The flying carpet, art and craft

I sometimes get textiles made in order to communicate certain types of ideas; in the past I have had headscarves, shirt material and hangings made. I'm now thinking about how the carpet and prayer mat carry associations. As crafted forms they can also be used to posit questions as to where the art/craft divide now lies and whether or not that divide still exists. I recently saw that there had been an exhibition of what have been called Afghan war rugs. It was advertised with the for myself worrying byline, "War and conflict have long had a role in the production of art." The associated text went on to say that, "This survey is steeped in the tension between aesthetic beauty and violent subject matter." I wasn't sure about this either but it did remind me of something that has long haunted my imagination, the flying or magic carpet, a form I have been fascinated by since when as a boy I saw the 1940 film, 'The Thief of Bagdad'.

From: 'The Thief of Bagdad'. Abu on the magic carpet. 1940 Dir. Korda

Much of the action in the film takes place in Basra and at one point the young thief Abu is turned into a dog, an attribute as a 'Barker' I could easily empathise with, my then late 1950s school nickname being 'woofwoof'. 

Abu as a dog

My understandings and feelings about the city of Basra are therefore conflicted and confused, it is woven together in my head as both a place of magic and of war, a place inhabiting my 1950s memories as much as my more recent awareness of tragic events brought to me by the various news outlets.

My inner head mash up continues; our lodger is from Iraq and he has tales and stories of conflict from the time of Saddam Hussein, many people in his family having been put to death because of their political views. I still clearly remember going to London to march and protest against Tony Blair's Labour Government wanting to take us into war with Iraq over weapons of mass destruction; which we found out later never existed. We now see night after night of images of a gradually being destroyed Iran, so soon after it seems like a thousand and one nights of a slowly being destroyed Gaza, these events being our contemporary bedtime stories. The Middle East or more accurately West Asia, feels like a media myth, a story played out like some form of fantasy tale that no one in the West seems to have any real understanding of. The 'Middle East' might as well be another story from a 1001 Nights. In Islam, a prayer mat is placed between the ground and the worshipper. It also operates as a magical flying carpet, one that helps to separate the devout follower of Mohamed from the filth of the world when they pray. The prayer mat in effect operating as a temporary vessel for a spiritual journey.

 Prayer mats

Within Islam, the prayer mat is a powerful symbol and it is disrespectful to put one down for prayer in a dirty place. They are traditionally woven with a rectangular design, typically asymmetrical so that it is easy to see where the head goes when in prayer. The designs may also represent the promise of paradise and eternity, the mat in many ways operating like a doorway into paradise. No wonder the myth of a flying carpet arose out of this tradition. 

Unknown maker West Afghanistan, “War Rug with Peacocks,” date unknown

Detail from a prayer mat I had made and which was installed as part of an exhibition

Ten years ago I had a prayer mat made for an exhibition about the migrant crisis and I had a Qibla compass inserted into it, so that it was always set out on the gallery floor pointing towards the Kaaba in Mecca. I thought and still do, that the idea of a direction for prayer being more powerful than an idea such as North-ness, was an amazing thing, giving a physical shape to the idea of belief. Ten years on, the work feels naïve, so much has happened since then and AI has thrown image making into a tumble dryer, what might have been seen as an interesting conjunction back then, is now simply lost under an avalanche of everybody's personal AI image generated snow. Which is sort of why I'm getting more interested in craft. The handmade object is coming back into its own. The more AI is used to make decisions, the more we will need to be reminded that humans can still make things and we will look more and more for the fingerprints of a maker and perhaps value the sleek engineering of the manufactured object less. 

When I used to teach on the Foundation Course in Art and Design, there were fierce debates about the relative value of art and craft. Craft was often denigrated as being just about hand skills and fine art it was argued was more to do with concepts and was therefore of a higher value. Since then we have had the material turn, a theoretical shift across the humanities and social sciences that now focuses on the agency, role and importance of physical objects, technologies and bodies. "Things", such as a crafted object or a skill such as an ability to weave, are seen as active ingredients, enmeshed into life's meaning, rather than them being passive or inconsequential. Artists such as Grayson Perry have shown how articulate craft can be and have helped to break down the art/craft divide. 

But there is still that need to create meaning. It is wonderful to think that the hand is being appreciated as a thinking tool and that the mind is now understood as something embodied, rather than being something that sits outside of our bodies, sort of gazing out of a fog of unreality. But ideas are still needed, they just change with the readjustment of focus and the application of a new lens. Craft or an understanding of making, becomes an idea in its own right, therefore it can be added into a theoretical toolbox and then it rubs up alongside all those other ideas, such as critical theory, spirituality, evolution, game theory, scientific method, human rights or communism. 

