View from the other end

Quite a few people have asked me about the ‘top end’ of the piece.  Because the public aren’t allowed up the top end of the Spinning room most visitors cant see all of my piece up close.

So here are a couple of pictures showing the piece from up there.  There is a view of the piece down the room and a close up looking towards the very end.  If you are paying attention you’ll notice the ECG (the red line) is very different to further down.  That’s the difference between 60 bpm and 181 bpm.

Studio shots

A couple of people have asked if I have any more detailed photos of the piece.

Here are a couple taken in the studio.  You can see one photo shows the piece in ‘folds’ the others are details.

I hope you find them interesting

here it is

So here it is

This isn’t a proper photo, just one taken with my i-phone but the give a good feel as to the piece and how it looks in the space.  The figure in red is Nicky cardio technical advisor and work horse when we installed.  Big thanks.  Her being in the photo gives and indication of the scale of the piece

Let me know what you think

what every textile artist is wearing this season

Now the Lobby is a dirty ol’ space.  And I upset someone when I said that I was taking footprints off a 150 years of dirt.  She was a cleaner in the mill many years ago and said that there wasn’t any dirt in her day.  That’s as maybe but there is now

So when I was installing I had a choice either to get very dirty or look like and extra from CSI Bradford.  I opted for the later.  I needed to redo a running stitch of about 10m which did involve me on the floor sewing quite a bit.  I had bought kneelers BUT it was the one that I attached to my ankle that really made me comfortable.  I sort of sit on my foot when I work on the floor and that was definitely the way to do it.

Want to see the piece properly?  Log on tomorrow

the giant plinth

I went up to Salts Mill on Tuesday to start the installation.

As the doors went back on the service lift and I saw the space again I was struck by one thing: the enormous run of pink plywood that was indeed the plinth for my piece.  It seemed to run the whole length of the room.  It went on and on.

As I left the lift I could see that in the distance the sides had been painted grey.  I didn’t panic.  I knew that the piece would fit……its just I hadn’t realised quite how long 100m was.

You can see the Cloth and Memory2 team in their charming white suits and the piece is wrapped up like a dismembered body.

the last stitches...for real

These are the final stitches on the piece….from a technical point of view its me joining piece 8 and piece 9, that’s the seam at 45 metres.  So what you see is the embroidered ECG being joined up.

 

And this is what 100 metres of lovely British woollen face cloth with my embroidery on looks like when its rolled up and ready to go.  It weighs about 4 stone.

the last stitch

Technically speaking this is the last stitches being embroidered.  I say technically because they are the stitches on the furthest right.  I have always seen the piece being read left to right or with the footprints coming towards you, either way these are the last stitches of the piece…..but that would mean that the embroidery was all done…..and it isn’t….its just that I have finished embroidering piece number 20.

The red threads

A big thank you and ‘star of the day’ must go to the guys at Madeira thread.  You might remember that they sponsored the thread for my piece (see: ‘The empty spool’ post).  I reckon that by the time I am through I will have got through 20 miles of the thread. It’s pretty close as to whether I have used more black or red.  Its hard to tell when I am using five different reds and just one black.  The plan is that the colour of the ECG waveform changes as the piece goes along but you don't really notice the colour change as its subtle; its stronger up one end and mellower at the other.

I was running low on one of my favourite reds. I spoke to them at Madeira and another spool was in the post that day.  Great stuff.  Thanks

An even more beautiful join

Sometimes the join does just have the ECG running over it but also a trainer footprint.  Dont you just love technology when it works how you want it to?

And here is a second one

The empty spool

When I picked up the cloth from Hainsworth in Leeds I carried on to Madeira thread in Ripon.  Karen Burrows had kindly said that she could help me out with some thread for this project.  They let me loose in the sample boxes and I came away with a treasure trove of stuff. 

I knew that I would be after some of their Classic embroidery thread; good colour, great sheen, dependable to use.  Its lived up to its reputation.  It sits on the woollen cloth and looks gorgeous; the texture of them both looks great.

