Displacement activity

 We had so much rain with those amazing storms yesterday that our grounds were waterlogged today. Getting up to my shed to finish some outstanding print work was out of the question unless I wanted to try it by canoe. So, I played around with something that had been in my head for a while.

 I've been putting a workshop together on flexible book structures like flexagons and quatragons and have become really interested in things that explore moving images like mutoscopes and zoetropes etc. In a conversation with a friend the other day we talked about using an interactive way to display work at the end of a course. She is a surface pattern designer and wanted to find a novel way to get people to look at her work. As I have been playing with similar ideas I suggested she look at kaleidocycles and how to make them on You Tube.

 Naturally, once I'd made the suggestion I had to give it a go myself. I found a downloadable template  and made a small one on an A4 sheet with a photo of some beetles that I had.

 Then I scaled it up to A3 and combined some colour and black and white beetle images, sticking the diamond shapes on to the card template individually to help understand how much one can control the composition of these things by where they are placed  and the orientation of them too.

 I really like the way they move in the hand and give you four viewing options as they are turned. Most of the online video tutorials focus on patterns , which might work for my friend,  but I think this is an idea that can be pushed further with thought. Once you understand that the template is a set layout of equilateral triangles you realise that the basic unit can be scaled up or down and can create some intriguing pieces.

With that in mind I've cut some larger triangles to try on paper up to A2 or A1 but the forecast is for dry weather tomorrow and I think I'd better plan to finish what I've started in the shed rather than continue with what I am calling 'displacement activity'. Good fun though. If you're interested in folding and playing do have a go.

Storm Warning

 I've been joining in with a pen and ink drawing group each Tuesday morning for the last few months. Today was our last meeting so we decided to visit an exhibition in St Davids about geology and artists' response to it. That was fascinating enough but the weather we had today was distracting as during our session we had sun, snow, hail and wind. All in the space of two hours. The journey home on the coast road takes me down and along the pebble bank of Newgale Beach. As I came down the hill today the sea was incredible. Waves were high and the sky was ferocious.

As I had my camera with me to take photos of our last get-together I decided to  walk up and see what I could capture. Newgale is a steep bank with a beach on the other side of it but the sea was so high today it almost looked level. Froth and spume was everywhere and the wind was very cold and whippy. I walked up one of the boardwalks put down to help get people up and over the pebbles and as I stood at the top panning round with the camera it felt like the wind was flaying my skin! Looking in the mirror when I got back into the car showed a very, very red and raw face and I was only out there for about 5 minutes as it hurt to stand there any longer.

The storms have persisted on and off for the rest of the day. Brooding skies and hailstones have been the norm. Someone told me today that early arriving house martins had been spotted in Tenby so they think it is Spring and have migrated home to breed. After today, I'd not be surprised if they didn't fly back to Africa, and quick!!

If this is Spring, roll on Summer....

Winter blues

After six weeks  I took the tapes from my hand this week as the fracture in my little finger is finally healed, but it is still swollen and I am unable to bend it much. Thinking that activity is the best medicine I looked at my list of 'things to try' that I jot down when the ideas come to me and set about trying to encourage my hand to return to normal duty.
I have become involved in trying out another alternative photographic technique this week (more later!) and whenever I go down this road my mind goes back to cyanotypes, the technique that started it all for me. Despite having new chemicals I still have lots of the solution that I made up for a workshop nearly three years ago and every time I say I won't use it again, I have to push it and see if there is anything left to it.

 I have cyanotyped on top of rusted paper before and thought I'd try it on fabric. The piece I chose is quite old and the rust marks were made with fabric laid out on bubble wrap and then rusted tools laid out on top, so it has a definite right side and wrong side as the bubble wrap clearly left an impression. I decided I'd make the wrong side, the right side,for this experiment and I soaked the fabric with the cyanotype solution. Interestingly the rust resisted the solution and it just sat on the top. I exposed it for about 15 minutes and the resist is clear by the fact that the rear of the fabric (above) is much paler than the front.

 Here on the front I put the acetate that I used for my screen print trying to see if the rust worked with the beetles.

 The results were great and now I am thinking about adding a gum arabic transfer on top of the print. Time will tell. In the meantime while I was waiting for the fabric to expose I found a pile of material that I'd either cyanotyped or indigo dyed many moons ago. I had started to make some patchwork pieces to use them up and obviously forgotten all about them. Now I've brought them back to the house and I started doing some more last night. Keeps the hands moving and is quite calming. Just love those blues but wishing for a bit more sunshine to play with rust and cyanotype again!

Postcards from the edge

 I was delighted at the end of last year when Fiona asked if I'd like to join her and 4 of her  friends in a postcard print exchange for 2017. I jumped at the chance for sharing ideas and the parameters were straightforward:- send four postcards to everyone else on the list, once every three months, in a pre-determined size and picking from a list of print techniques to realise them in.

