IN/OUT

I have had a good two days of painting and the bricks are beginning to look good. Another few coats and they will be finished.

Today I met with artist Emily Pitts to discuss a talk she will be giving during this year’s Chorlton Festival. Emily will be giving a talk about Women Artists who use text, at Chorlton Library 7-9pm on Monday 23rd May.

I will provide a few words about my piece for the Festival, so if you are in the neighbourhood do pop along.

Lets Get Weaving!

A large part of my work involves using hand knitting, because of its historical associations with gender. I am currently working on a group of new pieces. These will begin as drawings and observations, of buildings, my environment and from magazines and TV.

I want to record my process here, from initial drawings and test pieces. I welcome your comments, constructive please!

When I was young we had a family saying: Lets Get Weaving! Used when we had done enough talking and prevaricating and needed to get down to some work. There is always a point when I have to fix on a piece to make, rather than just cutting things up and sticking then in my sketchbook, when thought turns to action. This blog is a half way house – a liminal space if you will. Well that’s my aim, we shall see.

I like to build up layers of meaning in the work, by the references it makes to other artists’ practice and by pushing the images through various processes and stages so they are barely recognisable. This may take the form of knitting patterns transformed into concrete poems, or the use of digital manipulating in my camera or in the computer.

RiverText: I have been here before (Bookman Old Style)

by Jacqueline Wylie

For the Chorlton Arts Festival in 2006 I positioned 3 text pieces in various sites around Chorlton Ees. For one piece I placed bricks with letters painted on into the bed of Chorlton Brook that read FLUX.

These three pieces were made in response to Swine Flu and the real threat that wild bird would be culled on the Ees as they were throughout Europe at the time. I had visited Turkey that year and was aware of the absence of birds, very strange.

For this year’s Festival I am revisiting this by placing a new text piece in the brook as a response to the current Swine Flu outbreak. Chorlton Brook flows on regardless to what is going on around, if it could speak it might say “I have been here before.”

I am painting individual letters on bricks (using eco friendly, biodegradable paint) and intend to place them in the bed of the brook so that they can be read from a nearby bridge. “Jacqueline Wylie has placed a concrete poem in Chorlton Brook. It emerges from the flowing water as a comment on recent events such as Pandemic Flu and Regime change. If the brook could speak, what would it say?”

Its April 2011, the bricks have arrived in my studio, the result of a scavenge around the corner from the studio on Chapel Town Street. Shush, don’t tell anybody! I have sourced some lovely eco friendly paint and now I need to finish producing my templates and get painting.

The previous peice I did “FLUX” was only 4 bricks, this time I’m using 19 so this will be a serious logistical nightmare. I now have a slight but persistent worry – how will I move them all? Individually they are quite heavy. Also the banks of the river have been built up recently so getting into the river will be more of a challenge. I may get very wet!

Don’t you find this happens a lot making work? You get all excited about an idea, talking it up in a proposal, and then you have to make it happen!