So as you can imagaine I am eating up the thread at a fair ol' rate.  Give the size of the embroidery I had picked up 5,000m cops.  This is my first one empty; a black Classic.  However there are two reds looking pretty skinny and a white on the slender side.  I reckon I will easily have used more than 18 miles once the piece is finished and thats not including the bobbin fill.

the most beautiful join in the world

When you stitch out 48 separate embroideries each 20 cms in length and each one joining up to the one before to two separate pieces of lovely British woollen cloth and when you  then seam them together and press the seam flat and hoop  the cloth up, when you do all that and the gap between the two lengths of stitch  is exactly the size of the embroidery that you have programmed to go in between,  then you have the most beautiful join in the world.

Look no hands..............

The making is well underway.  So far, fingers crossed, things are going to plan.
This is my lovely Pfaff Creative Sensation (on loan from VSM UK Ltd) chugging away.  I often think watching it going is as interesting as watching a washing machine: Its interesting for about 40 seconds and then you have seen it all.  Okay this video is a few seconds longer than that but I thought it might be good for you to see the machine up close as well as the amount of room it actually takes up.

It shows a red wiggly line being stitched.  This is the ECG from the run.  At this point my heart rate was up to 181bpm.  At other points of the piece it was as slow as 68bpm.  On the ECG at that point the beat is two and a half times longer so it looks really different.  The ECG is being stitched down over an echocardiogram of my heart.  Its exactly the same ultrasound technology that's used for baby scans.  The image shows the four chambers of my heart.

Hainsworth

Sample book from 1913 in reception of Hainsworth

On Tuesday I went to Hainsworth in Leeds to pick up the most beautiful fabric for my piece.  The fabric is called 'face cloth'.  It has a smooth nap to it and a felt like texture.  It seems like the kind of baize fabric you find on a snooker table.  Its got a remarkable sheen and feels amazing.

Hainsworth have very kindly sponsored the piece.  They have a long and prestigious history of making woollen cloth, for example they have been supplying the British Army the fabric for 'Redcoats' since Waterloo.  however they aren't stuck in the past; they have a very forward thinking research centre and also make innovative fabrics as well as those more traditional ones.  Many thanks to June Hill and Diane Simpson for setting this up.

Whilst I was waiting in Reception for my fabric I looked through one of the their sample book from 1913.  This is a page of reds.

My fabric is grey.  The colour  reminds me of a wet bandsman standing at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, maybe because it might be the same fabric as his coat.  Its beautiful, really beautiful.

Its also huge.  I cut the first 5m lengths yesterday and it did nearly fill my living room.

The pressure is on.  I hope I can do justice to this fabric.

Taking the P wave



detail of one of the samples bearing the satin ECG

Okay now I don't want to get too technical on this but you might remember the post about the ECG data http://www.karinathompsontextiles.blogspot.co.uk/2013_01_01_archive.html
The ECG had 3 lines of data.  My technical adviser (Nicky) suggested that if I was to use a single line that it should be the bottom line as that was coherent throughout the run.  It clearly shows what my heart was doing from rest to peak to post-run.
I started cleaning up the data and programming part of it into a lovely 4mm wide satin embroidery.  After a couple of technical problems I finally could stitch it out in a way that I was happy.  I could repeat it and build it into lengths in a way that I will do on the final piece.  I was really happy with the results.

I could stitch the wave form out over the reprogrammed footprints and over densely stitched echocardiogrammes.  It felt like the piece was finally taking shape; it was looking really lovely

However working on the other 2 wave forms I suddenly realised that I had actually left out part of a heart beat and that every other beat had no P-wave.  That would be pretty serious if my heart was really doing that!  No points for attention to detail.......

Data: the scientific approach

So what did I learn last week......in terms of the heart data there wasn’t any real surprises.  According to my heart monitor my average heart rate was 175bpm with a high of 183bpm.  This was what I expected and was consistent with the data from the ECG run in January.  The image above is sheet of notes showing the timings from my monitor called out to June and Hannah in the Lobby and the data the heart monitor/stopwatch recorded.

However the running gait was quite different.  I had laid out 2 x 20m and 2 x 40m lengths of lining paper in the Lobby.  During the run I ran on one of each of these lengths leaving beautiful prints from the dirt on the floor.   The delicate patterns embossed onto the tread patterns were printed clearly with the dirt of 160 years worth of dust.  However I fear that the delicate subtlety of the dirt on the paper wont translate easily into embroidery stitches.  As the prints were so clear after the run I inked up my trainers (Okay Hannah inked them) and I ran the steps again.

