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We had roast chicken for Sunday lunch and guess what that means, ladies and gentlemen? Chicken stock. Yup, the simmering carcass has been perfuming the house all evening. After another hour, I’ll strain out the bones, add leftover roast potatoes, onions and mushrooms, some haricots verts, a bit of pepper and salt and . . . . Voila! Chicken soup.
One of the loveliest things about soup (besides eating it) is the process of making it. Putting everything into a pot and leaving it to simmer for a few hours, stirring it occasionally, sipping the broth, adding a pinch of this and a splash of that, nibbling a vegetable to gauge its doneness. Is it soup yet? Not quite . . . . aah, yes. Now, it’s time to make a batch of cornbread or crisp up a baguette, ladle it into bowls, pour a glass of wine. The soups that I love to make are not fast food. The long, slow making of it nourishes the soul as well as the body.
At times, within my artist-self, I still get caught up in doing rather than being. Focussing on the goal and not the process. Forgetting that the essence of being an artist is who I am and how I encounter the world, not what I make. I must admit to feeling slightly lax as an artist these past few months. Production- wise anyway.
But cut myself a break! I have moved a couple of times since last October and haven’t had a dedicated studio space for the past nine months. Since April, Steve and I have been busy, busy, busy as bees setting up home in our flat. I brought my batterie de cuisine and a couple of pieces of furniture and Steve has been living on his boat for the past three years. We’ve pretty much set home up from scratch. Yet there have been shimmerings in the back of my mind of “Why haven’t you . . . You should be . . . Look at what s/he’s done . . . “
But creating a home is like making a work of art. Steve and I both adhere to the maxim of William Morris – “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful” and it truly has grown into an oasis, a peaceful and beautiful retreat from the world. We’re having a housewarming party this weekend to celebrate our home and it will be the first of many welcomings and gatherings of friends.
And a few days ago I found a box in my studio with some pieces, ideas, beginnings of artwork. These also have been on the back burner, simmering and bubbling away. Now that I have the vessel – my studio and time, I can assemble all of the components and see how these beginnings and glimmerings will transform into finished pieces.
Over the past few months, I’ve held them in my mind’s eye, mentally adding ingredients gleaned from here and there. Precious Metal Clay, gold size and bronze powder, new fonts, feathers and some sheer packaging material from an Argos box – perhaps an inner layer for a transparent quilt?
Ingredients
I haven’t been up to very much fibre art in the past few months. Partly due to moving and not having much studio space (all due to change shortly as I will be moving into a large top floor flat in April with a dedicated nap room/ studio), spending concentrated amounts of time with my Sweetie between here and Birmingham where he currently resides and to be honest, my most recent work-in-progress is quite emotionally difficult and challenging . . . . . more on that another time.
I did however, this winter, make and hang a comissioned accordion book in The Spotted Dog, a Digbeth gem in Birmingham, UK. The comission came about on 5th September, 2008 when I went to Friday night Pimms-o-Clock to meet Nicky Getgood, Doyenne of Digbeth. Coincidently, I also met my destiny that night. Does one ever plan for that? . . . . more on this another time. I had taken some of my artmoney and a few small samples of my work. Landlord John Tighe not only let me buy a round of drinks with artmoney, but he comissioned me on the spot to capture his pub in image and stitch. The Spotted Dog is a lovely traditional pub with strong leanings towards its Irish roots.
The Spotted Dog
Silly me, I didn’t take any photos of the book before it was framed, but here are some of the images I used . . .
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One of John’s antique phonographs, currently at the centre of a controversial Noise Abatement Order. . . .
Irish men watching hurling
There’s nothing like a Guinness
18th and 19th century deeds
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Once the book was completed, I had it framed with a clear perspex front and back so that it can be viewed from both sides.
Front
Back
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The framed piece was hung with a piano hinge on the left side so that it can be swung away from the wall and viewed from the back as well.
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One of the finest compliments of all for a comission . . . .
“It looks like it’s always been there”
After many weeks of dawdling and delaying, hemmimg and hawing, lingering and loitering, I am going to fulfill the hopes and expectations of many of my visitors, old and new, by showing how to embed a Picasa slide show into a WordPress blog. Why so long? I don’t know. Have I mentioned that I have a tendency to procrastinate and prevaricate?
Anyhow, at long last, I have galvanized myself into action. Galvanize is a word that
has split into a couple of different directions. It is also a word, like mesmerize that was coined for the person who is responsible for its creation. Back in the late 1700s an Italian physician, Luigi Galvani surprised himself and everyone else when he was dissecting a frog and turned to another task when a colleague came over, picked up the scalpel and touched a nerve in the severed legs of the frog. Lo and behold the legs started kicking. Wondering why this might have happened he made note of the fact that on the same table he had some electrical equipment and perhaps a charge had gotten onto the scalpel. Luigi then undertook various experiments such as pinning frogs’ legs to an iron latticework in his garden to see if they would kick during thunderstorms. They did, but they seemed to kick even when he did this and the weather was clear. He came up with a theory that the brain generates electricity that flows down and shocks the muscles. So, originally, galvanization was the administration of electric shocks.
