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Showing posts from January, 2010

i did something i liked

i made a pile fabric out of ripped up strips of an old t-shirt and guess what, it's part of visual studies. not that sam said "make a pile fabric out of pieces of an old t-shirt" but she did say "take last weeks 3D sculpture stuff and express it in cloth in a 2D format with 3D elements coming off the surface" and i had this old t-shirt sitting there. so i cut it up into strips and made warp, weft and pile out of strips of warp-knitted fabric. i tied the warp around my A2 sketchbook it's all 1 colour and kinda ugly, and i couldn't keep the selvedges from pulling in progressively as it went on and i'm sure you can understand how crap that feels, cos once the selvedge is pulled in on there's no way of pushing it out if you're not using a reed which i obviously wasn't. it's a common problem i've found with tapestry and knotted pile on square-frame looms. not easily avoided unless you're going to go to the trouble of building littl

totalitarian art

North Korean propoganda poster, presumably the bad guys are US soldiers Monument to the Third International, communist More North Korean propoganda anyway so here's the question. i have been asked to, at great length it seems to me, define Art. and the question occured to me, can totalitarian art be considered truly Art, or is it merely propoganda? in the same vein you could ask if adverts have artistic value. the other issue that popped up when i was discussing this with a friend earlier that there were several schools of art, with their own distinctive styles that grew up in the USSR, so yes it is. but then, this begs the question doesn't it, that are all products of a totalitarian society necessarily totalitarian in themselves. certainly, state controlled propoganda artists certainly produce totalitarian work, but does that discredit every artist in the school of Socialist Realism, for instance, a state sanctioned artistic ideaology though it was? we don't call all art t

happy new year

hey there i know, i hardly ever put anything on this thing anymore. see, it's like this, it's actually hugely frustrating, i haven't done any weaving worth speaking of AT ALL since i started college. and yeah, i ken like that there's more to life than intersecting two sets of threads at right angles to each other, but i like it you know? and i'm supposed to be down here to be doing that. and the knitting is really quite interesting, and actually i guess a potentially productive money-spinner in terms of actually producing sale goods, and it's handy to know how to actually cut patterns and sew properly, with a machine, and print is fun and is so something i quite enjoy and want to do more of, but the thing is i feel like it's gonna take forever before i get to do any weaving and here's the other thing right, well one of them, there's a whole rake of things doin my brain in right now, but here's the other thing like i say. see, in first semester we