hot off the hook

 but not pressed yet

This double bed-sized bed-spread, it's on the grass getting a bit damp before I do the final finishing 

The month is bookended by giant squares

 

 

 

at the beginning of the month I made this metre-square patch from old pillowcases to be part of a giant patchwork covering a bridge in Wales 

This stitchy-stuff is in contrast to May which was mostly about inventing  puddings using different sorts of custard

I shall devote next month to gravy

Green shoots and shadows

 

I'm loving the impending sense of spring even more than usual and once again I'm making my annual attempt to get to grips with water colours,  the lesson I have to learn every time is that I go with far too many things,. My 'travelling' water colour set has a choice of tiny paint pots but my fidgetting keeps tipping the paints over and that makes me a bit sweary. 

I have finally realised that the future is monochrome. Last Sunday I went out painting with a solitary paint pot - my world became less blue and more green

Statue Wars

Last month, shortly after Edward Colston the Slaver was pulled off his plinth and dumped in Bristol's city dock the Mayor sent a dawn crew to dredge him out of the water and haul him off to a secure holding place. First thing the following day a fat concrete bloke, wedged in a wheelie bin was parked next to Ed's empty plinth. By dawn the next day the Binman had disappeared.

The weeks passed, no plinth action - until -  4am last Wednesday the famous sculptor Marc Quinn came down from London with a big crew and cranes and ropes and tv cameras to install a 3d printed effigy of Jen Reid, the woman who had climbed onto the plinth as soon as Edward Colston fell off it. The image of her punching the air had circulated around the world, Quinn and many others saw this as an iconic moment and this sculpture was christened 'A Surge of Power'.  All of Bristol was agog and flocked to see Jen and take pictures, to praise or complain and argue about whether or not this was actual history or just fake history.

By dawn the next day, the Mayor's crew had removed Jen, putting her alongside Ed and the Binman. Marc Quinn had not been invited to interfere with our plinth and Bristol should decide its fate democratically.

Good luck with that - but the bar has been set and I am looking forward to the next contender.

Footwear Coordinator Wanted

at the  Royal Shakespeare Company   - can my newfound passion for pockets expand to a general aptitude for sartorial appurtenances? 

'... As Footwear Coordinator, you will be reporting directly to the Head of Costume Props, Footwear and Armoury  ...'  


... and of course I know so much about armour   


art  shoes by Gwen Murphy found here

Jobs jobs jobs

The Natural History Museum is looking for a Curator of Meteorites but too late for me  to apply because I am now employed to bring Art to the Bewildered at a specialised facility on the edge of town. The Bewildered includes myself, the rest of the staff, the residents and the visitors

Despite it being in my job title,  I've stopped using the 'A' word, too many people find it frightening or annoying,  if asked what I do, I've learned to say that my job is to make life more interesting, no-one seems to be able to argue with that.

Data Privacy Rules are being updated - I'm not even allowed to write myself notes anymore let alone tell you what I'm up to, so details will be scant I'm afraid. 

Being part of a big work crew again after two years in anthropological study is delirious. My colleagues all  seem exotically fascinating - there's Big Doreen who told me off on my first day for standing on the wrong mat, and Mousey-Cat who keeps asking me really really sweetly to do 'little jobs' for her. Toya takes up all the space wherever she is, she's covered in tattoos and spends the entirety of every break in the tiny staff room having Facetime with her boyfriend or, in the event of internet breakdown, telling us all about what he-said-she-said last night and the night before, there was a brief moment when she stopped to draw breath and Helga, a young Finnish nurse leapt in to veer the conversation away

I would like one of those tattoo sleeves but for my leg - just one

me: would you call it a tattoo half-a-trouser?

elderly nurse: I don't understand, how can you have a trouser tattoo?

me: Actually it'd be more like a one-legged pair of tights - a tattoo stocking

Toya: .... he says he's taking me out for dinner tonight and I said well I'm paying and he said ...