In its current usage, the term galvanization typically means hot-dip galvanizing, a metallurgical process that is used to coat steel or iron with zinc. This is done to prevent galvanic corrosion (specifically rusting) of the ferrous items. I actually learned about this firsthand a couple of months ago when I was photographing the derelict Arkinstall Galvanizing Factory in Digbeth. An engineer from the head office across the road came over to see what I was up to and said that they have relocated the main factory to Tividale. He gave me a crash course in galvanizing and sort of escorted me around, probably to make sure I didn’t fall into any of the old hydrochloric acid pits or anything. It was nice having him there to answer some questions, but it sort of cramped my style. I felt rushed when I was taking photos and didn’t feel like I could explore as much as I would have liked.
So when I was back there in early September, I snuck back in and had a good look around. I walked around all three floors, including the catwalk, the spooky boys’ locker room and a lovely skylit room at the very top. This was one of my favourite spaces on the ground floor – a high ceilinged, cathedral-like room with the sun shining through a skylight. So empty and peaceful.
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I also found some beautiful, very heavy (try 1021 kg), silver chunks of slag which were waiting to be transported to Tividale. This metal is the by product of the galvanizing process and valuable enough to be used for something else. Slag has many commercial uses, and is rarely thrown away. It is often reprocessed to separate any other metals that it may contain. The remnants of this recovery can be used in railroad track ballast, and as fertilizer.
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Slag
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So when we say that a person is galvanized (into action) it isn’t that they have some sort of protective coating, it’s that they are moved into action.
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Now then, here is how to embed a Picasa slideshow into WordPress. . . .
First, set up a web album in Picasa. The software is a free download from Google and quite user friendly.
Once you have created your web album, you will need to upload it to Vodpod. You can set up a Vodpod account here.
To upload you web album to Vodpod:
1) Go to your album in Picasa and click on ‘Link to this album’
2) Click on ‘Embed Slideshow’
3) Here you have some options for slideshow size, captions, etc. After you have chosen these, copy the embed code and click ‘Done’.
4) Then go to Vodpod ‘add videos’ and paste the embed code. Then click ‘Preview’.
5) The following screen will appear:
You will be asked for your WordPress Username and Password at some point. From here you can write the post title and some verbage, then publish it as a draft (Send to editor) or for real (Publish).
Or, if you click the blue ‘options’ button, you’ll get these choices:
- ‘include source link’ lets the viewer click back to your album in Vodpod.
- ‘vodpod’ link goes to a page about posting videos into WordPress via Vodpod.
Both will appear below your slide show. I personally don’t include these.
- ‘draft’ publishes it as a draft.
Finally, if you click ‘Get the Code’, you can copy and paste the slideshow straight into your WordPress post. I prefer this option so that I have complete control over the creation of a new post.
Hope this has been clear. Drop me a comment if you need help!
For the last little while I’ve been prancing about in my flea market queen/urban explorer/video artist panties. Now that the Festival of Quilts deadline has come and gone and I’ve settled back into my non-routine routine, back to work on some fibre art – my ‘Winter Trees Wept’ quilt. I have some ideas for collaging some text onto the back telling the story of the forced Muscogee removal to Indian Territory, circa 1832-1836 and to stencil and stamp some feathers onto the front. What to do? Where to start? What if I screw it up?
Sometimes when I feel stuck, the best thing to do is what I need to do next.
I know I want to make a pillowcase border, so decided to go ahead with that and will add the rest as the piece develops.
How to do it:
- Square up the quilt top.
- Cut the backing fabric length and width about ¼” smaller (this is so it will ‘pull’ the front fabric around the edges and the backing fabric won’t show on the front of the quilt.
- Lay the batting out on a table.
- Spray with adhesive and lay the quilt top face up onto the batting.
- Lay the quilt back face down (right sides facing) and pin at the edges leaving about a 10″ gap for turning it inside out after stitching the edges.
- Beware of puckers! You’ll need to ease in the fabric backing to account for the size difference.
- Machine stitch with a fairly tight stitch.
- Trim to 1/8″ and clip the corners.
- Turn it inside out and slip stitch the opening shut.
Sounds simple, eh? Well my backing fabric was about 1″ too narrow, so rather than splice in some more white silk or some commercial fabric, I decided to surface design a strip of silk and stitch it in.
