Contour lines, topographical lines, bodies and weaving

(All photographs are taken by me; the top one is taken at The Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the bottom ones are taken at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago)

This is beautiful to me, and this idea is something which feels just beyond my reach (not in a bad way, but I will explain): lines of the body coming together and apart, as if he, the falling man (I can no longer remember exactly the title or the artist, but I think they were plates depicting the fall of men, somehow - horses were also falling in this one) was enmeshed in a net that perfectly contoured his body.

Can we do this with cloth? Or, is it possible to do this again, to make another skin? It comes back to what I have written a little of before, La Piel Que Habito, but a little differently? The body as a landscape, and these lines like the lines of a topographical map. 

Image found here. It is so large so you can actually see what is going on, but it is so similar to me. I tried making something like this on a figure study, cutting paper to be like mountains, a landscape. Also, I was thinking about... something like this during high school in Hong Kong: how a human face (and the body, also) can have lines in it that speak of something else. Something we don't know already! And it is not in the wrinkles, as they tell of experience, but rather... a secret language of the body! A language we speak without even knowing it! It is not body language either, but very different, in the very veins that lie in us.

Another reason for posting the photographs I took at the Met is that I really like muscles. I have been trying to get some of my own... Don't know if my body is made for that, but it is interesting nonetheless. Anyways, so I like muscles, a lot, especially on girls. It just looks so interesting and unexpected, I suppose because female bodies are "meant" to be soft. These images of Lisa Lyon, a female bodybuilder, taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, are really interesting to me:

This is one of them, I found it here.

Because:

1. the image from the Met is of a very muscular person. 

2. I enjoy muscles. They are great, and I think they are beautiful, also.

3. bodies and writing and people and mountains: I really like photographing mountains, and people in them. I showed someone a photograph I had made this summer, and it was of the mountains. They said, with the snow, it looked like a great Orca whale.

I don't know where this is going, but body + topography + maps + landscapes + language is probably already greatly explored in art, but I like it, so I will keep thinking about it. 

I also feel as though my posts disintegrate more and more the longer they get...

Well, tomorrow I might write about colour!

About beadings and embroideries, embellishments, etc.

Well, so as I am thinking about embellishment and beading, as the title of this post suggests, I got a suggestion to look at the Catacomb Saints. You may have heard or read about them; they were just discovered in different churches across Europe, and they are skeletons covered in jewels, gold, and various ornamentations. It reminds me of something I saw in Rome several years ago: a monastery where the bones of the dead nuns were put up in little... cavities, so to speak. They created strange patterns with the different skeletal parts, and seeing the pelvic bone was especially odd.

So, I am thinking about these in relation to what I am making. I don't know if I am embellishing memories or denying them, but I want to cover some surfaces completely in beads. It is a meditative process, and it is one of the things I enjoy doing most. 

And then, Nick Cave, which was how I first thought of doing it:

Images found here, here, here and here.

I don't know why, but I really really want to put beads and sequins on surfaces to cover them completely. It doesn't make sense. Which is of course why I am writing this; lacking the patience or the impetus to create a workbook like the ones we made in Hong Kong, I am trying to make a digital 'version' of it, or form, or something along those lines.

What I have been thinking is this:

1. I showed my class one of my beadings on paper along with this song. Now, we have to write down feedback for everyone in our class when we have some sort of critique. This works to some extent - the really good thing about it is that you will have something from everyone, although most people are afraid to speak. Someone wrote that the strings in the harp Joanna Newsom is playing is like the strings I am using in my beadings... which in turn makes me think about weaving, and how those strings come together. I thought it was a beautiful connection, and one I did not make myself. 

2. Should I try to hold on to things I have been working on from before, ideas which have "worked," and which I feel safe around? This would mean that I shape my work as it is right now in a mold I made when I was 16, 17, 18 years old. As I write this, I don't think it's a good idea. Then I would say: "I consider things that are minute and things that are modular and comprised of many, many little, similar or identical pieces, and mass thinking. Beading is just like this: many little, similar pieces coming together to form a larger picture." 

There is nothing wrong with this way of thinking. Is there? I am not sure, but I don't think it is a good idea to hold on to our ideas because they have worked for us in the past, so I think I'll let go and see where this takes me. That also means, realizing that I am not making the same kind of work that I made when I was 17 years old. Although I am proud of it, and it is a big part of me, it is not what I am making right now, and so I will (try to!) let go. That, in turn, means that I will write about things which interest me right now. Post to follow, enough writing for one post.

Beads and seeds

Samples of the mask, and how to display it! The three photos farthest down are of my embroidery in progress. The second image is of the embroidery from the back. 

It is now much farther along, and more photographs will come, in my attempt to document my work and be able to think about it in fluid lines again.

Someone that I knew some time ago. I am beading on a sheet of sketchbook paper, a little larger than letter size/a4. The beads are seed beads, and the string is normal sowing thread. 

slike ting

i dag tok jeg kontakt med en person jeg kanskje ikke burde ta kontakt med. jeg vet ikke hvor lurt det var. han svarte, i alle fall, og så får vi se om vi møtes! ugh. magen min hever og senker seg, og den beveger seg på rare måter. nå aner jeg ikke hva som foregår inni meg, det er mange rare ting.

skal jeg til Spania eller ikke? jeg vil ikke, tror jeg, men jeg vil ikke bli her. åh, hvorfor er jeg så rastløs! det er nok mange ting jeg må finne ut av, men virker helt idiotisk å være på det samme stedet i fire år. å fyke gjennom utdanningen for å fyke igjennom den...

as to why I have not posted anything

Well, then I suppose I will continue to write here! 

Although probably not so streamlined, not very continuously, but rather more personal, perhaps? 

As in, photographs I have taken myself, and also some art which I will make. I am not sure why, but it seems to make sense to me, which is the best way to gage something. 

So we will see. Although I now think that research is what will go here, as I have posted before, whereas I will mainly keep the personal stuff to myself, contrary to what I wrote a few lines up. It feels much more right to share research in this sort of way, because everything is already out there, it is just a way of pointing out the connexion between the disparate elements? Whereas the personal is not already out there, and so I will be adding something that can't be subtracted, and I don't want to do that right now.