Far Left Is Plaited Braid Stitch. Took Me A Couple Of Attempts To Get The Rhythm Sorted.

Far left is plaited braid stitch. Took me a couple of attempts to get the rhythm sorted.

your august 15 post, i have a question about. im a former crafts grad. did you crochet the piece, dip in slip then fire? i ask because someone at school was doing something similar, and I haven't seen much of this done but really interesting!

Yup! That was pretty much it.

I used a cheap acrylic yarn (because wool is expensive, and it seems a waste to just burn it), which let off a *lot* of black smoke as it burned off. I used a crochet hook a couple of sizes bigger than is recommended for the yarn, to make sure it was hole-y enough (both for aesthetic reasons, and to help air circulate in the firing). I dipped it in earthenware slip, let it dry out for a few days, did a very slow fire, and then glazed with a transparent glaze. 

This represents about five hours work. It's not the sewing that takes so much time, but the jumping around, finding the next spot, occasionally undoing, realising you've forgotten a solitary N somewhere and finding the thread out again just to fill in that one letter. This is just under half of the planned piece. It's William Blake's 'The Divine Image'.

And of course this is the other thing I spent my weekend working on. I'm about 25% done. Book 2 is the longest book of the Iliad, at 877 lines. I'm around line 220.

I'm working on this book a lot more slowly than I did book 1. But I wasn't also working for a PhD when I did book 1. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

I'm hoping I can finish this whole project at around the same time I finish my PhD, which gives me 3-4 years more.

Day 37.

This is the beginning of an art project called 'Mycenae'. At the end of the Mycenaean era, when the palaces burned to the ground, the permanent records of the people - written in leather - were burned along with everything else. But their temporary records, written in recyclable clay, we're fired in the heat and thus preserved by the same act that destroyed everything else. Life loves irony.

The project here is to take temporary communications (or things we perceive as temporary) - email exchanges, instant message conversations, text exchanges, even snail spam mail - things we don't mean to preserve, and imprint them on porcelain tablets, firing and preserving them.

I'll admit one tablet by itself really doesn't look all that impressive. This is a project which - if it works at all - will work because of the scale. Imagine hundreds of those tablets covering a whole wall, each one containing incidentally preserved fragments of peoples' lives.

This is something I made a few months ago now, whilst procrastinating and avoiding other projects. I guess it's a combination of my Iliad project, and another piece I was working on - The Text Gazes Back (of which there are photos on my website: www.theclassicist.co.uk).

It's the emotional states of characters throughout book one, represented by emoticons. Every row represents a different scene.