Tuesday, January 9, 2018

"This Week" series, "A Fortnight"- Diaristic works.

"This Week III"

"This Week" Series. 
Aspects of the work:
1. Materials used are: 
a. warps -silk that has been dyed in the eco-dye baths used for the picket fence explorations.
b. wefts – cotton fibres ‘unwoven’ from the eco-dyed calico used for the picket fence explorations.
These materials were all in studio stock – ready – at – hand.

2.Weaving is a repetitive activity. The stitching used is based on variations of knot making, drawing through various loops at various frequencies.

3. The pieces are created with one warp sett per day; each sett containing 8 warp ends – referencing the eight hour mundane day (If you sleep eight hours, work eight hours there can be only eight hours left for the everyday). They are built up to a seven day composite or a weekly unit.

4. It is planned to make these on an ongoing series across a period of time.

5. The fineness of the materials used and the unevenness of the subtle colouring is chosen to make the thread work existent but illusive. Shadow created by the mounting of the work amplifies as it masks the actual work. This resonates with mundane work that often only has its visibility in the effect it has of maintaining a functioning existence.

6. The fineness of the materiality and the small scale of the thread work evidences maker commitment or an intensity of emotional investment, reflective of the large part of mundane work being emotional labour.

7. The scale of the created work and the form of presentation are designed to stage an intense viewing experience. The details are incrementally perceived on close inspection. This relates to the micro-detail level of care the mundane is mostly involved with.

8. By creating these works with the concepts behind them I feel I have given a materiality to time.

9. The pieces are inspired by the ephemeral nature of much mundane activity – the tales of the work are loose, often unsecured. The passages of the weaving or stitching are mobile on the warp threads – they are not totally fixed or permanently located on their warp setts.

10. The warps used in these pieces are high value Cambodian raw silk. This is life – valuable, hard to come by. The wefts are recycled threads taken from other projects and reworked in a new nature so instead of being hard packed into a tightly woven pragmatic calico fabric – good for lining curtains but very cheap to purchase – they are treated with delicacy and high regard to create networks of beauty and individuation of each strand.

11. The overall impression created in these pieces is of fragility but they also have a tension and resilience in them with the warps being maintained under tension. This reflects the nature of everyday life – fragile but surprisingly resilient.

12 It is widely believed that the everyday is a set of habituated practices. This description implies things are monotonously repeated identically over and over but in fact that is never the case in the human process – there are always nuances of variation. The weaving and stitching is using a very limited vocab of automatic or habituated activities but every expression is subtly different from all others

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