glass domes

Time - and dust - stops under a glass shade…

Still gathering things for the Black edition of The Paper Museum. Not sure this exactly fits, but the idea of a visual pause seems synonymous to me with blackness, darkness, shade.

the calendar

From The Calendar by David Ewing Duncan, published by Fourth Estate 1999

Funny that over a year ago I decided I wanted to do a project about the 10/11 missing days in the calender, and then that I found a review for the above book stuck into an old sketchbook from 1999. Sometimes it feels like you go round in such small circles. Still, a good reminder to purchase and read it. The Calendar Index sums things up perfectly.

indirect communication at 50 mph

'driving back last weekend there was a wonderful speech bubble on a motorway signboard. It seemed to be malfunctioning, the pixel effect much larger than usual, and in 3 shades against the black background the led lights formed a rectangle in grey, then a single grey green light in the bottom left outside the rectangle and a single bright orange light within the rectangle itself.'

Image and words from J the other morning. 
It's lovely to know that people think about what you're doing from time to time.
Thank you.

book of stops

The Good Child's Book of Stops, c. 1825, British Library, C.193.a.181. Image © The British Library Board

So I've been busy in my sketchbook, working on a few small ideas for a series called Punctuation that does/says what I want it to do/say, not what other people want it to do/say. The thought's been lingering for a while, so this time I decided - for better or worse - to capture it and pin it down. We shall see. More another time. But this book at the British Library caught my attention as a result of my vague fancy. I guess it defined two of the thoughts that I've been grappling with in relationship to the idea of punctuation.

 

As David Crystal states in Evolving English:

The problem is that two systems of rules lie behind the use of English punctuation. One system requires that people punctuate according to the way a sentence is structured, following the need for clarity in grammar. The other requires that people punctuate according to the way a sentence is to be read aloud, following the need for effective phonetic effect. Much of the uncertainty over the 'correct' way to punctuate a sentence derives from the fact that these two approaches do not coincide.

Madame Leinstein's The Good Child's Book of Stops is clearly a proponent of the phonetic approach. From this spread you can see that she suggests a steady increase in pause lengths as you move from comma to semi-colon, to colon, to full stop. It's a theory that dates back to the sixteenth century and as Crystal points out, if stuck to rigorously, would result in a rather convoluted and ploddingly drawn out reading style.

 

white blanket

tokens of love

Have been a little obsessed with love tokens for a long while. The image above is one of a whole load of my own love tokens that I made back in about 2004. My parents had decided to sell the house that I had spent almost my entire life, and I was staggered at the sense of loss I experienced at the prospect of leaving it. I felt I couldn't just withdraw without some sort of significant act, something that demonstrated its importance to me and my formation (my parents built it themselves, on the hills surrounding Bath and overlooking the town). 

So I sanded down (by hand) one side of a 2 pence coin for every year that I had lived there (26 years). It took ages and felt incredibly doting. But that's what these gestures are all about. I couldn't find words to express all the emotion tied up with that place, so I left them blank. Just too personal I suppose - I couldn't bear to belittle or make hackneyed these feelings. It became more about the feel of their smooth facets, as if I'd been carrying them around with me for years in my pocket. And although they still look a little rough in the picture above, they weren't (and they were a real bitch to get entirely scratch-free with just sand-paper, water and elbow-grease alone!). Queen Elizabeth's face remained, impervious and impenetrable on the other side, the name a casual reference to me. Before I left, I hid all the coins in significant places around that house for the next inhabitants to discover. And they did - some of them anyway. But a few I think you'd have to tear the place down to get to actually.

Have a look at The Golden Smith's blog and his great post on love tokens: lots of interesting stuff referencing a sort of truth-to-materials ethos. His post reminded me of the above and made me think about convicts love tokens, exchanged between families and loved ones as they set sail from our shores for new lives elsewhere, particularly in relation to all the 'ah-hoy' things I've been thinking about lately.

passing time vol. i

Jumper knitted by Philip Furse for his friend Gordon Partridge

Lighthousekeeper Harold Taylor and his knitted jumper of the Trinity House crest. 

From Woman's Own  April 1977

A birthday trip on a real howler of a day: Falmouth's National Maritime Museum. Can't believe I never made it there before now. Excellent tea-towels for sale depicting an array of knottage, formidable views and awe-invoking boat displays. And a good show about lighthouses, particularly the bit that explored how lighthouse keepers filled their long days.

So, a return to those ganseys and knit-frocks. 
But also some of the thoughts the other Lizzie and I had about passing time for Tanks & Tablecloths ages ago. There's a long, long history of this sort of stuff. Will try and dig a bit more of it out soon.

message + lots of mores

On Friday the research group that I'm part of at University of Plymouth - Message - had a small one day only show on the ground floor of our building. It was an informal and understated affair, but lovely to see everyone's work and galvanise us all into 'finishing' something. Personally for me, things don't finish quite that simply really, but it was nice to feel that at least a line was drawn under the first chapter. More shortly.

