Centred Post

Lost rhythm with this blog. A month of year-end activity at Camberwell– an intense time, which rightly takes over. We have some community there. I have been thinking quite a bit recently about my teaching, after a year of trying some new things. I have to find conjunctions always with making work — never, ever to take focus there away from students' work — but more in order to have some centredness in moving between the two. So it is fortuitous when a seam of working interest finds that the maker was an educator; or associated with the process of teaching.

Above, by Richard Hollis, designer of John Berger's seminal Ways of Seeing (1972). This symbol, part of a mid(?)-1970s project, Language in Action, aimed at the teaching of English in primary schools, directed by Dr. Joyce Morris. 

I was reading his account of working with Norman Potter, author of What is a designer: things, places, messages and founder of the Construction School, the subject of ongoing research by James Langdon, to be presented at Corner College on the 29th of this month. The School, which existed in two phases between 1964 and 1979, was an experiment — a 'new bauhaus' — at the West of England College of Art, Bristol.

An embroidered linen panel, from the main body of an unfinished bag by Dorothy Larcher. Measuring 29.2 x 19.6cm. This piece (and image) is a part of an archived collection of Barron & Larcher's work at The Crafts Study Centre, Farnham. I've been interested in  both them and their work for some time, since Brian Whitewick — our textile screenprint technician — showed me some images of their hand block-printed indigo resist textiles.

The teaching connection here is Robin Tanner (1904–1988), an artist, educator and founder of the Crafts Study Centre. A close friend of Phyllis Barron, his archive constitutes the collection held by the Centre. He links to the early– to mid–C20th child art movement in education– and Marion Richardson, pioneer of children's handwriting tuition. I've just got hold of a 1973 reprint of her Writing and Writing Patterns (1935). The system — arriving at a free cursive hand through repeat–form drawing — described in the catalogue of a current exhibition on Tanner, at the Centre:

"The patterns were created by arranging letters by family group, such as ‘V and W, which are made with one continuous zigzag movement’, or ‘U, C, G, O and Q, which are all made without lifting the pencil except for the tail of Q, which is an added stroke’. This exercise taught a simple writing rhythm and introduced cursive writing forms. As the child progressed, lessons evolved from pattern drawing to writing in a neat cursive form, which maintained a free quality of line. Richardson hoped that pattern-making would continue after the child learned to write, and encouraged her students to decorate the pages of their written assignments with their own patterns."

Back to Richard Hollis' work for Language in Action. This, a set of glyphs adapted out of Futura, to represent the 21 vowel sounds. It's clear that each of these exercises connect as stimuli for currently developing vocabulary applied as stitch, appliqué and print for the bag and chair projects. I continue to try to tap a space between pictures and words.

A bit to the side but connecting in that his work is showing (until tomorrow) at Chelsea College of Art & Design, is Max Clendinning. These lovely images of his home taken by Anna Huix. The configuration of these rooms and their contents giving great spirit to me at the moment.

Sally and I are going to see before it shuts. Nice for Sally to discover he hails from Co. Armagh. His furniture strikes the odd, design-historical-bucking note of other work from these isles. Not quite hitting the internationalism of mainland Europe or USA. Beautiful in its (apparent) awkwardness to manufacture.

Maxima dining chairs (1965), via Christies.

So this has been a rambling post, after so much silence. But the point at the moment is of reflexive activity, between teaching, making and thinking about both. Something to inform both, without doubt, is the creative time passed with the children. These plasticine forms were made with Syd, during the ebb and flow of Open House, finding some absorptive out-of-the-way play in the kitchen.

There is some key into the appeal of Clendenning's home and Richardson's hand-eye strokemaking. Syd has a good hand and an imagination I can only half-imagine. Anything I show him, he shows me double back.

Hope this doesn't sound pompous but this calls up a final note on education. Something just discovered, that is really exercising; especially when one works for an institution. From The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1985), Jacques Rancière is described as arguing that "educators can channel the equal intelligence in all to facilitate their intellectual growth in virtually unlimited directions. The schoolmaster need not know anything (i.e., s/he may be ignorant). With the premise that all are of equal intelligence, and the insights from which knowledge is constructed can be found in any collective educational exercise founded on this principle."

Spurious Image Formation (1)

More to add here but just wanted to get something up.

Stitch Schematics Two

The purpose of the drawings here and in the previous post, is to think through a system for stitch and appliqué onto cotton canvas bags, with a simple underlying marked 40mm grid to give scope for improvisation. The dimension is based on standard 12oz cotton canvas totes, bought for prototyping. I've settled for supplied colours red, green, yellow, purple. So the palette means a retune, to gaudier, heavier-handed treatments which I am enjoying.

The underlying structure is both for me to be able to stitch and also for others, in the form of a kit with instructions. I'm interested in bags being one-off. The system is really motivated by the ROLU project and a set of techniques that can be applied to loose covers for the chairs. The main question is whether to screenprint dot-guides or to machine cut tiny perforations for the stitch. Sally is such a crafter, I cannot begin to match but the idea here is to find a way that someone with limited handskill can achieve a result. The appliquéd sections here would be grafted from a sacrifice bag (one in every ten-ish), ironed down with 'bondaweb' and then a couched edge in the same colour thread, or in black. Yet to see if it works.