I've just been working on two related pieces that are now showing in Yorkshire Sculptors Group exhibitions. One 'Monkey Mind' has gone on show in Barnsley Civic, the plan for its installation being directly below and the other 'The Cosmic Body' is on exhibition on the third floor of Salt's Mill in Saltaire. 

Monkey Mind

The Cosmic Body

Both installations are made of textiles and ceramic pieces, but I had the textiles made by a company that usually makes objects for domestic use, so they are seen as 'throws' or 'blankets' and I'm repurposing them as magic carpets. I have been trying to fuse several ideas together. One is to do with the fact that ancient burial sites have objects buried in with the bodies. These objects were often to help the dead navigate the afterlife and this navigation might be a protection from evil spirits or perhaps spiritual food for the now dead. 'Monkey Mind' is for the now alive, but to give them things to contemplate, in a similar way to how Japanese kusiizu images work, which are graphic depictions of corpses in the process of decay, images that Buddhists could meditate upon as reminders of the fragility of life and the reality of death. 'Monkey mind' being what we need to escape from, the never ending internal mind chatter of what to do and what to think being something that at some point we will have to cease. It's interesting that the only feedback I've had from anyone visiting is that someone thought my work looked like roadkill. 
In contrast 'The Cosmic Body' is more a reflection on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and its view of the body as a cosmic entity. In TCM the human body is visualised as a microcosm, a miniature universe or "cosmic entity". It is intricately linked to the natural world and governed by the same forces, therefore health is maintained by balancing our internal energies to ensure harmony between body, mind and the world. I continued to put 'The Cosmic Body' together in different ways as I was trying to follow various narrative shifts, but I had to stop as the work needed to be installed in Salts Mill in readiness for the exhibition opening. 

Details: The Cosmic Body

I like the mix of a cheap reproduction, (the textiles) and the hand made, (the ceramics). In many ways the ceramics are 'cheap', as I am using bright earthenware glazes and have avoided the subtlety of stoneware. I'm still trying to work out what things mean, rather than simply letting go but I seem to be in a mental trap of my own making. Both these pieces are presented on 'magic carpets'. The textiles being frames that allow the idea to float, as if in another world, the fringes defining the edges of an idea as much as an object. However I now need to refocus on the work for Graz, as I go over tomorrow to install work and host workshops. After all the hassle trying to get the work over there, (I was using a carnet system as organised by the Bradford Chamber of Commerce), I shall also go over with a tube of glue, in case when I open the shipping crate, the ceramics are broken. The getting of an exhibition into Europe is now a post Brexit nightmare, but I shall reserve the details for a later post, as the procedures took a while to sort out. If someone else reading this blog is foolish enough to also be thinking of shipping an exhibition across the Channel, all I can say is, beware the bureaucracy of the carnet system. 

See also: 

Craft and conflict

Craft and drawing

Fine art?

A tall order

Feldman's model of art criticism 

John Ruskin

Some primitive forms

By chance I found the image above entitled 'Some Primitive Forms', it reminded me of Hokusai's 'how to' drawings, whereby he shows us how to construct images out of basic geometry.

Hokusai

I was also reminded of William Latham's 'Family of forms' and his involvement in the Organic Art product. The idea was to show how organic forms could be 'bred' by asking a computer program to develop more and more complex forms from combinations of basic units.

William Latham

William Latham: A Family of Forms

Reflections bring about connections and I was soon thinking again about the time when I used to teach on the Foundation Course at Leeds. One of the processes we used to engage with was building complex forms out of simple shapes. We used to get students to draw simple 'primitive' shapes in the form of three dimensional solids and then to use them to construct more and more complicated forms. We would begin by constructing images similar to the ones immediately below. Occasionally I need to remind myself of how useful and important an idea this was.

The concept that the world can be constructed from a series of basic building blocks is an ancient one and relates to Plato's idea that beneath the complexity of appearance, there lay a basic set of simple forms, in his case we have what we now call the Platonic Solids, five simple forms whereby each face is made up of the same regular flat polygon and the same number of polygons meet at each corner. These forms would also come to have symbolic meanings, the cube representing earth, the octahedron air, the tetrahedron fire, the icosahedron water and the dodecahedron the whole universe.The thing about primitive forms is that you can gradually make them more convoluted, which is great if you are thinking about drawing complicated things. 

The first form to draw three dimensionally is usually the cube. This can be done in perspective as above or it can be an isometric as immediately below. Once you are able to do this, the first set of complicated forms most students produce are made by cutting slices and blocks out of the first set of primitives.