We're hoping to make something a little more permanent and long term to follow this work up - so more about that shortly too.

Best of all from this I get the great satisfaction of ticking something off my four things checklist…

So now I want to get some things up together for a small solo show. Something about all these absences I think.

studies in indirect communication vol. xvii: deleted exclamations

hair tents

 

  

Thinking about 'hair tents' after reading The Power of Hair in the Victorian Imagination by E.G. Gitter.

To download a pdf version of the article click here.

Hair tents: warm and nest like, dark, sheltering, a protective retreat.  
When 'your girl, lying on top of you, lets her long hair down around your head' (William Tindall).  
For Dante Gabriel Rossetti they provided a 'visionary moment of perfect dark silence' (EG Gitter).
Robert Browning writes about them in Pauline as a place to nurture creativity:

Pauline, mine own, bend o'er me - thy soft breast
Shall pant to mine - bend o'er me - thy sweet eyes,
And loosened hair and breathing lips, and arms
Drawing me to thee - these build up a screen
To shut me in with thee, and from all fear;
So that I may unlock the sleepless brood
Of fancies from my soul, their lurking places.
(lines 1-7)

Links abound between hair, gold, webs, weaving, story-telling and story-reading, with a ladies tresses seen as beautiful and pure, haunting and alluring, duplicitous and deadly. Some things I thought worth making note of for future projects:

Saint Agnes

There are various stories about the martyrdom of Saint Agnes. The following is just one variation.
 
Sempronius, a Roman prefect, is angry at Saint Agnes for refusing to sacrifice to the pagan gods and to marry his son. He orders her to be stripped naked and weighed down with chains and exposed to his soldiers. But as her clothes are torn off her, she prays to God and inexplicably her hair grows and grows to form a dense cloak around her that cannot be penetrated.

The myth of Philomela

Philomela has her tongue cut out after being raped by her sister's husband, Tereus of Thrace, when she threatens to speak out about the attack. She weaves a fine cloak/tapastry that tells her story and sends it to her sister Procne. The story culminates with her and her sister being turned into birds by the Olympic Gods. One variation of the story states that Philomela is turned into a swallow that has no song and Procne into a nightingale that sings a sad and lonely song by night. More here.

studies in indirect communication vol. xvi: colloquy

A colloquy is the most formal of all conversations (: a colloquy on nuclear disarmament); it can also be used to jocularly describe a guarded exchange (: a brief colloquy with the arresting officer). New Oxford Dictionary

notes in sketchbook

 History is silent.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  

Sculpture exists in time.

You walk around it.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Where narrative is prompted and defeated at once.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sitting quietly in a space between hesitation and action.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Both empty and promising.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

studies in indirect commuincation vol. xv: dialogue of the deaf

A discussion in which each party is unresponsive to what the others say.

studies in indirect communication vol. xiii: punch

 

 

  

 

  

  

  

Just playing. Getting back into the swing of it. Nice to just to spend time in my studio.

studies in indirect communication vol. xii: lusty exclamation!

I'm a bit in love with these paper fluoro-bang things at the moment…
They're stuck on my studio wall and I keep looking at them.
Somehow they're linked to all my speech bubbles for the Studies in Indirect Communication series, but I don't yet fully know how.

janus

studies in indirect communication vol. xi

Can you believe I don't even seem to have the time to take photos of bits in my studio these days. Let alone do anything else to them. So what an excellent birthday present from scb: a hotel room on the 9th floor overlooking a blustery bay, no work, wifi and photos and scans of stuff that needed to be put on the blog. 


I've been making some drawings from last year much bigger and using Hammerite on paper instead of graphite. I love the various qualities it can create from high gloss to something that feels more like a rain-filled and glowering cloud on the horizon. My wall is beginning to look like some sort of thunderous cartoon dialogue.

sit back

Sometimes you read something and when you finish, you sit back and breath out a satisfied sigh. Because someone has done it. They've put into words what's been spiraling around in your head for a long time. Suddenly a few things seem to make sense.

Download a .pdf of About the Typefaces Not Used in this Edition by Jonathan Safran Foer here. You'll need to scroll down a little bit to the second paragraph of the main body-text. Alternatively read the piece on the Guardian's site here. But you don't get the illustrations.

ten missing days

In the history books, nothing happened in British history between 3 and 13 September 1752. The change from the Julian to Gregorian calender in 1752 meant that 11 days were lost from history to compensate for the slight inaccuracy over the years of the Julian calender. Many people protested this change, believing that it would shorten their lives.

spectacle

My new tent. It has a hook to hang my glasses on when I go to sleep.
And - at last - a proper porch.