This weekend I managed to finish the latest embroidery in my – now – series of eight. Of course this is still not enough for me to stop. I feel I should have at least ten to work with by the time the degree show comes around, and today I found myself subconsciously bumping that number up to an ambitious twelve in a quick conversation about my work to my boyfriend.
I should mention here the average time it takes to create one of these small, 9cm by 9cm pieces of work, if only to highlight how unlikely my proposed mental targets are. Two weeks is the general completion-time, and that’s with several five-hour sessions each day. My eyes are going to be ruined. The long hours required to do the making does not seem too problematic to me, as they shoot by. My progress, however, fools me quite often into thinking I have achieved a lot in half an hour, until I check the time and discover that the small 3cm section I have so swiftly sewn actually took several hours.
It is, however, very exciting to untwist the screw in the embroidery hoop when that last stich is laid, to pop out the inner-hoop from the outer support to be left with a fine, flat disk of sublime texture. The colours also excite me deeply. I have just set up my next aim, the bloodied crevasses of Europa, and laid the first tentative stitches that always so neat. It is already too late in the day to do much else tonight thanks to an unwelcome cold, but with just one tutorial tomorrow to discuss my progress with my creative writing task, I am looking forward to several hours of embroidery-related labour on Monday.
This week I will also be sawing out the circular base and roof of my final piece. A prospect I am slightly nervous about as it requires a steady hand, (one thing I do not possess, apart from when it comes to drawing, sewing and painting [but of nothing else, especially not the painting of nails]), and lots of heavy lifting. My rough estimate to get the whole thing made in three weeks however seems to be about right, and I am currently waiting with baited breath to see if my course leader will let me move my final piece into my given gallery space a few weeks early so that I can ‘decorate’ it and work into it with research. I have curtains to make and paint to buy, as well as brass to engrave and vinyl to use. Art, I think, is the most expensive subject to undertake at university.
With this post I have decided not to show my latest work, but rather one of my earlier ones as Enceladus is currently being cleaned. The piece is Volcano on Venus, and is one of my favourites, if only for the Mayan-like design and the bold, boiling colours. All of the images I have been working with are either from Hubble or Cassini, so I am aware that they may not be completely true to their natural colours. But after my investigations into ‘scopic regimes’ I quite like that fact, that the disintegration of the raw image information is to be reconstructed by an isolated view, my view. Much of our interaction with the cosmos is broken down and reconstructed in similar circumstances. Through examining space through optics, the image of what we see can perhaps never be a completely true representation, or be entirely universal among us. This ‘loss’ of information in order to record and digest our interactions is visible through all of art’s attempts to engage with celestial bodies throughout history.
I am aiming to stock up on card tomorrow for my scale-model of the work. I hope it will highlight any issues before I make any mistakes in wood format, so watch this space. I am sure you will know if it has all gone horribly wrong: for there will be a silence on here for quite some time.
