Curating Knowledge - Anna McDonald

Anna's main interests are centred around the idea of Ephemeral Art, the 60s, Performance and Happenings. She invites the experience for example, her recent work Tree Ideas uses a group of people waiting for leaves to drop from a tree and the experience of anticpation, patience and the way in which the physical self changes in readiness for the potential of catching the falling leaves. This immediacy connects to her dance interest as her background is primarily in this field.

The fact that the body is therefore vulnerable to this change is an idea which becomes more apparent with her exploration of practice - incorporated and inscribed practice.

Her work also engages with larger themes which include scientific ideas such as the Arrow of Time, all change is permanent, an unrepeatable moment.

Presence and the "now" , "patterns and percentages offer a seductive sense of protection".

Maggie Phelan - Spacialised Time

Art can give the impression that time can be irreversible.

Anna's most recent work Car Conversations accentuates the fixed and the ephemeral.

Mark Johnson Bodily Schema

A manner of proceeding  - an action is long know and newly experienced.

The juxtaposition of the permanence and transient.

The Body brings the past to the present - EVERYTHING LEAVES A MARK

Definition of Weft

Weft Weft, obs.
     imp. & p. p. of {Wave}.
     [1913 Webster]



  Weft Weft, n. [Cf. {Waif}.]
     A thing waved, waived, or cast away; a waif. [Obs.] ``A
     forlorn weft.'' --Spenser.
     [1913 Webster]



  Weft Weft, n. [AS. weft, wefta, fr. wefan, to weave. See
     {Weave}.]
     [1913 Webster]
     1. The woof of cloth; the threads that cross the warp from
        selvage to selvage; the thread carried by the shuttle in
        weaving.
        [1913 Webster]

     2. A web; a thing woven.
        [1913 Webster]

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44

Palimpsest

A palimpsest is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again. The word "palimpsest" comes through Latin from Greek παλιν + ψαω = (palin "again" + psao "I scrape"), and meant "scraped (clean and used) again." Romans wrote on wax-coated tablets that could be smoothed and reused, and a passing use of the term "palimpsest" by Cicero seems to refer to this practice






Archimedes Palimpsest

Further Photoshop Experiements

 

Combines of two photographs. I wanted to create a modern twist by incorporating a further image down one side. This image came from discussions about Grandma's huge lilac tree which she had in her garden which I remember vividly. The scent of the lilac blossoms would fill the air and even now are evocative of this memory.

 

Embossed effect

 

Cropping of the original first experiment (see above)

 

The contrasts allowed me to create a ghost like effect, the girls become defined by their white dresses, and Annie's dress can be seen through the image. I would like to incorporate this idea within further experiments with cloth and manipulation of fabrics.

 Image copied and tranfered to acetate sheets

Marcie Farwell

http://katrinarodabaugh.blogspot.com/2008/03/interview-with-marcie-farwell-aka-zora.html

Weaving Techniques

Concatenation

Noun	1.	concatenation - the state of being linked together as in a chain; union in a linked series connectedness, connection, link - the state of being connected; "the connection between church and state is inescapable"
	2.	concatenation - the linking together of a consecutive series of symbols or events or ideas etc; "it was caused by an improbable concatenation of circumstances" connection, connexion, connectedness - a relation between things or events (as in the case of one causing the other or sharing features with it); "there was a connection between eating that pickle and having that nightmare"
	3.	concatenation - a series of things depending on each other as if linked together; "the chain of command"; "a complicated concatenation of circumstances" chain catena - a chain of connected ideas or passages or objects so arranged that each member is closely related to the preceding and following members (especially a series of patristic comments elucidating Christian dogma) daisy chain - (figurative) a series of associated things or people or experiences series - similar things placed in order or happening one after another; "they were investigating a series of bank robberies"
	4.	concatenation - the act of linking together as in a series or chain joining, connexion, connection - the act of bringing two things into contact (especially for communication); "the joining of hands around the table"; "there was a connection via the internet"

Based on WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart collection. © 2003-2008 Princeton University, Farlex Inc

Stephen Berkmann

The Songbird

Stephen Berkman's work uses the 19th century wet collodion process and through this creates Ambrotypes and Camera Obscura Installations. His work is widely referenced, using history, techniques and also satire within his work. Although his work seems to be situated in the past, Berkman includes hints and comments on today's society throughout his work.

http://www.stephenberkman.com/

Sally Mann

Sally Mann is a photographer who specialises in black and white photography. She created a series of photographs titled What Remains 2003 which explore the idea of loss.

