from the archives

I am slowly working through archiving all my photography from when I first started shooting with film way back in 2009. I've discovered lots of pictures I never shared here or uploaded to flickr. These ones here are from summer 2010, taken with Baby - my little Yashica 35-ME. 

I still love her to bits.

happy dance

My very first (successful) drypoint printed on the mangle...

This is the mangle I mentioned earlier. I bought it at an auction for 50p eons ago when I lived in Norfolk in England. At the time I was in my art-less wilderness years and bought it because it was cheap, no-one else wanted it and I thought it might come in handy one day. It still has the lot no. 547 on it and has sat in the basement unused ever since I bought it to France with me. Well, apart from the time I was without a washing machine for a few months it came in rather handy.

A bit of a clean up and tighten here and there, I treated myself to a lovely new drypoint tool and some Charbonnel ink I've been drooling over, rolled up my shirt sleeves and got stuck in.

Yes well. Getting the right sort of perspex, the pressure right, finding the right sort of paper, the required level of dampness of the paper...bref, lots of trial and error and swearing until I found how to get it to work. 

I made a sandwich of hardboard, a towel, newspaper, my dampened paper (I used some of the woad dip-dyed paper I made a recently) the inked plate, more newspaper and a sheet of calico. I found this gave me just the right amount of pressure.

Rolled it through the mangle 6 times just to be completely sure it was printing OK. A bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut, granted.

And finally, the print. So happy I hung on to that rusty old mangle all these years. I may now treat the old girl to some new wooden rollers as her rubber ones are a bit wonky. Bless her.

animate/inanimate

• My lovely old boy at the top is nearly 15, smells like carpet that has cheesy Doritos crushed into it but still acts like a 2 year old much of the time. 
• The chairs were lined up outside a house opposite this wonderful exhibition.
• Spring in the park, and this beautiful man cycling through who stopped to ask about my camera, in return he let me take his picture.
• A perfectly working practise amp my hubby found at the rubbish dump, and a sister typing a letter to her brother.
• Free range pigs in shit. Literally. And very happy.

{Mamiya DSX/Kodak TMAX100}

Thoughts

{Grafitti on Franz West's sculpture 'Agoraphobia' in Parc Raymond, Toulouse}

Yesterday I had a day alone in Toulouse, ostensibly to go and look around the commercial galleries, wander with my camera, spend some time with myself without being nagged. I think it's what's called a Me-Date.

Things went a bit haywire; I left home in lovely sunshine that turned to torrential rain by the time the train pulled in to the station. Me, I was wearing canvas shoes, no socks and woefully un-waterproof clothing. I also thought I knew my way around the city better than I actually do and got myself hopelessly, terrifyingly lost, while the rain bucketed down on me. No chance to whip out a camera then, mooch about enjoying this and that when really all I wanted to do was keep finding dry places to go.

However, it wasn't an entirely wasted trip because I did learn something valuable from going round the galleries, and that is…I'm not cut out for the traditional art world. Now, I realize this is a bad idea for an artist. Thing is, I'm introverted, pretty unsociable and a bit of a moody bugger. All I really want to do is just make art. But I love sharing my work in the real world and wish I could devise a plan of doing so that was an equivalent of yarn bombing or street art. I love this artist's work. Any suggestions? 

***

I was kindly invited to answer some questions about my work over on Carole's blog...

sail to the moon

{Mamiya DSX/Kodak TMax 100}

woodcut

Recently, my man-child has been teaching me how to woodcut. For several months now he's been getting stuck in to it, dumpster diving for bits of old wood to use and cutting his hands to bits with old blunt tools. But, he assured me, it's so much better than my lino, you can really see the hand of the artist, and the richness of the grain is, allegedly, the mutt's nuts.

That's him above in my studio, using some of the scraps of wood a dear friend (another one! I know! So many lovely people just give us stuff) had she thought he would like to use. First you have to paint the wood with encre de chine and draw with a white pencil before cutting. His woodcuts were very cool, involving taps, shower heads and spurting water. Mine, well let's just say they involved hares. And trees.

He took his back to Marseille so he could print using the school's presses while I had to make do with a spoon and sore thumbs. But I've hauled an ancient mangle up from the basement that I'm in the process of cleaning off the rust and tightening it to try and use as a press for lino and drypoints...