Isometric rectangular blocks being cut into

You can also twist a basic shape, or elongate it by pulling it. If you have sliced it, you can gradually change each slice, so that a form begins to bend or get larger or smaller as it is built. 

Once you have grasped the basic concept you can go on to create organic looking forms such as the shell below. all you need to do as a drawer, is to have a basic grasp of perspective and the time to practice drawing these forms over and over again, so that in your head you have a good three-dimensional understanding of possibilities. 

Drawing for snail votive

This notebook drawing for a snail votive may seem a long way from the concept of primitive forms but without time spent doing the work of drawing those forms many years ago, the what seems to be a quickly thrown off sketch, would not be anywhere near as convincing. 

Snail votive

In the world of CGI, other techniques and processes have now been introduced that build on more sophisticated rendering systems to do something similar, but with an inbuilt awareness of light interaction as forms evolve, so that the changing form of shadows becomes a vital part of the process.  

Some primitives made by raymarching 

For instance, raymarching is a 3D rendering technique that iterates rays step-by-step through a scene, often using Signed Distance Fields (SDFs) to determine safe step distances, (the distance an object travels between frames, to achieve natural, weight-accurate, and smooth movement). Unlike traditional polygon-based rendering, it is frequently used to render complex, procedural or fractal geometry by calculating, rather than intersecting, surfaces.

It gets more interesting when you begin putting forms together. Nature of course got there first, anabolism is the process where cells build complex molecules from simpler ones. Examples include amino acids joining to form proteins or nucleotides forming DNA strands. 

I'm always looking for visual metaphors and the idea of building images from 'primitive' units, is an interesting one, as it suggests that you can build an image in a similar way to how nature constructs complex forms of life. 

This is an old idea, in the 5th century BC the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus articulated the idea of 'atomism'. This concept which asserted that all matter consists of indivisible, invisible particles called atomos, is at the root of why we now call atoms, atoms. The Roman poet Lucretius, then re-articulated this view and in his influential text 'On the Nature of Things' he wrote that atoms are eternal, vary in shape and combine to form all the physical substances that we experience.

However over the last hundred years or so, we have been breaking down the atom and discovering that it is not indivisible, but that it is made up of quarks, electrons, positrons, neutrons, charm and it seems more and more bits, the more scientists probe into the nature of matter, the more it seems to slip away from our understanding of it as a physical substance.

In India at roughly the same time as Leucippus and Democritus were thinking about atomos, a similar idea was being developed by Kaṇāda of the Vaiśeṣika school of thought, he proposed indivisible particles (paramāṇu) too, however he also proposed the idea of atoms having momentary (instantaneous) presence, a presence that flashed in and out of existence. Kaṇāda asserted that all that is knowable is based on motion. He also asserted that all substances are composed of four types of atoms, two of which have mass and two being massless. These ideas were presented within a larger moral framework whereby he defines Dharma as the cosmic order. He understands that duty, law, and a right way of living sustain our universe. This is a foundational principle out of which Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism will develop concepts of virtue, morality, and righteous conduct. Kaṇāda's explicit mention of motion as the cause of all phenomena in the world, does seem to echo the realisation that it is the flux of energy and solid mass that is fundamental. Our present understanding of the basic interactions governing the universe is based on an agreement that there are four fundamental forces; gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force. There are though still little bits in there in terms of the way physicists think. These four forces dictate how matter and energy interact, but in order to interact there needs to be a factor that allows them to do this and this is where we come across exchange particles or bosons. There are various types and some most of us have come across already, Photons carry the electromagnetic force, Gluons the strong nuclear force, W and Z bosons the weak nuclear force, the Higgs boson that gives mass to particles and the hypothetical Graviton that is supposed to carry gravity.

It would be nice to think that our present understanding of the universe might also come with a moral framework, whereby our understanding of the cosmic order, was reflected in a way to approach life. The interconnectedness of everything makes us aware that we are part of an ever forming universe and therefore any religions or forms of thinking that attempt to fix or hold down our conceptual grasp of who and what we are, should be seen as suspect. Over the centuries we have witnessed terrible wars and conflicts, often initiated by one party or another refusing to see the point of view of another. The inflexibility of thinking that comes from a belief in dogma, has caused us to forget that we need to be in constant dialogue with the world and not see it as something separate from us. Empathy with the not us, could perhaps be the starting point for a new moral framework, one that also saw duty, law and a right way of living as principles on which to sustain our world. 

