Transferring the Conveyor Belt Images

Following on from my drawings of rotar devices and creating rotar wheels with resin and iron fillings, I transferred twenty-four of my favourite images onto a cream coloured, slightly elastic material. Once dried I plan to cut the images out and stitch them horizontally together to create three conveyor-like belts.

Tutorial with Emma Rushton

I had a tutorial with Emma Rushton today which proved incredibly useful and inspirational. I was able to communicate to her my interest in abandonment and deterioration and how that had inspired my many photos of wastelands, decrepid buildings and old ruins. I think Emma wants me to press on with manipulating the photographs and perhaps take the images out of the studio, which is something I have been thinking about. However I am tempted to put the images to aside, as it has always been the materiality of the metal and the wool, and the contrast between them, which has inspired my progression.

Unfortunately I had already taken down my wall installation, which illustrated the woollen process, though the photos seem to do the piece justice. One question that did stump me is why I was initially interested in the weaving industry. It seems I have travelled quite far away from my beginning interest in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I have definitely drifted away from Leeds' social or economic industrial history, though as my work becomes more specific, I also think the idea or concept behind the work gets stronger.

Emma really liked 'The Land We Live In' illustration I discovered in the Brotherton's Special Collection. I understand it highlights the industrial pride of Leeds but I find it too Romantic. I find the industrial history of the North really interesting because it exists within two opposing realms; pride and embarassment. Therefore I am disinclined to use anything that will cause an imbalance to this unusual equilibrium. On this point I wonder how Leeds' City Museum will display their heritage when it finally opens in August...

Emma liked how I had transferred the images onto cloth and felt I should try to push this idea by incorporating the cloth into a mechanism so it has direct parallels. I showed her my drawn diagrams of the cloth coming through rollers, which is an idea I want to push further, but the question of how to also display the images on the cloth will now have to be considered.

The question now is should I push the historical or the aesthetic value further... Also if I choose the historical significance, what light shall I portray the work in? A celebration of Leeds' industrial past and the worker's pride? Or a dirty history of bad working hours, dreadful living conditions, smoky atmosphere etc.?

Claire Barclay

CLAIRE BARCLAY’s sculptural installations use craft and industrial processes, composing precious and everyday materials into poetic and menacing installations. She views each exhibition as a ‘pause’ in an ongoing project: objects are grouped and re-grouped from one installation to the next, refining and adding to a growing vocabulary of forms. 'Barclay uses traditional craft materials such as wood, clay and wool in a traditional way but combines these elements to create powerful works. Often balanced around wooden or metal frames she explores the idea of ‘thinking and making’ through the construction of pots, screen printed cloth, weaving, basketry and other processes. The installations themselves move beyond the innocuous connotations of these acts and arrest the viewer with a quiet sense of unease.’ (Kirsteen Macdonald)

- Gained an MA at Glasgow School of Art
- Represented Scotland in the Venice Biennale in 2003
- Her sculptural pieces should be treated as a whole, but could exist separately
- Interested in the reduncy of museum objects and their ambigious qualities
- Began by creating found object installations- often the found objects would infer the reference, i.e. broken pottery would allude to domestic violence
- Barclay now uses only self-created objects in her installations- believes that by working with the materials one gains a greater knowledge of the object's properties and its creative scope
- However, she has to hire an engineering company when wanting to work with aluminium- therefore the model drawings are very much a collaborative piece
- Barclay's work is very interested in space- often encloses a section of the gallery, using 'barriers of space', to repel the visiter
- She also constructs the sculptured form in the gallery so there is a strong relationship to space
- Some works portray a fragility, which contrasts to the sharp edged forms that have a 'sexualised quality'
- Recently Barclay has incorporated fabric, as she believes by incorporating representational imagery, a psychological dimension is added to the work
- Her drawings do not sit within the installations and are often exhibited in the exhibition's corridors
- Her silk- screen prints often show knot designs, which draw attention to the tightness of space within her work
- The sculptured forms have a seemingly functional appearance, though for different reasons they could never be used for that purpose, i.e- chair legs are different lengths, the bed is unstable etc.
- Barclay constructed the framework of a dining table to mirror the gallery's historical decor in that section of the exhibition- alluded to greed and vanity
- A silk screen of intestines and stomachs was thrown over some of the beams in the dining table structure- from far the design looked floral
- Barclay's Bristol project rejected the viewer from the space by confronting the viewer's entrance with heavy wooden planks
- She also created some smaller sculptural pieces of Bristol's landmark municipal buildings, which dominate the skyline
- Barclay says her work negotiates with space, it does not interact or engulf space- it is more detached
- Her sculptural forms recently have a precarious quality, of balancing or pulling, which adds tension to the work

Seminar with Roger Palmer

I thought Roger Palmer's seminar was the best to date in the series, 'Artist, Space, Practice', as the Director of the Fine Art Programme had really put together a well structured and informed talk about three artists, who had featured in the Venice Biennial, and Palmer had an obvious interest in what he was talking about.

