Really, I must be some kind of saint. I’ve gone and knitted something for someone else again. And not only that, I did it so that playing WoW would be more comfortable for him…

A few weeks ago, when I’d just cast off the blanket, Mr C asked for a pair of fingerless gloves that he could wear at the computer to keep his hands warm while retaining dexterity. He wanted something with separated fingers, and chose some plain green yarn from a selection I offered. He mentioned that he liked red too. I agreed, went in search of a pattern, and ended up here.

I found the Hexagloves pattern on Ravelry and couldn’t resist. The mittens were gorgeous, used interesting construction and were loaded with wordplay potential (WoW, hex, casting and so on…) and I just happened to have some Noro Kureyon sock in my stash. In my defence, I did try making them with separated fingers but the number of stitches available just wasn’t enough to comfortably fit big man hands. The gloves themselves (I made the M/L size) are a perfect fit though and I’m really happy with how they turned out.

Find the Ravelry details here.

Back in March, I was part of a wonderful group show called lots of people have what you have, curated by Anusha Kenny at George Paton Gallery, Melbourne University. The show has recently been reviewed in Un Magazine. You can download the PDF and read the review on page 42 (listed as page 79 in the actual magazine.)

Considering that I had a dream about Neil Gaiman last night (no, not that kind of dream), and you can’t actually see the full embroidered Sandman: Endless Nights quote talked about in the article from any of my text book pictures, I feel compelled to post it:

He did not create the path you walk. But the movements of atoms and galaxies are in his book, and he sees little difference between them.
It is all in his book. One day he will lay it down, when the book is done, and what comes after that is still unwritten.

Destiny continues to walk.

He is holding a book. Inside the book is the Universe.

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]

Apocatastasis. What it means:
1) Restoration, re-establishment, renovation
2) Return to a previous condition
3) (Astronomy) Return to the same apparent position, completion of a period of revolution.
Think about it.

Now that the semester is almost over, I’m just getting around to talking about what I did in the mid-year break. Figures.

Anyway, I pretty much chose not to have a break. Instead, I went into uni almost every day (it helped that it was winter and the printmaking studios were much warmer than my house) and made an edition of 33 artworks for our annual graduate exchange portfolio.

The requirements were to make a piece based on 20x20cm dimensions, taking into consideration that it was to be part of a folio that people would interact with as opposed to something that simply hangs on a wall.

It also had to be a good representation of our work as a whole, as a copy of the portfolio is kept in the RMIT printmaking archive, and another copy was sent to Tyler University in Philadelphia.

I used my leftover recycled paper to make 33 woven möbius strips, each made from the equivalent of a 20x20cm piece of paper. The möbius is my phoenix, a representation of the universe, and the outer packaging is representative of a black hole. Figuring out how to package these to avoid damage and reduce bulkiness was an issue. I ended up putting a few stitches into the centre of each strip with some hand-me-down yellow cotton to assist in the flattening without completely squashing the strip. I dyed a bedsheet black (actually, after two dye attempts it ended up midnight blue, which I actually like better than a really harsh black) and sewed 33 20x20cm square pouches that the möbius emerges from.

I had some trouble with the title. How do you put a title, signature and edition number on something that is 3-d and has a single, heavily printed surface? Or a dark fabric cloth? I decided to make a tag. I realised that I wanted to use the word apocatastasis as the title, so, in line with the printed material on the möbius, I did another solvent transfer on some extra paper of the word as taken from Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s wonderful graphic novel, Signal to Noise. I made it into a tag, which I signed and added the edition number to.

This is a really, really amazing portfolio. 28 different works from the staff and graduating students in my course. Which means, m1k3y, I have this and you don’t. (Although any of you can buy Jazmina’s print if you follow that link.)

And speaking of Jazmina reminds me that I really need to head into her class now…

Well, the green and white Pi circles have now been frogged and turned into these…

I dyed them using the d20 die set method. As you can see in the following picture, Mr C’s 8-sided die determined the colour, the 20-sided die indicated the length in centimetres of the colour and the 10-sided die determined the overlap of colour.

All of this is part of my latest art project, crocheting the Lorenz Manifold. This stems from my interest in space, the universe and Chaos Theory.

As the Oxford Amercian Dictionary on my laptop puts it, chaos theory is

the branch of mathematics that deals with complex systems whose behaviour is highly sensitive to slight changes in conditions, so that small alterations can give rise to strikingly great consequences.

My lecturer at uni did advise me to go all out with my geek this semester, and as such, I’m lovingly referring to this project in my head as Jaffa Cakes and Coat Pockets.

This was my Ravelympics project, but I didn’t have the yarn ready in time for the opening ceremony and ended up starting this a week ago instead. There is no way I’ll be getting Ravelympic gold here, but at 23 rounds of a total 47 in, I’m pretty damn proud of my progress anyway. Before this project, the only crochet I knew was the basic stuff needed for knitting, so I’ve learned how to crochet on the coolest (“cool” in geek terms…) project ever.

I’ll give more details as the project goes on, but my proposal this semester is looking at the links between fabric, stories, creation, science and the universe.

As such, this podcast, which I listened to on the tram coming home from work the other night, almost made me cry with its wonderfulness. Thanks to Alex for turning me onto Radiolab.

Happy National Science Week everyone!