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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.