The Venice Biennial is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years (in odd years) in Venice. The formal Biennale is based in the Giardini Park, which houses 30 permanent national pavilions. However Palmer focused on three Aperto events, i.e. an exhibition that coincides with the Biennial and one that is usually put together by artists of a national origin that does not feature in one of the permanent national pavilions.

Monica Sosnowska (b. 1972) represented Poland

- Her work, 'Poloni' (roughly translated 1 to 1), refers to the scale of the work and has sport connotations

- Sosnowska took a pre-fabricated metal framework, which was a standard frame for Polish council houses during the Cold War and had a construction company in Warsaw build the structure.

- She created this full-scale, three storey unit of social housing in the industrial space and then had the metal frame squashed so to fit within the Italian pavilion

- Within the space in the Biennial, the raw structure seemed to be squashed by the high architecture of the Venetian walls and floors of the pavilion building

- The intense collaboration between the artists and the technicians, who had to do numerous crushing tests, was amazing, as the metal frame was actually 'stuffed' within an existing building

- The deliberate distortion of the shape and form was incredibly melancholy and it seemed to reflect how newly allowed countries are having to be squashed into exhibition spaces all around Venice

Angela Ferreira

'Maison Tropicale'

Paul O'Neill

PAUL O’NEILL: Curator, artist and writer. His practice is interested in addressing the systems of interpretation that are involved in making sense of the world around us, as much as he is concerned with the compulsions that lead to interpretation and meaning itself. He was Gallery Curator at londonprintstudio Gallery between 2001-2003 He is Artistic Director of MultiplesX an organisation that commissions and supports curated exhibitions of artist’s editions, which he set up in 1997 and exhibited at spaces such as the ICA, London; Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin and The Lowry, Manchester. He has curated over 40 exhibitions and projects, that include recently: Tonight at Studio Voltaire, in London, Coalesce: With All Due Intent at Model and Niland Art Gallery, Sligo and Are We There Yet?, at Glassbox in Paris.

-Working towards a PHD in Curatorial History from Middlesex Uni- this course was first created in 1987, so still relatively new
- Curatorial anthologies have been a major publication since '96- O'Neill's favourite being 'Thinking About Exhibitions'
- 4 Considerations when approaching Curatorial Practice:
1) How useful can I be?
2) Is there a system or a form of enablement that I can use as a creative strategy to produce an opening out rather than a closing down of my own 'usefulness' in the given context?
3) How can I incorporate failure as part of the project?
4) How can I use 'lots of people'?

- Artist/curator- skill needed when thinking about juxtaposing one's work- helps the practitioner to think about spacing, lighting, walls and spaciality
- Artworks already exist in the world- idea behind his exhibition, 'All That Is Solid'- as artists were invited to add artistic epherma to the gallery space
- O'Neill believes the typical white cube gallery is out-dated and restrictive- believes curating should be 'an invisible gesture'- give up autonomy
- Curating helps the work interact with the viewer and subtly imposes a route for the visual spectator
- His conclusion, that the exhibition space was always divided into the background, middle area and foreground, was quite interesting. The background not allowing interaction with the spectator- just offering a visual aesthetic. The middle area offered partial interaction, whilst the foreground interacts fully with the viewer- something I had not considered...

Material Experimentations

Various material experimentations.

Playing around with the materials linked to the history of the textile industry and how to convey the dirtiness and time-worn quality of the items within these old factories and mills.

