when you remove the "bandage", lift up the paper, the cracks are still there and any reflection is as crazed as ever.

Max Ernst's "Forest and Sun" (from MOMA) shows what frottage can be in the hands of a master -

Another by Ernst - "The Entire City" -

And one of many gravestone rubbings -

that of poet John Keats, in this case. 

Fiber artist Susan Lenz makes quilts (with interesting backings) of grave rubbings -

Book du jour - perhaps a cover

Doing a rubbing of stitched fabric is like taking an x-ray:

 And if you turn the fabric over, the "picture" reverses itself:

Suddenly you have the back and front covers for a book.

"What if" - you used thicker fabric, or thinner fabric, or stitched in paper (thick and thin), or left the stitching very loose, or reintroduced some colour, or used the fabric itself as a page of the book (maybe with a false back so the stitching was hidden) ... enough already! All I wanted was to have something mindless to stitch while catching up with a few radio programmes...

Underground time

Plus ca change

8.15 am -

 10.45 am -

What you don't see in the deceptively spacious first photo is the countertop, of course - which was invisible under all the papers and supplies that had been moved there from the table. All (all?) that remained was to move the pile in the corner - and the clutter hidden behind it. But there was no room on the other counter for yet another pile of clutter. At that point I set my timer for 15 minutes ("you can do anything for 15 minutes") - and spent some of that first 15 minutes cleaning the window, inside and out. There's nothing quite so soothing to the spirit as a nice clean window, especially if you plan to spend a lot of time looking out of it.

15 minutes of sorting and throwing out - and finding the right place for finished projects, work in progress, supplies needed now, supplies not currently in use ... and lots of paper ... Ding! release! leave it for now...

Reset timer ... 15 minutes "off" - having coffee, doing emails. Ding! reset timer, back to the studio.

So it went. It really helped that my son joined in and moved his toolboxes off the counter! I had to keep reminding myself, as the minutes ticked away, that I was doing the top of the table and would do the area under the table, and the shelves and drawers, another day...

Now I have pens, pencils, inks, binding supplies lined up on the windowsill, along with a tended, trimmed, and less dusty plant in the corner. Also in the corner are (only) the papers and books I'm currently using, as well as "bins" for the scraps.

My son offered to put up some shelves in the corner. And I have emptied the garbage bag.

Goodbye, old thing

I am cleaning up my work table, 15 minutes at a time, and trying to be ruthless in getting rid of what doesn't belong and isn't needed. This object used to hang on the red, textured wall of the bathroom - but the wall is now smooth and white, so I've said goodbye.

It's important to me because it marks the start of "everything". It was made in 199...2? in my first one-day-a-week textiles course at City Lit. The theme of the course was "medieval" --- and I loved, loved, loved it. In the first class we chose a postcard and drew details from it and used tissue paper to build it up into something more 3D. I chose this "rather obscure" painting in the National Gallery

taking the design from the decorative band in the middle. In the lower right panel, St Margaret is being swallowed by the dragon and is bursting forth from its belly, unhurt. She is the patron saint of expectant mothers, women in childbirth, and nurses.

Raise a glass

When I hear that my quilts have actually arrived in Beaujolais for the Quilt Expo next month, I will  raise a glass of the appropriate beverage! Quite frightening to see the stamp go on and the package disappear... consigned to its postal fate.

I was asked, out of the blue, if I had some quilts to send to the show and I sent these favourites, made over the past 10 or so years.

"After the rain" is 1.5m long (the others are about a metre long) - the metallic organza leaves are made separately and caught into the diagonal seams. Beads are included in the diagonal quilting along the ribs of the leaves -

 "Blown away" was inspired by a painting of desert gardens by Aboriginal artist Gloria Petwarrye. It's made in seven sections, each with slightly different colourways of "leaves" (thumb-nail size), joined together by appliqueing yet more leaves on the joins -

 "The other side of the river" is one that just happened - the method of making fell into place in seconds as I looked at a picture of Mbuti mudcloth with the mapping marks; I made up my own marks, embroidering in almost-black shades onto already-quilted neutral cottons -- with no idea of what would make the "fissure" in between the two panels -

The most recent one is "Rainstorm", from the time when I was obsessed with weather as a topic for my textile work. Some parts are monoprinted; some of the applique represents bands of rain and others represent glimmers of sun between showers -

 

Meandering

"Taking a line for a walk" - the world's longest bench at Littlehampton -

The seafront  Paseo Maritimo at Benidorm -

An art work in Austria by Diana Lynn Thompson -

An artwork (frozen wool) by Andy Goldsworthy -

Greek patterns (from Rhodes) -

Patterns from elsewhere -

Rivers (image from here, which unfortunately gives no clue as to where it is) - 

And scars left behind -

Roads tend not to meander (leave that to paths and perhaps lanes), but this section of the White Road in Croatia is trying to -

Synonyms: drift, extravagant, gallivant, roam, rove, stray, stroll, traipse, twine, twist, vagabond, wind Antonyms: decide, guide, set, straighten

Book du jour - Night Journey

Point the camera out the train window (right up against the glass) - press the shutter - hope for the best (and delete the failures immediately -

Unexpected trails of light, printed and cut ready to be glued into long strips -

My first thought was to have each opening of the book showing one "streak", but there's the possibility of the long format as well -

Shiny paper, or matte? Long or square? Whichever, the size needs to be somewhat bigger...

At the poetry library

Great place, the Poetry Library (5th floor of Royal Festival Hall, open 11-8 daily) - a borrowing collection and a reference collection and an exhibition space, and 180 poetry magazines. Oh and sound archives of poets reading their work. We had a class visit, and they kindly got out a lot of artists books for us.

Rhapsodomancy by kevin mcpherson eckhoff gets up to all sorts of tricks with shorthand  -

 Matthew Halliday has conjured up some fetching Venn diagrams (click to enlarge) -

 in this magazine, with its fetching cover -

What also sticks with me is an A4-size book called "After Marvell" that consisted of blank pages in various shades of green. It took a while for the penny to drop - very conceptual!

Darkeness and dust

The "dark text" of Claude Horstmann, seen at the Daimler Collection in Berlin a couple of years ago, continues to intrigue me - it did in March, when this post was started, and still does now. The way you have to move to see the writing is like stumbling around in the dark, and encountering an object by stumbling over it or bumping into it. The amount of effort required to read the text, though - what would motivate someone to make that much effort? Is there something that would catch the attention to the extent that you'd need to know as much as possible about the work ... to retrace its making, in effect, via the reading....

In looking for other images of Horstmann's work, I found the work of Karel Nel, a South African artist who collaborates with scientists, recently on the COSMOS project. Fascinating to see his reinterpretation of images from the Hubble telescope; above is Bandwidth (540 million year old black carboniferous dust and salt).

The images in the compilation above are (top) Satawal;  Sector, Two Square Degrees; Stellar Grammar (540 million-year-old carboniferous dust from Gondwanaland and salt from the Atlantic ocean on a wooden base); bottom, photo published in an Oct 2008 issue of Nature, which can be "rented" for $3.99; There But Not There.

Patchwork-in-a-bowl

Laura Carlin gave this week's lecture at college. She has illustrated Ted Hughes' "Iron Man" and cites as influences the books and maps of her childhood, including Edward Ardizzone (one of my favourite illustrators) and the maps of battles that one of her brothers drew.

She showed this bowl among many delightful slides of her work -  it reminded me of Harriet Powers' famous bible quilt, updated with a bit of Gee's Bend. And translated into ceramic.

See more of her ceramics on her blog.

Temptation

So many new books ... so many gorgeous covers ... so much to read, so little time!