Peter Nencini

Dredged Ornament

2012-01-30T15:05:00.000-08:00

I've been dredging for modern ornament, with treatments and vocabulary for the ROLU chairs in mind. Isolating them from background in order to lose their context and see them as a family. More to say and show but I want to try and do it in littler, more often posts. Lost that habit, building up too much to convoluted posts, which really do miss the point of blogging. The blouse — or Mola — is modern day Kuna, from Panama (via the Textile Museum of Canada). The others are my photos, heavily edited. The top one, a ubiquitous window vinyl for launderettes, with the legend 'wash and dry your duvets here' removed, in order to expose the graphic expressions of squishiness. The lower images of nondescript leaning pads on London buses. A whole genre of municipal street furniture out there intended to prop the user for a moment, without encouraging 'loitering'.

Page One, Make Do

2012-01-14T10:20:00.000-08:00

Just before Christmas, I completed a piece for Page 1, a book by GraphicDesign& (the interesting studio-venture of Lucienne Roberts and Rebecca Wright). Published next month, it commemorates the bicentenary of Charles Dickens' birth. Fifty graphic designers were asked to typographically rework the text of Page 1 of Great Expectations, which in the given Collins version, starts part-way down the page and ends mid-sentence, with "seems to me to have".

Each invited designer was also asked for a rationale. My starting point was the same as all recent typographic projects: to extend the Make Do Type family (started here, continued here and discussed here). The three variants — maybe nicer to call them mutations — are shown at the head of this post.

It was also an opportunity to find out more about typographic habits, orbiting as closely as possible the years 1860–61, which marked the serialisation of Great Expectations in Dickens' journal, All The Year Round. Make Do's autodidactic routefinder this time, was charged to get beyond preconceptions of C19th ornamental excess.

I've gained the habit of heading to LCC's library, for research of this sort. They have an excellent collection of specimen books. Tricky to find anything mid– to late–nineteenth century but pulled out some very nice early twenthieths, including this. More further down the post.

Something that kept cropping up, was the revival of early C18th Caslons. I started to make some attempts to wrench Make Do's limited, magnetised geometry towards something of the humanist refinement of Caslon but found in the process, that the kind of 'wrongness' I like was lost in translation; ending up in a hinterland of neither. A crucial element was to shed the monospace, monoline display awkwardness — which I want to try sometime soon — but here I wanted to persist with the inherent and enjoyable problem of trying to occupy all those gaping letterspaces with kind of uglybeautiful decisions.

I started then to look more directly at calligraphy; in particular using this little book, Wie Schreibe Ich Schrift (1961), by Sigmund V. Weech (see earlier post on Wie Zeichne Ich Schrift; long-term loan back to you this week, Josh!).

Aside from enjoying the potential — in the way that the calligraphy herein keeps some kind of faith with geometry despite the hand — it struck me that the nib stroke angle which determines everything, is right-handed. This seemed the case everywhere. I picked up a photocopy of Edward Johnston's beautiful Foundational Hand at St. Bride's, which gave an angle of 35º, for the right hand.

I am left-handed. Recollection a of teacher turning my hand and wrist to stop me push-writing over the top, to find this angle. So, the calligraphic Make Do was underway and then it occurred to make a partnering left-handed version.

The novel is suffused with gaucheness, in Pip's desire to shed his own and his mortification at Joe's visits to London. The heavy-handedess of Make Do; my own patchworked typographic knowledge. Leftedness. A gaucherie. So, Make Do Droite and Make Do Gauche were used in tandem, alongwith a new monoline discussed below. The idea was to reflect Pip's stage of narration, looking back at the events and his own folly, with the benefit of hindsight.

Had this photocopy for a long time, part of a box of typographic treasures passed on by mentor David Strickland. Make Do's stroke angle is stubbornly 45º. But I'd like to come back to these more. Also, the implications for drawing devices, in conjunction with templates. Been thinking recently about direct drawing jigs, as a way of making anthopometric studies for ROLU's chairs. But that's another post. Quite fascinated by stroke terminals and how they totally change the character — also the relative doubt or smugness — of a drawing. Also the mimetic pen tools in Photoshop.

Some more pages from Faces Borders Ornaments. Lovely, inconsistent old face and below, the first of a set of early sans serifs. I thought the name 'Great Primer' referred to the typeface itself but it seems it's more specifically to do with the large woodblock forms. Two sans serifs emerged. Caslon's Two Lines English Egyptian (emerging in about 1816)and Figgins' Two-Line Great Primer Sans-Serif (version I saw from 1847).

I wanted a set of caps for names and headings — so these sans-serifs inspired the set — but then a lower case which had some other quality in order to also deal with the monospace. It sounds convoluted but the story began to remind me of 1980s American Dream / Rise-Fall-Rise films, like The Secret Of My Success (above) and Working Girl. So, the slab-serifs are nodding to Susan Kare's 1984 Apple classic Monaco. With also some odd, oblique strokes to retain something calligraphic.

So in the clipping here and the ones below, what I hope can be seen is the way that the three mutations swap monospaced place, to nuance the text — in the droite and gauche cases — between the objective and the first glimpses of his pretensions.

Edward Johnston quickly looms, as soon as one starts to read of calligraphy. Inspirational, influential and somewhat intimidating, in his assertions regarding standard forms. I have to admit a liking for the disproportionate 'B's, shown on this 1906 work, via Ellen Lupton's great site.

Difficult, though, for someone coming from an imagemaking schooling, to ignore the question — in the C19th light — of ornament. The key here for me, is the way it can occupy a space between words and pictures; between typography and illustration. Not one or the other?

The same book shuffled between scrollwork such as this and some early C20th slash-hatchings and Deco optics.

Then this, which resonated. A cobweb-eyelash lacework border, speaking to me of Ms. Havisham's rotting cake. Also, adding to a collection of splayed line motifs I've been collecting, as something that can signify optimism and aspiration (think sunbursts on the gable end of Irish bungalows, or the 'nice view' icon on Ordnance Survey maps) or oppression and deprivation (as below).

These security grilles, from the to-be-demolished Heygate Estate, London.

