So, I finished installing my work for assessment last night (and holy crap the studios were so frakking hot and humid yesterday… worst day for installing work ever), and it’s being assessed today and tomorrow. We’re not allowed in for the assessment — the print shop is closed to everyone bar staff and a mystery external assessor until Monday, when we go in and deinstall. As such, I’ve spent today in various states of lying down and doing not much.
Personally, I’m quite impressed with how restrained I was when putting my installation together. There’s always a tendency to be indecisive and put up as much as possible, but I feel like I’m getting better at that.
The crocheted Lorenz Manifold was the central part of my work, and all the printmaking pieces evolved from it.
An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns — but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth." [Robert Bringhurst, ‘The Elements of Typographic Style’]*
As stated in the excerpt from my proposal posted with the Flickr set, my work is about the connection between story and science, and further, the way that textile metaphor connects all those things.
I produced a series of books and fabric scroll-like pieces that reference the mathematics of chaos theory combined with lines from stories that reflect the concepts of change and chance that the theory encompasses. The silk I used to print on was purchased as recycled scrap offcuts from Kazari warehouse, and the shapes of each piece strongly informed the resulting work.
In this book, titled Text Book, I have started to embroider between the lines of the chaos theory definition and the lorenz manifold pattern, hinting at the idea that we read into the technical details to find meaning and purpose in the way we lead our lives. I do plan on embroidering some more on this before the graduate show. I also intend to finish the entire lorenz manifold crochet, which I didn’t do yet because the back of my right knee has been achy and sore for a while and I’ve been hesitant to spin as a result.
Gotta say, it felt very good to embroider again. I haven’t done much since burning myself out on the Wayne Coyne and Jenny Hart portrait from a few years back, and I really loved getting back into it.
One piece I didn’t embroider on was this long scroll…
…instead, the text on this one (from Neil Gaiman’s latest offering, The Graveyard Book) was transferred in that wonderful way from days gone by, carbon paper. I swear, one of my favourite things to play with at my grandparent’s house as a kid was my grandma’s notepad with carbon paper in it. Maybe that’s where the printmaking obsession started.
There’s something especially lovely about rolled up fabric.
As a companion piece to Text Book, I made another book, this one from my collection of paper offcuts saved from the previous years of my course. This one is called, of course, Picture Book.
Inside, it contains a chronological selection of the progress documentation photos that I’ve been taking, along with the metadata concerning time taken and the camera settings for each picture. I hope that it helps tell the story of the more abstract work in the rest of the project.
But I go back to my man Galileo who was maybe the first, in western tradition anyway, to honour mathematics as the primal force of knowledge. ‘The logic of the universe,’ he said in his book The Assayer, ‘is written in the language of mathematics, without which one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth.’ But having honoured math, Galileo was very happy to create beautiful metaphors, to invent marvellous characters, to draw pictures. He knew how to light that labyrinth so the rest of us could see inside. Because the more abstract and mathematical science gets, the more we need to imagine something concrete. As the physicist Alan Lightman has said, ‘We are blind people inventing what we don’t see.’**
*Harper, D. 2001, Online Etymology Dictionary [Accessed: 31.7.2008]
**Radiolab,‘Tell me a story’ scienctific education podcast, WNYC, New York [Accessed: 22.8.2008]
(Although any of you can buy Jazmina’s print if you follow that link.)
