I then read Rupert Thomson's Katherine Carlyle, about a young woman who seemed to remember being an embryo fertilised in vitro, and then being frozen for 8 years before being implanted in utero and being born older than her years. She felt abandoned by her father after her mother died while she was still in her teens and sets off for the frozen north.....so lots of Frankenstein/Shelley connections here too...( it is so nice to have time to read now without feeling slightly guilty....) Rupert Thomson always writes interesting books but never seems quite to get his due....
Tristan - I have seen several versions of Wagner's opera, including one with stunningly dramatic enactments of Tristan's self destruction in tearing at and flinging off his bandages while waiting for death and Isolde. I suppose I could have also mentioned toilet rolls here as they seem to be on everyone's mind at the moment ( and what is an artist for if not to pick up on the zeitgeist) - much like paper bandages, with such potential visually and metaphorically....as has the delicious word 'unravelling'.....
In The Untenanted Room, two versions of which I did with poet James Simpson, I showed Perceval as a Holy Fool with a bandaged head....
Using references from my previous work is what I seem to do all the time - it is like making yogurt: using a spoonful of the previous work acts as fermentation to set the next batch of images....
and shopping trolleys are self-explanatory and very topical too.....
if we consume too much of the world we get sick.
The virus, alongside Climate Crisis, is a wake-up call.
These are healing trees are apotropaic, protective guardians we should love and respect; today I started cutting them in wood to be printed for my playing card forest
When I am teaching woodcutting people always ask - how do I get the images onto the block? I try and discourage making pencil drawings and tracings , although reversing images so they will end up the right way round again sometimes needs some technical assistance I agree, but I say they mustn't be 'drawings' but maps, plans of roughly where things are going to go in relation to the block, and each other, for guidance - but flexible, subject to endless change and thinking on the hoof once you start cutting ; a pencil drawing is a pencil drawing , a woodcut is a woodcut. People forget that even a pencil line has a width, and 2 pencil lines to denote a solid limb or branch can be very misleading.....you are dealing with mass not line, and a binary system of on or off, left or cut away....
so on this tiny playing card scale I did make these drawings but everything started changing as I was cutting
Tomorrow I will start cutting the Sick Fools and talk about Cecil Collins...
meanwhile if you are baffled and haven't picked up some of the connections with past posts - posts about the playing cards are back on the post for January 2019
they are an ongoing project....
Descriptions of cartoneras are back on the post for 16 March 2019
The Ship of Fools ones are printed over newspaper pages containing photos or articles relating to climate change and flooding......see below
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