So the potential of ornament to be free of the over-explicit pictorial thing asked of book illustration, in order to carry something more abstractly to do with tone of voice, or the reader's reading. Inflecting, rather than stifling, the text. I think that illustration can do this. But it's not asked of it often enough.

The 'C H A P T E R 1' letterspaced here, in Victorian manner, starts to feel a bit like Copperplate, which I quite dislike. But also bringing the 1980s again (when I saw it a lot); so I left it.

The cobweb motif bookends the passage and looks to the future, the next page. The disappearing road trope does something similar, also setting some scene of the Kent marshes. But certainly each motif was meant to be stylistically a little inconsistent, with this one carrying the kinetic cheesiness of motorhome graphics, with their alto-sax aspiration discussed in a previous post.

Lastly, the problem of the truncated sentence. I looked at setting and sizing so that the word 'have' ended naturally on the line break for the next page. But then wanted it to end in a kind of widow / orphan way (corny nod to the text). On screen, this would leave a flashing cursor, for which I used this little archetypal Nike running shoe, setting out with the road rising up to meet it.

Post Pre-Post

2011-12-16T08:28:00.000-08:00

I'm preparing two other posts. One related to the way I have looked at C19th type forms for the Dickens project and then into ornament. Another on a building collection of forms in the built or natural environment, to feed some conception of a modern ornament. So the commonality is ornament. This folds in, too, the previous posts on tropes and (motorhome) aspirational, sentimental graphic language. All of this is coagulating to give a language base for projects, predominantly the ROLU chair exercise but also work in steel and ceramic and some general thoughts on how I might draw with materials. Also some reference to the last post, thinking about inner-pink and colour being revealed out of a form or grouping. Was getting bogged down, so made these, in order to see something quickly, which helps.

Gnaw, colour

2011-12-13T16:04:00.000-08:00

Let's Talk About Progress

2011-12-07T02:42:00.001-08:00

Thursday 8 December, 5 – 6:30pm.
With Peter Nencini, Andrew Foster, Alice Moloney and David Garcia.

"In a bid to further understand what we mean by ‘Illustration’, ‘Let’s Talk About Progress’ is a discussion that aims to offer different perspectives that explore beyond the boundaries associated with our practice. With a panel of practitioners, educators and students, we hope this event can be used as a building block in an ever-evolving dialogue, intent on constructing a critical framework in which illustration can confidently speak about itself."

Lower Gulbenkian Gallery
Royal College of Art
Kensington Gore`
SW7 2EU

Free and open to all

Post-, Pre-

2011-11-16T08:18:00.000-08:00

I've just ended a typographic project, for GraphicDesign&'s upcoming book, 'Page 1'. The research took me to some great early C20th type specimen books; one sandwiched here. Preparing a post on that, which involved some new variants of Make Do Type. Now thinking a lot about surface, material, for the project with ROLU. So this is a sort of buffer between the two.

Postmortemism

2011-11-14T09:52:00.001-08:00

A few weeks now since visiting Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990 at V&A. It did feel timely. A tough one to curate but something happened enough to make it resonate for weeks after. At the age and stage now to be presented with a lived-through history, which makes one much more aware of the edit and framework. In terms of the greedy eye — the elements which impact and feed concurrent working concerns — a film of Kazuo Ono, performing La Argentina, stopped my heart for a moment. Horrifying and beautiful in micrometrically equal measure (the c.1600s pre-perjorative meaning of the word 'grotesque' was fanciful, or fantastic). Rare to see an original form that shocks. This, attributed to Ono, sums it:

"There are an infinity of ways in which you can move from that spot over there to here. But have you figured out those movements in your head, or are we seeing your soul in motion? Even that fleck at the tip of your nail embodies your soul... the essential thing is that your movements, even when you're standing still, embody your soul at all times."

This 'embodiment' does remind me of the acute, needle-sensibility of Matthias Grünewald's The Crucifixion (1515) (via).

And the artificial limbs at the Wellcome Collection's permanentMedicine Man displays.

Tatsumi Hijikata, it seems, was the founder of the dance-form Butoh; but somehow in parallel, they took the form forward, albeit with divided concerns. Hijikata's work was more violently trangressive in its themes and spectacle, borne of a post-war, 1968-catalysed rejection of an undue, superficial imitation of Noh and of the West; towards a subversive, truly Japanese form.

Oddly, appropriately, I took to bed midway through this post and had a Butoh-infused nightmare. The first corner turned in the show featured two long-held-heroes; Ettore Sottsass and Tadanori Yokoo. This poster (via), from 1965. Learning from Las Vegas — as a documentation of the strip, rather than the later book — began in 1968. A group of the earliest works in the show are from this year too. Interesting to think of the student/worker protests as a cultural catalyst for Po-Mo. Born that year, so this genuinely felt like a lived-through span of a show.

Das Scweizer Plakat (1984) by Wolfgang Weingart, via MoMA.

And Kunsthalle Basel Kunstkredit (1976-77), also by Weingart; alsovia. A nice conversation was had, in front of Yokoo's and Weingart's posters, with some of my students. The Weingart characteristic is so much a product of its technical time; the make and then break with the Swiss typography amplified by the dot-screen photosetting of layers. Intrinsically planographic. But also the fragmentation is making evident the gridded alignments it breaks, so it's a respectful eruption. These were 'learning' posters for me, from an age when working out how something was made, from top to toe, was really important.

Adhocist Chair (1968) by Nathan Silver, via. The perfect incarnation of Charles Jencks' "using an available system". Furniture, architecture and ceramics to discuss from this show; perhaps in another post.

Tape, Toy Soldiers, Boxing Gloves and Ball Bags

2011-10-21T02:28:00.000-07:00

My limited edition packing tapes are available now — alongside other choice items — at NY's Chandelier Creative Limited Editions shop site. I keep them, sandwiched and tempered by masking, sello- and double-sided, in a Scooby Snack stack.

Creamed Ware

2011-10-19T07:00:00.000-07:00

Made these assemblages as response — in some way, shape or form — to the BBC's excellent Ceramics: A Fragile History. Episode 2 (of 3) focused on industrialisation, Wedgwood and Stoke–on–Trent. I was particularly interested in the coming about of Creamware, as a cheap alternative to Porcelain. It has its own dairy, opaque quality and reveals its mutton–dressed–as–lamb, earthenware body, when chipped. The death of the Potteries as relayed, was sad and frustrating in equal measure (as is the lights going out on so many famous Ceramics courses). Outsourcing of process was fatal in undermining the very thing that a market might value in the product: local craftsmanship. So the pieces here, comprised of cheap, import, mimetic materials.