Notes from 'Contemporary Installations'; Kate Davidson and Michael Desmond

Installation is an an art of the real:
- Era of fluid identities, mobile lifestyles and undefined relationships- installations are 'islands of refuge'
- Connect with world through physical materiality- can be beyond visual- sound/ smell/ spatial
- Self-contained spaces- exclude the extraneous, reinforcing a singular and insular aesthetic
- Art of connections- unity of the components
- Suffer from a loss of the real- long for 'first-hand accounts and for contact with primal sources of information' Jean Baudrillard, 'Simulations', New York: Semistexte, 1983

Geography of Installations:
-Sets up borders to create physically separate spaces
- By mapping a place- establishes as environment that exists as a work of art
- Elements are choreographed- making movements within a complex and varied site
- Haphazard accumulations of disparate data
- Follows a tradition of walking and viewing- origin in Flanerie- the nineteenth century practice of promenading
- Emergence of exhibition halls, department stores and museums- encourages the pedestrian's mobilised gaze
- Advent of cinema, television and computers, non-commercial transactions increasingly depend of the immobility of the audience
- 'The gaze becomes more virtually mobile, [while] the spectator becomes more physically immobile'- Anne Friedberg, 'Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern', Los Angeles: University of California, 1993

Time in Installations:
- Allows the artist to compress and manipulate the time the viewer spends within a work
- 'The 'flow' of life as a primary inner experience [is, in reality] a succession of states that melt into one another to form an indivisible process'- Paul Edwards, 'The Encyclopedia of Philosophy', New York: Crowell, Collier and Macmillan, Inc. 1967
- Artist's capacity to evoke memory, displacing the past into the present
- Christian Boltanski's installations attempt to create a hiatus, momentarily suspending the audience's belief that they are in an art museum- his works are more reminiscent of disused storage areas than the pristine white cube characteristic of modern museum spaces
- Materials can be selected for their appearance of embodying time- Rosalie Gascoigne's materials- weathered artefacts- prompt a Proustian evocation of their modest life and the passage of time

Theatre of Installations:
- Illusion of reality in theatre and cinema depends upon the convention of a single-point perspective- the view of the immobile spectator
- Installations- offer a multiple of viewpoints for the 'mobilised gaze' and offers palpable references to the material world
- Senses- surround and enhance the encounter of the work
- An arena for personal performance- the viewer is implicated within the work of art as a participant
- The 3-D space- visitors acutely aware of their bodies
- Sensation is the data of immediate awareness- the audience 'acts a [both the] catalyst and the receptor' Andrew Benjamin, 'Installation Art', London: Art and Design, 1993
- Frequent use of 'found' objects- apparent that the objects are props, choreographed for effect, placed for seduction
- Installations themselves are displaced objects, never able to join the 'real world'

Space of Installations:
- Fundamental to installation art
- El Lissitzky, 'Proun Environment', 1923: 'Space is the equivalent of a physical material with properties such as wood and stone'- considered to have form

Materials of Installations:
- Enormously varied
- Hybrid of art forms- little respect for established conventions- strength derives from its novelty and synaesthetic effect
- Objects- unaltered from ordinary existence, preserve an aspect of reality- have the capacity to intrude and provoke with their presence
- Familiar, domestic items- never innocent or neutral- remain recognisable and retain their character
- Collage of meanings- provides a rich, synthetic field of relationships- generating allegory and metaphors
- Metaphoric process- combination of object and context diverts original meaning and intent- creates a dynamic between literal and implied meaning

Site of Installation:
- Not permanent or site-specific- destined to be 'works in progress'
- Planning and preparation must be re-negotiated for each new site- enable's the work's renewal - Location of an installation defines its meaning- context of the museums to evoke institutions per se.

Simon Callery

Simon Callery talks about his current painting in relation to the Thames Gateway Project – a research fellowship he is currently working on. These painting constitute a response to a landscape that is the subject of a major regeneration scheme. The work is informed by time spent on excavation sites with Oxford Archaeology in the Thames Gateway region.“The paintings are characterized by an ambition to confront landscape as a material and temporal environment. My experience of this landscape calls for a multi-sensory response challenging the entrenched traditions of landscape-based art that place an emphasis on the visual - the domain of the eye - above all else. The dynamic of change taking place across this landscape has acted as a spur to develop new forms for painting to represent the experience of contemporary landscape.”