"Death is powerful," says Mann. "It's perhaps best approached as a springboard to appreciate life more fully. That's why this show ends with pictures of living people, pictures of my children. This whole body of work is a process of thanksgiving."

She caused controversy by photographing a range of bodies and documented the process of decomposition at a forensic study site.

These images ask the viewer philosophical questions and tries to make sense of what happens as life ceases to be, and what remains after? Mann explores this through the physical viewing of the act of decomposition, but the questions are further explored through subsequent images which include photographs of landscapes which were once locations for battles such as the Civil War, and a set of extreme close up images of children's faces peering out at the viewer through a fog/haze.

Mann also uses the collodion process, a 19th century photographic process which is highly dangerous, as chemicals such a cyanide are required in order to create the sepecific qualities rendered in the photographs.

Derrida's problematic "definition"

Derrida stubbornly refused to define the term and thus failed to fix it. It is an activity, a reading of the text, which shows that the text is not a discrete whole but that it has more than one interpretation and very many conflicting interpretations.
Example – Inside/Outside, nature/culture, opposing terms, questions and re-thinks the terms.

The ideas conveyed by deconstruction have profoundly influenced literature, architecture, graphic design, new media, film theory and fashion.

Designers generated new construction and signification possibilities – questioning traditions of what is invisible and what is unseen. They re-thought and subverted the parameters determining what is high and low fashion. They challenged the relationship between memory and modernity, enduring and ephemeral.

The deconstructed body – the dressed body represents the physical and cultural territory where the visible and sensible performance of our identity takes place. Fashion shows how absence, dislocation and reproduction affect the relationship between the individual body and a frozen idealisation of it.

Designers criticised for their “shapeless” garments, argues they are “neutral”, so neither revealing or accentuating the body.

Kawakubo 1997 Comme de garcon s/s Dress becomes body becomes dress”, reversal of the relation between the body and the dress. Body reacts to the garment. Containment and inside/outside are crucial to the effectiveness of the deconstruction theory. Also present in Margiela’s Doll’s Wardrobe s/s 1999.

Tutorial - March

This tutorial allowed me to explain my work so far and discuss my progress in terms of how the ideas are developing. I took with me some experiments on cotton and muslin of my images transfers and discussed how these could be subsequently used within the Praxis.

Also discussed was the Critical Essay which I had spent some time researching in relation to Derrida's wrtings on Deconstruction and how these could be a starting pint for the paper. After discussing this with Jane, I felt that I was perhaps getting too involved in these readings in terms of just how elusive this term was, and how Derrida himself struggled to create a specific definition for the term.

My interest in the deconstruction ideas tend to be centred around the practitioners using it as an exploration through the visual arts, for example, Margiela experiments with the notion in temrs of creating a series of garments which are left in the gallery space with different amounts of bacteria being introduced to the cloth and left to rot and disintegrate of a period of a week.

http://www.contemporaryfashion.net/index.php/none/none/113/uk/exhibition.html

Contextual Framework

Maya Onoda
Su Blackwell
Fashion is my muse blog by Ingrid Mida
J Morgan Puett
Tim Walker Lamp Tree
M Gres White Dresses
Keiko Sugiyama
Dave Cole The Money Dress
Steven Partridge http://www.rewind.ac.uk/partridge/calcut.htm(article)
Stephanie Lerma
Nicholas Hlobo
Bat-Ami Helerman

Dr Jane Turner's Seminar on Embodiment

Embodiment

The terms is given to somthing which has no body. Definitions are linked with spirituality and the personal.