Go n-eírí an bóthar leat

2011-10-01T04:20:00.001-07:00

May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind always be at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face,

and rains fall soft upon your fields.

From an Old Irish Blessing, via. Here, because the sentiment is close to that of a wind-beneath-my-wings motorhome livery.

As posted previously, I've become interested in the trope. This — edging toward cliché — but I've struggled with the distinction between the two terms, here and there. This may be wrong but tropeimplies a figurative device which is still relevant or useful, as opposed to redundancy and overuse of cliché. Both are interesting, as is the oscillating space — if it exists — in between. So the kind of nondescript, abstract form that somehow signifies a hoped-for lifestyle.

Via.

The top photos were taken between Montpellier, Nîmes and the Ardèche; the E15 Euro–holiday-route. The poor camera shake quality — by accident rather than design — glitch-propels the livery on its way to some campsite or other.

Also thinking about a mutation of neutral (perpendicular, grounded, tangible — or looking back at you), into aspirational (diagonal, buoyant, intangible — or looking away, at what you want to be) primary forms. There is some recollection of the way this first happened in the 1980s and the Thatcherisation of logos such as British Telecom and British Rail. Shown here, the BT logo 1980–1991 and then the rebrand 'Piper' logo of 1991–2003: "The reorganisation was named Project Sovereign to reflect the company’s commitment to meetings customers’ needs – ‘the customer is King’" (from Ask).

It's such a common migration of one to the other, across corporate culture. I don't care a jot about Kraft but am still dismayed, diverted by the overcooked euphemism of this redesign. Make today delicious. Via. Off to have a Crap Kraft Dinner.

Via. Requisite, pre-digital vector tool: the French Curve.

Via.

Drawing +/- : Wk01 Speed lines from TU+ on Vimeo.

All brought together here: the sentiment and the tool. "Top North East Club Band 'French Curves' featuring Miss Jane Reed singing The Wind Beneath My Wings".

Here and there, identifiably a less liquid, earlier decade of livery. Stacked gauges of horizontal lines. Pre-tapering and whiplash. Like the first, tentative pinstripes of sponsored football kits, ahead of later gradated, flocked excess.

Écouter Avec Les Yeux

2011-09-25T15:26:00.000-07:00

Just-finished stitch design; a piano stool commission for the excellent Andrew Rae. Colours are always open to change, when Sally is working each area. As said — with each new work — new stitches are folded in. We are going to use a darker linen, close to linen canvas; so it works authentically as a halftone, either side of which the whitish whites and blacks register equally. I'll write more soon, on the research and content feeding the imagery.

Schematics

2011-09-23T14:56:00.001-07:00

Trunk

2011-09-21T23:58:00.000-07:00

R.I.P., Richard

2011-09-14T01:23:00.000-07:00

Finn MacCool by Richard Hamilton (1983), via Tate.

Twelve Indeterminate Wall Works

2011-09-04T04:30:00.001-07:00

These twelve wall works will be installed at Partners & Spade, New York, accompanying the boxed edition, for their re-opening next weekend 9th September. All within a 400mm dimension, with a plywood carcass. Each with a variant 40mm pegboard grid that takes plates and bars of ply and hardboard, plugged with found erasers, dowel and nylon screws. Materials held therein: found papers, leathers, linoleum, linen canvas, sticky notes, erasers, rubber bands, with stitch. Each base board is a different dimension and I intend them to display on a centreline, with the consequent awkward negative spaces between. Coming from an interest in the way groups of images load to a crude template onscreen.

Memo

2011-08-22T13:49:00.000-07:00

Lemelon

2011-08-16T01:03:00.001-07:00

Indeterminate Roughs #2

2011-08-14T10:39:00.000-07:00

Indeterminate Roughs #1

2011-08-12T10:16:00.000-07:00

Am Nuden Da, Sundays, ICA

2011-08-11T02:35:00.000-07:00

The gathering planned for Sunday the 14th is, if not outright pathetic, then a means to nothing. Nothing.

We have been involved in incredibly serious and arduous discussions. We have gone out of our way to satisfy the needs of a wide variety of thoughts and we think, and believe, that any attempt at disrupting matters at this stage will only lead to further confusion and a potential absolute downfall.

Falling flat on your face, breaking a few ribs, losing a little skin might be healthy.

Get up.

Am Nuden Da Session_20_Propositions. Four Sunday events, across August, at the ICA.

Poundshop prototype

2011-08-10T08:13:00.000-07:00

The Poundshop returns for London Design Week in September. It's such a good project by Household and Sara Melin. A chance to play, or to break in an idea. This time I'm making an 'Indeterminate Kit'. There will be three or four variants. It has some precedent in Handwerk, with the function unspecified. This uses euroslot hanging tabs and standard dimension cellophane card envelopes to force a layered composition of components sourced from poundshop poundshops. The components I want to be stripped of their linear use by grouping them with disparate partners. I'll write more about this once the variants are resolved (this one isn't), in a couple of days. Suffice to say that I've been influenced by notions of indeterminate and aleatoric music. Also looking increasingly at sentimental, aspirational abstracted forms and colours, such as false nails, iridescent papers, pearlised pin heads. And offsetting these with the 'poor' materials I've used more habitually in the boxes.

Further Studies

2011-08-09T04:29:00.001-07:00

Flotta Chair finished

2011-08-01T00:16:00.001-07:00

We are away in the South of France but taking a moment to post some images of the Flotta chair, just completed before we departed. Will add more on return to London.

Tropes, Elasticity

2011-07-21T05:25:00.000-07:00

Looking forward to the upcoming, big V&A show on Postmodernism — and making adaption, account of it in our Camberwell programme-to-be. Just read Ryan G. — or R. Gerald —Nelson's DDDDoomed — Or, Collectors & Curators of the Image: A Brief Future History of the Image Aggregator (2010). Now reading Jan Verwoert's Apropos Appropriation: Why stealing images today feels different (2007), published here. Early in the piece, he describes the act of appropriation as a 'radical temporal incision', in the context of the late 1970s, by artists whose "works convey an intense sense of an interruption of temporal continuity, a black out of historical time that mortifies culture and turns its tropes into inanimate figures, into pre-objectified, commodified visual material, ready to pick up and use."