I've had loads of culture this month

the latest was a visit to the Southbank to see the revamped Hayward Gallery and a massive exhibition of Andreas Gursky's massive photographs. Before seeing the exhibition I went to hear Ralph Rugoff, the Hayward's Director discuss the photographer's themes, framing is a recurring theme, he photographs humans and their stuff contained in a series of boxes within boxes; buildings, cars, offices, rooms ... they all have windows - frames through which we can look at the stuff and at each other.

After the talk I went to look at the photographs, on the way to them I took this one - eat your heart out Gursky!

I'm staying in London this month, visiting culture, taking part in an arts residency and continuing my anthropological research on the Thames Foreshore*

There's socialising to do here too. Last night at supper my friends were loudly denouncing Phantom Thread, a movie I'd thoroughly enjoyed, it's about a very British sort of weirdness, revealed in a way that only a foreigner can manage - according to my friends the only thing good about it were the flowers - an element that I had failed to notice.




* The Thames foreshore is the term for the beaches that appear when the Thames is at low tide - lots of people go there, they do beachcombing, walk their dogs, look at remains of boats and Saxon fishtraps - it's a temporary seaside place

How to defend oneself?

The painter Rose Wylie depicts HRH Elizazabeth First disguised as a piece of furniture to keep attackers at bay. 

On my way back from the Rose Wylie show I visited the Wallace Collection. I recalled hearing a captivating interview with Tobias Capwell the mueum's Curator of Armour and a man with his own collection of custom-made armour - he does a lot of jousting, I remember his comment that one doesn't 'wear' armour, one 'operates' it - it becomes a prosthetic device, I found this intriguing so I went for a closer look.

I found this piece of Lady Armour - also handy for the after-fight Fetish Ball

We've had a bit more Chumpy

in the Life Class, which was divertingly chaotic. I'd booked a pregnant female model for this evening's class but she couldn't make it, so one of the office staff agreed to fall asleep and let us draw her, I put some Agnes Obel on the music box and it was lovely.

Went to an Catalunyan outdoor boogie woogie concert

met this gang of loud women-with-many-fans-and-one-man

the following day we went to see Vivian Maier's photographs

that was a high point

Best resignation letter ever

Sping is here

also noted by the local primary school

today I played hookey from school

to attend a textiles masterclass, by the fabulous Faye McNulty who makes slinky devoré fabric interlaced with thermodynamic ink that glows when you get warm. She also made the massive batik sails for Yinke Shonibare's ship in a bottle that sailed across Trafalgar Square last year and  she makes wild runway creations for the fashion shows.

I have come away clutching recipes for acidic dyes and discharging dyes and instructions for how to burn through the threads of a fabric to reveal an underneath layer. Also I made some very pretty pink and green silk fancies

in cat news
If I leave the valise on it's side with the sections unzipped the cats can slide between the layers and hide while also peeping out to watch me knitting

Hell is other people

    The Divine Comedy - is a firey road trip where Dante and his friend Virgil  go to various places and look at bad naked people on fire. The Botticelli drawings depicting the story are currently on in the Courtauld Gallery and it's brilliant, the link doesn't show the best pictures which is why I've had to make my own version - I particularly like the one where bad priests have been plunged head down into boiling pits of pitch with their feet on fire - Dante has spotted one that he recognises and is trying to say hello.

I also enjoyed the image of soothsayers being punished for trying to look into the future - they've had their heads pulled off and put back on - backwards.

Mainly I've enjoyed how Dante deals with all the horror: at the beginning when it's really monstery and flaming he's clearly screaming like a girl but he soon gets used to it all - here he is in purgatory which is not as bad as hell, this is where people can atone for their sins, like this proud person who can't stand up properly because he's bent under the weight of lots of rocks - also the man is naked, there's nothing to help the chaffing so he's probably really uncomfortable, but there's Dante again trying to make chit chat.

[this blog looks better if you view the web version]

In the news

In Bristol a blind piano tuner is in trouble for touching the bottoms of his female employees and licking them.

