Dusty answer

Portrait of myself as a child, made from washing machine fluff...

I had to laugh when I read Kitsch and Curious Elaine's post about Illustration Friday. Illustration Friday is a lovely website that I hadn't come across before where people can upload a picture illustrating a weekly theme. This week's theme is 'Dusty'. I smiled at Elaine's interpretation of this as a command to draw Dusty Springfield (brilliant!), but also because I have a piece of artwork from the Foundation course I did a couple of years ago that also fits the bill. Yes, it's made of dust! To be more accurate, it's made from the 'felt' of dust you can peel off the filter in your tumble dryer.
     On the course I got quite into the idea of autobiographical art and how objects or substances could signify experiences. This led to various pieces, including this one, using scraps of fabric from my mum's material bag.

You might not be able to see them very well, but it has 'names' for each design of fabric that go counter to the 'happy' feelings that such spriggy fabric usually invokes -- things like 'No one picked me' and 'Dad was angry'. Tragic!
     But I was quite intrigued by the idea of making pictures with the detritus of the body itself -- because there must be a fair amount of skin and stuff in that tumbledryer felt. I know, I know... not very nice, but I was very caught up in my project at that point. In fact I collected a huge number of sheets of fluff, some of which varied in shade depending on the type of washing being done (ie slightly pink, darker or lighter grey), and I still harbour a desire to do something with them. One day.

All too soon it was over

I've been back at work today for the first time in two weeks -- my official break was extended by a few extra days taken in fear of the snowy roads just before Christmas. Two weeks off and what do I have to show for it? Not a lot, really, although I had very high hopes of forcing a return to frothing creativity. It was a very fragmented period, with Christmas squatting at its centre, implacably.
     Don't get me wrong, I like Christmas. I really enjoy putting together stockings for my kids and wrapping presents is very satisfying, but intense love of Christmas isn't deeply embedded in my soul. I really wanted all the hooha to stop so that I could just do my own thing, quietly. It didn't. Except that I enjoyed making the story of the Christmas reindeer after we'd eaten our Christmas lunch -- that was fun and the kids helped me (see previous post).
     Let's take stock of what I did manage to do, before I had to head down the A1 to work again this morning.
     I collaged a little box:

It's a little chocolate box, about five inches across. The edges of the lid have legs on them:

I made a new display for a digital photo frame with 100 old images culled from various places. Here are a few:

I love the mesmerising effect of the slideshow playing the photos over and over again. In fact last night I had a second digital frame playing a different selection of photos at a different speed and it was interesting to see all the different combinations that came up and how one image interacts with another. Here are a few from the other frame, which was intended to act as artistic stimulus (maybe it's working!):

Henry Darger

David Salle

Christian Boltanski

     I also had a first experimental go with my new Bind-It-All machine -- thanks to Barbara for bringing this little marvel into my life.

It's a notebook made from the covers of an old Ladybird. The inside pages are a mixture of papers including bits from old maps, colouring books and sweetie bags:

Trouble is, I like it too much to write or draw in it at the moment.
     In the little breathing space between Christmas and New Year the four of us went back to Brighton for a couple of days, because my daughter and I had such a great time there at half term. It was just as cool as ever, the shops were just as beguiling, the weather was probably better than before as there was no driving rain. My family turned their noses up at the chance to visit the Museum and Art Gallery so I went on my own. Their loss, as it was a real little jewel of a place. It was like a distant relative of classic English municipal museums -- eclectic, eccentric, a little shapeless -- but in this incarnation, the eclecticism was of the highest quality, the eccentricity was galvanising. Every room brought new pleasures which were heightened by being so surprising. There was a wonderful main room of twentieth century furniture with paintings from each decade to accompany the settings -- beautiful treasures from the world's best designers. There was a huge case with pottery by the designers I love most: Ravilious, Laura Knight and too many others to mention. Then a companion case full of glass. Everything was beautifully chosen. There were rooms with themes -- performance art from around the world, the transformation of the body, clothes worn by famous and less famous Brighton citizens. All of it made sense in the context of Brighton and evoked a sense of pride in the place in all its glory and naughtiness past and present. There was also a temporary exhibition on how colour was introduced into the moving image which I found particularly interesting as I'm obsessed with vintage film footage. I can't recommend it highly enough.
    We ate some great food while we were in Brighton -- fantastic grilled lamb in a local Lebanese restaurant and expensive eggs and bacon at Jamie Oliver's Recipease (I think it was worth it). The absolute highlight, though, was dinner at Terre a Terre, an amazing vegetarian restaurant. We're not vegetarian, though we're tending to eat less meat these days, but the food at this place was just so imaginative and the flavours so convincing that I would eat food like that every day if I could. The 'tapas' starter, which is basically a taste of all the starters, was stunning to look at and wondrous to eat.

When we left Brighton we went home via Eastbourne so that we could visit the new Towner Gallery (above). This is a great new building, although it seemed to be having a few teething problems the day we were there. We saw an exhibition of art inspired by a sense of place and then, upstairs, a solo show by Tomoaki Suzuki which consisted of about fifteen small carved wooden figures standing separately in a huge room.

