MA-Ness Week 9 and a half - Happy Accidents, Experiments in Hemming and Curating-Ness

I try to be organised and get things done in a timely and sensible fashion eg going to post office on same day as going to supermarket as the post office is on the way and that kind of thing hence today when I'd finished ironing my husbands work shirts I left the iron plugged in and had a quick experiment at using wondaweb or rather generic instant hemming material from local shops habadashery section and magic tape as hemming device on the silk organza I did some practice prints on last week.

Getting ready to cut and iron 

end result on sample piece from edge of test piece

Tis fiddly stuff but so far the wondaweb/generic instant hemming material is winning as is it the least visible, most flexible and least fraying - but of course it does mean that I will need to account for this when printing images so as to leave a big enough edge around images so it can be hemmed this way. It's still slightly fiddly but I think it will be better for both my sanity and fingers than trying to hem it either by hand or by machine.


 

Happy Accidental Layering - please ignore reflection of light bulb....

I was putting some of the images I've been using for cyanotyping away last week in A4 plastic wallets in a folder when the image I had taken of a chum dressed in a Marie Antoinette inspired costume applying lipstick and by accident I put the see through acetate the other way round on top of the original image and this created another image which I love the look of and I hope to make another cyanotype of it soon - when it stops raining that is and I get to a photocopier to copy it onto acetate. You can just about see his ghost face either side of the image. Can't wait to get started on that one......

And last but not least for week 9 and a half thoughts on curating-ness, went to see an exhibition at the White Cloth Gallery on Saturday featuring photographs of urban exploration by emerging photographers. Some of the individual images were beautiful - especially ones of abandoned factories where nature was reclaiming the old machinery and winding green tendrils round no longer used wheels and cogs by Jemma Roe, I also especially loved the one by Joe Stenson of an autopsy table and the one of a skull diagram and old siemens manual by George McConville but I suspect I loved these because of their subject matter as opposed to their actual aestetic. It got me to thinking about the overall space and how it had been filled - it's not quite the traditional white gallery space as it has columns and windows in places you might not expect and it is also a bar that serves food so there are sofas and tables and chairs in one of the rooms. Not all the pictures were the same size, the bulk were in the same black with cream mount frames though and as far as I could make out they weren't put up in a all by one artist first or all one location together. It made me think about how I would have put them up in the same space - if finances weren't a factor then I would have have had a few of the images blown up massively and put alone on main walls and then filled the surrounding walls with a victorian style salon approach of everything on wall at once. But once again it got me thinking about context - not just the context in which images are made and then how you show them......