- Studied for a BA in Fine Art from Cardiff Uni, then travelled around the States and the Middle East for five years

- Callery thinks it is the painter's duty to create an experience and that artwork is the output of formalised/ academic research

- Every project informs the next- organic process

- Work is often large in scale as he likes to create a link to architectural grammar, as well as painting

- Does not like to paint pictures, as he does not feel the need to represent the world or establish an art language, instead he often paints the canvas lead white, then strips the surface, so to remove any trace of the canvas

- The size and surface of these luminous white works helps the viewer to become aware of himself

- Callery also creates canvases that lack rigidity. By creating a bulge on one of the vertical sides, similar to the slight curve in a Greek column, the artist believes a relationship is more easily formed between the person and work

- Callery attended a six week dig of an Iron Age hill fort in Oxford, as he wanted to reassess his interest in landscapes

- The uncomfortable conditions caused the painter to collaborate with a photographer, Andrew Watson, and together they created trench aerial shots. After photographing the area, they 'sewed' the images together using an image software programme and created an image with a 20x40m dimension

- Callery commissioned the making of a large pan chest, so to place each individual square print into a drawer, as he wanted the viewer to have to open the drawers to physically move across the surface

- By increasing the viewer-work interaction, Callery hoped the visitor would gain a better grasp of the archeological dig's surface and it would help prolong the experience of the artwork

- Callery also used material from the site, as he got casting experts from the local foundry to cast the walls of the trenches. The dimension of this work was equally large- 20 x 2m wide.

- The artist then approached English Heritage and they agreed to house this large casted piece in Dover, so linking the white clay cast to the white clifts of Dover.

- When presenting the work, Callery carefully pieced together the squared casts and displayed them along a commissioned frame, which had to mirror the curves in the dig's trenches. This work had a very similar physical dimension to his lead white paintings

- Recently he has moved back to his studio practice and painting, though his work has a much greater physicality, which goes well with his newly discovered use of warm colours

- It is interesting to note that had I seen an image of his lead white paintings, then his clay casted wall installation, then his current circular, protruding warm paint works, I would never have seen such a strong correlation as I do now after his talk.

'Wool- A Fabulous Fibre'- The 'Behind the Seams' Series

Notes from watching 'Number 3- Wool: A Fabulous Fibre' from The Behind the Seams' series. The 45minute documentary showed the manufacturing process of wool in Australia.

-the wool industry in Australia has a value of £3, 000, 000, 000 a year- its in Australia's top five exports
- the shearing process accounts for 1/5 of the cost of wool production- on average a shearer can collect the fleece from 150 sheep every eight hour working day
- the bulk of wool comes from the sheep's back- that specific cut is called a 'long blow'
- the shed hands remove the tangled belly wool and the poor quality edgings of the wool, which is referred to as the 'skirting', on the grating table
- a Wool Classer assesses the fleece and classifies the wool according to its quality and the thickness of fibre (each fleece has over 100,000,000 fibres)
- the raw, greasy wool is packaged in bails and transported to a large holding warehouse
- exported through local buying agents, who price the wool according to the length and strength, the style of the clip and how well prepared the sheep's wool was (clean wool brings a high premium)
- most Australian wool goes to Italy, France, Japan, Germany and China. A sizable quantity also goes to the UK, America and Russia. There is a constant demand, due to growing populations in these countries and the fast turnover of fashion trends. The sale is subject to 'supply and demand' fluctuations
- three quarters of the exported wool is sold in an unprocessed state
- the quarter processed has to travel a large physical distance= high cost

2 main systems to process the wool fibre into yarn: the woollen system and the worsted system

The woollen system:
- uses coarser, shorter stapled wool, which is highly contaminated
- used to produce upholstery, bulky knitwear, carpets and tweeds
- used in Bradford

The worsted system:
- uses fine, long stapled wools, which has a low level of contamination
- used to produce fine, smooth suitings and fashion fabrics
- used in Leeds

