can you make embroidery from detailed photo images?

my creativity has been focused on a new home.
textiles follow from this state. here are photos i want to register as potential embroidery designs:

hmmmm 

a kind of writing

discarded yarn, like a kind of writing:




 yarn and inner tube... lines of the week's activity

Tunisia (2)

Tribute/Tributary

In a discussion this evening I was reminded of an image I took in Greece, 2008, and how I had been thinking of Eva Hesse when I had composed it.

It's nice to see it again.

Bitter Cold, Grey Park...

...look at the little feet!

A Return to the Thames

The first of these videos is a part of the view from a pub window, right on the Thames. It's the changing colours that made me want to record it.



As often happens, once you do something with the original impulse, some other interest wakes up. It's as if after videoing water, the next step is to think about the framing of that video of water. I find myself making another video with the conscious addition of structures.



I haven't commented on the sounds. They're important, as two sensations overlapping to create the moment, and perhaps in an incongruous manner. The fad for 'assemblage' has been stimulating my thoughts recently. For the 2nd video I went outside and we lost the hubbub of people and beer.

Work Lines III (continuous update)

Edward Abbey

Mugabe and the White African, Channel 4

The fold of one 'half' over the other - a geological fold, physical land based in my imagination.
The camera, we/I moves from the partition (head on) between the halves and takes the dominant's side.
Woman is folded over,
unseen unheard from beneath Man's enfoldment.
Man seeks/achieves transcendence by overcoming Woman (animal) - Woman seeks transcendence by overcoming her animality. Again, Man's viewpoint - Woman nothing more than animal. To what extent is our language of this talk contributing to this understanding?
Language - rational, of man's domain?
Where is Woman subsumed? Within language?
Investigate animality.

The difference between knowing something through language and learning something through experience.
Investing the material with the spiritual - sacred earth vs. sacred thought, sacred feeling, sacred energy.
The feeling of fabric against skin - erotic, not because it fits idea of the erotic.
The moment of realisation - crystallisation, condensement, reification of new reality where the elements/conditions rearranged.

Division between sensible and conceptual/Idea - how this translates into 'eco', Natural, concepts of.

"The proper test is not that of finality, but of progress."
A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, Free Press corrected edition, p14

Quite nice having only limited powers of perception or sensitivity to things. Less responsibility to the chains of effect that lead out of every event, moment, thing.

Sensitivity: to take on - suffer - great imprints from things; to be impressed upon in great depth and length by the imprint of things.
- Not only prone to being hurt.

How do you make a structure? How do you make a visual representation of a structure?
Doomed to fail.
Francis Alÿs a structuralist - the pictures, the walking. Re-inscribing structure(s).

A painting reduces all elements, conditions, to an equality of substance and makes possible the re-rendering of both visible and invisible components on this new plane, for the ready communication of this portrayal and recreation within this new plane's substance.
The absurdity of trying to represent, make real/sensible structures, that are inherently non-representable. Or even just obscured too much for us to recognise this structual form. If it exists, visibly/sensibly or not, can we re-present it in sensible form?
By attempting, Man exercises his capacity for freedom and action and the right to transcend it, change it, have control of his destination.

Work Lines II (continuous update)

Agacinski

The sensitive object
TO TRY
Empiricism vs. Conceptualism

╚►

out of this an -No Theory
experiential mode
of DOING art emerges.


Representing the non-representable through the transformation of painting, through the mystery of the process of painting making real the mystery of the object (Idea or otherwise) itself. And visa versa...
Art being the act, the simple narrative of how it works.

Bernstein

Rationalism being a cognition of dead objects.
Living is deligitimised.
What would be the affinities between existences?
Wielding the critical axe - scything through the problem to pit the various conditions of the concept, question, problem against itself. Re-forming or reconfiguring the problem to produce a new object.


I am like a weather vane.

Where J. stands in for the cynic
<—> making both ways. All experiences, events, people, things like tokens, signs, symbols, for the meaning we have associated with them/it. For our own universe/service. Works both ways —> what happens as this tokenography works the other way?
Empty ourselves out from centre of universe - we are locus for other peoples!