More drawings will come and I aim to prototype this week coming.

Stitch Schematics

New York Surface Impression

 

 

I haven't properly digested or collated the recent New York trip, on these pages at least. More to say about the time there, studio visits and putting faces to valued words. In the meantime, this stack of photographs points to the fact that I am press moulding with clay and thinking about surface on an object and physical, handleable pattern. I'll name these places in the next post.

Up and About

Read below for some context. I've been wanting to find a way to draw directly, quickly. But in a way that registers and needs no reworking. Trust the hand then let it alone. Rubber and lino gives me the route to by-products too.

Wake Up

We have Open House coming up and it—arm in arm with Spring—always becomes a time to prototype. To wake up forms, materials, ideas for more sustained projects. There are bigger projects which do need this bit of hand-thinking, in order to have them turn over and collectively lurch forward.

The waking up is a lot to do with colour, which I've been sourcing and calibrating. Along with a certain, desired, heavyhandedness which I think has been lost since the first boxed works. The colours correspond to some experiments with body stains for ceramics, worked just before Easter. More on that in another post.

 

These can be considered first fragments. Root works that I want to grow outwards. That's how the broken symmetries of the embroidery designs are worked. Some mirroring, which is then disturbed. Sally and I have both been looking a good deal at Berber rugs, Kuba cloths and so on. I've mentioned elsewhere the Droste Effect and do like the idea of starting small and working outwards. Exoskeletal decisions.

Another aim is to make by-product prints. Building on the potential of the little woodblock prints made a year and a half ago. That's for another day.

Before, During

Calibration

Learn to Drive and Everything

Here, a monochrome preview of a three-colour Risograph print (using pink, teal and gold), made for Landfill Editions' new collection of works to be exhibited at Pick Me Up, Somerset House. It opens tomorrow. The collection — 'Lots of Pictures – Lots of Fun' — is named after (and inspired by) Eduardo Paolozzi's 1972 silkscreen print. "Each work is connected to elements of his visual maximalism, disorienting juxtapositions and oblique political commentary". The piece is called Go-Go Elite Traveller, after the genuine model name of a mobilty scooter.

It's been a period with lots of drawing, not much object-based making and zero blogging. Drawing seems to suck up concentration in contrast to the object-based work, which needs to be made at arm's length. I do love Paolozzi. And wanted to make a work that owed something to his Ballard collaborations and to the Independent Group's focus. Oddly—in researching Nigel Henderson in relation to the Group—I returned to Full Table, the extra-ordinary online trove of treasured ex-tutor Chris Mullen. He gives first-hand, fond testament to the under-documented Henderson and sadly here, the evidence in letter correspondence of an eventually broken and bitter relationship with Paolozzi.

But this little project has aggregated a set of visual thoughts around, for one, hi-octane and 'performance' graphic liveries (see previous post on motorhome swooshes). I've enjoyed synthesizing and uprooting a set of forms, to see them as a family shed of their application. As an aside, this image was made for dear friend Derek, a true Gooner. It's derived from the notorious c.1991 'tyre track' Arsenal away kit. An unpalatable he learned to love.

So picture items that reference the vehicular. Familiar—therefore invisible—ingredients but also those than point to the petroelectrical pulse.

 

I'm quite mesmerised by the formulae at work, tattooing the surface of each piece of protective-performance wear. So I wanted a skin-tingling, sensory rider. But of a mobility scooter. A potent individual riding that most impotent of machines, genitally fuelled by a go-large bucket of St*****ks and chicken in a basket.

At an earlier point, I wanted to incorporate a clumsy crash, with Duane Hanson's Motorcycle Accident (1967) in mind.

And most particulary the sleeve image of David Bowie's seminal Lodger (1979).

For ROLU, for this, for other stuff, I've been trying to create an Everywo/man. A default puppet, from the inside out. Dressed according to the occasion and application. Borne of Henry Drefuss' anthopometric percentiles of wo/man and first drafted for a study of ROLU's chair use. So a relook at the blog top, profile image will give an idea of how this applies. I was working the image just here, infused with David Bowie in this end of the 'seventies moment, when he appeared both 'other' but also almost like a proto-salesman, with the kind of once-an-hour combed through hair you sometimes see on old school London white working classers. 

I was looking at the squashed nose of Lodger and again thinking of the Independent Group's exhibition with Roland Penrose, The Wonder and Horror of the Human Head (1953).

If I'm going to have anyone as indirect scaffold for a dress-up doll, who better?

I recall seeing years ago, in Brighton Polytechnic's library, an old 1962 bound copy of Town magazine and an article which featured Marc Bolan in his Mod/ernist teen years. A Hackney Face. Very good account here, on Dandy in Aspic, which describes his obsession with clothes since the age of twelve. The kind of attention to sartorial detail amongst late teenagers which feels so familiar to somewhere like Peckham High Street now.

Finally, Giger. I have a similar love of but problem with the overwroughtness, as with 'performance' graphics. But the vision and teenboy sensuality carries.