I deliberately waited until the second half of the run as I didn’t want fresh legs to give a longer than usual stride.   The big surprise is the length of my gait.  I had done some simple measurements at home and had been working on the assumption that my gait, particularly when I was tiring, was around 85cms.  However measuring my 'dirt' prints my gait  is between 115-130cms.

This means around 82 steps in a 100m embroidery.

The Run

Me doing the run.  It look like it's hard work....which it was
Photo credit: Hannah Coaten

On Monday I finally ran the mile and a half that represents an hour’s worth of wool production.

It was strange to finally do the run after all the false starts with the weather.  I had also been poorly with a bad cough that meant that I could do the training I wanted to.  BUT it wasn’t a race it was an exercise in data capture; this is the information that would dictate the nature of my piece for Cloth and Memory 2.

There were only two other people in the room curator, June Hill up one end and embroiderer and photographer, Hannah Coaten up the other.  I had an heart monitor on and they recorded my heart rate and lap times at each end.

Not scaring myself

I have been doing some sampling.  Okay I haven't got all the heart data that I want AND the programming of footprints that I have done are from prints from my old Asics NOT my lovely new Asics that I will run in at Salts Mill, but I need to get started and see if my theory of how to solve some of the physical problems that I am going to have to overcome if I am going to make an embroidery 100m long.

One of the biggest worries for me is the physicality of handling big bits of fabric; where I can lay it out to measure and cut it; how it might handle under the machine; how I will know where footprints and heartbeats will go.
I have had a go.  Admittedly these initial pieces are only 2.5m but when together they are coming in at 5m which is the size that I am planning on working on....and most importantly that length fits very comfortably in my living room so it should work.  I do however have to roll the rug back for the photo but that's small stuff!

13 Anonymous women

Okay in case you thnk I have been slacking.......
I have been working on a proposal for Tatton Park, a country house south of Manchester with a great reputation for contemporary art.  I won the chance to put forward a proposal for a piece of site specific art work telling the stories of the servant's at Tatton.  Its part of a bigger project called Hidden Histories that is about the servant's lives rather than the grand family that they worked for.
My proposal uses this photogrpah as a starting point. its undated and unannotated so all these people are anonymous; we can make some educated guesses at to who some of them are but we will never know the majority;they weren considered 'important enough'.  It will explore the 13 anonymous women in this photograph by looking at the repairs and laundrymarks on the household linen, and the inventory entries in household paperwork.  the plan is for a bedcover and a 'mended sheet' as well as portraits of the women
Here is one of the samples.....I have been busy

Half hearted




Half stitched out echocardiogram of my heart.  you can see the frame and the clips used to hold the fabric in place

 

Those of you who know me, know that I use a Pfaff sewing machine kindly sponsored by VSM UK Ltd (thanks Mike). Now I am not going to get all Jeremy Clarkson about it but it has got one of the biggest hoops on the market.  However to use that hoop you need to 'break' your design into two halves.

Its a simple thing to do if you know what to do before you stitch out and you get an even better effect if you split it when its a design, rather than an embroidery file.  However this piece is at such a preliminary stage I have programmed a couple of footprints but for the large scale samples I just increased the size of an existing heart scan embroidery file.  The software automatically split it down the middle and the result is half hearted in all senses

ba-boom ba-boom ba-boom

So what does this ECG data look like?  Well the image above my pre-exercise heart rate.  You'll see from the numbers in the top right hand corner that it says my heart rate is 68 bpm.  I have quite a slow heart rate, sometimes its a bit lower than that usually around the 60bpm as any of you who follow my work will know. If you haven't seen my work before you might want to read about my piece '60 beats a minute' here.
http://www.madeinthemiddle.org/post/21905077027/karinathompson-60beatsaminute-photoandykruczek-on

Now there are three wiggly lines because there are three leads each measuring electrical activity from different angles as the heart beats.  This is me wired up and ready to go.  Yes, I did feel a bit of a Charlie.