Spike Jones' Cocktails for Two (1945).

I'm gathering interest in the 'trope', as a form and a gesture. Certainly in drawing reductively, there is a queasiness that comes with use of a spiral or an oval. Others, such as the stack of three tapering, lozenge-ended lines or an upward-widening arc, appear so often in tattoo or moulded relief on household object, as something parked between euphemism and aspiration. Classically, in grainy pastel Eurocoach livery. But then also a set of properties, borne of boiling something too long.

Two Cooks and a Cabbage (1941), directed by Alex Bryce.

A farty, khaki-cooked elastic slapstick. I think given its hue by late 1970s powercut, candlelit readings of Whizzer & Chips comic. And the puce-face of Windsor Davies against a bobbled, electrostatic mustard poloneck squeezed into a caravan with Bernard Breslaw, leering through the condensation out onto a damp squib campsite of late, tired Carry Ons.

Tom Paterson's line — and roll-call of wafting sock, bulging pocket, belching orifice — made an impression lasting to date. Each prop described as if held, with special attention on how one thing plugs itself in another. Not so tricky to unpack, I guess.

It took me (via Sonic Youth's Dirty) to looking a lot at Mike Kelley in the early 1990s. This, Ectoplasm Photograph 10 (1978, 2009), via.

But I enjoy how solid, satisfying the tics and devices are, even when isolated.

The elasticity of everything.

St. James' Infirmary, from Snow White (1933), sung by a rotoscoped Cab Calloway; animated by Roland Crandall for (Max) Fleischer Studios.

I know that I LIKE ... my O.W.L. – a lot!!! .HH.

2011-07-13T02:38:00.000-07:00

In fact dark shadows were gradually falling over the little wood.

The birds were growing quieter.

The flowers were closing their petals.

The insects were flying more slowly.

Night was not far off.

Enough for Something

2011-07-07T03:47:00.000-07:00

For the last few weeks I've been organising material as customary — but now editioning three of decision. Positioning judgments are made by eye.

Using sunlight and poundshop sugar paper as a first markmaking stage. To be followed by some cuts and application to the peg boards.

The elements are disparate at the moment but certainly it is the intention that is editioned, rather than the action, which encapsulates flaw.

Grip, fill

2011-07-06T06:43:00.001-07:00

From The Measure of Man; Human Factors in Design (1960) by Henry Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss can be understood as an antecessor of user–centred design, his practice predicated by the fitting of products to human scale. His ubiquity, for me, epitomised by the chiselled handpiece of his Western Electric Model 500 telephone. Never held-held but only beholden–held in past US drama, the squared haptic misfit in a sweaty, harrowed hand.

Or held to the ear by another: Klute (1971), via. Dreyfuss engaged with and extended the application of 'human factors', ergonomics, anthropometrics (as seen in The Measure of Man).

Arzberg by Udo Koch (1991)(coffee pot, plaster, wire), via. Only ever seen one piece first-hand by Koch, at the Goethe-Institut in about 1995. It comprised a group of coffee pots, the plaster nullities spun on an axis and wired together, in and around the form. Around the same time, perhaps a little later, I'd seen the cold turkey mechanical ceiling baby in Trainspotting. Over a longer phase, Michael Powell's mechanical-tangible fantasy sequences. The point being the visible invisible. Hallucinatory ordinary.

A Family of Three at Tea (c. 1727) by Richard Collins, via V&A. First seen in Early English Porcelain by Bevis Hiller (Walker Books, 1992). The cup grips are indicative of both wealth and fashion.

Man and Child Drinking Tea (c. 1720), via.

Matthias Müller's Alpsee (1994), via.

The book Milk and Melancholy (2008) by Kenneth Hayes "considers milk as corporate advertising's moustache of health; as the antiwine; as a complex mixture of fat, protein, corpuscles, lactose, chyle, and plasma that lacks darkness but lacks also the morally pure transparency of crystal; and as the luminous middle term between mercury’s glare and water's transparency". Published by The MIT Press.

MIT Professor (1948–1977) Harold Edgerton's milk drop captures, regarding the iconic Milk Drop Coronet (1957).

De la serie Trautes Heim (1985-86) by Anna and Bernhard Blume, via, where they describe "victims of a sort of ‘medium assault’ by commonplace objects and artefacts".

Richard Serra's Hand Catching Lead (1968).

From Selle (1988) by Udo Koch, again via.

Wilder Shores of Love

2011-07-06T01:28:00.000-07:00

Cy Twombly has died, age 83. For such an idiosyncratic, he is held as a standard by many I've known or taught, in their reaching for a way to make. He showed a way to make work from narrative without being literal. He showed that the history of a drawing is the drawing. He showed that no work is definitive. Latterly, at the Tate's retrospective, the revelatory sculptures. Today, finding some of his photographs; stand-alone in a way similar to Tarkovsky's polaroids. This, 'Yard Sale' (1993), via. Nearby, Dulwich Picture Gallery have just opened 'Arcadian Painters: Twombly and Poussin', with the 16mm Tacita Dean film Edwin Parker. Rest in peace.

Box End

2011-06-27T03:11:00.000-07:00

An edition of five boxed works are with Partners & Spade, New York and will be in the space and on the website in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, my set of five packing tapes are now available at Chandelier Creative's Limited Editions shop.

The boxes have been more or less a year in the making, tracked through this blog. As a consequence, a document of cul-de-sacs and iterations. The piece is sequential, fiddly in the way it pieces together but also in the way it was conceived. Maybe the most significant outcome for me is quite a changed methodology — or one that taps a more natural vein.

This was the last decision, like each previous in its way realigning the perceived function of the box. Spares, by-products, leftovers to leave with the user but also to take into the next one. This one, I recalled at the end, was dimensionally conditioned by the found envelope. These envelopes were purchased from Inno twelve years ago, when we lived in Brussels. I've used them here and there, feeling they were always important. Only have a few left and need to replenish. Odd how cheap, ephemeral items can assume such indispensability.