In London I am taking care of a huge hairy cat, a noisy madam with fluffy pantalooney legs who creeps up on me when I lie on the lawn and licks my armpit.

I arrived yesterday during a 48-hour tube strike and had to join all the rest of the world marching through the city overtaking grid-locked cars and buses. At St Pancras I passed this scene

Tomorrow I shall go to Tate Modern to see Sonia Delauney

Miranda July

is my big girl crush, I love her writing, her art projects are brilliant and she is very good at titles -I am particularly fond of  Eleven Heavy Things 


As we have both contributed to Sheila Heti's book Women in Clothes - I feel like we are colleagues if not actual friends.

Miranda visited Bristol last night to talk about her new book The First Bad Man (which is great!) and I have spent the last week suppressing my excitement in case it didn't happen*

Just in case she really did show up I resisted eating kippers for lunch as I hoped to get to speak to her.

She showed up, she was patient with the embarrassingly awful interviewer and she was funny, she also signed my copies of her books and was charming.



*last time I went to see a writer at this same venue he didn't show

Three bus stops up the road

from my house there's a prison and all around the prison are streets and streets of samey-looking houses.

One local nosey parker devised a scheme to get a peep into as many people's houses as possible, she suggested that the whole neighbourhood did art in their windows for three hours this evening and let the rest of everybody in the whole world walk around gawking into their houses

AND THEY DID!!!!

This evening I have been peeping into peoples houses - whole front rooms have been transformed into a disco or an aquarium, someone made several little illuminated boxes of glass animal scenarios and many children made Lego-worlds and cardboard Minecraft Worlds in their windows.

One house was bathed in a projection of flames - the house next door had a giant puppet sausage-on-a-toasting-fork tipping towards the flames.

There was a house that had made it's front garden into a beach with a punch-and-judy show and a beach hut and a flock of seagulls on the washing line guarded by a Cliff-Richard-singing-light-flashing dalek.

There were houses that looked like they were full of balloons or full of a forest and lots of people just left their curtains open so you could look at their stuff

and it was great!

Day Two Painting Billboards

Arrived at Bearpit to find the boards I'd started the day before had been scribbled over during the night - adapted designs to reduce the impact of taggers.

Went to get coffee, the women running the Bearpit café were inspecting the newly installed planters; one of them was full of vomit and another's plants were uprooted.

Neighbourly drunks came by to say good morning, a woman stopped to chat and then a young junkie who is magnetically attracted to soft-looking women arrived, he got some change from us and wandered off.

I started painting; an Irish girl-with-a-guitar arrived and started busking. By the end of the first song she had proper money collecting by her feet,  a boy-with-a-guitar turned up, stood beside her and made like he was in her band (they had never met before). Then the junkie returned and circled, trying to work out how to get the money out of her case without anyone noticing, he settled on standing very close to them, jingling his own coins in the hope that people would think he was collecting for the band.

and that is why painting outside is slow work.

Lemurs

today I'm printmaking again

Head fiddling

My friend was trying to explain the notion of opposites to his son: wet/dry, light/dark, heavy/light ... the boy moved swiftly into advanced extremism and asked

... what's the opposite of a frying pan? a tree?


during work-avoidance today I wondered what the opposite of a dinosaur might be and came up with a feather, bracken, a woodlouse and flu.  BUT ... if the dinosaur was a metaphor for Venice then it's opposite could be an Asian stilt village or the Gobi desert... I have no idea where this is going



I was also thinking of Andy Goldsworthy because I think he's fab

Zig Zag

Before setting off for Spain I went to see this Francesca Woodman exhibition focusing on the zigzagginess of her photographic compositions. I now see zigzags everywhere - even when I'm wondering about the animal that needs that nest so big but can also balance itself and babies on top of a bell tower

and the bells must be bothersome - maybe they go out for dinner on Sundays

It was this kind of day today

jug: bastien aubry and dimitri broquard