I am on holiday from tomorrow May 12th until May 24th in New York. Any orders placed in my shop will not be posted until the 25th. If anyone has any recommendations for anything in New York, particularly related to weaving, let me know! Thank you

I was asked to take part in an exhibition happening on the LSE campus, to make a response to the building of St Philips, a place rich in social history due to be demolished to make way for a more modern design for the University.

The show entitled 'Students, patients and paupers' due to the use of the building throughout its history as a workhouse, then hospital, then academic building aims to celebrate the many lives of the building. When exploring the building I was told about how the building's turn of the century design echoed changing ideas of how workhouses were being built to stop the spread of disease by being highly ventilated, light and spacious places whereas previous ideas had been to make the buildings undesirable places to discourage people from wanting to be there.

With this in mind I paid attention to the details of design within the building that related to improving the lives of the inhabitants, and the fragments of activity within the vast white walls.

I chose to make a long vertical weaving, the composition echoing my initial walk of the building.

Colour theory technique experiment

Woven back to back with my san gimignano weaving project and with only 5 days from seeing the building to opening night, this was an intense project but enjoyable; I chose to use whatever resources I had already which forced me to find solutions to problems I had. One for instance was I did not have the right colours to reflect the colours in the building so I tried to use a colour theory technique I had read about recently in the Interactions of Color by Josef Albers which places colours of different values in a relationship so that the eye sees a colour of a middle value between the two. I want to continue exploring colour in the way, which makes sense in the way I already explore tones in the use of stripes in the monochrome work.

It is an excellent and superbly organised exhibition; on for a few more days if you get a chance go along and have a look.

Lately I have been using my San Gimignano wallpaper design to investigate the pictorial possibilities available within weaving, in this case, using the tapestry technique which is a weft-faced technique, ie the warp is completely covered and acts as a frame for the horizontal wefts.

I decided to weave the designs in a strap/band formation as a lot of current inspiration is drawn from weaving in this method, firstly in the form of ancient peruvian bands and tapes and also secondly in some woven furniture I have been looking at.

Scans from 'Textiles of Ancient Peru' by Raoul D'harcourt

In february I went to Gothenburg, and one afternoon we took a walk around the Design museum and spent a nice long time in the most comfortable and beautiful Bruno Mathsson chairs. Gunta Stozl wove a similar style of chair in collaboration with Marcel Breuer in 1921, and there are some wonderful woven Mary Heilmann chairs in the reading room of the Whitechapel you CAN SIT on.

Mathsson

Uglycute

Stolzl/ Breuer

Heilmann

I wanted to create the bands as if there were vertical compositions in their own right, but also to correspond on the horizontal axis too, and also as a whole picture. Unfortunately the process of weaving in this way is a long, slow and fiddely process, and I wish I could have also created within this time, straps separated from one another to try interweaving in the way in the furniture as well as this attached hanging piece.There is a long way to go in investigating this process (as always), but I find it exciting to think of applying the weaving in this way- how you could create interaction between the layers of weaving interlacing each other, and how colour and contrast of pattern and plainness could be used within the structure.

Another aspect I was looking at was the surface texture, the variety between the silk and linen and the heavy silk- resulting in varying surface textures - although similar in colour, the effect of touch and reflection of light is quite contrasting and is something I want to continue looking into.

The various patterns and textures are created using float patterns, which involves using a pick up stick to drop and pick up certain warp ends, as well as the soumak technique I used in previous weaving.

The San Gimignano wallpaper design is now up at new Pizza Express branch at Brent Cross, a site specific design was made for this location, as well as a panel for a glass partition.

Some screen printed stationary I made a few months back- notes and stickers, perforated business cards that I screen printed on the reverse of, stickers on a print to be posted.

Around christmas time I was approached by independent publisher Little Otsu based in Portland, Oregon, to produce a book for their living things series they launched this winter. Initially the words 'Living Things' circulated in my mind without finding meaning, the stumbling block being a mental block of the two words seemingly opposing each other; in my mind 'things' exclusively equalling inanimate objects, without life or 'living'.

On an icy walk with one of my family we were discussing this, and ideas in general, and I spoke of one idea that had appeared in my mind of a man walking around the city isolated from everything apart from his task at hand; head down he wanders the city observing the ground, the pavement, taking in that which is normally ignored, he collects objects from these walks and gathers them at his home; enclosed in some way- pinned to boards, arranged in collections and categories.

I have been planning a trip to New York as I've never been and its long been a place I have thought of, and so have been talking to people about the city. Someone suggested I read The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. It was surprising to read halfway through City of Glass of one of the characters Stillman traversing manhatten, secretly followed by the protagonist, Stillman looking only at the pavement and collecting objects; detritus and debris of citylife from his walks. How strange to read of something so parallel to my own consciousness. This correlation, my interest in this is only at the beginning it feels, but with time constraints, I produced a series of drawings exploring this minutiae of citylife, but there are many fragments of ideas, continuing from other constant fascinations seeping in. My dissertation at university on why we collect, and a V&A workshop I presented in 2009 about the objects we choose to surround ourselves with and how they reflect ourself and meanings and become another language in our lives. These drawings feel more like workings out, and processing of thoughts, rather than exercises in drawing, but was interesting and useful to work so quickly for a change.

In City of Glass, Stillman collects objects and names their forms. It makes me consider the origins of language and also visually of written language, how the object forms the words/marks that were chosen. Especially on recent wanderings round the British museum, seeing similar marks repeated across time and culture enforces a belief in the universality of human existence, something I also thought about when watching 'The cave of forgotten dreams' lately.

The original drawings from some of the spreads above, translated to colour for the publication.

Workbook, sketching out:

Still life of collected objects:

Some photos I took in Berlin last year of forms in isolation, perhaps when the idea began:

The book is now available to order through Little Otsu here. Thank you to Little Otsu for being so great to work with.