How do you show a 100m long piece without a 100m long plinth?

You might remember my piece '1 hours production = 1 ½ miles = 15 lengths' that a created for Lesley Millar’s show 'Cloth and Memory 2' at Salts Mill, Saltaire, West Yorkshire.  The piece contains my biometric data recorded whilst running in the Spinning room at the mill as a metaphor for woollen cloth production in the 19^th century.  I made the piece specifically for the space but have been thinking how I could also show you in other venues.  Its 100 m in length and whilst I had the luxury of a plinth that long at Salts Mill I know that is unlikely to be repeated.

So I have been thinking how I could show this piece again in another venue…..one without an enormous plinth!  

This year I will be showing the piece at Festival Of Quilts, NEC, Birmingham 1^st - 4^th August.  We will hang the piece from the ceiling letting it drop from the 15m ceiling and letting it rise again before wrapping it around the stand itself.

Game On

I am very excited to have a project selected as part of Utopia, a festival marking the 500^th anniversary of Thomas More’s famous book.   The festival will be hosted at Somerset House, the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Cultural Institute at Kings College London in 2016.  We are hope to be installing work in the Inigo Rooms at Somerset House during the summer.  
http://utopia.somersethouse.org.uk/

I will be once again collaborating with Dr Matthew Howard and the Centre for Robotic Research at Kings College London.  We plan to combine e-textiles with digitally printed and stitched textiles to make art quilts that respond to the audience’s presence.  Those of you who know me well will know that I am passionately interested in bio medical data and this will be a theme within the work.  We will look at the positive effect IVF has had on peoples’ lives.

Just as with the Cloth and Memory 2 exhibition and the Crafts Council Parallel Practice residency I will be blogging about the progress of the project and I hope you will enjoy following the story.

Getting it right

Those of you who follow my blog posts will know that the Parallel Practice residency at King's has been full of ups and downs.
I’ve moaned about how small I have had to work; I am used to working in metres and now I am working in millimetres.  My piece for Cloth and Memory 2 was featured in the December '14 issue of Embroidery magazine in a feature about monumental scale textiles, and I am currently finishing two quilts for the ‘Error in the bone’ project that are each 3msq.
Today I am emailing about whether the PCB is 17 or 20mm; just so you know, a penny is 20.3mm.  I am not complaining about this but using this as a stark illustration of the difference in the way of working for me.  The other challenge I have had is the technical one: that circuits aren’t right or contacts aren’t good enough; that threads have shorted or that work has been just ‘wrong’ and often I have struggled to find the ‘right’ way.
So here is a lovely positive image of getting it right.  The image on the little screen is a wave form of the electrical impulses (or EMG) of Ali’s bicep moving.  The sensors are embroidered; the band making contact is textile.  Result!

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!