pix

Ok…

I’m tying myself in knots thinking about this…

I have a list of questions I’m working through to try to make sense of it.

Deconstruction/reconstruction – when you deconstruct something do you necessarily make it less?

Is it degenerated?

So am I aiming for something less than the original image?

Or am I looking at it closely to find some truth in it?

Am I really able to reconstruct something original from that degeneration?

Will it inherently always be less than the thing I started with?

But I didn’t like what I started with.

I like what we have both done with it more than the original piece.

I said that when you get in close you can’t see it anymore… does that by definition mean that it is less?

“Less is more”?

Is the fact I can no longer see the original work actually what I am aiming for?

I can’t see the piece I hated, that’s good.

I can see my stitches that I like, that’s good.

Bo asked how far he could push his process and still see my work. Actually, before I sent him the images, I had done enough deconstruction to mean he could not see what it originally looked like…

Bo, did I ever send a photo of the (in)complete work before I chopped it up?

Do you want to see it?

Should I show it here?

I also wrote about a “spiralling down”, but maybe I’d feel better if I said spiralling up?

I think about layers and depth here. Am I just working at one level, just responding to what is sent and not really getting anywhere?

Bo is right about addiction… but I’m not feeding his, I’m validating my own by implicating him. The temptation is to look at the dozens of images he sends to me, and make a response to each one. Just translating it into fabric and stitch… lazy…

I have enough stimuli to make a thousand embroideries, a million quilts… each one another “fix”?

But are they merely fabric illustrations of Bo’s work?

I have to ensure my brain is engaged, must not get drunk on the images swimming around my brain.

Back to the single stitch, the single pixel. Take it to that, examine, rebuild afresh.

Disembroider/re-embroider? I have spent half a day totally dismantling, or “auditing” one of the little pieces. I ended up with a pile of assorted fluff and knots, three pieces that were reusable, in total about 12 inches of thread, and a canvas that was warped and for the most part, unusable. It was a soul destroying process, not in the least creative. Of course not. But the fact I was left with nothing that I could practically reconstruct from it meant I probably won’t be doing it again. Even though I knew it had to be done once, just to find out. So I will do some more play, and see where it gets me. The canvas embroideries are complex and tangled, even though built upon the even weave pixel-grid canvas. Maybe I should unearth some ancient discarded cross stitch and undo the squares of that instead?

I will go back to the perfect little pixel, the perfect stitch, the building block. Magnifying, translating, re-imaging.

I think about the venn diagram.

I don’t know that it’s a good analogy anymore, as I suspect Bo and I might both be working in the bit in the middle.

As my friend said previously….

Questions… Questions…

Whist Elena has been taking chunks out of my pieces, I have selected to sample just one of her disembroidered pieces over the course of this past week. I’m not really sure what I’m looking for in the work yet which gives me a great opportunity to experiment… and progress some of the methodologies I previously discussed.

How far away from Elena’s work can I take her work and still leave it recognizable? Is it possible to change the textures yet leave it feeling still part of the work?

I tend to start work late at night. I’m an insomniac and I enjoy the silence of the night, generally working from 10 till around 2 in the morning. I can produce a couple of hundred varied mages within that time frame so the work really starts coming down to a selection process… and yet, as I write, I know its not that simple.

I select processes. That’s the first point. I select the image I steal. The apps I run it through. The pixels I alter. The colours I vary. The stitches and drawing that I introduce. I select the final images that I show only after due consideration where I have weighed up the merits and disadvantages of each individual piece… but even within that process there is another sub-process. The majority of the images I create – or the iPad creates – are never even saved; they are fleeting; only ever seen by me and rejected for a whole variety of different reasons.

What are these? – not the reasons for rejection, but the rejected sketches? What would the results represent if I only saved those that I would normally reject?

Questions… questions.

For me the images that I choose represent my taste or work that gives me ideas to progress further into painting, 3D or print making, fabrics etc. they are sketches produced by machine that stimulates and inspires the new in me… they are the flint in the lighter that sparks the next piece of work, and from reading what Elena has written, they are obviously having a similar effect on her.

It’s a highly addictive process… I’m not sure its wise to admit that… randomizing imagery… that curiosity of what else might be generated that makes you hit the button again… and again.

I haven’t started a painting yet… yet I have more images than I could paint in a lifetime… another selection process will have to take place at some future stage… another ay of presenting may need to be found…

Worryingly, Elena has already sent me 10 or so disembroidered samples! Is she feeding my addiction whilst having a quiet chuckle at my quandary? Does she realize the dilemma she creates? Is that a part of the work to?

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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.

