snow on snow on snow

A magical Sunday in Kent with friends and snow and roaring fires and delicious food. Plus a possible new commission for a window piece. Exciting. It was very hard to get back to work on Monday.

Feel as though there has been rather more heat than light this week - struggling to get down to any sort of systematic analysis or writing about the work and feeling increasingly anxious about it. Also failing to make the birds for the Dublin exhibition. Deadlines for both looming alarmingly.

But I did manage to polish up and photograph two pieces to enter the Biennale, and a promising hot shop session despite several of the embryos getting contaminated with fibre blanket. 

I also built a series of rigs / frames so that I can photograph the work properly over the weekend - hopefully the Hockney Gallery will be empty and I can set up the camera and tripod and work through all the variables to get a handle on which combination of fold and overlay give the greatest illusion of depth.

10.7 over 11 lines / cm @ 20cm

The problem is that, as well as the differences in apparent depth generated by variations in the frequency of lines, several other variables seem to affect the illusion of depth, creating an almost impossibly complex matrix - the distance and angle of the viewer relative to the object, the angle of the patterns themselves and the distance of the folded paper from the front sheet...

A tutorial with Colin Reid was inspiring and informative - particularly on how to use float glass to create controlled veils / inner 'walls' / spaces for the crystallography work. To Be Continued.

I managed at last to master the art of making a mold precise enough to cast the angled spaces that I need to create accurate optical effects: instead of trying to carve the angle in polystyrene or use the 'sledge' technique as I have done before, I created a frame using panels of glass hinged with gaffer tape. Owen kindly made some plugs of furnace glass yesterday. The kiln will go up tomorrow. I think this is going to work.

Jing screen grab...

Also resolved the problem of how to create a secure online format for the thesis / content - a combination of the RCA folio space with Vimeo and Flickr accounts for the video and photographic content. Rodrigo also tracked down a piece of software called Jing that makes it possible to create videos of activity on screen - so I can capture / save the steps involved in creating models in Rhino as a tailored tutorial that I can revisit and share in the future. Now just need to work out the structure for the blog and start putting stuff into it...

Got the go-ahead to make the drosophilia embryos for the University of Bristol team - KT has agreed to take the lead on that - she is so talented and kind - so looking forward to working with her.

desk top...

Failed to sort out the pension debacle, fix computer or do any laundry... but did get out for a quick swim four times ;-)

Home James!