Fogs of yesteryear, dug up whilst shuffling through the photo archive.
Filed under: craft, drawing, surrounds | Tags: craft, embroidery, watercolour
Contemplating windows, the blueprint of interior spaces and the experiences held in them emerge, housemates and lovers, settling and escaping, individual and shared histories.
Whilst painting and stitching away at my current project I contemplate the zine format. A format of reproduction and distribution, reaching it’s audience through a cheap transaction, taken home, examined intimately. Do I have anything to express through a format that does not require hundreds of hours production, that is cheaply and easily reprinted and rebound? And what does the beautiful piece of expensive paper hanging on my studio wall have to do with it?
In studio news, I’m now sharing my space with the lovely Phebe Parisia.
Sky, sunlight, life, warms me.
Industrialisation of the land, cleaving, ripping, smothering in concrete.
Should I forget where and why I live.
Sometime drawings fail, solution: fold them. Still a failure.
Filed under: surrounds
Working at home or at the studio will chance interruptions. The best of them is to be found at home, crying and scratching at the door, knocking suitcases over and exploring the windowsill.
Inspired by this cat lady, who should update one of these days.
Filed under: book binding, craft, surrounds | Tags: artist book, desk, embroidery, studio
My beloved drop leaf table easily forms a home studio. A perfect base for my embroidery work and the occasional watercolour. Also the site where I plan book formats and designs.
Embroidering from designs on my computer screen, hours pass without my realising, I hadn’t planned on spending the entire weekend here, working on textile maps and watercolours.
This print is from the time when my intentions for my work first began to fall into place, a coalescence of subject and technique. Made at the commencement of second year uni it is the earliest work that will appear on this site, a starting point for all that’s followed.
Filed under: book binding, drawing | Tags: artist book, book binding, watercolour
Progress is progress is progress.
Progressing out of sequence, my book is emerging from the thoughts that contain and grow it. The pages are bound before all the drawings are done. Homes have been painted out of chronology, numbers 1 and 6 (pictured) completed. The bottom picture is a preliminary design for the cover, pattern taken from William Morris. The centre will be an inset embroidery of home no.2, not sure the design will frame it or the entire book correctly, a high risk of it being scraped. The cover is to be engraved hoop pine with copper pigment impregnated in the line work.
Two of Tacita Dean’s alabaster works. Tracing the veins with a dry point needle, she reveals the landscape contained in the stone. Maps of geological formation and history. Maps of mental landscapes, the dividing line between sleep and death.
It has been said that printmaking breeds fetishists, sticklers who care more for good technique and materials than they do for art. Every time I fall in love, on sight with a material, seduced by it’s textures and colours, I hope it is towards a final greater result.
If I never use this pigment, the money it cost is worth the flurry of ideas it has inspired. There is a use in the obsession with details brought on by my training.
Filed under: book binding, craft, surrounds | Tags: embroidery, ideas, watercolour
A snapshot of my current output, slow processes govern my work. An embroidered map takes many hours longer than anticipated, intended as the first of a series, a series that will be a life time task.
The emergent beginnings of a book, documenting the buildings I’ve known as home. A complex mix of binding, embroidery, wood engraving, pigment flocking and watercolour. I consider adding more to the plan, perhaps words need be involved.
My mind is endlessly engaged with new projects, yet must be reeled in and contained, assessments to be written instead.