As an artist I have to sustain my practice with some sort of underlying belief. Perhaps this is a curse as much as a strength. It would be wonderful to just 'know' what is right, I use up so much energy worrying about what stance to take but as I get older I get even more thoughtful as to what it is to make art and in this instance perhaps all I can do is leave you with an unformed blob, something waiting for realisation, something on the way to being something else.

I spend time every week with lumps of clay not too unlike the form above and as soon as my fingers begin to push and pull its surface into different directions, ideas of possibilities begin to emerge. Perhaps that is the point, everything is full of potential and all we need to do is to play. Out of play emerges wonder and it is through wonder that we finally find our place in the world. 

See also:

Paul Neagu

Abstract comics

Is drawing a language?

Connecting the singularity 

Children's play in the work of Francis Alys

Observer Patch Holography

Drawing and street games

My granddaughters live in Glasgow and one time when I was up there we went for a walk and they took a few fat chalks with them. We had stopped for a rest and they began to make chalk drawings on a road that went through the local park. It seemed to be such an obvious and natural thing to do and it took my mind back to the 1950s when as children we used to draw in the road using any broken bits of stone that would make a mark. Most of the drawing was done in my day to aid the playing of games. This might be hopscotch if there were girls involved or football and cricket if it was boys. But we also drew people and things including roads and other places for our toys to inhabit, tiny towns like those play-mats you can now buy from the shops. There were far less cars about in those days and streets were as much for children to play in, as for ease of automobile transport. 

Hopscotch was always a favourite game and like so many games its origins lie in warfare. It was originally a way for Roman soldiers to train in full uniform and with heavy equipment on their back, hopping was a way that they could learn to keep their balance and dexterity when laden down. If you can't remember the rules, they go like this: each player needs a marker of some kind either a rock, stick, or some other object like a glove or hat to pickup when they return. The first player throws the marker into the first square without it touching any of the lines. If it touches the lines or goes out of bounds they are out and it’s the next players turn.

Once a player has successfully thrown the marker, they hop on one leg (often through squares 1, 2, 3) or two, (when two squares are side by side as above, 4/5) until the course is complete, always avoiding touching the lines. The game can be made more challenging by hopping on one foot throughout the course to the end of the first leg. Players must only make one jump into the last double foot square. Therefore in order to be set up for the return, players must jump from the second to last square and spin 180 degrees to land in the top (in the case above the 7/8) squares facing the starting point. From what I remember, the game got faster and faster as it went on and this was how the best players were finally eliminated.

Tony Luciani: Elia Luciani plays hopscotch

The artist Tony Luciani was still working with his mother, when she was 93 and had dementia. By engaging with her around the game of hopscotch, his mother could get both physical and mental exercise. Tony was also able to make an image that contracts time, the game being one his mother remembered playing as a girl and as he worked with her to make his images, she was brought into his world, rather than being excluded because of her condition. Hopscotch allows Luciani's mother to return to the innocence of play, her dementia allowing her access to an inner child, her adult life being gradually erased. What we tend to see as a terrible illness perhaps in some cases is a journey back into a time of innocence, a time before the cares of life have weighed us down. 

Frances Alys has for years been filming children playing games. He filmed 'Hopscotch' in the Sharya Refugee Camp in Iraq. Children are forever inventive and able to construct imaginative worlds out of whatever and wherever they find themselves. In amongst a situation that could drive them to the edges of despair, these children remind us that we are all born with the ability to play games and that the simple ability to mark out ground can lead to a communal idea, perhaps even more easily than lines scratched into the earth to demarcate ownership.

Frances Alys: Hopscotch 2016

Hopscotch somewhere sandy   

Just as children will draw in the sand, so will artists. 

Picasso

The artist Andres Amador also makes drawings on the beach, drawings that he is happy to see being washed away by the tide. Using a drone, he takes a picture of the work from above once completed, his geometric structures in many ways resembling lines of giant hop scotch squares. Perhaps he is reliving his childhood, being an artist gives you the licence to be a child, or as Picasso put it, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

Andres Amador

When boys we often made makeshift goals by roughly drawing an outline on a wall. These outlines are everywhere if you keep a lookout for them, I pass some on my way into the university every time I walk in and sometimes scratched lines in regular use become traced over with chalks or even painted, to form a slightly more permanent idea. 

Sometimes I am reminded of the history of art by things you can see in the street. In the case of the image below the painted football goal is on a plaster skimmed wall and we are very aware of this because the plaster is breaking away and the image is already incomplete. So much of our historical reference to painting is on similar surfaces. 

From photographer Michael Kirkham's 'Football Goals'

A damaged fresco

Just as the painting of a football goal is now revealed to have been done on plaster that was itself laid on to cover a brick wall, the damage to the fresco above has revealed the layers of its making. The football goal it could be argued is rather like a minimalist abstract painting, the construction of it being very similar to that of fresco painting. 

