'What have I got to do to make it okay' curators tour

The exhibition at The Pumphouse Gallery 'What have I got to do to make it okay' ends at the end of the month.
If you arent able to visit then you might find Liz Cooper's tour of the show on the Studio International website interesting.  Liz talks in depth about all the work in the show.

http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/liz-cooper-video-interview-what-do-i-need-to-do-to-make-it-ok



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The error bred in the bone

Polygon model of skull from Digitising Diseases website. http://www.digitiseddiseases.org

Some of you may well know that I have been working on getting a project off the ground with the Biological Anthropological Research Centre (or BARC) at the University of Bradford.
Thanks to Arts Council England funding the project will finally begin next week with an extended visit to the Centre.

So how did it all happen…… At the opening of Cloth and Memory2 last summer I met Professor Keith Manchester  who was worried about my ECG in the piece.  In fact a number of people expressed concern at the ECG until it was explained to them that for most of the ECG on the piece my heart rate was at 181bpm and that’s why it wasn’t looking ‘normal’.  At the very beginning where my bpm was 60 you could see it was fine.

 

So Keith and I got talking and he suggested that I should visit the University and see the fascinating things they do.  8 months and a G4A award later the chance for me to make a body of work in response to what is going on in the Centre is now finally about to begin.

So what will I be looking at….?  To be honest I am not sure what the focus will be yet.  They have some amazing stuff in their collection or passing through their hands…everything from medieval leper bones to ancient and modern ivory and scrimshaw having its DNA analysed.  They have been very involved in the Digitised Diseases project that allows you to examine and rotate a whole range of archaeological bones indicating various diseases.
http://www.digitiseddiseases.org/alpha/

I intend to tell the story of this project through my blog so please keep reading!

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

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.

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.

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

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.