The green line - Moorfields to Old Street

The line is intact at the Moorfields end, running parallel to the "no smoking beyond this point" outside the eye hospital. Further on, we noticed that it makes quite a hump along its length.

I discovered it in 2010 and have blogged about it several times, thinking to use it for an art project to fit in with "journey lines".

These latest photos don't record every inch of it, just some of the interesting textures, marks, juxtapositions, wear, accidents ... deletions ...

Art I like - Linda Ekstrom

No sooner had someone asked me, "Are you ever going to get back to your lines?" than I came across the "Wreadings" of Linda Ekstrom.

Wreadings (Edward Jabes) 2003

She says: "Wreadings is a process in which the artist writes the text simultaneously as she reads the text. Considered drawings, these works are created in the style of blind contour drawing in which the artist looks only at the words of the book and never at the marks on the page." (What would a blind drawing of a journey on the tube or bus look like?)

Another of my ongoing interests is erasures, and Linda also does erasures ("Erasures reveals within the text of the page underlying patterns and repetition of words, and uncovers hidden meanings by erasing the extraneous") -

Erasures (live/veil/evil), 2003

Word is central to Linda's work, as related to the body and to space and memory. She seeks to construct meaning out of the common and domestic forms that abound in her world, "and to insert my practice into larger currents of religious thought, history and ritual expressions which define life, lived-out within the cosmos."

This is a view of her 2006 exhibition Unravelling, showing some of the other forms her work takes -

Do visit her website to see more.

Book du jour - a punctuated journey

In the sleepless reaches of the night I had an idea about taking the words out of sentences, paragraphs, pages, books... and leaving only the punctuation. These examples are from "Owl" by Desmond Morris.

Towards the end I was thinking about how to space out the punctuation - or rather, include the word spaces as part of the punctuation. And then I started thinking about how different authors - or different genres, or different literary eras - might have different "punctuation journeys". And that sent me to sleep...

The idea seemed worth a try, so I took a book almost at random, which happened to be A Stranger at Green Knowe by Lucy Boston, and opened it almost at random and started reading/writing, using 6B graphite -

Unfortunately, rather than starting on a nice clean sheet of paper I was trying to combine two experiments, the other being whether the coloured ink would show up under black ink at all. The idea was to cover the sheet with ink and rub it to bring the graphite through.

Too faint!

To cut a long story short, it didn't work - the graphite lines were too thin, and the writing was lost. But the reading was most enjoyable!

Book du jour - reusing a dictionary

Needing a book without pages - just a cover and spine - I took most of the pages out of an old school dictionary. (More about that later, perhaps.)

While I was tearing them out, one by one, the headwords continually caught my eye. My first attempt at recycling the dictionary words uses the page TIGRESS to TITAN. The words look a little lonely on the page, a little purposeless without their definitions. The cut-up page is not without interest, though...

To stick the words onto the page - they are tiny! - I sprayed the back of the dictionary page with 505 (repositionable) spray, then cut them with a scalpel and lifted them into place with the tip. The sheet of paper had been scored with parallel lines to help placement.

Rather than doing more "big pages" like this, I'll fold them in half and do a dozen or so to make a "proper book". My original plan came from the "line as text" idea, and was to sew through the middle of the words with fine thread to hold them on the page. That might be tricky with words on both sides of the page, as I envisaged when thinking of a "proper book" ... but having the words just on the right-hand page means that the left-hand page really would have "lines as text".

(Two days later....) The words are glued onto graph paper, which makes it easier to align and position them. One dictionary page fits onto one graph-paper page -

The temporary adhesive is not to be trusted, so, using the finest thread I had, and bobbin thread to match the graph paper, I ran a line of machine-stitching through the lines of words -

The stitching makes them almost illegible - is it some kind of subconscious erasure? And ... what to do with the thread ends, to keep them out of sight?

They tend to cling to each other when brushed into the middle - hence the title of the book - Combing the Alphabet -

It comes in a plain brown wrapper.

Line as text, text as line

While gathering - or rather, separating - blog posts into categories related to college work, I started a new category relevant to my project: "line as text, text as line". One consequence is that I'm on the active lookout for relevant images, and the first in the new collection is by Gill Banks -

The character and density of the marks she uses to make these lines are right on target for me, true inspiration - they raise all sorts of interesting possibilities. Sewn into paper (horizontally?), they will have a different character on each side of the page. Sewn into paper covered in graphite they will become smudgy as the thread - perhaps a soft thread? - gathers graphite. Will a waxed thread resist the dusty look? Could the redness of that red line survive stitching into graphite? Perhaps the stitching should happen first? What about using overlay ... perhaps glassine paper?

What about stitching into cloth and applying graphite or wax to that? What about using some of my dyed indigo pieces? What about stitching into/onto my screenprinted journey line fabrics? (If fabric is going to be a book, it needs to be not floppy ... or does it?) Am I making a book or trying to find "the right kind of line" and then decide how what it's "saying" can be put into some sort of book format...

Hmm, another example of "I know what I think when I hear myself speak". All that is needed now is action!

Meanwhile, here's one I prepared earlier -

Im-materiality

"Mistrust of the Image as Representation" is a web project by Michael Robbs (2007) - he draws a line in Photoshop, using various brush and pencil tools, including "scattered maple leaves". What you see is pixels of various tones, in various configurations, while reading the name of the tool. Fascinating.

Other web projects are at antenna.org.uk

Punctures

My two main "puncture" tools are the sewing machine and a tracing wheel, the sort with spikes. (Other puncture tools are lurking around the house, waiting to be found and tried.) These are particularly useful for making lines across paper ... and I'm using those lines as "text", playing with how it might communicate non-verbally.

One aspect of that communication is the "support" - the type of paper (or cloth?) that the line finds itself on. These are intended for experiments - stiff paper, graph paper, ordinary paper, tracing paper, patterned paper, all marked with punctured lines.

Rather boring as such! To take this forward we must consider other characteristics of lines:

spacing, density, "shape", flow, intersection, separateness, reflection, reticence, integrity, weight, conformity, individuality, timidity, boldness, visibility, randomness, intention ... there may be others ...