theclassicistblog - The Classicist
The Classicist

This is the main tumblog of Silvie Kilgallon. I'm a conceptual artist and my work is largely influenced by my academic interests in classics, ancient history, translation, and philosophy of language. This blog details conceptual, casual and personal projects on which I am currently working. To see the Stitched Iliad project, please check out the Stitched Iliad blog below.

154 posts

Okay, I'm Very Curious: What Makes You Determine How You Are Doing A Translation Into Stitching?

Okay, I'm very curious: what makes you determine how you are doing a translation into stitching?

Essentially: just reading the poem. I read to see if there's an obvious colour palette suggested by the poem. Reds and oranges, for instance, seem a fairly obvious choice for Blake's poem 'The Tiger' - the tiger  'burning bright' and the imagery of the forge, etc. 

Then I do a pretty basic frequency analysis of the text and sort the letters according to frequency, which helps me refine the colour palette - if I want more reds than oranges, then I need to assign reds to the more frequently occurring letters, etc. 

I also might assign colours based on a specific detail I want to pick out - to carry on with the Blake example, I might want to draw attention to how many questions there are in the poem, so I'd assign a really stand-out colour to the question marks. 

I'm currently working on a translation of Wordsworth's 'I wandered Lonely as a Cloud' I picked a blue colour palette because so much of the imagery refers to the cloudy sky, the night sky, the reflection of the daffodils in the lake, etc. but I'm picking all the punctuation out in yellows to represent the daffodils and to try and catch on some level the images evoked in the poem. 

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More Posts from Theclassicistblog

12 years ago
I Looked Up From My Work For A Couple Of Seconds To Watch The Kittens Play, And When I Looked Back Down

I looked up from my work for a couple of seconds to watch the kittens play, and when I looked back down this little punk was crawling over it.


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12 years ago
This Is The Start Of The Piece For The Winner Of The Giveaway. The Road Not Taken, By Robert Frost. I

This is the start of the piece for the winner of the giveaway. The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost. I spent a lot of time figuring out the exact lay out of this one. I ended up writing the pattern out four or five times, but I think I've finally figured out how I want to do it, so here we go. I also think I'm going to make quite a lot of mistakes in this one.  I've made it pretty complicated, but hopefully it will be worth it.)

Incidentally, the winner was allibys. 


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12 years ago
This One's P. Mountmellick Stitch. Te Big Stitches Are Rhodes Stitch. In Execution, Mountmellick Stitch
This One's P. Mountmellick Stitch. Te Big Stitches Are Rhodes Stitch. In Execution, Mountmellick Stitch

This one's P. mountmellick stitch. Te big stitches are Rhodes stitch. In execution, mountmellick stitch is sort of half way between Dutch knot or Sorbello stitch, and an inverted feather stitch (guess which stitch is next?). And a shot of what the whole thing currently looks like, too.


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