With the rest of the flexi-ply prepared and ready to be put on the final structure, tomorrow I am all set with bleach and wire brushes to scrub clean the studio floor. This is because once the structure is up it will be too heavy to be moved, and so everything has to be pre-prepared for Friday which is when the antechamber, and hopefully the main room, will be erected.
In the meantime I have been working on my tenth embroidery – the silicate crust of Io, one of the innermost of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter. Io jumped out to grasp my attention due to its sickly (of course, colour enhanced) surface, pitted with large spots and pimples that have a range of patterns and complexity. Io’s several volcanoes produce plumes of sulphur and sulphur dioxide, which is quite possibly the cause of Io’s colouring – colouring that looks as if it really might smell.
I have great plans for this embroidery, depending upon how it turns out. My next focus will most likely also be a moon – so far their surfaces have been the most interesting to me, but having embroidered two galaxies, their complex pull is also tempting. I have not yet felt the urge to explore star nurseries, as it is the lure of other worlds that is captivating my interest, not worlds that will be, or worlds that were.
Once the antechamber is up and painted (along with everything else) I will then have to tackle the task of how to frame the embroideries. I have a good idea of stretching and presentation, but this is going to be difficult to see through into reality. I am in week 8 of my course at the moment: after week 9 many resources at Brookes will then be partially closed over Easter. If everything is set up by then, embroidering from home and working into the antechamber should be easy. Looking at the surfaces of planets through images taken by telescopes, however, I am reminded of a musing explored through my creative text in The Divine Stitch:
We cannot touch space, or feel it with our own forms; rather we must experience it through metal, through optics, through machinery, and through technology. We are thus contradictory in ourselves: we are both detached from our universe and a part of it.
