AAARRGGGHHHH!

Spent the sunny Easter Saturday morning cutting up my photographs and getting them ready to apply to my silk banner ....

Then, when I started to iron the images on, I ran into a serious problem - the images wouldn't transfer from the paper onto the silk no matter how hot I had the iron.

I stopped to go for a walk and then came back and did some research to discover that I'd printed them all onto the Lazertran Silk transfer paper using my INK JET printer - I should have used a TONER based printer.  Of course, the last time I did it at home I had a toner printer.  

Anyway they are all useless and I've wasted alot of money.  So I've reordered the Lazertran from Fred Aldous - checked with the print shop in Harborne that they can do them for me from a suitable memory stick and packed everything away for the weekend.  I'll carry on on Tuesday - good job that I've given myself alot of time to finish this before my deadline on 16 May.

Stravinsky's Rite of Spring 3D Performance

I went to this last night at Symphony Hall - this (and the image) are from the flyer:  "The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and extraordinary dancer Julia Mach perform Stravinsky's primeval Rite of Spring live, while digital wizardry interacts with them in an astonishing interplay between reality and fantasy, translating real-time computer-generated stereoscopic projections into a virtual reality space".

It was really amazing - the music, the dancing and the computer manipulation ....

Finished scanning & printing my photographs

This has taken all day long - firstly I couldn't get my Photoshop Elements 9 Organiser to work properly so I edited a few of the photographs in Edit then decided that I would use my Lexmark printer to action the printing. 

These are some of the images printed onto Lazertran silk ready to be reviewed and applied to my silk banner.  I decided to use colour rather than black and white so that some of the amazing colour and detail could be seen in the mundane.

Anyway it's glass of wine time.

Fabric etc

Whilst I was ticket checking at Compton Verney this week I was reading Stitch Dissolve Distort with Machine Embroidery by Valerie Campbell-Harding & Maggie Grey.  These are the notes I made which apply to my current project:

I've just got my fabric out and was rather overfaced with the width and length of each of the three pieces.  However, just putting up these notebook pages has made me realise that I'd the idea of two or three foot panels x ceiling height rather than an enormous 6' x 9' work (for this time). 

Anyway today (Good Friday with the sun shining) is for printing up my photographs.

Negotiated Project

Spent yesterday getting my photographs sorted and ready for manipulation onto fabric.  This is one from Saturday.  Went into Brum to the Fancy Silk Store and brought three different materials to make banners.  Ordered my transfer materials from Fred Aldous http://www.fredaldous.co.uk/ which were promptly delivered this morning which means, provided I pick up my work-in-progress from uni today I can work on this over the next week or so ....

This is what I am planning to do but watch this space ....

Where does the time go (Part 4)

Lesson 1 - do not upgrade your computer in the middle of getting 'stuff' ready for my Negotiated module which is due in mid May.  Anyhoo ....

Went to Leamington on Sat to take more photographs for my Negotiated module and then over to Compton Verney as (although I volunteer there) I've not had the opportunity to see the Alfred Wallis & Ben Nicholson exhibition.  From the exhibition leaflet "AW experiences at sea as a coastal fisherman, and then as a marine scrap merchant, informed and shaped his art.  Wallis began painting 'for company' at the age of 68 after the death of his wife.  The younger Ben Nicholson, however, as already an established member of a circle of modern artist by the time he met Wallis in 1928.  Wallis' singular vision had a particular impact on Nicholson's own work". 

These are two postcards from the exhibition - the top is Three-masted ship near lighthouse 1928-30 (AW101) and below White houses - Hales Down, near St Ives 1930-32 (AW47) both from Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge. 

This is what I wrote at the exhibition "what I really like about Wallis' work is the rhythm of the pictures, whether it is the sails (eg Grey sailing boat) or the Boats in the harbour which is an absolutely stunning picture.  This rhythm causes a movement across the board.  Obviously his details of boats are accurate and well-drawn so he is able to convey what it is really like to be at sea.  The land pictures also appeal with their single repeated shapes and small repeated touches (eg ::::::::::).  His use of paint - texture and colour is beautiful.  I feel that my own work has resonances with his.