Creating a Creative Family Tree - this task allowed to reflect on my practice so far and seemed to clarify some of the routes I had been exploring in relation to my own work.

Notions of Disenchantment and Reenchantment - Suzy Gablick Re-enchantment of Art, discusses the creative practice and the job.

In relation to Balinese dance there is both an active and dynamic tension. The culture includes both visible and invisible realms which co-exist and equate to both the physical and the spiritual.

The question is, how far do you have to know something to embody it?

Gablick claims that the disengagement within western culture has in fact created a atrophy in terms of how we engage. These are defined in the following terms:

LACUNAE - Gap or empty space, used in relation to the sense of spirituality. Seeking out a self that needs to be filled.

EMIC/ETIC - Emic denotes account of culture from within - Etic the view from outside that culture.

AXIOLOGICAL - Enages with the idea of value judgement, acknowledging knowledge.

DEEP PLAY - Involvment with something at an unconcious level

DEEP ACTING - Trained imagination "as if", simulates the moment.

These terms are interesting in temrs of the role I play in the exploration of my work work, how much of the work is done at an unconcious level, for example, the use on construction and sewing in my practice has been passed through the generations, perhaps I could explore this notion through the idea of deep play.

Jamie Davies

Dresses for the Babies I'm not going to have 2005




http://www.anotherjamiedavis.com/?p=work&w=1033

MACA Research Presentation

Art Praxis 1 - Research Inquiry

At this point, my research inquiry has two main strand running through the project. Firstly, the use of my identity and secondly the idea of embodiment in relation to my place within the family and my own heritage.

Critical Framework:

Deconstruction in relation to Derrida and exploration thorugh dress and garment deconstruction - eg, Martin Margiela
http://www.maisonmartinmargiela.com/en/index2.html

Rei Kawakubo
http://showstudio.com/contributors/311

Female Gender Roles

History of Dress - in particular the Seamstress/Dressmaker throughout history

At present, the themes discuss the Autobiographical and the Curatorial

Notions of "The Self"

Tracey Emin

Cindy Sherman

Encountering the Archive/Documentation of Practice

Susan Hiller

Mary Kelly

Susan Hiller - Work In Progress 1980

 Work in Progress Tuesday

 Work In Progress Friday



The three works shown were completed in the early 1980s. The works use original paintings on canvas created by Hiller and later destroyed and reused to create the works shown. The idea that the work is created from other work and re-interpreted for a different audience, incorporating both historical and contemporary elements.

Hal Foster - An Archival Impulse

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/0162287042379847

Slaves of the Needle

"Slaves of the Needle:" The Seamstress in the 1840s
Beth Harris, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York
In the early 1840s, lower middle-class, middle-class, and even upper-class women ("distressed gentlewomen") were increasingly put in the position of having to support themselves. Mrs. Jameson noted that if one considers the widows or daughters of "attorneys and apothecaries, tradesmen and shopkeepers, banker's clerks &c, in this class more than two-thirds of the women are now obliged to earn their own bread" ("Condition of the Women and the Female Children," The Athenaeum, 16 (March 18, 1843), 258). Unlike painting or writing, which some middle-class women were taking up as professions, needlework and teaching were seen as "natural" professions for women, and so would have been appropriate for those from the middle- and upper-classes. Whereas only some women had the education to be a governess, virtually all women had the necessary experience for needlework.

