Creating Disk Hangings.
Little did I know the difficulties before me when I decided to create large disk hangings.
The idea was to create disk designs based on the size of the back of a tanker, with designs of the many contents I had discovered on my travels - hazardous waste, oil, flour to make Cornish Pasties, milk, acid, bitumen, and I was delighted to find that tankers carry liquid chocolate – pouring out as a silk design, tumbling to the ground and pooling over the floor. These are now approximately 5 ft across with 3 or 4 m trails.
My first issue was how to create such a large piece. How much space do I have at my show? I decided I had to lower my sights and create smaller pieces than I had initially wanted. But that was the least of my concerns.
My mission was to create the large disk piece and the ‘trail’ all in one print. This was much too large to be screen printed, unless I created the design in sections. Or I could paint the piece. But as I wanted to master digital printing, this seemed to be the most challenging and hopefully successful option.
Firstly, I have been bound by my technical ignorance
The files were enormous. At college, there was a file size maximum of 80 mb.for the digital fabric printer. Mine were much larger than this. (over 400 mb). To ‘make them fit’, I reduced the resolution and size thinking I could send them as smaller files and that they could be ‘blown up’ in situ. Alas, once reduced the resolution could never be regained. All of my work was wasted. I would have to do it all again.
My computer crashed with the large files. The designs corrupted and became irretrievable. Was I any closer to realising my desire? Despair set in. I felt like giving up. It seemed so simple but was difficult at every stage.
During my 'making' trials I discovered so many difficulties. It was incredibly hard to simply sew a seam around a circle. Thankfully Di has shown me how. I am absolutely sold on the industrial sewing machine. It is so easy to sew a controlled seam with. (unlike my Bernina which is so difficult to control).
Eventually, I sent my huge designs, samples really, to The Silk Bureau (who has no size limit), to see what they would do with the designs. I had decided to take a sample slice from the disks but having had so much trouble, I decided to ‘go for it’ and send the complete disks. After all, it was only money!! The designs were too large for a CD or a DVD. I managed to clean off a 4GB memory stick and sent that along with a CD of repeat fabric samples.
And still I have not worked out how to get the design for the trail incorporated into the disk design.
Another problem I have had is with my ‘scale’ designs mentioned earlier. I put a sketch of the back of a tanker through Live Trace, Inked Drawing in Illustrator and attempted to blow that up into a 50 inch disk. The exciting thing for me was that apparently the software reconfigures the image when it is expanded over a certain size. This elusive image seems to revert if I work on it at all. I find this difficult to understand. Surely any image acquired must be stable. The more difficult the image was to hold on to, the more I wanted to print it. Frustrating! So frustrating. Just when I thought I had captured the image it would disappear and revert to an Inked Drawing image. Does this mean that the image I have, the one I want to print is so elusive that it would not normally be seen. Most projects would not want to create a design of such a size. This seems to fit in so well with my project which is all about scale – the scale of the tanker. I am thinking of an immediate error. I did not draw a circular line around the design which has a broken edge. As I will have to add a strip of fabric around the disk, it is going to be difficult for me to establish an absolute circle.
The fabric has been crucial. Which fabric? Any silk is see through. Once I have the actual size of the silk disks, I will have disks made out of iron bar. This seems to fit in really well with the fact that the tankers are made out of steel. I don’t mind the metal showing through the silk disks.
I also have two 6 ft. disks made out of layered ply. These are 5 inches deep. Luckily one disk is divided into two pieces, thus enabling me to print this in two pieces which will fit on to the 54 inch wide fabric. The second disk is over 58 inches wide, too wide for the maximum width fabric. This disk will have to be screen printed and painted on something like cotton sheeting.
Once I have a disk printed with its trail, I then have to face the problem of how to fix the fabric to the hoops. Will the trail pull the disk fabric down if it comes from the centre of the disk? Will they work as art objects? I thought elastic was excellent. It allows for easy removal for cleaning. However, it would not create a beautiful finish to an art work.
Firstly, I must see what the experienced Silk Bureau can do with the images. Once I know that, I can carry on if all is O.K.
Tuesday, 29 June 2010
Monday, 7 June 2010
MARC QUINN
Marc Quinn 'Iris' series.
In October 2009, Marc Quinn held an exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in Fifth Avenue.