- First process, Scouring- the raw wool is washed vigorously in water and hot detergent, which removes dirt, perspiration salts and vegetable matter from the wool- it also removes lanolin, the wool's natural grease, which is sold as a by-product
- the dirty water causes a lot of pollution concerns, as in a year it produces the same amount of waste water, as twenty-five thousand residents- nowadays most wool factories are forced to have their own sewer treatment system
- Second process, Carding- uses large blowers to dry the wool and then feds the wool into the carding machines, which uses large revolving drums with rollers and pairs of fine wire teeth, to shred the wool into a continuous slither/ web and lay the fibres roughly parallel to each other.
- this process also removes seeds which may have remained immersed in the wool, even after the scouring process
- Third process, Gilling- continues the carding process by aligning the fibres further using rollers and combs, and stretching the slithers into thinner hanks
- Fourth process, Combing- uses pinch rollers that thrust the fine slithers onto a revolving drum comb, which eliminates any fine or broken fibres. This process unifies the fibres and creates a slither of uniform thickness. These slithers are then wound into balls called 'tops', which are immersed into a chemical bath, which coats the fibres in shrink-proof resin. The fibres are then dyed in a boiling dye bath an hour later if needs be.
- Fifth process, Drawing- spins the tops into yarn for fabric production, by passing the tops through a drawing machine, which is set to adjust the fibre to a certain weight and thickness, ready for spinning. The drawing machine also twists the fibres adding strength to the yarn
- Sixth process, Spinning- completes the yarn process by spinning the yarn through a spinning frame, which twists the fibres, stretching and strengthening the yarn. The yarn is finally then spun, at high speed, around a rapidly turning bobbin. Two single spun yarns are combined to produce worsted yarns.

- The yarns are then packed for overseas mills, ready for domestic fabric and garments.

Knitting- Interlocks loops of one or more yarns
Weaving- Interlaces yarns at right angles. The warp is the name given to the length yarn and the yarn that travels across the material is called the weft. This process takes place on a loom, which produces a much finer and softer fabric than knitting. This fabric is usually used for suitings and quality apparel.

Oliver Richon

OLIVIER RICHON: Artist, and professor of Photography at the Royal College of Art. Olivier Richon’s work addresses various themes such as the desire for the exotic, the pleasures of imitation, the function of the object in the still life, quotation and appropriation of art history. These are slow images, where time stands still. Anti-naturalistic, they address the dream-like nature of representation as a frozen tableau, which may be deciphered slowly in the manner of a hieroglyph, yet which resists interpretation.

- Swiss artist that has been exhibiting for over twenty years
- Has always been fascinated by the page- Laurence Stern's first modernist work had a complete black page for pg. 61- alluded to an excess of writing 'a black page soaked in ink'
- Reminded him of photographic darkness- not meant to be read as text but you can do
- His work is not triggered by the image but by the allegorical reading- Platonic idea of imitation
- Multiplication of copies- 'mimesis'- Richon's realm of art
- Velasquez's painting- very allegorical- excess of signs to be deciphered- 'melancholic burden to show all the signs'
- Interested in how to paint or capture emptiness as a content
- Made a sign for 'Inventing', which commissioned him to create a design for a large billboard in America- His two signs read:

The unveiling of the presence of nothing and The concealment of the absence of nothing

- Follows his idea that photographic images always have an absence, something which is outside the image- the signs were therefore a commentary on advertising
- Richon's work also addresses the Still Life genre- a genre about closeness, that dispenses with people and landscape, and focuses solely on the close-up, a world of objects
- I thought his reasons for shying away from depicting the human figure were particularly accurate- 'humans still the show, everything then becomes an attribution to the human'
- Uses a direct image for inspiration- the table in a still life becomes organised as a microcosm
- The trompe l'oeil effect is used to destabilise the viewer

- Colour functions in an allegorical context- sometimes mirroring the correct colour function, other times also using colour to destabilise the viewer

- The use of colour also follows the gender differention- colour= feminine (the make-up artifice)/ drawing= masculine (monochromatic, basic structure)

- Richon loves how the appearance of an image can be 'out of place' or deceptive, through concealment- why he uses front projection devices

- Idea was inspired by Robert Morris' 'Steam Sculpture', 1995- the work inscribed a temporality, Richon's 'Bubble' photograph was a response to Morris' work

- More recently, Richon has been influenced by the work of Braco Dimitrijevic, who has been using live animals in his installation works since 1981. His following exhibition in the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris, placed twenty of his works in cages with zoo animals, such as lions, jaguars, dromedaries, crocodiles and bison- Richon likes the added dimension of danger to Dimitrijevic's work

- Richon has begun branching away from using controlled, inanimate objects in his studio setting, and has recently begun placing placards outdoors and photographing them

- Richon also touched upon his thoughts regarding studio space, which has been a discussion in our weekly seminars. He stated that studios were strange places, as you can bring things in, but it is only alive when lit. It has no prior reality and as an artist you are working within 'a rogue space'

'The Art Fabric: Mainstream', Constantine Larson

Notes from my reading of 'The Art Fabric: Mainstream' by Constantine Larson;

