5th May

what to do ??

Raven Row and Matthew Harris

Visited two very different exhibitions as well as quick look into BM - partly to take more images of the loo doors - find them fascinating especially as they are in the British Museum making their anthropological mark!!

Ravel Row - The Stuff That Matters - textiles collected by SethSiegelaub for theCentre for Social Research on Old Textiles.  Beautiful venue in an old merchants house in Spitalfields - a fitting locations for such an exhibition.  Huge array of things from coptic, woven silks, velvets and brocades through to chasulble, embroidered items, tapa cloths and an exciting collection of head dresses.  A collection for study as well as the sheer beauty.



The second exhibition was at the CAA - Contemporary Applied Arts in Percy Street.  Matthew Harris - embroiderer/stitcher  along with Cleo Mussi - mosaics.  Lovely exhibition space displaying the wrok really well.  Love his work - it appears so simple but of course isn't, has a very strong Japanese feel to it.

getting on post wip

getting on with things

noisewhitecanvas

Again long time since I have done any blog stuff.  

The dreaded Assignment 1 for Creative Enterprise has started and we have formed a good group, Lisa, Karen, Nan and Chloe.  We've called ourselves White noise and started a blog.

Back to Palimpsest

the spine I am using as a path or river - may be a golden

bruce nauman

Gathering thoughts ready for the WIP seminar

Just wrote a useful blog and it has disappeared - so annoying!

I think I started by saying my thoughts for my current work are coming together - influences include:

Artists:  Kounellis, Spero, Christo, Andrew Wyeth, Richard Long


Writings: Bachelard: the Poetics of Space, Mandelstam: The Age.

Just found a book on Amazon and the LRC has it - David Batchelor: Chromophobia - will get it today - sounds interesting.  

Words:   narrative, voyage/journey, palimpsest- traces of the past, rivers and paths, spine, poetic

Images:
They've  been staring me in the face for weeks on my laptop - 2 images of Richard Long 

Mudday Water Falls 1984 - Anthony d'Offay

White River Line

Sao Paula  Bienal  Brazil 1994

Looked up David Batchelor on Google and that's when I lost everything!! Love this image though. It has a spinal quality to it .

 

 Parapillar - David Batchelor 2006 Steel support with plastic, metal, rubber, painted wood and feather objects

Going with Irena and Wendy for an induction with Lisa into the dyeing room at college today.  So will be great to be immersed in colour after removing it from my work for so long.  Enjoy dyeing especially using the acid dyes, have never been satisfied with procion so will be good to go through these processes again.


Later......  what a day!!!    I want to find out about illuminants and how they work but everything took so long!!

Lost in Brimingham

Peter Pan is now over and of course was brilliant - such a great bunch of people all coming together but sadly no party because of snow.  Was on the whole pleased with the costumes especially the fabulous mermaids !!

Wendy and I made it to Birmingham for Lost in Lace and managed to get lost driving in ever decreasing circles but found a car park eventually.  I enjoyed the exhibition in many ways.  Great to see a serious textile exhibition in such a large space.  There were a number of highlights.  These two artists I particularly liked.

Chiharu Shiota Japan After the Dream 2011

Ai Matsumoto Japan No Reverse - Lace 2011

Visited Sylvia afterwards where we swapped junk as usual. I traveled home with three mannequins and a large coffee table - it has been worse!  Wendy met the skeleton.

Kerry suggested a poem to me mentioning the spine by Mandelstam - have found it:

The Age by Osip Mandelstam

My age, my beast, is there anyone
Who can peer into your eyes
And with his own blood fuse
Two centuries' worth of vertebrae?
The creating blood gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
And the parasite just trembles
On the threshold of new days.

While the creature still has life,
The spine must be delivered,
While with the unseen backbone
A wave distracts itself.
Again they've brought the peak of life
Like a sacrificial lamb,
Like a child's supple cartilage—
The age of infant earth.

To free the age from its confinement,
To instigate a brand new world,
The discordant, tangled days
Must be linked, as with a flute.
It's the age that rocks the swells
With humanity's despair,
And in the undergrowth a serpent breathes
The golden measure of the age.

Still the shoots will swell
And the green buds sprout
But your spinal cord is crushed,
My fantastic, wretched age!
And in lunatic beatitude
You look back, cruel and weak,
Like a beast that once was agile,
At the tracks left by your feet.

The creating blood gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
The lukewarm cartilage of oceans
Splashes like a seething fish ashore.
And from the bird net spread on high
From the humid azure stones,
Streams a flood of helpless apathy
On your single, fatal wound. 

I think it will take a long time to unpick this but so far the middle verse seems to resonate.
Good Crypt meeting on Friday at Chris' home.  I think it is going to be very exciting.


Now to spend some time on CEC audience  research.......