Open House, The Point

We are in the midst of Open House this weekend and the next, a part of Dulwich Festival. Please pop in and see us if you can get here. Showing Sally's knit's and for my part, the chairs. This is a commission, at the stage of screenprinting the design onto a stout linen with a good half tone (so white thread will read as well as black and other colours). Using a little wooden school chair and a move to a more functional piece, with pockets for notebooks and picture books and pencils. This won't make sense with these images but will post images of the overall structure in a couple of days.




We were asked to work with The Point, Harry Nilsson's curiosity of an album from 1971. Imagery-rich and naturally sequential, so the surfaces have a kind of reading order and lifespan I hope for the little boy whose chair this will be. The drawings are somewhat influenced by lots of looking at information images, with indiscriminate perspective, flatland co-existing with the descriptive, the dimensional. On a basic processing note, the drawing I have screenprinted to give Sally a much better ground for stitch.



She found this, an embroidery-ready piece of fabric. A moment of forehead-smacking realisation that we should be doing this, rather than stitching through newsprint when not drawing directly onto the fabric.



Some of the imagery sits on and refers to the functional parts of the cloth structure and I want to work through another chair which talks purely of use. Sometimes ones reads something that sticks. This, by Jurgen Bey: "The language of products is a language that we give them so that they can communicate with users. Sometimes they have an interpreter in the form of a written set of instructions, sometimes through tattoos on their body. It is a functional language that tells us what they can do, where they come from and what they are for".



Damián Ortega's Elote Clasificado (2005). Saw this at Tate Modern in 2005, almost the same time as reading J.Bey in the book Bright Ideas, Beautiful Minds and the two illustrated one another.



The Point involves a Hole too. This will be used to punch said Hole. Sharpened it last week. We will need to back the linen and use a kind of blanket stitch to seal the edges.



A dog's nose button will be cut from ply. These are fragments I know and it will make sense next week when I photograph and post the chair complete.



Also continuing to move the box parts around compositionally. Took a print yesterday from some of the components and will take some more this, then post.



Also making a new edtion of Hand Werk this week, for exhibition in Berlin. News forthcoming.