Time for a coffee break! I have to show off another find, this one from a car boot sale just outside of Sidmouth. I made a pretty good score from a guy with ‘Jedi Knight’ and ‘Made in Space’ tattoos. This Piquot Ware coffee jug for a fiver. Never been used, absolutely pristine condition. This is a beautiful little design, cast in a single piece from Magnailium with sycamore handles.
I’ve been collecting feathers for the past year, mostly delicate, downy breast feathers. Lately, I’ve been picking up skrunjy trashed ones to use for stamping and stenciling. I used silver and black fabric paint on a strip of white silk dupioni and also a hand-carved, wooden, vine motif stamp from India that I picked up at the market last Sunday.
Sewed my backing fabric together and did the pillowcase binding as above.
Front and back
I’m using my new typewriter to type the text onto a long skinny (5″ x 36″) piece of white tissue paper. I’m reading a couple of textbooks: The Trail of Tears - The Story of the Native American Removals 1813 – 1855 by Gloria Jahoda (1975) and A History of the Indians of the United States by Angie Debo (1977). Both very good historical surveys. Of course I am currently focusing on the Muscogee (Creek) Indians, my ancestors, but it is utterly appalling and difficult to read about the 400 year long history of the relations between European intruders and the native American people. Yet, it is my story and tightly woven into the fabric of my family’s story and needs to be told.
Next steps will be collaging the text onto the back and stenciling a few feathers onto the front. Then, I’m going to hand and machine quilt this one. I bought some really nice crimson silk hand sewing thread and have some ideas about how the stitches will spill down the quilt. I’ll see how it flows when I get there . . .
A couple of days ago I got an email from Tom Schulz, “a painter who works into and around concrete”. Tom designed and created Amaze, the concrete labyrinth project in Charlotte, NC, which I have photographed and worked into my fibre art. Something I love about Amaze is how the surfaces reflect different light values, giving a metallic or translucent sheen to the piece, depending how the light falls across it.
Tom is installing a labyrinth and a prayer wall in a Presbyterian Hospital Hospice next week and has shown them how I have used the labyrinth image in my work, to indicate how the labyrinth travels.
This is so interesting to think about . . . . . the labyrinth travelling .
My experience of the labyrinth is so interior. To walk a labyrinth is to travel within and be led to an inner space.
Yet, I have given an exterior expression to my experience of the labyrinth through my photography and fibre art. I have travelled through the labyrinth and the labyrinth has travelled through me. Now my images are travelling through cyberspace and via my fibre art into people’s lives. Perhaps inspiring other journeys within and without.
I procrastinate for various reasons and there are different issues depending on what I am putting off. I know why I procrastinate when I need to do something like vacuum the house or organize paperwork. Sheer boredom and lack of interest.
When I was in college I had a conversation with a friend about waiting until the deadline to turn in a paper or application. That has to do with control. Until I actually submit whatever it is, I have control over it; I can still make changes to it or fantasize about what grade I’ll get or if I’ll get the job, but once it’s turned in, there’s no going back. That’s what it is about for me anyhow. I still see a deadline as the time it gets turned in. It’s a stretch for me to turn something in a few days in advance. Maybe I also like the thrill of working to a deadline!
There’s another more sinister procrastination that happens to me though. When I am working on a new piece of art like I’ve never made before or on a new technique, I can get paralysed with an insidious, grabs-me-by-the-wrists procrastination.
I feel like I have to figure it all out in my head and make it come out the right way before I can begin the work. So it will come out perfect. Which is nuts. Because a) there is no such thing as perfection, and b) it is the trial and error, the very imperfect process which creates the work. Duh! Why do I keep forgetting that?
I think this is one of those lessons that keeps circling back around from time to time.
These past few days, I’m working on my final entry into the Festival of Quilts and have been doing everything but working on my final entry into the Festival of Quilts.
Last week, I came face to beak with my inner critic. I sat with my bogged down, wrists-tied feeling and became aware of a big black, clawed, sharp-beaked bird sitting on my right shoulder. This guy actually looks a bit goofy, but note the sharp claws and beak.
Earlier this week, I was dithering around and not working and I consciously picked him up from my right shoulder, plucking his claws out of my skin and set him down in the corner of the room and said, ‘You can watch, but if I hear one peep out of you, I’ll put you in a cage and out a cloth over it. You’ll have to go to sleep like a canary”.
And I was able to get on with my work.
Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, suggests that an artist draw or make their Inner Critic and put it in their studio. I think it’s a really good idea. It gets that destructive voice out from the depths of the subconscious and into the light of day. Somehow that lessens the power it can have over our creative process.
Right now, I am taking a break after a three hour stretch of work in which I’ve figured out how to make the border on my Manhattan Angel quilt.
I’ve been wanting to work in 3D some more and I think my next project will be my inner (now outer) critic.
“The maxim ‘Nothing but perfection’ may be spelled ‘Paralysis’” buddhabuddhabuddha- Winston Churchill