'Cloth- wrapped, compressed, nonutilitarian, has played an early and important role in the twentieth century art concepts. Dadaist Man Ray wrapped an 'enigma', 'Enigma of Isidore Ducasse', 1920.
Christo some forty years later wrapped a building; 'The Museum of Modern Art Packaged', 1968. In the early 60's Claes Oldenbury had introduced cloth (muslin) as a basic material for his art forms- 'Wrinkled, torn and creased surfaces, rippled edges, expressing the physical sensations, visual perceptions and poetic associations that the object arouses in the viewer are assumed to be relative entirely to his own experience.

Christo Javacheff, 'The Museum of Modern Art Packaged', 1968.

'Soft Drainpipe - Blue (Cool) Version', Claes Oldenberg, 1967, Acrylic on canvas and steel.

The interest in cloth has extended to the use of compression, laundry elements for his environments and totem-like forms. Working directly with cloth and other 'non-art' materials, some artists have broken the barriers and changed the definition of what constitutes art. (Man Ray, Robert Rauschenberg, Eva Hesse, Sam Gillian, Colette.)

' Sans II', Eva Hesse,1968, Fiberglass and polyester resin.

Interest in dye and needle techniques stimulated the increased use of silk and, especially, cotton in the mid-70's. Fabric- usually fine counts of mill woven cotton- became a prime material. Dyed/ stuffed/ machine embroidered/ darned/ fabricated and woven.

A Few Artists whose work I was particularly inspired by:

Francoise Grossen, 'Metamorphosis 1.5', 1986, (braiding; manila rope); knots ropes using Chinese twists which emphasise the ply and the natural luster of the hard twisted, honed smooth sisal. Uses ropes which have a smilar gradations of colour, so create a strong aesthetic of colour and form. Grossen fixes the ropes into bisymmetrical and biomorphic forms, which are sculpted into freize-like forms.

'Metamorphosis I.5', Francoise Grossen, 1986, mixed media, 38" x 14''.

'Metamorphosis IV.4', Francoise Grossen, 1988-9, mixed media, 84” x 24” x 15''.

Ritzi and Peter Jacobi, 'Ohne Titel', 1974, (tapestry, drawing; goat hair, horse hair, paper); combines wrapped elements and tapestry together with charcoal drawing on great sheets of 'rice' paper. The combination is unified by the palette and image-especially the fibre-like drawing and drawing-like fringes.

Jolanta Owidzka, 'Leather Exercise', 1976, (weaving; hemp, leather, silk, linen); old industrial beltings of waxed leather recycled for a small hanging. To exploit tonal subleties within the leather surface, she wove the beltings through a spaced warp of hard polished linen. There is a strong aesthetic in the stiff, patinated leather of the discarded industrial beltings.

Madeleine Bosscher, '7 Banen', 1972, (knotted pile; polyethylene tubes); Bosscher knotted transparent plastic tubing into a woven ground, which creates the luminous relief. The precision of the sheared contours and the symmetry of the minimal forms, alongside the transparency of the polyethylene tubes, creates a really successful Minimal sculpture. I also liked her 'Small Squares' piece, which was tens of thousands of mill cotton squares wovem into the white-on-white hanging. The shadow lines and the matted thread ends produce a richly opaque texture. Bosscher's work relies on the collective impact of an object, which is systematically multiplied.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, 'Wheel and Rope', 1973; love the industrial nature of her sculpture and the mammoth scale, which seems to command the space its presented in. The sense of space is another key element in her work, which plays alongside voids and lighting. Out of all the artists featured in this book, I found her work to be the most thought-provoking, yet the understanding of the fibre's materiality is always at the forefront.

'Wheel and Rope', 1973, wood, burlap and hemp; Wheel: dia. 234 cm; 122 cm Ropes: lengths variable.

'Rope with Wheels' 1973, wood, burlap and hemp; Wheel: dia. 234 cm; 122 cm; Ropes: lengths variable.

'Installation of Ropes', 1970.

Sachiko Morino, 'An Air Sent from Switzerland', 1977, (knotting; cotton rope); Morino packages air in her many roped works; her hallmark is the void she contains. The object's main frame is made of rope, leaving the inside visibly hollow.

