Along the Grand Union

The clocks went back, and the autumnal morning mist rolled in -

A quick coffee and toast, and out for a short stroll along the canal. But it was so beautiful, so quiet, I just kept going .......

 along the towpath

past moored narrowboats and barges

The smell of woodsmoke

Mad! (note the canoodling couple in the bathtub)

Hallowe'en reflections

past various sorts of wildlife

The 'regulars' meet near Ladbroke Grove Sainsburys

Double layers of spider webs

The patient heron

A gaggle? covey? glide? of swans

Cygnets en famille

A collusion? intimidation? spacing? of terns (spot the magpie)

In one of the industrial estates that line the canal are murals of horse and heron -

 and the canal (and towpath)

 crosses the North Circular -

 Elsewhere, structures glimpsed over the wall -

 In suburbia, edging a golf course, lovely reflections -

 And finally, near Greenford station, the marked path (Capital Ring) passes through wetlands -

For (only) a tiny moment I was tempted to go the extra 9 miles to Richmond Bridge ... but decided to leave that little jaunt for another day. 

Plenty of led, group walks were on offer, but they involve travelling for an hour or so to the start of the walk. How wonderful to have "green walks" so close to home! I was out the door at 7.45 [GMT] and back home, with a coffee-shop stop in Kensal Rise, well before noon.

Upheaval

Meanwhile, back at the flat ... the carpenter/decorator is doing drastic things.

This is the room before it was gutted -

Everything in it, including hundreds of books, is heaped up in the other three rooms.

The double bed needs to fit into the living room

My studio has become a clothes cupboard, among other things

110 bags of rubbish, "none of them light", had to be carried downstairs (43 steps down, and 43 back up to get the next bag).

The inside wall is soundproofed, but floorboards and much else is needed

Insulation has been started and will make such a difference

Of course it will be worth it in the end!

"Slipstream"

It's 77 metres long and weighs 77 tons, but you don't know that when you see it  - it's Slipstream, by Richard Wilson, at Terminal 2, Heathrow. I took lots of photos ... it fits right in with my fascination with old armour and with how airplanes are built, especially the ones with fabric stretched over the wooden frame.

Here it is under construction, in Hull  - love those rivets, hinting at the structure underneath -

(via)

Nearly 78m long, and weighing 77 tonnes, this is the longest permanent sculpture in Europe, made from around 32,000 unique, digitally fabricated aluminium, plywood and steel parts. Construction was pre-fabricated throughout with 23 pre-made cassettes, each weighing between 3-4 tonnes, brought to site for installation. (via)

And here it is, or rather, half of it, as first seen on getting out of the lift - 

Another view, the whole thing this time -

You'll have to imagine the sounds of the planes taking off from the runway beyond the terminal, one every 45 seconds.

"The beginning and end are very different," Wilson says in this video; "it's like a journey." He talks about building Slipstream in this video.

The sculptor and his models (via)

Installation: a cassette is being craned into position (via)

Background to grids

Aspects of past work that feed into the "grids" idea

Irregular grids of city maps
and by extension, maps of museums with their structure of rooms

Are portolan charts grids?

Gridded pseudo-maps, reminiscent of kuba cloth patterns

gridded book pages

gridded quilting

Images found on the internet that feed into my gridded, structural thinking -

Karen Goetzinger (via)

Gridded facade of the Bodleian Library (via)

A grid by Gego (via)

source lost, but isn't it a wonderful structure?

a multiplicity of shapes within the gridded roof of the Great Court at the British Museum

Gridded drawings by Clare Smith - see more here

Deleuze conceives of the grid as territorialised "State Space", inside which movement becomes fixed and tribal. Hmm ... how to break that fixity, disorganise things a bit?