It was strange having all these wires attached but if truth be told it didn't really affect how I ran.  I really tried to push myself as much as I could.  I had been doing some fast runs in prep although I am not fast.  I was hammering it trying to do between 7-8 minute miles.  I couldn't keep it up.  In many ways it was about my thinking rather than my legs that let me down.  I was thinking 'I cant keep this up' rather than 'my legs have gone.  I am going to fall over'.  If you know anything about running you'll know some people would consider that a jog.  I don't.  This is what running like that was doing to my heart.

171bpm; lots to work with.

Snowed

You might have noticed it snowed last weekend.  That really messed up my plans to do the run at Salts Mill.  We had 12 cms of snow in Birmingham and were worried that we might get to Saltaire okay but if the weather continued we could be stuck on the M6 on a Saturday night trying to get home.  It also wasn't fair on the others who said they would come out to help.
However Nicky had gone to great lengths to borrow a 24 hour tape and with things as they are at UHB it was going to be after Easter by the time that she might be able to get one again.  So we hatched a plan that I would do a mile and a half on a treadmill at the hospital gym with the 24 hour tape on.  this will give me a record of the electrical data of my heart whilst running.  When I do the proper run in the 'lobby' of Salts Mill, I'll wear a simple sports hearts monitor that will enable me to record beats per minute and beats per length of the room.  To get the data I need it should be a simple matter ( yeah right) of combining the two sets of data.  I'll tell you more about this run and the data in the next post.

The reality of the smudge

splodgy photoshoped footprint

The idea is that I will embroider a 100m length of fabric with footprints in the position that my actual footprints would have been.  At the same time I will have the data of the electrical activity of my heart whilst I was running the 1 ½ miles in the Spinning Room.

The footprints hopefully will be fairly straightforward; I’ll have lengths of paper that I will have made relief prints on.  Initially these are likely to be wet prints from the dirt off the actual floor in the Spinning room.  The theme of the exhibition is cloth and memory;  I love the thought that 150 years worth of ingrained dirt will be used in the creation of this piece; that there is a continuing physical presence of the work that went on here for so many years; they keep sweeping the floors but the dirt is always there; the fabric of the building will be adding to not only the prints I make this Saturday but will add to the piece itself when its laid out in August.

I might have to make relief prints off my trainers for the embroidery programming.  In experiments in my studio the prints are often ambiguous and smudged which raises the question should I use a neat crisp image or the reality of the smudge?   I’ll take some prints whilst on site; if I have them then I can always not use them, but this will mean inking up the bottom of my lovely new Asics Gel Nimbuses!  I am going to have to be careful on this and do this after the actual run as I don’t want to leave inky footprints all over the floor of a listed building.

the begining

Well of course its not the beginning, but I am going to blog the story of my digital embroidery that will be part of Cloth and Memory 2 at Salts Mill , Saltaire, West Yorks.19th August- 3 November 2013.

Here is an artist's impression of my proposed piece.

I am hoping to visualise my physical response to moving within the Spinning Room (or Lobby) of Salts Mill, part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Saltaire by creating a 100m long, mixed media installation for the exhibition.  The room is 168m long: a tenth of a mile.  The mill, when in full production was reported to have made 1½ miles of cloth an hour; fifteen lengths of the spinning room.

I am going to run fifteen lengths representing an hour’s cloth production.  Whilst I runs I will use standard digital medical diagnostic testing to record the electrical activity (ECG)of my heart by wearing a 24 hour tape and capture my footprints by conventional running gait analysis tools.  I am hoping to do this this coming Saturday 19th Jan, although the weather might make this difficult.  This data will form the basis of the piece which will be created using cutting edge, computer programmable sewing machines (in this case a Pfaff Creative sensation, kindly lent by VSM UK Ltd) that will allow incredibly accurate surfaces to be made.    

This is a new departure for the major regional cultural venue of Salts Mill, who is looking to re-establish their link with textiles. The exhibition, 'Cloth and Memory', is curated by Professor Lesley Millar and will involve 23 emerging, established and international artists whose work engages with the history and character of the Mill. 

I am looking forward to sharing the story of this piece with you.  I hope you'll enjoy seeing it develop and hearing the trials and tribulations.  I would love to hear back from you.