 All postcards had to respond to the changing seasons so January's offering was Summer....
now I know it's not summer here but it is in the southern hemisphere and I did not want to be out of kilter so I did my summer postcards in December for January posting and I am currently contemplating a collagraph for autumn to be posted in early April.

 I chose to do a monoprint based on a Barbara Kingsolver quote from the book 'Prodigal Summer' and I sat back to wait for mine to arrive. Susan's came first followed by Kim, Andrina, Fiona and Steph. Poor Stephanie's took 2 months to reach me and we'd almost given up hope of getting a full set and then it just appeared last week. So, now I had 6 including my own and wanted to find a way to keep them all together. As I always slip in default mode and make a book I cracked on with an idea today.

 I made a mock up of a double folded accordion book and made pockets to slide each postcard into. I thought cutting a letter out of the front would show a peep of the postcard and make it relevant as all the seasons have 6 characters so I could make a full set by the end of the exchange.

 Then I just cut off one of the flaps and turned it on itself to neaten the front. I was thinking of adding covers but I used quite thick paper for this exercise and just drawing or printing something on the front may be enough. I am well aware that my cutting is wonky but I did not plan it too closely. I made it just to see if it would do the job and I think it will although I need to re-think the right typeface to use. I also know that summer has two 'm's' but Blogger won't upload the second photo for some reason which was housing Susan's postcard. I love technology!!

 That last statement is of course only partly true.......

 I went up to Bristol yesterday to do some screen printing and had a mock up of all these beetles from either my drawings or my photos from the Natural History Museum in Oxford. I cut them out and stuck them all on a circular piece of paper because I have been looking at making toroidal books recently. Simon, who was running the workshop said I work in a very analogue way because most people would have scanned all the drawings in and moved them around in Photoshop. Well, I use Photoshop a lot but like to have my hand in things and quite enjoy messing about with scale on the photocopier and superimposing images on top of one another.

 With the circular book in mind I bought these old sheets which I think might be from a tachograph or something similar and I printed by beetle ring onto them for a bit of experimentation. I might use them individually or stick and cut them back to back before making the book. I shall reveal all when I decide.

In my 'analogue' way I had produced some imagery for the 'winter' postcard for the exchange already. As we're in the middle of these freezing temperatures it is a season uppermost in my thoughts! Simon altered it in Photoshop to get it onto acetate and I gaily printed 8 versions to get 6 good ones but I have noticed today that they are too small! He may have changed my original or I made an error up front. Who knows?
The long and short of it is that I have my postcards for July already but not only are they the wrong size, I have realised today that screenprinting is not one of the disciplines on the list. Drat and curses.
I'm not showing them here just in case..... but if I have a surfeit of winter themed postcards to get rid of.... anyone want something sent from Wales?

Getting ahead

 About a month ago I nearly fell down the stairs but I managed to save myself by catching my hand in the banister, resulting in a fractured finger. I heard a sickening crack and thought I'd broken bones so a fracture was getting off lightly. Since then my hand has had to be taped up and you realise how important every digit is when you don't have use of all 10 of them! Luckily it was my right hand and I am left handed so it could have been worse. In fact I could have fallen badly and done myself a bad injury so I consider myself very fortunate. I have been able to carry on drawing this month and I have been working on ideas for a screenprint as I am going up to Bristol this weekend to get some screens exposed with Simon again. He has set up a special day for me and one other so I aim to make the most of it and I need both hands strong enough to pull that squeegee!!

I've been drawing beetles and hellebores - as usual, with more ideas than I can fit into the time allowed - but I also want to do something local to here so I went up to St Davids Cathedral yesterday to add more photos to my groaning files.

 I've lost count of how many times I've been up to St Davids in the 20 years we've lived here but there is always something new to see. Yesterday it was empty of people, probably because Wales were playing Italy in the Six Nations at the same time. St. Davids was like a ghost town so the cathedral seemed like it was all mine, except this time I got more involved with what was outside rather than inside.

 I realised that I had never walked around the whole perimeter and looked in detail at the  statues either side of the big windows. The two above are either side of the main door but the others are towards the east end, mainly in shadow in the afternoon. Some are eroded beyond recognition but others stand out.

 I love this lady clad in her sandstone wimple and the creature below was a real find.

 My favourite is the young man. Something about those flowing locks and the faraway look in his eyes just speak to me. I can see me returning just to see what he looks like in different light. Yesterday was cold but sunny and he was in shade for the afternoon. I might try an early morning to see if his features are highlighted more sharply then.