Anna Elizabeth Blunden (Mrs. Martino), 1830-1915, The Seamstress (A Song of the Shirt), 1854.
Millinery and dressmaking constituted the higher end of female employment with the needle; they were "respectable" occupations for young women from middle-class or lower middle-class families. The number of women involved in dressmaking alone in the early 1840s was estimated to be 15,000 (House of Commons, Reports from Commissioners: Children's Employment, Trade and Manufactures, Sessional Papers XIV (1843) 555). Milliners and dressmakers came from families who had enough money to pay for them to be apprenticed to learn the trade. This type of employment was part of an old, established apprenticeship system (like tailoring among men), and it was one of only a few occupations open to women which offered a skill and a sense of belonging to a trade, and which promised, at least after the apprenticeship period was served, a decent and respectable living.
Dressmakers were involved in an old type of commerce the business of producing women's clothes made to order. However, in the 1830s and 1840s, the growing middle class created a new demand for cheap ready-made men's clothing (the work of the bespoke tailor was simply not affordable). Like many trades in the 1830s and 1840s, tailoring had therefore shifted from the unionized labor of skilled male artisans to the cheaper labor of women. To serve this growing market for cheap clothing, many women worked at home sewing ready-made clothing (also called "slop" and "slop-work") for very low piece-rates. The women who sewed slop could be young, but they were sometimes older and widowed with children and other relatives to support. Sewing men's shirts, even for starvation wages, was often preferable to the only other option, domestic service, because it allowed one to remain independent (an important factor for middle-class women and distressed gentlewomen).
In the spring of 1843, the Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission shocked the public with horror stories of the cruel and heartless exploitation of needlewomen in the backrooms and garrets of London. The public was appalled to learn that so many "delicate" young women lived, worked, and died, in such miserable conditions, and what was worse for Victorian sensibilities, that some resorted to or succumbed to prostitution.
Soon after the publication of the Second Report, the distressed seamstress became something of a cause celebre. The public was barraged with newspaper articles, pamphlets, novels, short stories, poetry (the most famous of which is Thomas Hood's "Song of the Shirt"), and plays, many of which utilized the information on needlewomen "uncovered" by the government's commissioners (often quoting it verbatim and at length). In October of 1843, a report in The Times about a needlewoman who had illegally pawned the clothing she was given to sew, because she and her child were starving, escalated the concern for seamstresses into something of a hysteria. Two months later, in December 1843, another scandal (also reported in The Times) erupted when a shirt-maker tried to kill herself and her child. Together, these cases (and a handful of others) shaped public opinion about the condition of all needlewomen in London. They became the symbol of how poor, helpless English women were driven to criminal activity and even infanticide by unfeeling and (significantly) Jewish merchants. Jewish slop-sellers were frequently blamed by The Times and Punch for what was really simply the unheeding and often cruel progress of capitalism. The Times also used seamstress stories as part of their longstanding (and sometimes scandal-mongering) campaign to discredit the New Poor Law of 1834.
Given the vast amount of literature on seamstresses produced during this period, it seems remarkable at first that virtually every source one consults tells the same story: a story in which a happy, healthy and virtuous young woman leaves her home in the countryside to become a seamstress in the big city where she encounters an evil employer and/or seducer, and begins an irreversible decline leading to death and/or prostitution.
Even the evidence in the Second Report offered this narrative, although in a professional, semi-detached manner and format. Writers of fiction, motivated to bring the "facts" of the parliamentary report before a wider audience, created engrossing narratives by pitting sympathetic, young, blameless, and virtuous seamstress characters against cruel, evil (and often Jewish) employers. Like the narrative that was constructed of the prostitute, the downward progression of the seamstress in these stories was nearly irreversible. In most stories, the seamstresses' only choice was to succumb to vice (prostitution), or to retain her "virtue" and die. Authors often used two protagonists to demonstrate the inevitability of these two fates.
The sense of urgency evident in the constant repetition of the seamstress's decline, the use of one-dimensional characters and a melodramatic plot, indicate that the narrative was being called on to negotiate, and find solutions for, the question on everyone's mind – who or what was to blame for (and what ought to be done about) the volatile, angry, impoverished, and potentially revolutionary working class. Whenever the question grew pressing, as it did in 1843-1844 (and then again in 1848-1850), due to fears of working-class unrest, the distressed seamstress reappeared as the focus of public concern and outrage.
Why the seamstress though, and not some other type of laborer? The answer to this question is complex. The people who wrote about the seamstress all had political agendas of one kind or another. England, many people felt in the decade of the "hungry forties," was facing a crisis, and the seamstress fit perfectly into almost every way the problem was analyzed. The problem involved (depending on who was asked): a lack of communication between the rich and the poor (Disraeli's "two nations"), unemployment among men while women were working in increasing numbers, and the related breakdown of the working-class family, the New Poor Law of 1834, and not enough decently paid work for women.
Sewing was, in many ways, the ultimate sign of femininity. It was sedentary and passive, and it was traditionally done by women only for the care and maintenance of the family and home. In the literature of the period the needle itself often stood for women's "natural" place in the home, and carried powerful associations of domestic bliss and maternal devotion. Where other female workers were seen to develop masculine characteristics, the seamstress remained a "woman." It is no wonder then that needlework performed by women for the marketplace, for strangers (not unlike prostitution), became a source of intense anxiety. Ideological notions of motherhood, home, morality and national stability all became dislocated when the needle moved from the home to the garret.
On the other hand, for those women who yearned for a place in the world outside the home, the dull, repetitious act of plying the needle represented their unfair confinement to the domestic sphere (see Charlotte Brontë's Shirley). The impoverished seamstress became, for early feminists, a symbol of the consequences of a hypocritical society that circumscribed women's lives, preached that they should not work (and consequently made almost no occupations open to them), while forcing them, at the same time, to work. The hardships of teaching and being a seamstress were elaborated by Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Jameson and others to demonstrate the necessity of widening women's education and opportunities.
In the 1840s, the figure of the distressed seamstress appeared in the work of Charles Kingsley (Alton Locke and Cheap Clothes and Nasty), Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna (The Perils of the Nation and The Wrongs of Woman), Friedrich Engels (The Condition of the Working Class in England), Thomas Carlyle (The Nigger Question) and Charles Dickens (The Chimes), among others. For more information on the distressed seamstress in the 1840s, including visual images and her relationship to the political issues of the day, see Beth Harris, "The Works of Women are Symbolical" The Victorian Seamstress in the 1840s, Ph.D. Dissertation, City University of New York, 1997.

