Sketchbook project progress

"Along the Lines" today was the Central Line - which has four end stations - in the west, West Ruislip -
and Ealing Broadway -

and in the east, Woodford (via Hainault), with its charming clocks -

and Epping, which is north as well as east -
(Yes, there were other people around - while we were waiting to leave Epping, a train came in to the other platform, and 39 people came down the stairs, along with four scooters, a pushchair, and a red spirit-level.)

I'm recording the project on my "travelwriting" blog. The sketchbook is almost half full -- after only the first two of the 13 lines! Mind you, the Central line is the longest - today I travelled 94 miles on it, in about five hours.

The plan was to do the tube lines in alphabetical order - but the Circle line and District line, which are next in the list, have sections closed till 23 August. The choice is to wait till then, or to add a new "rule" - along the lines of: if the next line in the list isn't running completely, go down the list till you find one that is. So far the other rules are: take a photo of the line diagram at each end station; photograph randomly (or not) along the way; write station names with connections to other tube lines in capital letters; give the times of arrival at the end stations; do the entire line on the same day; post it online quickly. And: finish the entire project as soon as possible!

Connections

This quilt - by Bethan Hughes - has a personal connection. We were in a workshop together at a recent Contemporary Quilt summer school - during which there was a bit of swapping of materials going on - the music paper that Bethan has used at the bottom of this piece brought it all back -

Bethan has taken up the odd spot of "travelwriting" and showed me the jiggly bit of her journey from north Wales -

That summer school workshop was useful to Bethan; she said it was tough, but she pushed through - to the point of bravely cutting her work into smaller pieces. One of the toughest parts for me was trying to use (her) paper with text on it! The memory of it all made me reconsider the pieces I started there - if and when they resurface, I'll definitely chop and reconfigure them.

Laundry lines, and others

Lines written in shadow. Image from here (with Anita's permission).

Perhaps lines of washing are no longer as common as they were - New York around 1900, for instance (no tumble dryers then) -

The overhead electricity lines that are common in North American aren't found in the UK, unless they're lines between pylons. "Domestic" electricity lines run underground.

Image from here, where you can read about a pylon design contest.

Desire lines

A very different desire line, in conjunction with Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirrors, is here.

Jubilee line, end to end

After a morning at college, I spent the afternoon on the Jubilee Line, doing some TravelWriting. The Overground connects with it at Canada Water, one of the "new" stations, added between Charing Cross and Stratford in 1999.

Approaching Stanmore, I looked up and saw all these lovely lines of cabling -
The western, or is that northern, end of the line -

Stanmore station (opened 1932), not very busy in the middle of the afternoon -

Along the stairs, "Linear", a work by Dryden Goodwin as part of "Art on the Underground" - he drew portraits of 60 Jubilee Line staff. You can watch the films of the portraits being made here.

The highly visible and rather colourful cables on the open-air sections of the line are a nice counterpoint to the grim-encrusted cables along the underground sections -

Sixty minutes later, the other end of the line - Stratford, gateway to the 2012 Olympics -
Beyond the lines, Tube Lines offers "skills training" (but didn't deliver the 2010 upgrade of the Jubilee line in time) -
The result - Willesden Green to Canary Wharf, printed and ready to make into bags -

This week at college

Not much going on ... no seminar on Tuesday; the screenprint workshop was unexpectedly shut on Wednesday, and I was coughing too much to go anywhere on Thursday.

In the Wednesday afternoon slot, Graham Rawle (of "Lost Consonants" fame) gave a most interesting lecture about his work. The current project is a book about a man who finds playing cards, and starts to make connections between them, feeling they are telling him he has a mission to save Princess Diana. Graham gave us some combinations of cards, so we could make our own connections -

(Sorry about the blurry picture.) He ended with this thought: If you don't want to get out of bed in the morning and start work immediately, you might be doing the wrong project.

In the get-together on Wednesday before the lecture, I brought out my screenprint project

and got some interesting feed back, which has me thinking about moving on from presenting it as "a book" into a more sculptural forms, via cutting slits (yikes! cutting!) in the larger pieces to "weave in" the smaller ones, using them as double-sided joins to make a circular piece; or a concertina trail along the floor; or rolled

or folded pieces added to flat backings

or even cut up into tiles - that will get me looking at tiles in the Underground ...

"Water" lines

Always on the lookout for lines that resemble my "journey lines", I found this - a "Water" mandala by Phyllis Wright.

Book du jour

More books to explore the sound qualities of sheets of paper in sequence - crinkle, rustle, whisper; there are undoubtedly other words. The last of that shopping bag has been used up - some of it was crumpled before being sewn. The tissue paper came pre-crumpled, and one of the tea-bag paper books has also had the crumple treatment.

While you have the materials in your hands, you start to do unexpected things. The little book at bottom left has had each page folded before stitching together, which makes interesting shadows. The tracing wheel was used on the tracing paper - instant, tactile "journey lines" - travellers' braille?

The sounds of turning the pages are much more subtle than of opening and closing the folded book I made yesterday.

Night walking

Tim Knowles again - carrying three powerful torches, and a battery in a backpack, he walked away from the camera, over a treacherous ridge, for an hour. "The image invokes Plato’s allegory of the cave, appearing like a pathway of ghostly travellers shining inside an electrified landscape."