:

2011-06-13T12:14:00.000-07:00

Forest Marks, Love is Enough, Utopia

2011-06-10T07:11:00.000-07:00

A month or so ago, my Camberwell group visited the London Metropolitan Archive, the Guildhall Art Gallery and library, brokered by Adrian Holme. A day leafing through and opening up fascinating documents of — and belonging to — the City of London.

The LMA is, simply put, London's archive. Kilometres of shelving in strong rooms, holding miscellany reaching back to a small piece paper, a 1067 decree by William the Conqueror (or the Bastard as he was known at the time).

We spent some time with boxes brought up from the archive, related to Adrian's seminars this year. What became clear, is the impossibility of a definitive record. Through the conservator's studio and here, we handled Victorian concertina'd paper viewfinders of the Crystal Palace, a scrapbook belonging to an employee of Horniman's Tea, photographs of crowds esconced in banter and singalong, in Bethnal Green tube station during an air raid, hand-coloured architectural plans and sections of a works. It's clear there were reams of more linear records but the unpredictable truth-telling of these things detained us.

I enjoyed the Epping Forest box.

The Guildhall library presented an opportunity to handle two amazing, original Kelmscott Press editions in a limp vellum binding. This, Morris' Love is Enough (1897), with illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones. A full 100-page scan here.

And Thomas More's Utopia (1893). Note the yapp edges. Also seen here.

The stick that moved on its own

2011-06-03T15:34:00.000-07:00

A new work, He dared not tell them about the stick that moved on its own. Dimensions 420 x 300 x 20mm. Plywood, four-colour risograph print with die-cuts and found fixings, shelves, erasers. It's exhibited as a part of Questioning Print, now at Kemistry Gallery, curated by the very good 40/04 — Alex Hough, Jake Hopwood and Charlie Abbott.

The title follows the work's bitty ethic, taken from the 'Golden Pleasure Book' series of 'The Gold Star Library', 1967. I'm wanting to find each time something insolubly wrong in the pulling together of title, print and things on a kind of peg-board which would suggest compositional harmony.

The picture element is intended to be explanatory of something incidental or unimportant or ephemeral or momentary, observed first-hand.

I'm thinking about how these can operate on a wall, at different proportions and scale. The shelf aspect is particularly interesting at the moment.

Run Back Chain Brick Rope

2011-05-16T22:27:00.000-07:00

Sally is making good progress, stitching the Flotta Chair. This time, before each element, we are looking at new kinds of what essentially are the fundamental running–, chain–, rope– and back–stitches. Also, for the fills, weaving and couching in a number of ways.

So here, two mixes of a sage green and dusty, dijon yellow. Whipped and threaded backstitches for the radiuses; couched lines for the angulars. At the drawing stage, I pay a lot of attention now (in translating the original hand drawings to more 'stable' — for the overstitching) screen drawings) to a muscle memory of each form. This then is a guiding logic to the character of each stitched line and helps us navigate the array of unfamiliar options.

It also gives me a clearer idea of where to stop, in making the artwork.

So, to an extent, each chair is a sampler. On this note, we are preparing a sampler for The Idler Academy. Sally will be running an embroidery workshop; I'm making drawings, to adapt as artwork screened onto linen, for each participant. Returning again to notions of 'kit', Froebel's Gifts and Occupations, Bauhaus preliminary exercises. I like the idea of an underprinted structure that allows for some improvisation, even by the novice. Not sure yet whether this is sufficiently simple and practicable but will try.

Monozukuri, Chaumont Festival

2011-05-10T00:15:00.000-07:00

Two modular woodblock prints measuring 400mm x 600mm, to be exhibited along with the plates, in Monozukuri: formes d'impression, part of the 22nd International poster and graphic design festival of Chaumont, France. Opening 21 May.

The exhibition, curated by Sacha Léopold and Charles Beauté, shows examples of the interdeterminate relationship between mechanical process and print.

So these prints are building on the first experiment at this scale last year. This time monochrome, to foreground the structural and patchy surface; therefore the object quality of the plate. I do want to try some flat underprinting with an acidic or dark tone from non-grained plates, then overprinting with opaque, milky colours using the plywood. This will involve plenty of drying time and heavy inking of the second colour.

Not sure it will offer something better than this. The blue here is getting close to something I like about Barron & Larcher's indigo discharge and resist designs.

Luke Best, Krets gallery

2011-05-06T05:32:00.000-07:00

The unrivalled Mr. Best has an exhibition, opening this weekend at Krets gallery, Malmö. More here.

He's showing new, large drawings, alongwith hand–appliquéd cushions. Very exciting. Luke is so good with commercial work but the moments too — when he goes after drawing process, concocted out of a circling set of personal marks, forms and props — are so interesting.

Morocco: Found, Made

2011-04-30T01:09:00.000-07:00

Final post on Morocco and a notemaking process to take back into the things being made back home. Ceramics has knocked me healthily sideways, regarding the behaviour of glazes, shrinkage and knowing when to let it be. Don't want to lose a natural tendency to worry something into shape but it can be offset.

Some of the colours here resonate with stoneware glaze tests; violets and purples especially which have surprised me. Also, not so clear on this image, manufactured surface repeats subjected to erosion.

And knotting. Was playing a while ago with remembered lashings and unfamiliar ones, such as the Monkey's Paw.

This last image is an improvised brush used by a boy we met, who made and painted something to give to my boy. He did it just because he wanted to. Best moment.

Morocco: Washed Forms

2011-04-29T06:29:00.000-07:00

Back now in London, always somewhat disorientating after neighbouring the Atlantic for two weeks. Time there does give vent to overview of one's work and one's conduct as a maker, a teacher; moreover as a father, a partner. That sounds pompous but it happens.

In terms of making, there needs to be more of it bearing relation to the speed I think. Not that all the ideas are so good that they beg to be realised; just so that the intent is clear throughout the rendering. And so that I stop having people hang on too long for the result. There is such a discrepancy between design, art and craft lead times; it's tricky to know when one is slow or not but at the moment I want to quicken.