Each work depicts large renditions of the iris of the human eye, spotted and permeated with bright colours.
In October 2009, Marc Quinn held an exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in Fifth Avenue.
Each work depicts large renditions of the iris of the human eye, spotted and permeated with bright colours.
He also created the controversial massive marble sculpture of a pregnant Alison Lapper who was born without arms, placed on the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square, London and the 'Sphinx' sculpture of Kate Moss.
These round art works resonate with my tanker disks. I just love the vibrancy of the rust colour and the blues.
"These round canvases each depict in gigantic scale, the iris of a human eye - turbulently streaked and spotted, suffused with bright colours, and highly individual. Although photo-realistic, the disembodied images might equally serve as renditions of whirling interstellar space".
These comments have been made about my tanker disks too. What I cannot ascertain is whether these are totally painted or whether they are digital images which have been enhanced with paint.
At first I thought these images were concave disks of perspex or glass, but they are canvases.
This series of work has been considered to be 'interstellar', or 'cosmic'. Since Biblical times, the eyes have been likened to representations of the soul. Quinn considers the eyes to be "doors of perception"
Bayon Sunbow 67
Quinn said, "They are like a leakage of the vivid interior world of the body to the monochrome world of the skin".
I do not share my husband, Mel's, love of flying. On one flight on a beautiful sunny evening when there were masses of puffy cumulus clouds (to be avoided) I was almost swayed. On the clouds was a beautiful round rainbow. The pilot, Jim, placed our shadow in the centre of it. It can be stunning up there, especially above the clouds.
The exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery, Fifth Avenue, New York.
WHAT IS IT?
Taking a tiny sketch of the back of a tanker, I became interested in scale, in the enormity of the tanker and I wondered what would happen if I increased the size of my sketch considerably. I took the sketch through various live trace facilities in Illustrator and loved the beauty of the imagery.
This image is a vectored Illustrator image which, frustratingly, I cannot print on silk. How to maintain the beautiful smooth line is a problem. In Photoshop (and the image must be a Photoshop tiff to print), the line will pixilate, creating a blur. I have changed the image to a PDF and converted that to a tiff and it seems reasonably smooth. We shall see.
Creating 4 paper quarters assembled into a 5 ft disk, I wondered about the scale. How would this piece be viewed from a distance? What would the viewers think it is?
I hung the piece in the galleried foyer of our campus at Tremough and created a questionnaire. The large scale piece created imagery within imagery. Looking at the hanging, one could see more and more 'secret' images, animals, people etc.
WHAT IS IT? I had some wonderful replies.
'Man in the moon'.
'Sperm and egg at the moment of conception'.
'A ball of wool'.
'A tree in a hurricane'.
'A dandelion seed head'.
'A burning ball of fire'.
'Eco advert'
'Earth'.
'From a distance, it looks like the trail of something that went in circles really fast, really slow and then found it's place'
'A flower'
'Paint swirls'.
'A long tailed monkey in a crescent moon'.
'A person on a swing above the trees'.
I am really pleased with this response as I love that which becomes something else, something seen in the eye of the viewer.
I then asked
WHAT WOULD YOU SEE ITS END USE AS?
'Art on a wall'.
'Textiles print'. (Several said this)
Decorative piece/ drawing/print/sculpture'.
WHAT IS YOUR AUTOMATIC RESPONSE TO THE PIECE?
'I want to look closer'.
'I like it'.
'I want to stand back from it'.
'Butterflies in the stomach feeling. I love it'.
'Interest and intrigue. Wanting to know why'?
'Food for thought'.
'Interesting. Curious. Makes me wonder what it is'.
There was some discussion about the 'tail'. Some thought it worked better without.
WITH OR WITHOUT TAIL.
Most said 'with'. (i.e. stalk of the dandelion, end of ball of wool, string.
'Tail could be a fishing rod. Dreamworks? Reminds me of love. Pretty'.
I found these responses wonderful. To look at an art work and be drawn into it, to see other imagery within, to want to look and look into a piece, is to me what art is all about.
I had taken this image through Inked Drawing. I could only arrive at this image by converting the image to a PDF. However, it would not always happen and I was becoming demented. I discovered that, when the image is enlarged over a certain size, the software actually reconfigures. This fits in so well with the concept of the piece, the idea of the scale of the tanker large scale actually creating the change in the imagery.
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