Rosemarie Trockel

Rosemarie Trockel

Knitted Paintings



She used the female pursuit of knitting to explore this idea and in turn strips away the connotations associated with the pursuit. She emphasises the mechanical and technological process by generating the images on a computer and in turn feeding the data to a knitting machine which then creates the work as above.



Sleeping Pill

Experiments with Image Transfer

 

Annie Vint c1880

This image and the two below also include experimentation with hand and machine stitching to enhance my theme of the seamstress. I wanted to leave parts exposed and unfinished, like an open seam you may find on a toile or moulaged garment.

 

Annie, Grandma, Great Auntie Flo and Great Aunt Edna

 

The girls together

 

Grandma and Great Aunt Edna in a school production. This image was quite succesful and I have managed to capture the wearing of the image over time.

 

Second attempt image transfer to experiment with layering and creating a weather beaten effect to replicate the passing of time

Maison Martin Margiela:The Book - Art + Culture + Critique, online Zine http//ibamex.blogspot

Fashion and philosophical deconstruction : a fashion in deconstruction

Flavia Loscialpo claims that by the practising of deconstruction, designers have disinterred the mechanics of the dress structure and with them, the mechanisms of fascinations that haunt fashion.

They undo the structure of a specific garment, renouncing to finish it, but also re-thinking the function and the meaning of the garment itself.
They question the relationship between the body and the garment, as well as the concept of the body itself.

The creation of a piece implicitly raises questions about our assumptions regarding fashion. Following Derrida’s use of deconstruction, they show that there is no objective standpoint , outside history, from which ideas, old concepts, as well as their manifestations, can be dismantled, repeated or re-interpreted.

This constant dialogue with the past is what allows designers practising deconstruction to point to new landscapes.

Tilleke Schwartz

Loosing our Memory 2000



Tales

Andrew Ortiz

Masa 1998





Blackbird Speaking 1998

Ortiz uses digital imaging techniques to create his work. He combines images found through a variety of sources such as portraits, photographs, objects, etc. He then scans these and manipulates the images through Photoshop.  His focuses on the idea of montage, the images blurring in view.

Inspiration

Janice Thwaites

Covered Lady



Egg Machine


Uneasy Relationships

www.janicethwaites.org.uk/