Reading was judged right this time. Often take away the wrong book but gained a good deal from Hyphen Press' God's amateur: the writing of E. C. Large, which I'd taken away from the live reading by Stuart Bailey at Somerset House a few years back. Bailey's essay, on re-reading, resonated here this time; particularly his notions of low modernism and of a nowaday supplanting of experience by convenience.

Also a collection of Graham Greene's short stories. Coming to him late on, like ignoring the obvious or resisting the forcibly recommended. And in terms of process logic, James Langdon's concise iteration of Ulises Carrión's texts on the book; as he says, "potentially a manual for making and using books".

Morocco: Seen Surface

2011-04-27T01:07:00.000-07:00

Morocco: Found Colour Notes

2011-04-25T06:33:00.001-07:00

Coming to the end of another stay in Aglou, near Tiznit, in the Souss-Massa-Draâ region of Morocco. On the doorstep of the Atlantic, an empty beach with tidelines of salt- and sun-bleached organic and synthetic matter.

Combing and collecting colour has become something to look forward to each time. It's had a significant effect on my attitude to and use of colour; something I've considered to be a struggle. Local colour; colour arrived at through the action of one agent upon another; elemental wearing of processed forms — variegations therein make so much more sense than the burnt umbers and cadmium reds of My First Acrylics Set.

Same applies to the varieties of battering to a recurrent form.

A Rack for the Box

2011-03-28T05:08:00.001-07:00

A rack, which sits a layer of found forms on top of the stacks and bookwork, is just about there. Each layer changes the character of the whole; certainly how it might be read as a functional, learning or play thing.

It also signals for me that I need to start to author more truly spatial and dimensionally weighted works. Not at the expense of imagemaking but as a logical next step for the language. Ceramics has only added to the feeling.

I'm so used to making marks on things; it's a slow uptake to understand that the things are the marks.

Last Layer

2011-03-20T08:39:00.000-07:00

Drawing the last layer of racks for the sourced stumps, needles, sticks, rubbers and egg–timer glass to go in the boxes. Each spurt of forms gains its own character, partly because of the time taken over this project, spliced in between other works. These are a little bit hammer anvil stirrup, a little bit universal bicycle wrench.

Book, Pad, Pick, Needle, Stump, Chalk, Pot, Dish, Tin

2011-03-14T10:55:00.000-07:00

Further Consideration

2011-03-07T09:53:00.001-08:00

Nail Bars

2011-03-05T07:49:00.001-08:00

A print for the excellent Hato Press, instigated by artists in residence efdeay, for their Tic Toc Pop Up Shop; details here. Open for 24 hours (over three days), 24 people were asked to conceive and produce an artwork for Risograph print, within the span of 24 hours. Edition, of course, of 24.

My selected colours. The image is coming from lines of thought that bond everything in progress at the moment. Bar structures from Handwerk — fingers, piano hammers and graphic notation to sound in working a chair design for Andrew — Bibendum belly bulges, crisscrossing hatching, ambiguous instructional code for ROLU — and more loosely, from recently going to and fro up and down the Walworth Road for Ceramics class. Feeling dazzled by nail bar displays; no pun intended but I can't put my finger on it. Off–the–meter innovation. And caramel, black and gold three–piece suite ludicrousness. Been trying to find a calligraphic, almost whimsical stroke in the linework; a little bit queasy, even.

That's also fed by the calligraphic briskness of Vanessa Bell's Omega Workshop textiles and this, recently discovered on Tell You Today. From Writing & Writing Patterns (1935) by artist, educator, author Marion Richardson. She is fascinating, all round, for someone whose week is split as mine, between Make and Teach and Make. An archive of her work, I think, at Birmingham Institute of Art & Design. Must go see.

Connection then, to screen manifestations of synthetic sound. Here, a Lissajous curve.

And here, Arabesque (1975) by computer–generated animation pioneer John Whitney, with sound by Manoochelher Sadeghi.

Under Consideration

2011-03-04T09:04:00.001-08:00

Flotta Chair (1)

2011-02-23T15:21:00.000-08:00

A chair, commissioned by artists Rebecca and Richard, at the pre–physical stage. The story here links two pairs of people, generations either side; Rebecca's two grandmothers and her two children. It is a family chair, originally owned by one of the two who was born on Flotta (Old Norse for 'float island' or 'flat island'), a small island in the Orkneys.

Charted here, by Blachford & Imray in 1846. The island now has a population of about 90. The only school recently closed; no children of the appropriate age still living on the island.

Rebecca has a wonderful archive of both sides of the family. Two contrasting characters in the two grandmothers. A Flottarian and a South–East Londoner. One removing herself from a strictly religious upbringing, her father a minister on the island, to become socially mobile, travel widely; as testified by the glamour of this photograph. I believe, though, she returned to Flotta later in life.

The other, from family with numerous business interests in South–East London. Rebecca's Victorian terraced house has always belonged this side of the family and as such, has a rare integrity and atmosphere to the interior, rooting back to its newness (in a way that ours and many others don't).

The fabric in this photograph provided an initial, compositional cue.

The Orkneys, the Shetlands have fascinated me, particularly since seeing Michael Powell's The Edge of the World (1937). The film blends known actors, such as John Laurie (later of Dad's Army) and local people. So the dialogue, the attitude is peculiar, unextended toward the audience. There is some forecast of Emeric Pressburger's dialogue for their later, amazing films together; Pressburger's Hungarian, outsider–observing take on manner and speech, gives The Archers' films an eerie, stilted Hyperenglishness. Also in The Edge of the World, the natural elements interfere with sound and picture quality, with the net result of something between documentary and theatre artifice. A very good interview with Powell's wife (and later collaborator with Scorsese) Thelma Schoonmaker on the film here.

In the absence of going there, it's all mediated but nevertheless striking how such a small place can transmit an identity. It's the case each time for me to build a vocabulary up out of disparate sources within the source then chamfer it down to something that has a cross-purpose line character.

The impression of a flat landscape, a low viewpoint studded with a network of elementary gun battery structures and Neolithic circles. There is an apparent formal resemblance between the two. The emplacements feature throughout the Orkneys, I think around the Scapa Flow. This, the Cara Battery (via the Fortress Study Group) interesting in the way the concrete shuttering has been formed by water tank panels, giving an oddly ornamental exterior.