David B. Smith
Charlotte Street

www.speculativeheresy.wordpress.com
www.planomenology.wordpress.com
http://www.k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/

laura douglas

Georges Braque
Bottle and Fishes, 1910-2

At losing ones job:
raw despair
at the primordial fear at prospect
of not being able
to support oneself,
elated at the
promise of new beginnings,
new chances, new
opportunities. Maybe
things'll get better!
Sick of this place
anyway.
Brutal anger at the
injustice of it all.
How has this been
allowed to happen?

www.opelori.com

MONOSKOP
PDFs.

Duty
manager
scoffing
the biscuits

The Overlap Series: Jogger
(with comic event)
2000-1


The Emancipatory.
Emancipation
as
revelation
Sacrifice
-McCarthy

Carly Simon
What's the rule?
Adorno?
(internalising the law/s)
Baldessari

Colouring my mind
Romanticism w/ its
cheap promise of c o m p l e t i o n


plays itself out at my mercy


Imagine, being given edifaces and abysses with our
birth and box of characteristics. The abyss we carry and on the other side of the cut
lies All That We Cannot See. All That We Cannot See - our blindnesses, our abjects, our beasts.
We cannot see them. They look like merky areas
of unseeing.
They unleash themselves on all that we encounter, colouring our perceptions, unknown to us.
Our neighbours,
the other beings we come into contact with can see,
they see our blindnesses, they make form
from what we don't delimit. Their eyes and their
powers make things out of our unseeing and give them back to us as real life encounters, the incidences, the bus stop chats with strangers, the friend round for tea, the kiss, the supermarket queue.

Other people see out blindnessess.

Bird song anchor points
To elevate
Come back to
yourself
Feel your periphery again
Feel your edge.

John Buckens

Snatched London in the Autumn

Some quick randoms...

15th September 2009

Alrighty. Next stage: intermittent (guerrilla?) internet visits (get in get out), dump photos and videos and some thoughts. Disappear completely again.







These shots were from the night of my 30th Birthday.

More on that Discursive Shift

It's funny, I have felt stumped by a niggling worry that I cannot place myself at the moment, that I don't know where I am, as if this is a problem to be overcome and solved before I can resume an art practice or a commitment to writing regularly.

I wonder how much projecting ourselves into the future is locationally influenced. In Greece I let it go, circumstances forced me to live according to my mood, the space my inner world seemed to create beyond my physical limits in which to line the path before me on that day: the bad mood signifying a sullen commitment to my internal movements, a good mood turning my insides outside through a beaming smile.

Anyway. The manner in which my lack of placement has been known to me is the unease that my artwork - and particularly my blog - has been accompanied by when I have thought about it. I have noticed that my clothing style has changed in able to converse more relevantly with my London setting, and now I look on the works that I produced in the last year with the same distancing judgment, that my work was fine for the setting I was in but it must now be updated, freed of its innocence somehow, its safe position as outsider looking in, automatically possessed of the outsider/artist eye.

What am I, who am I here? Good questions. What I am is someone trying to define myself in this mix, knowing intellectually that definition should be treated with suspicion. Who am I? Silence. Silenced by the lack of definition.

I let the new thoughts crowd in: am I a failure that at my age I am (only) a gallery attendant and not successful as something of my own? How successful am I at playing the game? being part of this city? showing that I am part of it? what is my art? what do I want to achieve? what do I want to create? what do I want to say? what do I think?

Who do I want to be?

I am looking now at a set of cardboard storing boxes piled up beside my table. They are each wearing a different configuration of light and shadow. I think to myself 'it's beautiful' and I reach for the camera. After taking a series of shots I put the camera down, and I think about this decision making process I am involved in while photographing: natural shape, being - according to a kind of faith that I possess - instinctively the same as the shapes that our thoughts take. All our inner workings follow the same laws that the natural world does and therefore we can understand our own workings by seeing the similarity, or instinctively feeling a resonance with these shapes, knowing they tell us something about the behaviour of thoughts, conceptualising, and creativity.

But this thing about what is beautiful sticks with me here in London. Beauty is unquestioned to the traveller in Greece and being a tourist believing she had the kind of eye that went just that little bit further than the average tourist's goes unquestioned. Read: my ego met no major external challenges. By contrast, London is immense and home to countless intelligent, questioning, 'creatives'; they have already marked out the territory for themselves. London is grimy and difficult. It is competitive and requires of us hard work. And it is so big that it is difficult to get perspective.

