..and finally ...

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...And then...

Even though I'm aware of it happening - that moment when some connections are made in the synaptic circuitry of the brain and an idea is born - what causes it, or allows it to happen is a mystery to me.
The previous post ended with one development that had potential, and one result that was not what I'd hoped for.
...And then... there was this idea and I was in a fever to try it out - and where on earth had it come from?
So - the words for this part of the work had moved from "Absence of Swallows" to "Memory of Swallows" - then the word "evidence" arrived, which prompted a train of thought about historical evidence / archeological finds, which led to pottery shards. Maybe not an immediately obvious series of connections but it does make retrospective sense to me.
In her book "The Creative Habit", Twyla Tharp writes about the 'spine' of a piece of creative work. It's the "first strong idea... the toehold that gets you started. ...the statement you make to yourself outlining your intentions for the work...The audience may infer it or not."

The spine for this project was this image :

I find it profoundly moving; not only do I find it beautiful as a recorded moment, but grief fills me that a species as relatively small as an individual human is able and willing to destroy the largest creature on earth.
The original wish was to make a life-size ghost of a whale - all 80 feet of it -  from some insubstantial material like muslin and suspend it from the ceiling of a large and public building - to get across the scale of it - just how awesomely big it is....and to honour all the whales we are killing by polluting the oceans. Although I am unable to see how it would be possible for me to construct such a whale or to find a suitable venue, nonetheless this image and the feelings it arouses are at the core of this work.

From there the idea grew to making the 'ghosts' of things ... and presenting some of them to look like museum exhibits of things long gone.... a sort of playing with time and an expression of future grief for the loss of species.

Which brings me back to the swallows and pottery shards as evidence ...

Although these look like bits of toast they are pieces of dried paper pulp with sawdust and glue added. I've cut some edges with a hacksaw, then sanded, painted and sanded again.










Below is a map on which a was painted a wash of turquoise ink. Paper stencils were used with a layer of ink, water and acrylic paint.

Later, I added lines with black crayon and printed small areas of pink on the heads, white on the bellies.

...And then...

What I'm aiming for is to create the look of fragments of broken pottery ...evidence that swallows once existed. I may try this with white pulp and cleaner edges.
The next step is to mount these in wooden cases that look like an exhibit from a 19th century museum, with maybe a small, handwritten label.

After I'd made these fragments I realised that on my kitchen table, for some months, there has been a piece of pottery found on the nearby shore...

Birds and the bees

The bees are doing fine. I sit and stitch at odd moments, or occasionally work at them for an hour. Likewise the moths... it's almost mindless, meditative; a silent rhythm of thread the needle, stitch, stitch, snip, thread the needle. Each wing is two layers of  wedding dress net, one at right angles to the other and stitched along the lines.  At first I drew the lines with a very soft pencil, which was difficult to see clearly and made the thread dark grey. Then I traced the lines on to newspaper, pinned the net to it and machine stitched (remembering to put the 'paper needle' into the machine).

My fancy light box...

Back stitch by hand to make lines more visible; also because I love hand sewing.

The newspaper is torn away - but it usually leaves little bits along the edges. Another happy accident that I decided to use, as it adds to the dead, ghostly look of the piece.

When finished, the edges are trimmed ... then I shred the wings into further dilapidation.















And the birds?

This is what I had ended up with after that oh-so careful unpeeling of layers and reconstruction, and it's a mess - not at all what I wanted.


But it could be that there has been a breakthrough. I've been seriously struggling with finding a way of  expressing "the absence of swallows". Although I'd stopped working on it, the idea remained somewhere at the very back of the brain's dark cupboard under the stairs. The other day I found myself thinking "What if I worded it differently?"...  the words 'memory of swallows' came to mind and shifted the feeling of being stuck. So I very quickly made a couple of bowl shapes to experiment with. The idea of using maps - as symbolic of their migrations -  keeps coming back to me and I've recently been given a big bagful of old maps. Synchronicity?

Outside... turquoise ink wash

...and inside, ink with acrylic paint.

Another, larger bowl.

Although these are quite crude, it feels like there is potential. I'm liking the mistiness of the swallows on the second bowl and I'll need to work on getting the right balance of colour density difference between the layers - some of the birds were barely visible. And I do like the map motif.

These were the birds used for masking out ... and although of course I have known for decades that successive drawing and cutting out of a shape alters it each time, this was a rediscovery (because I've not done it for some time??) ... one to use again as it removes unwanted uniformity.

Those little card birds led on to trying out another idea that has been hovering for some time....

.... making wire silhouettes.

So draw, draw again ...and again.

Transfer to wood, knock in nails ... bend fencing wire around  ... realise I should have used nails with smaller heads...

... and end up with a twisted, clumsy wire shape.




Not everything has to work.








Try again.

Moth story

It's interesting how some elements of this project have fallen into place relatively easily, while others falter and stall. I've stopped stressing about it ... and arrived at a mindset of  "it will either come or it won't, or it might at some later time".
Possibly because I have relaxed, my attempts to construct the ghosts of moths produced a happy accident, due in large part to a perceptive and supportive person I met recently sending me exactly what I needed.

The first moth... 20cm long, and I was pleased with it for a day or two; mostly for the fact of having made it. When the perceptive person said she thought it was too 'solid' to be ghostly it confirmed my own feelings. Much mulling followed....
A week later a generous amount of teabag paper arrived in the post and after mentally searching the house for a suitable former, I came up with this...

Wrapping fine wire around the kaleidoscope produced a thin, fragile and unstable 'skeleton'...

...which I covered with pasted teabag paper, first of all - with great difficulty -  placing narrow strips on the inside. The paper stuck to my fingers more than it did to itself and the whole time the flimsy construction was in imminent danger of falling apart.