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Hmmm… it always seems to me that Bo has a plan… He is much calmer than me with my chaotic scatter-gun/headless chicken approach.

My process appears to me to be a haphazard thing, rather than organised, and the starting point I suppose is wherever I choose to jump in…

Looking at the work I have flitted between over the last couple of weeks or so, I have 3 or 4 themes on the go, at various points in the deconstruction/reconstruction cycle.

1. The fabric I use is always reclaimed clothing so it has always already been through someone else’s selection and construction process. Once I have selected various items, they are then deconstructed into their constituent parts and put in little piles: collars, cuffs, buttons, pockets and so on. The seams are stripped out and put in another pile. Then I am left with various flat pieces of fabric to chop up into “pixels” ready to be reconstructed into the quilt. There is a layering process here too: depth, structure, purpose, there may be issues of construction, and finally the stitches that have the function of holding all those layers together are decorative and textural too. The pixels of fabric, as well as the textural stitches are directly inspired by Bo’s work.

2. Disembroidery is another angle I’m working from – I have talked about it briefly in my personal blog. I have invented this perfect word (I think). I am unpicking the previously stitched work, fraying, examining, cutting, de-layering… a sort of archaeology perhaps? I’m being careful, but not particularly respectful. It is my work, abandoned many years ago, so I can do what I like! The deconstruction of this piece has been the making of it, The craft has become art. It is images of these pieces that Bo is currently working with.

3. (or possibly 2 and a bit) Disembroidery charts: can I code the destruction, in a similar way that the creation is charted? Do I want to codify it after the destruction, to record it? Or before, in order to plan it?

4. The pixels for me, are suggesting huge variations of scale. I can stitch 28 stitches to the inch… or 32 if I get out my extra strong glasses and the swear box. At the other end of the scale, one pixel could be a square metre of fabric (or larger). The square on the chart can represent any size. The squares on the charts don’t vary much in scale. They are usually around 10-14 squares/pixels per inch, too many to the inch and they become impossible to follow clearly (even if the stitching is much smaller) too few per inch and the design appears incoherent. I have some of Bo’s pixels to play with this weekend.

The bit that I love here, is that Bo is sampling from images of my work, and I am sampling from his. The ultimate collaboration and appropriation of each other’s work. If I take a photo of the quilt I am making, inspired by him, I stand a good chance of seeing it further deconstructed and cycled back to me… then I can make something else. The concept of the cycle, the exchange, the stealing and the giving is interesting and exciting to me.

Bo talks of the space which I pursue… I’m not sure I know that yet. I’m following all these trails… I could end up anywhere… but I doubt anything I end up with will look like Bo’s work, but hopefully that little segment in the Venn diagram will be discernible.

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Elena suggests that I have a plan… No!

An idea… yes… but no plan.

I start at the other end… I already have an image… created, stolen or abstract, that I deconstruct, alter or make unrecognisable. I work on iPads. I develop my own methodologies, running images through a variety of Apps to create specific effects. I replace individual pixels as well as groups of them… but critically I have no idea of the image I am trying to create until it appears on the screen… for me, this is playtime.

My target point is the humble pixel or Elena’s stitch. I’m curious about their relationship to one another; how that when you multiply them they alter, mutate into something other. I’m training myself to view the world in pixels, macro viewing the textures of the environment I occupy…

All this is the intention… I work towards making paintings, maybe some prints. I will reveal the path that this meanders along… maybe some methods…

Already started…

Elena sent me some images of her “disembroiderey”. In a sense, I wanted to continue her unpicking… reveal new layers and take the work back to its basic stitch before revealing some of those stitches as I interpret them. Colour is important so was enhanced… the odd pixel or two altered. The first image was then randomized through an App called Decim8; (Image 1). I have built my own set of filters within the App using some of the pre-made already on offer, so to a degree that part of the process is also borrowed… that’s important to me – that the only hand I have in the process is selection… everything else is adopted and stitched together as you would a collage… Elena’s starting point. The image was finished off in PS Touch after some further manipulation in other Apps. The final selection is from around 30 similar images… a sketch for a possible painting… where my hand takes over, selects the textures…re-structures.

Image 2 follows a similar process, yet strips back even further. I really like what is achieved here, yet all is accidental. A learning is taking place… I’m beginning to understand the “lock-ins” – an algorithm echoing the same function – involved in my processes and the idea is to try and avoid that repetition that so readily occurs whist using Apps.

I’m left now with a series of mechanical sketches that need my hand in them. Selection again becomes key. How I translate each mark into discernable language mirrors the ideas that I am developing alongside this in my own blog, and the resulting work will hopefully occupy a different space to that which Elena pursues… even if it is her work that I am sampling from…

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