Sheila Hicks- Works with cloth and linen on a large scale. Often uses iridescent colours, though varies the thicknesses. Unlike the other fabric artists I have looked at so far, she works with several techniques in one piece, such as wrapping, hanging, stacking, braiding and weaving. Similarly to Abakanowicz, Hicks creates a suitable environment for her work;

'It will concern itself with the communication through the language of textiles, to conceive and to realise a certain nuber of practical and personal objects'.

'Linen Lean-To', Sheila Hicks, tapestry bas-relief, 1967–68.The artist conceived the work in 1967–68 after a winter trip to Normandy, France, where she saw houses with snow piled high on the roofs. She successfully re-creates the effect of this compelling sight with a totally unsuspected material.

'Voyage of Serpentina', Sheila Hicks, 1994.

Cynthia Schira, 'Seascape 1, 1975, (weft brocade/ cotton/ wool); The brocading elements are cotton tapes pre-dyed in a range of half-tone shades. Some of the tapes eccentrically weave in and out of the others- a technique that extends the weaver's range of expression. It also serves to tie down the very long weft floats.

'Four and Three', 1973, (weaving; aluminium/ linen); On a conventional handloom Schira wove flat aluminium strips through linen warps, then lulled the lower portions into cylindrical forms. The look of the slubby grey linen against the polished metal is very aesthetically pleasing, and ties in with the formal composition.

Project Idea

After the completion of my installation showing the textile process, I turned back to the initial images I had taken. I began once more playing around with the images, by transferring them onto fabric and aging the material, as well as the photograph. However, after my tutorial with Richard Bell, I realised that though I was producing work, I had become a little stuck in a rut and that my enthusiasm for the work/ concept had faded a little. I spoke to Simon about this, as I had a tutorial with him two days ago, he suggested that if I enjoyed working with just the materiality of the industrial machines and the delicacy of the textiles, then why don't I just begin to focus on that for the time being... Very good suggestion!

I have put the research photos up once again around my studio space, so I can look for aesthetic forms that I would like to work with. I plan to start a Henry Moore way of sketching and morph the chosen forms together into some sort of minimalist sculpture...

For further inspiration and ideas, I have been reading a variety of art books, around the issues of craft, fabric art and soft sculpture, as I am looking to create a hard edged, perhaps fibreglass form, which I can then compose wool or cloth or thread around/ in/ through, as I loved how the flax-linen passed through the power loom system in Armley, or the how the bulkiness of the sheep's wool was converted to thin threads through the loom and weave machines.

Elly Clark

ELLY CLARK: Artist and a former student of the School of Fine Art. “I am interested in using photography to illustrate different perspectives on the world and alternative ways of seeing. By involving other people in the image making process, I step away from the traditional role of the photographer as outside spectator. Instead I am forced to interact with the community or cultural context I am working with(in).. .” October 2007 - January 2008: “Moscow to Beijing - The Journey”, Gallery West, University of Westminster, London

- graduated 9years ago, after beginning a Curating MA Course at the Royal Academy, only to switch to a Fine Art MA Course at Central St. Martins
- Very interested in research and practice/ video installations/ follows a mostly photographic practice/ inspired by modern day travel and communicability and how it affects space and relationships
- Her work also travels, thus ironically adding to the journey concepts within her work
- Clark's work was heavily informed by conceptual writing and literature. I was really interested by the David Rousset (1912-1997) extract she read, about how the French writer's diary was a recording of his wanderings around Paris as in these 'hours of solitude, he was his own master, what nature made him to be'.
- Clark's work reflected her enjoyment also in fluidity, as her art practice often had an unpredictable ending due to the methods she implemented
- 'Everything is fluid, I like to capture these notions of presence and absence'- therefore allowing her work to portray Clark's and her participant's mental and physical travel
-Her initial work was inspired by the internet, as Clark felt threatened by the ability to publish or find anything, the lack of personal space, the reduction in individuality etc.