And finally, when they restored the east end of the cathedral they added a sculpture of the last Dean, John Wyn Evans, a figure I remember well. My husband said 'Oh look there's Eric Morecambe'.....
which got a withering look from me, but at the moment I need him as a driver so I kept my thoughts to myself. I need to stay strapped up for at least another two weeks but when I go back for the next look , I shall drive myself, and leave him at home!

Murmurings

 I have a great friend who rants and gets into a real tizz about the way hedgerows are managed by farmers. She writes to the local paper and has been known to stop contractors in their tracks and question them as to why they are cutting hedges back so roughly rather than laying them in the good old fashioned way.

I am with her every step of the way, probably more so since the old farmer with land around us passed away a couple of years ago. His rented land , after over 75 years in one family, now has new tenants, charged by the local estate who own it with bringing everything into the 21st century. Two years ago the hedges on fields on our side of the road were chopped away. We felt exposed and vulnerable. Our road was always a bit hidden and overgrown and people whizzed past our house without even seeing it. But life moves on and the new hedges are settling in and growing better but the downside has been the complete disappearance of ground nesting yellowhammers in our garden. Already a red data list species, we've gone from a healthy winter population to no winter population as their habitat has been lost. Similarly we no longer enjoy the constant hoots of tawny owls at night as much as we used to. It is definitely a case of winners and losers.

 And then just after Christmas the contractors started on the other side of the road. It's poor land, very marshy and boggy, but the estate have found someone to take it on with free rent provided they cut the trees on the roadside boundaries. In one afternoon we lost all of the cover we have had for over 16 years and it has taken some getting used to despite knowing that some of the trees were rotten and failing.

 In truth, the house is lighter and the sudden loss of so many old trees has meant even more birds in our garden. Every morning we delight in four or five jays feeding together as a group, obviously missing their daily roost somewhere. Buzzards are more frequent and so is the sight of red kites overhead, but it is late afternoon where we notice the greatest difference.

 We've always enjoyed large numbers of starlings flying overhead to their  night time roost in the winter. They congregate in their thousands each day at the massive farm half a mile down the road and swoop over about 4pm.... except that since the trees came down they've taken to stopping off in the trees in front of the house and in the garden. I start to hear a noise and look up to see them land in my favourite ash tree, building in numbers.

 Very soon they are everywhere, on the ground, in the trees, in the air and the noise is deafening.

As soon as I open my back door for a better look they are off like lightning and the noise of their wings as they take off en masse is quite thrilling. Watching them duck and dive together in the field is also one of natures wonders but lots of birds mean a lot of mess so whilst we're enjoying this as a benefit of the hedges and trees being cut it takes some getting used to.

I've yet to tell my friend what they've done but she's coming over next week and I know she will be horrified. I'm thinking of making her arrive at 4pm and hope she will be taken by the spectacle in the air and not see the one on the ground!

POSTSCRIPT

For those that have asked me, let me tell you that my friend had steam coming out of her ears when she came yesterday. In the meantime my husband had visited the estate office to find that a tree survey should have been done before the cutting so whilst there were apologies all round that the contractor went ahead too soon, the deed has been done. Someone has been back to tidy up the whole roadside boundary but what is lost is lost. I try to be philosophical as it is not our land and we do not have any rights over how it is managed. In small communities like ours you want to keep people working with you, not against. The field contained within has been a bog for years but now the trees are gone it is going to be drained so I wait to see what happens next.
In the meantime the starlings have stopped meeting in our ash tree en route to the overnight roost but they are gathering in larger and larger numbers and you can time the afternoon fly past to within a few minutes either way. My friend stayed to see it and thought it wonderful leaving us both being philosophical about the outcomes of change.

Year end ... new beginnings

I am patiently waiting for 2016 to end and open a door on another chapter. I hope it will be better than the one we've had this year. It has been like a year like no other in my memory with contrasting highs and lows. Sadly, more lows than highs.

For someone of my tender age we've lost  musical heroes this year in David Bowie and  Prince, and then we lose Rick Parfitt and George Michael within two days of each other. News about Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds seals a week of strange tidings and has had me wondering 'who next?'
A phone call today tells me that 'who next' is an old friend from newspaper days who passed away in Ireland yesterday after a long fight with cancer. We had e mail exchanges this year when he was well enough to write and his humour will leave me with wonderful memories of friendship.

The political upheaval of Brexit in the summer had me wondering if the inmates were now running the asylum. Recent events here and abroad makes me conclude that they might be. So many others seems to have an agenda that differs to mine. I want the impossible it seems. I'd like to see a resolution in Syria in 2017 and hope for refugees. Faint hope I suspect.

I am not usually so introspective but I think the biggest loss, that of the passing of Leonard Cohen, has made me so this year. Revisiting the  words from 'Anthem' makes me realise what an important step change there has been in 2016. Eyes down for something more positive in 2017. Bring it on.