Computers bah!

I've spent all of Sunday migrating my computer to a new version of Windows .... and I think now (18.00 on Monday) I've just about got things where they need to be.  This is not withstanding the problems of receiving emails ... which I need to leave to visit a friend in hospital.  She was just walking the dog this morning on the field, stepped awkwardly and ended up with a broken ankle.  So - sorry if you are expecting an email from me and haven't got it yet!

I will try again manyana ....

Holiday

Spent the weekend in Suffolk at my cousin's daughter's wedding at Thorpeness - had a great time and the bride and bridesmaids looked stunning. 


Hadn't really visited Suffolk before - stayed at Laxfield which has a traditional old pub "The King’s Head (The Low House) is one of the very few pubs left in Britain that has no bar-counter. You go in the tap room at the back. Beer drinkers survey the array of barrels and request whatever takes the fancy, drawn  straight from the barrel. Before you reach the barrels, you pass through a room dominated by an ancient fireplace. Old settles, polished in parts by the backs and  bottoms of the long dead, surround it in a U-shape, with a table in the middle. Another room, also called the tap room, likewise has one large table and bench seats around. This is a social pub. If you want to be slightly less social you can go in the card room, which has small, separate tables and chairs, or the restaurant, but even there you may  get into conversation with people to whom you have not been introduced."  Bob & Linda Wilson are the owners of the pub which has been in Linda's family for most of the 20th century.  A really great place.  I see from their website that they were Adnam's Pub of the Year 2010 http://www.laxfieldkingshead.co.uk/

Travelling around Suffolk I realised what a lovely county it is.  I went walking round Dunwich and visited Lavenham on my way home

Lavenham Streetscape 

as well as the village on the Cambridgeshire/Essex/Suffolk border that my maternal ancestors came from .... 

St Mary's Church in Bartlow 

3 Maltings Cottages, Bartlow - home of my great great aunt and great aunts in the 1950s.  A new owner has sympathetically converted 1-3 into one house whilst retaining the pargetting and essential look of the three original cottage properties.

I really felt refreshed by walking and exploring the unspoilt countryside, listening to the birds and spotting signs of spring.  It occurs to me that we are really so fortunate in having such beautiful spaces within our countryside and that there have been two recent issues - the High Speed 2 train and the proposal not to bury power cables which will then cut through some of our pristine historic landscape - that I should really get involved in ... so I've joined the Council for the Protection of Rural England  http://www.cpre.org.uk/home

Background Information ....

Compton Verney hosted an exhibition from The Whitworth Art Gallery in Summer 2009 entitled Subversive Spaces: Surrealism+Contemporary Art which I visited with a fellow art student.  It was split into two sections - the one entitled Wandering the City was one that specifically appealed to me.  Calin Dan's Sample City 2003 was a 11min video of an innocent at large in Bucharest wandering with a door attached to his back.  (Described as a flaneur walking through the streets like the melancholic simpleton of traditional folk tales who unwittingly stumbles on buried truths).  Whilst I was 'stewarding' this week I had a look at the catalogue for the exhibition from which the following is taken:

"Blurring the boundaries between our conscious and subconscious, through acknowledgement of the ways in which layers of memory and fantasy imprint themselves on the surface of our lives and our spaces for living". p8

"Ruins, wastelands, sewers, demolitions, the repositories of lives lived and the remanents [note the fabric-like implications] left behind, tell stories of attempted resistance against the order imposed by the city's spaces".  p10


My silk-screen has been prepared by Taryn the kind Textile Tutor at BCU so I will be able to start printing the street block onto organisa after Easter.  During the holidays I will do some more research on the above and prepare the two other panels.