They are apparently one-third of full human size but seem much smaller. They are extremely lifelike and the effect when you stand in front of them is that they are contemplating you. The tables are turned and the viewer feels like the exhibit. It was fun, though not lifechanging, perhaps.
     Home again, to the kids being much more creative than me -- my son painting a fantastic painting in acrylics and my daughter getting excited about sewing and knitting and making a fabulous bag (any shop in Brighton would have snapped it up, I'm sure).
     Oh, I also managed to read The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton (very strange, some wonderful stuff in it) and to watch Adventureland, Juno, Robots (cool vintage-style animation) and Festen. Watching some films was one of my stated aims this holiday, so that box is ticked. I thought I'd love Festen but it left me a bit cold. Adventureland was good, especially watching it with my son.
    All too soon, it was time to go back to work -- when you pick up the threads and set everything in motion again, it's as if those two weeks never happened. But now I have proof that they did.

The deer are back

Christmas baubles

Herr Bauble

Greetings! Sorry it's been a while. Back with all my collecting zeal now with some photos of our Christmas tree and its bouncing baubles.

Well, of course we couldn't just have a tree and hang a few nice but random bits and pieces on it. No, we had to make a collection out of it. And, not to set the bar too low, we decided (this is about fifteen years ago when we first got married) that we would collect glass Christmas baubles of edible things.

I've just looked up 'bauble' on the internet and have completely overwhelmed myself with exciting things about baubles that I never knew -- more of which in a moment. But the first exciting fact is that when glass baubles were first manufactured, they were made almost exclusively in the shapes of fruit and nuts to mimic the real fruits and nuts that were traditionally hung on 'Christmas trees' (I don't think they were even called Christmas trees at that point). Strings of popcorn, candy canes and biscuits in the shape of stars and hearts were also used to decorate the trees (and, of course, still are). So our 'edible' collection, without our even being aware of it, went right back to the earliest days of Christmas baubles.

The golden walnut, above, is one of the oldest decorations we've got. Most of the others are modern. 

 There are plenty of lovely sweet things to tempt us -- I always want to eat the cupcake.
     But as the years went by -- and we tried to buy one or two new baubles for the collection each year -- not only did the choice of edible baubles get a bit slim, but we began to be beguiled by ever more amusing objects of different kinds and these became irresistible.

 

We're particularly fond of the little telly because -- you've guessed it -- we collect little tellies (a future post, for sure).
     Christmas decorations are one of those things that families accumulate and that cause gushes of nostalgia each year as they come out of their boxes again. Especially if they've survived their year in storage. Sadly, each year we usually find at least one decoration has broken. It's lovely if families pass their collections down the generations. I've inherited my mum's decorations which she, in turn, had got from her granny, so some of them date back to the 1930s.
     When I was growing up, I'm afraid Christmas wasn't a time of wonder and magic, but just a bit of a chore for the grown-ups, or so it seemed. We had a sad little tinsel tree that got more and more naked every time it was dragged out and the decorations hung rather wanly on its bare wire branches. My mum handed over her decorations to me with something close to relief a few years ago and chucked the horrible silver tree away.
     The best thing about Christmas now is re-reading the accounts she wrote of dreadful Christmases past -- the year she forgot to soak the 'mushy peas' that my dad insisted on having with the turkey, the year my dad insisted on our having a duck instead of a turkey and she didn't know how to cook it (blood ran out of it when the knife went in). You'll sense a certain theme here... We fall about laughing when we read them now but it wasn't so great at the time. Anyway, here are a few of the old baubles:

The ultra-modern ornaments are amazing and seem to get more elaborate every year. Do you like these slightly exasperated-looking pandas?

My absolute favourite decoration makes me feel a little bit guilty every time we hang it on the tree -- it doesn't seem quite right, and yet there are devils in quite a lot of European Yule celebrations, I think:

Naughty bauble

Old Christmas cards featuring Krampus the devil

Well, as I say, I got very excited when I looked into baubles online. A bauble wasn't a decoration at all, originally, but 'a stick with a weight attached, used in weighing a child's toy, but especially the mock symbol of office carried by a court jester. This fool's bauble was a baton terminating in a figure of Folly with cap and bells, and sometimes having a bladder fastened to the other end. Subsequently it became a term for anything trivial or childish. More recently the term means a virtually worthless decorative object.' (Wikipedia). 

     Woah! Even putting aside the question of why it was necessary to weigh children's toys, why did the jester's stick have a bladder fastened to it? Ah -- to 'belabour' people with, ie, to beat them about with. The figure of Folly at the other end of the stick wore a crown and asses' ears. How did this word come to mean a glass trinket? Who knows? The etymology of the word may come from Old French meaning something like 'beau-bel', that is 'pretty pretty', or from 'bebe' -- or even, in some online dictionaries, from Babel, the mythical tower/city of non-communication.

This mermaid sits at the top of our tree instead of a fairy

Then I discovered that glass baubles first started to be made in the little German town of Lauscha, in the Thuringian forest between Erfurt and Nuremburg. This town had been a glass-blowing centre since 1597 but the market for inkwells, bottles and oil lamps, their traditional wares, was diminishing, so enterprising artisans started making glass fruit and nuts. The trend took off and soon the baubles were being exported to England (which bought into Christmas in a big way after Prince Albert decorated a tree for Queen Victoria) and the United States (helping to make F W Woolworth's fortune). 

A Lauscha family business

Now in Lauscha they have a museum of glass art and many glass design studios. In early December they have a big Christmas market where you can buy the latest bauble designs. My head is swooning with the things I've seen on their websites just now. These dogs are my favourites: 

Check out this link for loads more adorable doggie baubles. And more nice ones here.

     My head is spinning with bauble wonderment, so I will leave you with a big warm bauble of Christmas love.

Happy Christmas! xxx