Filed under: book binding, craft, surrounds | Tags: artist book, book binding, embroidery
I’ve been pottering along working on embroideries. A slow process with limited moments of revelation and excitement but sustained pleasure and growth. Today I finished this new book cover which will soon (don’t ask me to define soon) be bursting with drawings that will spill out of the covers.
I’ve begun work on a new very special book cover. To simplify the process and avoid mistakes I’ve broken the design into eighths. Over 8,000 stitches will be sewn before it is complete but I already see it all before me.
Expect some posts over the next week that look at some older books I’ve made both complete and incomplete.
And apparently I’m not the only person who thinks textiles and book covers make a perfect pair.
A new colour palette for a new map, this time of clifton hill with merri creek running through. Contrasting vibrant colours juxtaposed next to each other dull the whole down whilst retaining some essential purity.
I’ve been writing lots of applications lately and have not yet been able to put coherently into words what these maps are and mean to me. Women’s labour codifying the land, exerting a passive categorical control through slow observation and documentation. An intimate colonisation.
Working on a new zine. It will be interactive and able to exist in a variety of forms as with the last one but will come completed. I’ve scanned, formatted and printed the first few drawings into a mock up and all is looking good. Now to complete the seven remaining drawings and photograph some feet.
Filed under: 2009, made in, drawing, photography | Tags: drawing, graphite, hands, landscape
Thinking about the drawing as an object, a three dimensional piece of paper and lead to be held. Folded and smeared the drawing will change state degrading to destruction. I want to watch drawings move, I may need to use some video.
Filed under: 2009, made in, craft | Tags: embroidery, cartography, mapping, cross stitch
My first completed embroidery map. My finger tips may be swollen and sore from the final stitches but I am so pleased to have this finished. The bulk of the cotton thread makes stitching hard but gives a weight to the fabric; distorting and warping the image out from its grid like origins.
To give an idea of the bulk of the thread here’s an image of the back taken before the edges of the linen were trimmed.
Filed under: surrounds
I’ve returned from the rolling hills and fertile lake shore of Canberra with a pocketful of treasures. Now it’s back to work and hopefully back to regular art updating here. I’m finishing embroideries both maps and a book cover, starting a second zine, planning drawings for a new book, getting my watercolour skills back up to scratch and I have a photo/drawing project in my head that I must make asap. Time is indeed a blessing.
Filed under: surrounds
Uni is over for the year and I’m off to Canberra for a few days with my camera in tow. After that it’s back to these guys and my long abandoned studio. Very exited.
Looks like it’s going to be a warm weekend.
Filed under: surrounds
The final weeks of uni and my dad being hit by a car on friday (he’s ok!) have left me intellectually and emotionally drained. One and half more weeks of uni and a few thousand words to go before I can relax and maybe make a picture.
I did drop zines off at handheld gallery today and I do recommend the reframing darwin exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art – on till November.
And Jessie’s show looks magical, check it out.
Everyone’s at it:
There’s the massive imap at city library. Overcoming its name it engages it’s audience in community building through the mapping of personal narrative.
Walk this way a series of guided walks that are part of the melbourne international arts festival. I picked up three of the walking maps and found them to be of variable interest and depth. The best were those that explored the individuals relationship to the city’s structure and society rather than just listing some cool places. Could be amazing but not all contributors appear to have really engaged with the project.
If you walk through flinders st subway you’ll find the interventionist guide to melbourne at platform. A group of artist have created guiding maps to their city focused temporal interventions.
Photocopied Map a zine collaboration between the asylum seekers resource centre and sticky. A series of postcards written to family, friends and strangers give brief insights into the asylum seekers lives. Money raised by sales goes to the ASRC a fantastic institution.
My first zine is completed. A simple collage forming a compendium of the ideas and images I’ve been revolving around for the last few months. Sold flat the book’s owner will become part co-creator, folding and cutting as per instructions. I should be dropping a small pile of these off at Sticky Institute this afternoon. Hopefully they’ll catch people’s eye in the wall of zines.