'Broadway House Photo Project', 2002-3
- Lived in a large council estate in East London and wanted to gain a sense of her neighbours
- Those who agreed to participate in her project, she lent a camera to for a week
- Asked the participants to take a photo of the view from their kitchen, lounge and bedroom window, and a photo of something they liked in their appartment
- Exhibition of the photos held in a nearby gallery- participants got to take home their photos
- I thought the idea was relatively simple, but the organisation due to Clark's particular methodology, meant the final images were really thought-provoking and subtly informed the viewer of the participant's character and thoughts about how and where they lived


'The Trans-Siberian Photo Series', 2005-6
- In some ways, this was a continuation or enhancement of the Broadway House project, as this too mapped an area, though one from Moscow to Beijing
- To fund her travel, she auctioned photos even before they had been taken on Ebay- I thought this was ingenius
-Asked already assembled and translated questions to the passengers on the train and if they agreed she took a photo of them. She also gave cameras out to willing participants who agreed to take photos of their journey and send the camera back to her
- the cultural and linguistic gap made the project a really interesting way to document the differences

Yoshio Kitayama/ Naomi Kobayashi

I discovered Yoshio Kitayama's work, in a book I am currently reading; 'Soft Sculpture and Beyond', 1993, Gordon and Breach, Switzerland. The Japanese artist, born in 1948, uses materials such as wood, copper, steel and bamboo to create his fragile constructions, which using fisherman's wire, he hangs from a space's ceiling, to create 'centres of energy'. His constructions are really delicate and due to his choice of materials, alludes to his Japanese heritage. I feel quite inspired by his work, About What Happened, 1991, which is a work comprised of several large box shapes, stacked together. The boxes are made by griding the bamboo, wood and paper, which creates a net style framework, which the thin paper is delicately attached to. Unfortunately I was unable to find any photos of his work, but I thought a note should be taken anyway!

I was also intrigued with the fibre artist, Naomi Kobayashi's geometrical forms, which are created by bundling, grouping and layering soft, fibrous material. However, the final forms seem very rigid and solid.

Kobayashi's ring series stood out to me especially as she had glued thread around horizontal circles, to form huge rings, sometimes up to 6metres in diameter. The artist usually leaves one or two gaps in the frame allowing the thread to droop in that section, giving the overall ring a softer accent.

'Like a poet, I wish to chant the vast cosmos of eternity, using fragile threads, instead of words and phrases. This is the basic concept of my works'.

I liked her work, obviously because it deals with fibrous material, which I am hoping to include more in my work, but also because it has quite a natural, delicate element, similar to Kitayama's work.

Artists to look into for Research

Artists to look into:
Ritzi Jacobi
Peter Jacobi

Display Wall and Installation

Whitworth Gallery

After visiting the Trade and Empire Exhibition in the Whitworth Gallery, I had a look at the permanent collection. I was impressed with Ann Sutton's work. Her piece, 'Frozen Fabric: Twills 2', 1983, was a macroweave of a basic textile structure, which wove torn strips of cotton into a square construction, which Sutton had then whitewashed with white acrylic paint. The work was created to allude to the artistic practice of painting on canvas, whilst exploring the 'leitmotif' as her weaving practice, which began in the early 1960s.

Trade and Empire Exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery

I went to see this exhibition in Manchester, as it offered a view of the North's industrial history, which I had previously not considered; the slave trade. The exhibition was created to mark two hundred years since the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. The exhibition highlighted the importance of the slave trade to the story of the Industrial Revolution and to the accumulation of wealth in Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and the North overall, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Every ounce of cotton was imported into Britain from overseas plantations, many of which used slave labour.

The slave plantations in the West Indies provided Manchester with raw cotton during the eighteenth century, alongside the traditional sources of the Middle East and India. From 1790, this shifted to a dependence on the slave plantations of the American south and by 1802 America had become the largest supplier of cotton to the British market.

Slavery continued in North America after the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 and Manchester remained dependent on slave grown cotton. As late as 1860 America supplied 88% of the cotton imported into Britain. Slavery enabled cotton to be grown cheaply and was a major reason why the price of cotton textiles fell steadily from the 1790s to 1840. Also, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, new generations of rich industrialists and other businessmen emerged whose wealth derived from businesses associated with cotton.

The exhibition was really thought-provoking as it linked the rise in the population of the Northern cities, especially Manchester, with its population rise of 17,000 to 180,000 people between 1760 and 1830, to the obvious rise in the cotton industry, which led to the increase of African slaves, estimated at over 12 million. The exhibition also highlighted the working and living conditions of the British workers, which is another facet I was looking at, though the images and written text about the crowded, dirty and dangerous conditions of the Northern cities, was completely overshadowed by the basic lack of human right and the inhumana treatment, which the African slaves had to face.

Rough Drawing of Wall Installation

Leeds Photo Exhibition Along Briggate