Sketch-O-Matic call for artists
In an age of buy to invest instead of buy what you like, the making of Art has been torn from human hands as mass-multiple prints flood the high street. Instead, the buying of art is seen as rarefied and reserved for a wealthy few. Sketch-O-Matic is a full size photo booth situated in the busy ground floor café-bar at Cornerhouse, Manchester's' international centre for contemporary visual art and film. But where the machinery should be is a tiny, fully equipped artist studio.
You the public are invited to sit inside the booth as if for a photograph and make a donation to an artist through an anonymous slot in return for a self-portrait. Wait five minutes (give or take) and the image will appear in the side wall, accompanied by the warm blast of a travel hairdryer. If you hanker for that still-wet sensation, they may even lick it for you. It could be a pencil drawing, doodle, cartoon, collage or even word-poem. Take it, frame it, consider it. Now you are both patron and muse!
Launching for Art Night on Thursday 24th November until Sunday 4th December 2011. News of additional activity including film screening and Cornerhouse Projects exhibition to follow. Please see booth for timings.
ARTISTS WANTED!
North-West and Manchester based artists are required to join our Sketch-O-Matic rota in one-hour slots. Lunchtime slots (1 - 2pm) and evening slots (6pm - 10pm). We're looking for pencil drawings, pastels, watercolours, illustrators, cartoonists, cubists, doodlers, poets (for word portraits), collage, ink-blot, dried pasta decoupage and just about any zany or straight-laced style you can imagine... as long as it can be dashed off in approximately 5 minutes. There is, I'm afraid, one exception. No caricaturists. We don't want anyone to walk away feeling crappy about themselves because you've managed to exaggerate a slight mole into a volcanic eruption on the scale of Eyjafjallajökull. Please contact bren@cornerhouse.org or via this website if you'd like to take part!
Tooth collection points
These tooth donation points for the Palaces project have been recently competed by Barry at the Bluecoat, with a bit of steady-handed help from project assistant Sam on the vinyl lettering front. These two here are earmarked for the Bluecoat, home to artist Gina Czarnecki's forthcoming exhibition and the first public appearance of the palace sculpture in December, and The Centre for Life in Newcastle - newly confirmed as an exhibitor for late 2012. As the teeth are starting to trickle in, work on the beautiful fairytale animation to accompany the international call for milk teeth is nearing completion from the talented folk at Design by Day. I can't wait to share it with everyone...
The Lady Appears
Mandy is now pulling together the calico book cover for the final finish of The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington; completing the stitching and applying beaded pomegranate seeds. I’ve talked about my own experience on this project in some depth so far, but at this stage I'm going to hand over to my co-author to get her valuable opinion on our shared working process:
“Because we'd talked through all our ideas quite thoroughly, getting to this point was fairly simple. I feel that visiting The Icon Collection at Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery together helped us aesthetically to stay on the same track. I hadn't appreciated how helpful it would be to have Bren working with me at the studio as we went through the general layout, the choosing fabrics and colours, even deciding what type of stitches to use when generating each design.
“Having collaborated with other artists in different ways, I’m used to discussing work together before heading off to the studio off to work on certain elements of a project by myself. However working with Bren at the studio meant we were able to sketch, visualise and realise all the different aspects of the piece together, which made problem solving and decision making much quicker and simpler.'
“As it lays at the moment, a piece of textile art on a calico background, I have reservations about covering the block of wood with it as the untouched space around the illustrations stop the piece from looking too busy or overworked.'
Re-Covering opens at Untitled Gallery, Manchester in June. Follow the process and thinking behind our joint submission in the instalments listed below.
Chica bonita
As the deadline approaches for Re-Covering, work has begun on creating a cloth envelope to contain the rectangle of wood provided by the Untitled Gallery, itself cut from the furniture of a defunct library. I'm assuming that most other contributors will be working directly upon this, but we wanted to fetishise and play with the notion of an object-icon imbued with power and mystery. With this in mind, the calico sleeve is similar in look and texture to grave wrappings, a viewing and touch point exposed to reveal the wood beneath. This came about because when we received the block it had been previously damaged or knocked, but which had the adverse effect of making the area in question more fascinating and tactile than if blandly uniform and squared-off.
Here you can see the area in question, which will form the side of the Un-Orthodox icon of our unholy nun, functioning like a window upon a casket of bone or scrap of withered flesh. The intention is that anyone handling the piece will want to rub the exposed and uneven wood; perhaps for luck, desire or to channel forbidden powers. The fabrics alongside are coloured suede - the purple will form part of Dona Rosalida's crest upon the rear, that of a split pomegranate decorated with hand-beaded seeds, while the blue will become a swirling backdrop of Musc de Madelaine, a vapourous aphrodisiac and source of her power. Mandy and I also intend to add a care instructions label, 'All bedding is property of The Well of Light Brotherhood', as if the elderly residents of the nursing home in the novel had cannibalised a bed sheet in making the piece.
Here you can see Mandy's Ferrari of a computerized sewing machine with multiple needles, working on creating the spine title stitched direct to leather, later trimmed to form part of the wider patchwork entirety. As for the cover portrait itself, although nesting dolls and religious art remain an influence, we've decided to lean more heavily toward souvenir Spanish flamenco dolls as they possess that same, dark-browed passion and exaggerated features (the swan neck and missing ribs) we want to incorporate. Still toying with the facial features, one idea right now is to incorporate fake eyelashes, albeit snipped to fit, particularly for the one winking, leering eye. We wouldn't want anyone to think this was a genuine Saint, oh no, that would never do.
Unholy alliance
Leonora Carrington in her studio
A new project and collaboration with friend and artist Mandy Tolley took us to Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery yesterday to check out their small but perfectly formed collection of Orthodox Christian icons. As part of a forthcoming show which asks contributors to re-imagine the cover and reverse art of a favourite or influential book, we’ve chosen The Hearing Trumpet by surrealist artist and a favourite of mine, Leonora Carrington.
Leonora Carrington: Self Portrait, 1937
A character within this novella will be the focus of our efforts as we in turn look to creating a cover portrait of the deliciously titled Dona Rosalinda Alvarex Cruz della Cueva; at face value a pious and dedicated Abbess of the Covent of Santa Barbara of Tartarus, actually a scheming sorceress whose power can be traced to vials of ‘Musc de Madelaine’, a magical ointment that may or may not be responsible for the miracles performed by Jesus of Nazareth.
Early thoughts involve combining not only religious art but also, as our approach will be using computerized embroidery and hand-beading, the folk style of Russian ‘Matryoshka’ or nesting dolls; the painted dark-hued allure of Spanish flamenco souvenir ladies, fetish neck braces, cubist landscapes and the seemingly demure practice of needlepoint, scrapbooking and patchwork methods.
Electrostitch
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4