Renwick Battery gunhouse loophole. Other images of Neb Battery here.

The Standing Stones of Steness, via. Originally a circle of twelve. Their shard–like geometry does link them to the batteries and both suffer/gain the patination of harsh weather. So I'm getting at the sense of an ancient modernism which is evident generally in the British inflection of something that was ostensibly universal.

Paul Nash has always meant a lot, before maybe I knew what that might mean. He was in and out of something wider spread and as such, so unusual. His photographs and collages, including those for his Shell Guide to Dorset, really give off his attitude to source. I like those that do note a grafting of abstract and 'modern' with the elemental 'romantic'. This is Seashore and Steps, Swanage, Dorset (1935/6), via Abbott & Holder. A very good article by Michael Bracewell here, on British Modernism's 'sense of the modern quotidian running parallel with, and at times overlapping, the presence of the supernatural and paranormal'

Swanage (c. 1936), via Tate. Nash described this small, coastal resort Dorset town as possessing 'beauty, ugliness and the power to disquiet'.

Other ingredients include local flora, such as the Marsh Cinquefoil, illustrated here in Rambles in Search of Wild Flowers by Margaret Plues (1864), via Time & Life.

And compositionally — the flora, the lunar–solar, the shuttered concrete slabwork, the thirties lips, the serge grids, the battery blasts — I wanted to not overtweak the scaling, for an even and patchy tattooing of the surface. Michel Simon's torso in L'Atalante (via) is foremost, the components filling the space over time and event, so that each one is not too much in rhythm with the other.

Trish Keenan

2011-02-23T01:16:00.000-08:00

Very sad to have heard yesterday from Alice, that Trish Keenan of Broadcast died a month ago. Such an artist, with so much to come. This, a recent collaboration with Julian House.

Thinking about Sitting

2011-01-28T09:01:00.000-08:00

This is a half–finished post(!), thrown up because nothing on here for too long. Will add commentary asap. This is embryonic visual thinking for a collaboration with the infectious Matt Olson of ro/lu, related to their family of chairs.

Anthropometrics, with grateful thanks to Michael Hurley.

David Gentleman's seminal, folded British Steel mark (via Graphic Journey).

Bruno Munari, via.

A Breton Lit Clos.

Not Quite is Where

2011-01-15T04:10:00.000-08:00

Tea bowl named Mino-game ('Mossy tailed tortoise'), attributed to the polymath Hon'ami Kōetsu (1558-1637), via the Smithsonian Library.

Books (2003), cardboard, acrylic paint, adhesive tape by Michal Budny (via). A recent, excellent show next door to us at South London Gallery.

Soft Holes with Dried Fruit (2010), bronze, berries, by Des Hughes. Via Ancient & Modern. Hughes was a part of Strange Events Permit Themselves the Luxury of Occurring at Camden Arts Centre in 2008. The selection of work, by Steven Claydon; concerning itself "with certain exceptions, flaws, aberrations, yawning apertures and flowering discrepancies inherent in taxonomic, historical, and aesthetic groupings. In particular it considers the way in which the artifact, object and document behave within a shifting contextual climate with an emphasis on the ‘thingly’ character of the work of art and its constant attempts to struggle against definition, toward selfabnegation and self-cannibalization." This essay, in full here.

Untitled (2010), pâpier–maché, acrylic paint, by Vincent Fecteau. This orientation was shown at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gradens, Edinburgh. "When I decided that these pieces would be hung on the wall and be reversible, I knew that the mechanism of this movement and installation should be clear and simple: hang from one post, no extra support. The forms and the fact that they are reversible – that was complicated enough. It seemed important to me that the 'how' was as honest as possible".

The flipside was exhibited at Greengrassi earlier last year.

Data (2009) by Hayley Tompkins (clay with found object). As a part of Autobuilding, her exhibition also at RBGE. A film work, in the same space, was named Interstice; that is, "an intervening space, especially a very small one" (OUD).

Neither Growth nor Structure A (1979), hessian, plaster and acrylic paint, by Barry Flanagan. Via Waddington.

Werk in Progress

2011-01-10T13:47:00.001-08:00

Long Live The King

2011-01-09T05:00:00.001-08:00

Good luck, Kenny. You might need it.

Whatever happens, you can do no wrong in my eyes.

Even if you can facilitate a pass along the grass from one man in a deoxygenated blood red shirt to another, that will be something.

Season's Findings

2011-01-03T03:11:00.000-08:00

Just returned from County Down, Northern Ireland. Retrobest wishes for the season and thankyou for reading. A miscellany here of seen, found and received in the time away.

This, given by Micheen, my mother–in–law. A wonderful potter, gardener, cook.

Seashore Life and Pattern by T.A. Stephenson, published by Penguin (1944), from the King Penguin series, edited by Nicholas Pevsner (he of the architectural guides).

A C18th tally stick, with a function similar to that of rosary beads, for Catholic observance of covert, outdoor prayer during the penal era, enforced by the Protestant ruling class.

Christmas Day snow, at -15˚C. We were lucky to dodge the pipe–burstings.

Starting Ceramics next week, at Morley College.

My son Syd slept throughout the time with this chap behind the door in his room. In a corner–of–the–eye way, I couldn't help but think of a half–recalled moment from The Shining.

Thought him a clown but turns out he was a bear.

Perhaps they were mixed by a memory of Barnaby the Bear, his nightmarish but somehow edible features postered on my bedroom wall in 1974.

Daughter Sadie was too busy making to wash.

A glove stretcher, as seen in the Ulster Museum, Belfast.

Recently re-opened, with fascinating (and balanced) sections on The Troubles.

Even Keel Exercises

2010-12-19T09:33:00.001-08:00

Camberwell Illustration's term has ended. A wonderful new group with which to have worked. Excited by how much of a stake everybody has in the group and by the collective faith in content as a root to original work. Doing this a part of the week and then switching to making work is stimulating — one talks to the other — but sometimes one can lose the feeling in one's fingers. That is, for a metronomic play with a limited set of materials to hand; decisions arriving only in response, rather than in anticipation, of what is happening between the hands and the stuff.

A lot of recent work has been, out of necessity, two–dimensional. The Hand Werk boxes are (over)due for completion, along with a set of other projects which require shut mouth, open eyes and sound touch. Also starting a ceramics course in January; some kind of resolution to graduate beyond extruded images.