My experience of London has always been one of looking for my place, although perhaps actually that is just life. It was always expressed by radical changes in the clothes that I wore, identities I assume, and continues to. It occurs to me this morning that the question of place - geographically, psychologically etc. is an intersection that pegs together a set of queries that I am so used to living with that I don't even see them, and yet they are the flimsy abode that I have lived within since I can remember. It's funny how far we go to discover new territory and yet the new material is just more of ourselves uncovered.

Last Batches of Bodmin #1

I'm just uploading the last few Bodmin images that still command my attention in an attempt to move on.

Some Quickies...

...I'm on fire!

Sunset this evening:

Observations #3

Observations #2

I'm getting tardy I know, but there are reasons.
Some observations recently in words:

So many birds in cages, birds singing gloriously, nailed to a crumbling wall, above the ancient woman who keeps them there.
Birds in cages outside the petshop. Chorus of competing singing and chirping to the accompaniment of terrifying Greek traffic on a tuesday morning. Birds calling to be noticed in cages.

A lone cockroach outside the supermarket. Retreating from the pavement as we pass. Returns to its position when we are gone.

A basketball court at night with the stars just visible despite the floodlight. Tall metal arms holding the hoops and their shadows falling over the court, one arm's shadow intersecting with an oilstain, interconnected, a centipede makes a quick scuttle across both and into the dark on the other side.

A rusty drain pipe protruding from the middle of a balcony four floors above us. Showering the street with soapy water. At midnight there were rivers of the stuff making inky landscapes all over our walk home.

A fish with a tail of fine silk billowing out behind it, locked in a never ending forward motion in a glass bowl. Glassy eyes that don't register me.

Market Day

Everything is a sensual feast at the moment and with it comes the urge to preserve or possess it all. I think that might need investigating - possession - a sign of the times or inheritance..? In my small way I wonder if my wish to hold on is because the date of my departure from Greece is looming ever closer.

Today C and I went to the λαϊκή ('leiki' - street market) and gawped at the amazing array of fresh produce. We talked of bringing our cameras next week to mark my final visit and try and save something of the visual experience. It was the fish that caught my eyes the most. Plump, compact, tiny bodies seemingly pushing out at their taught skin; the silver and yellow and black and blue shimmering; the shape of many of them slippery on top of each other; the death that their prettiness distracts me from until wide open jelly eyes stare me right in the face. Pools of bloody water collecting in plastic buckets under the table.

In the heat all smells are pungent, lettuces reek, parsley - fennel - celery emanate, peaches and nectarines drift down the busy corridor of humans pushing past each other, trolleys over sandled feet and body odor as normal as toothy grins and rough hands throwing bags of produce from the scales to the customer. I can let most of the noises ride past me as I don't understand much of the Greek.

There was an enormous woman in a bright red dress. Her flesh was visible underneath the thin layer, rolling, and she had no apology for it. I smile, this red is dazzling and suits the market. Mushrooms, peppers haphazardly splayed over everything, live rabbits to coo over, thyme, olives in vats, sweaty feta cheese, tomatoes tomatoes tomatoes, cucumber, cherries, potatoes, errant snails moving in their boxes. When we cleared the stalls the heat was unbearable.

Sticky

It's really hot here. Hot in a sticky mosquito-bitten irritating and grubby kind of way. I'm not coping very well.

I want to put something up though just to keep momentum. This image is a favourite from my recent trek down the Samaria Gorge. I want to write/post more about it later but the effort to concentrate is beyond me right now.

Derrida Drawing

Not sure if this will work but anyway...



..it's the product of the last talk on Derrida I attended at LSE, over a year ago now. I don't know if it works because the pencil is too fine really for the scan, but maybe the general idea is there - responding to the discussion with both words and doodles or free-flowing pencil marks, like automatic drawing...

Some Light Shaping

Observations

Like I've said before, there are so many reasons to write or to throw something out into the world. Today my ventures are like the lone survivor clinging to a piece of his broken ship, his desperate grasp at life before being dashed against the rocks in one of Poseidon's best storms. A little dramatic, but then maybe that's part of feeling melancholic - the dramatic, the performance, the identity in it.