Last year it was Pigs on Parade and this year, the Jack & Jill Foundation have decided to put Hares on the March around Dublin for spring 2016.
My piece started with Far Eastern folklore. In place of the man in the moon, there is a hare that is pounding herbs to make the elixir of life. As the moon is associated with the monthly cycle, he is also connected with fertility and the wheel of life and death. The Japanese for a hare is Usagi, and for a deity or god is kami or gami so mixing in a bit of French, this piece is called Usagi Gami(NS). If you tickle his ears and ask him nicely, he might spare you a little potion for you to have your own leverets. Mr Usagi G is packaged up and on his way to the pale as I type. I shall miss our chats.
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I'm supposed to be cooking sprout tops for lunch but keep getting distracted by the colours. Hurrah for brassicas that give us such inky purples and defiant yellows!
A crisp autumn day enhances those addictive autumn hues that are splashed, almost randomly, across the array of textures and forms magically emerging from their summer cloaks.
I've been keeping myself properly busy this last week. It all started with some sample pieces I've made using leftover computer cables that were knocking around the former Government building when Sample-Studios first moved into the space. Initially, when I started working with the cables, I tried stitching the grey skins. It's an odd sensation eviscerating the wires from their protective coating,almost like gutting fish. I stitched the skins onto a bit of coffee-bag hessian. The result made me think of a song title I once heard: the Space between the Lines (Tim O'Brien). I liked the sense of void and missingness this technique gave, the hint of wires that were once there, the former function tattooed onto the outside surface and the shininess of the inside like it was lined with a peritoneal fascia. Next I tried keeping the wires intact so they spilled out of the sheathing and I wove into them: LEFT- single wires warp and weft created very open spacing because the plastic coating on the wires made them less flexible and their twist created a twist in the grey skin MIDDLE - I cut the grey skin which made the weave lose its tension. I also had single wire in one direction and left the twisted cable pairs on the cable direction. Interesting to note that the cable twist frequency varies for each colour. I wonder if this is to do with allowing the bunched cable to bend more easily. RIGHT - I kept the grey skin intact and used string to wave into the cable wires, keeping them in their twisted cable pairs. There is little resulting tension in the grey skin This work was the basis for the following piece, In Obsolete Knowledge So, coming back to the current piece, the original intent was to combine both techniques: to stitch lines of skins together and make the piece more 3-D using woven cable for the hair. As it turns out, I find that I like the pixelated drawing that the skin stitching creates and feel that this would be lost with additional weave. So perhaps the next piece would use more simplified shapes, allowing an exploration into forming layers of weave over the base stitched skin without the distraction of descriptive lines. The results of this will be for another day.
I spotted this little Russian kale leaf in my compost heap, peeping out like a freshly cut Thai ruby.
I've been playing with some dyes. More specifically, Lidl's cheapest red wine, salt, rust and bicarbonate of soda or citric acid. While working with pebbles on another piece, I realised that there was a resonance in hues. Life is good that way.
Horse chestnut disease means we no longer get sails of autumn colour in our Sussex avenues. It just means we have to consider beauty a little differently. You need to look closer at the leaves to find amber mosaic mottling heralding the approaching end of summer
Love that moment when you're thinking of something completely different when your eye gets suddenly distracted and drags the rest of your mind to hush
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