So these are simply exercises to open up and switch on to the made and found components sitting around the space, which I smugly thought would start putting themselves together, on return and on demand.

Tape, Inch by Inch

2010-12-17T09:28:00.001-08:00

I've designed a family of packing tapes, under production now, in partnership with Chandelier Creative, NY. The widest roll is 2.5", then downwards incrementally to 0.5". Not sure yet how availability will work but will post once they appear.

Embedded Messages

2010-11-12T17:43:00.000-08:00

An excellent trip last week, to the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Neighbouring but entirely separate entities, with contrasting taxonomies. Apparently, originally, there was an intent to demonstrate a social Darwinism in the Pitt Rivers, by juxtaposing objects of common function from 'primitive' and 'advanced' cultures. The net effect is opposite, with beautiful examples of the symbiosis of available materials and requisite making. I always return to the cabinets containing object–systems for writing and counting.

These West African Oroko and other symbolic systems, communicate personal insults, calls to battle, requests for foodstuffs, news of death, bids for friendship. The number and orientation of cowrie shells denotes an array of meanings, as described here. The intrinsic character of a cowrie is human and therefore connotes a human situation. Where they face away from one another they really are facing away. Elsewhere, knotted string gives the intuitive property of distance and space to travel.

I reflected afterwards (in the light of messages and matter) on another trip, back in September and in Berlin. The Museum of Otto Weidt's Workshop for the Blind is the original site, where around thirty blind and deaf Jews were employed—and therefore shielded from internment—by Weidt to make brushes and brooms in the early 1940s. Under constant threat, they hid within concealed spaces in the workshop and Weidt obtained false identities (as above, for Marianne Bernstein) and bribed Gestapo officials; any means to stave off the inevitable.

The museum has humility, weighted only by the original nature of the spaces and the stories of individuals who, in the majority were killed and the exceptions who survived. This is the recto and verso of a postcard, thrown from an Auschwitz–bound transportation train by Alice Licht and addressed to Otto Weidt in the remote hope of it finding him, which it did. Somebody picked it up and sent it on.

Alice parents were killed in Auschwitz. She was later transported to Groß–Rosen. Weidt managed to make contact and organised a safe hiding place in Berlin, to which she fled during an evacuation in 1945. She emerged few weeks later, surviving the war and then emigrating to the US. She died in 1987.

This poem, Zurück–Glück (Return–Happiness), written after her escape in April 1945.

Beyond the stories, the walls within the hidden spaces.

Walter Benjamin: "To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger".

A certain resonance in straightforward effects and documentation, telling a human tale. Perhaps the gap to think. The frankness of a factual item. Christian Boltanski has referenced and used as a raw material, the emotional impact of piles of clothes belonging to those deported, discovered in the Nazis' storage warehouses. The specificity of belongings, indicating an individual's life, over the anonymity of a naked body. This piece, Inventaire des Objets Ayant Appartenu a une Femme de Bois-Colombes (1974), from a series of five (I think) bookworks which fully documented the belongings of a woman living in a suburb of Paris.

At no stage do we see an image, a likeness of the woman. Only her taste in books. Which tells a greater truth?

Back to the Pitt Rivers and some more from the Writing & Counting cabinet.

This beautiful correlation of one available material with the form to which it refers and encodes, a reindeer herder's register of his herd's ear notches, cut into birch bark.

Nearby, a cabinet displaying scrimshaw and other notchmaking, markmaking in bone. An object behaving as a page.

Make Do Type, New York Times, Day Save Time

2010-11-07T15:32:00.000-08:00

The New York Times commissioned a typesetting of six poems to "mark the end of daylight saving time". It has been a really enjoyable project; an excuse to develop variants of Make Do Type and building on a notion of how attributes might develop within the rationale, which is to make do with a limiting grid, a monospace set width, a single line weight and, inevitably, a typographic outsider's patched knowledge.

Also to test balance imagery and type. My fascination is the way that type, when drawn from the same hand, can take the onus away from imagery and allow it to be sometimes something other than figurative.

The two variants here, a condensed (created to fit this poem's setting into the column width and maintain a consistent x-height with the rest) and a slab serif. This one does pull on established solutions for optical balance in a monospace 'i', for example. So I looked a lot and gained greater appreciation of Courier and the favourite Prestige Elite. Wanted to see how familiar or not Make Do would become when taking on board some of these features.

And then keeping stray awkwardness in some characters, like the double-height 'g'.

These examples are taken from a great Walker Design Blog piece here by Ryan G. Nelson, on Typographica's 1962 piece on typewriter typefaces.

I'm looking quite a lot at visual explanations (also for a Camberwell teaching project) and wanted the header to read as something almost ornamental, arriving out of dense information related to November and December 2010 Northern Hemisphere moon cycles, onset weather bleakness, land and sea strata. Maybe a cross too, between the influences of Wiener Werkstätte (via) and Susan Kare (very nice article here on the process behind the original Macintosh system software).

The inter-poem patterns were simply referring to time passing, incremental permutation, reversals. Apparently each of the poets sent their pieces mechanically typewritten. All the more reason to set all of this into an inflexible matrix. The type and imagery were all designed to the NYT's 0.2 inch gutter width, which then became a modular grid. Concrete poetry was the first moment early on (as in, Art Foundation Course early on) where I could get hold of some essence of typography as a thing in itself.

Discovered Dom Sylvester Houédard's work in an old ICA catalogue. A Benedictine priest and concrete poet, he corresponded with Herbert Spencer and Typographica through the 1960s. For me the work stands out because it seems less locked into its time of making; aerated in a way that destabilises the Olivetti characteristic or puts the tension between mechanical and improvised composition in an odder place.

He said: "Words: hard and lovely as diamonds demand to be seen, freed in space; words are wild, sentences tame them. Every word an abstract painting, read quickly in a phrase words get lost: in concrete, eye sees words as objects that release sound/thought echoes in a reader. Concrete poems just ARE: have no outside reference; they are objects like toys and tools, jewel–like concrete things-in-them-selves".

I also like Ernst Jandl, much for other reasons, in the purity and acceptance of the letterness of letters.