I took a chunk out of one of Bo’s pieces, and patchworked the pixels. His piece of work was made from a photo of one of my disembroidery pieces.
I have taken the basic building blocks, and by rendering them in pattern, allowed for the possibility of yet another magnification, another layer of pixellation… the implication being we could spiral down forever. I quite like the idea that by a process of magnification, you lose sight of what you are doing, what you can see. Things don’t become clearer at all: the work of art being greater than the sum of its parts.
There is a Terry Pratchett book in which the Universal Auditors dismantle the works of art in order to see how they work. (A reliable source tells me it’s Thief of Time). They weigh the pigments, ordered in little piles upon the floor, and they don’t understand.*
I have so far nibbled at the edges of the little chunks of embroidery, still keeping in my head that they are attractive, and should remain so. I think it is time to get brutal. I shall “Audit” a couple of them and see how it goes. Are they greater than the sum of their parts? Can I dismantle them, and reassemble them using the same bits?
* When I was doing the MA I used to quote Bachelard and Deleuze… now it’s Pratchett. I find when working with young people one has to keep abreast of popular culture.