Looks a bit slimy and disgusting ... but when it had dried I loved the haphazard quality of it as well as the translucence.
The wings that had taken quite some time to stitch were attacked with scissors, vigorously crumpled...

..... and this time I am truly happy with the result. This moth ghost made itself; although the initial mental vision of it was misty and undefined there was an "oh, yes!" moment of recognition when it was finished.

The shape reminds me of an empty pupa case, but the wings suggest an additional layer of emergence and leaving.

The plan is to make a number of these and I have a misty, undefined mental image of the completed piece, but am totally open to what form emerges.

Fish Tales

For today - a quick review of progress on rust prints so far. The idea is make pieces that look like an amalgam of cave paintings and fossils, only these are the future ghosts of fish. Having looked up a little information about rust printing, I sort of know what I'm doing but each attempt so far has resulted in a surprise.

The very first fish  ... I had not realised that the fabric was a cotton/polyester mix, so the print was rather disappointingly pale, although the loose tea sprinkled randomly produced interesting spots.

The paper on which I had drawn guide lines for the first fish, and then left under the fabric - I liked the combination of visible pencil lines with the bleed from the print. I could try this again...

Rust on handmade paper, with stitch added ... not that exciting.

This time I used pure cotton and soaked it with tea, vinegar and water - some parts came out very defined, others too pale. I have no idea at this point why that happens. Stitch is being added to define the shape and add detail. I had outlined a silhouette with white thread... two visiting textile artists both advised me to remove it... so pleased I hadn't used backstitch all the way around.

Handmade paper which has string embedded - I thought this might look interesting and it was promising while wet but faded to almost nothing once dry.

Much better ...possibly because I had forgotten about it for several days. What to do next with them???

Fabric again -the underlying print does not show well in this photo - it is much more visible in reality. Machine stitched over the print, then added a layer of burn-melted voile and stitched on top. A bit crude and technically not great but I like it ... could I take this further?

Metal baking tray lined with foil, a layer of paper towel, a layer of cotton fabric.... rusty bits of stuff, a few loose tea leaves, a layer of tissue to help keep the bits in place... all soaked with tea, vinegar and water. On top of it all, paper pulp made with mostly brown paper soaked for several days in tea, vinegar and water. I had got this far when I remembered that the pulp needs the addition of glue and sawdust (it's quite a while since I last made pulp)... plastic bag over the top, then an old T-shirt and last of all a couple of books. The result will no doubt be a surprise ...another one.

Fail better...

At the moment it feels like mostly failure ... if failure is a result that does not match what you hoped for...

The beginning of a bowl - playing with the idea of the absence of swallows and hoping for a filmy, semi-transparent base with graduated edges on which to add silhouettes. The first two layers are of translucent papers - of which I now have very little.

Adding layers to strengthen the structure, whilst keeping some areas see-through ...too thin and it will collapse...At this point it is too fragile to lift off to check.

Parts of the bowl are exactly what I wanted ...but the overall structure is still vulnerable and I'm not sure about those hard edges, or the direction of the vertical strips.

So I add more and now it's very wrong... far too harsh. It sits for a week.

Because I regret the loss of the paper in the first two layers, I do something I've never tried before ... soak the bowl gently with wet paper towel for a day. To my relief, the layers do lift off and I work back. It's now once again too fragile to lift off, so has to dry before I can check ... but I'm hopeful.

Although it feels like a failure in one way, there has been useful learning.

A "first thoughts" attempt at the absence of swallows... pencil and stitching on a paper map, with two layers of net overlaid. Room for development, but feels like a step in the right direction. Fabric maps would work better, so I now need to work out  printing on to fabric...looks simple on the internet.

Bees

The project I'm working on has a number of elements. It began as a few ideas, which at the time felt like too few, and too simple. I've learned that ideas mature if you sit on them for a while; also that although the initial pieces of work are often made to be abandoned, it's a necessary part of a process I call 'first thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts' - as the thinking about it deepens.
Since last writing, I've got through the fear and the "what's the point?" moments, which are total cripplers. Note to self: the point is irrelevant. Making is the thing that I have to give. It's also my voice and there are things I want to say.
    As I work, new ideas arrive - they are noted and now put to one side for later. Those first few ideas led me into new and unfamiliar ways of working. Starting on several new pieces at once, I lost focus and felt overwhelmed. The plan now is to get one element at a time sorted so each one can be ongoing as I work out the next bit. At the same time, the tucked-away ideas can be simmering gently.
   The first of the ongoing ideas is Bees.

  It now seems as if it all came 'right' almost immediately, but my notebook reminds me it was weeks of trying different colours for the printing and various fabrics / threads. Admittedly I was working very slowly. Muslin was my first choice but it's too soft - organdie worked perfectly. Eventually it did come together and when I hung the first finished panels, the effect was what I'd hoped for ... the ghosts of bees.

The print is fainter on one side and as the light changes the bees become less or more visible. Some of them are stitched and some have cellophane wings added, which catch the light.
    Figures vary as to how many bees live in a hive; a reasonable average seems to be 50,000 in the summer months. I'm aiming to make 1,000.  Well, that's the plan.
   
     The thread for each bee is 65cm. At this point I could make out that as a result of research, this reflects the 6-7 week life span of  summer bees. Actually, it was random...having cut the first thread, I then decided to make them all the same length. The stitching starts and finishes in random places - the ends are left visible, signifying the thread of life. It was while working on bee 130 (probably) that I thought the stitching is like the 'dance' of the bees.

As I was playing around with some of the trial pieces, this idea arrived ... what I wanted was to enclose a single bee between two pieces of glass. Folding over the organdie occluded the bee - made it even more of a ghost ... it is visible only with light behind it. I spent hours online fruitlessly looking for a solution and the card is a temporary arrangement.

   
140 bees so far.