Cricket stumps

Cricket stumps used to be as common an urban image as football goals, but recently I have noticed a decline, I suspect this means that the game is in decline too, but not invention. In the case of the wheeled bin, a rupture has occurred between an object and its intended function; object and meaning are destabilised and the cricket bat leaning against the bin, reinforces this, the bin is no longer primarily for waste disposal, it is now operating as an adjunct to the game of cricket. 

The streets are where we used to play and where play begins so does art. Perhaps we need to reclaim our streets from the car. In the late1990s Methley Terrace in Leeds was greened to see what would happen if the cars were taken out. So it is possible. 

Turfing the Methley's

Kolams, an art using rice flour laid down as drawings on the ground in front of homes by women gives sanctity to the spot where they are drawn. These drawings are a welcoming sign to the Goddess Lakshmi who is believed to bring wealth and prosperity. 

What was a daily morning ritual has recently spun off as a Chennai kolam competition. However this tourist trade development, has not destroyed the core motivation for ritual, reminding us that it is possible to inventively engage with the streets of our cities.  

Murmurations: Lou Sheppard

During the time of Covid19, artists found that they were still needed, in particular as they were able to quickly and inventively rethink how people could interact with the surrounding environment, especially if there was a sense of some sort of ritual engagement. Lou Sheppard was one such artist. Murmurations: Scores for Social Distancing were a series of dance works based on bird flocking behaviour. The choreography required seven dancers to perform an interconnected set of movements while never coming within two meters of each other. As a public art work Murmurations consisted of the notation-directional markings that formed a choreographic score painted onto the road surface. The markings referenced the social distancing directions that began to be seen everywhere in public spaces. The work was in effect a visual score for the choreography of social distancing and it highlighted an awareness of the new collective public rituals that were being developed.
I remembered Lou Sheppard's work because it was very similar to hopscotch, a game that I participated in when I was a boy. The ritual chanting of the girls, which if I remember was something like, "Wibbly-wobbly turn around. Wibbly-wobbly touch the ground. Wibbly-wobbly tie your shoe. Wibbly-wobbly that will do", set alongside the queuing up to wait your turn and the sound of the hopping feet, rasping breath, all set around the chalk drawn diagram for hopping. It was a ritual that I can still feel the excitement of, it continues to sit inside my body; the waiting for your turn, envisioning how to do the game faster and without mistakes and how this as an achievement would make me appear, even if only for a moment, a winner amongst my peers. I look back on those moments as being some of the best times of my life. Out of such games were being made social bonds, physical tests of skill and dexterity and group dynamics that were ritually being encoded. To paraphrase Bob Dylan:

! wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could play simply in that street again
Ten-thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that

Perhaps I'm thinking of hopscotch in these terms as a way of reflecting on my own loss of innocence. The photographer  Andy Wright recorded the image below of a hopscotch layout in Barcelona. When I first saw it I was reminded of the fact that the shape of the drawn elements are very similar to the basic layout of the human body, the head in this case having being cut off by the drop. Whoever drew it was very aware of making an image to represent the end of innocence. 

Andy Wright: Hopscotch to oblivion 

See also:

Lines in the road

Walking and drawing

Graffiti was always a serious art form

Asemic writing

Drawing as the trace of.a touch The Mohs hardness test: Something every child will have done instinctively. 

A history of drawing as thinking The line as a territory marker

The Drawings of Anna Barratt

Anna Barratt's art is centred on vulnerable and transforming bodies in flux. This is why I am interested in her work, as she has had to engage with a similar materials invention to myself, in the search for a visual language that can carry both emotional and physical information about how we feel about inhabiting this strange thing we call a body.
She is obviously dredging up some of her imagery from the depths of her unconscious, but at the same time the tensions of everyday life and what we can think of as the domestic come into play. Indeed in one review of her work it states, "transforming the everyday into the carnivalesque and back again."

Anna Barratt’s figures are often disembodied, an expressive use of her materials giving life to the various characters that inhabit her images. The interplay between material flow and image, helps to create a liquidity of attention, that flits from an attempt to work out the consequences of an image's form and a sense of needing to let it all flow and become an always becoming entity. All of which are issues that I have at one time or another tried to engage with.

Like myself she has made simple animations and she also uses notebooks to develop ideas, something that again I tend to do. I also love the fact that she recognises that when an animation is looped, it completes a process of transformation, that moves from the losing of an image's initial form to its restoration. All of which is lo-fi.

Cardboard bodies

Barratt's cardboard bodies are another reminder that you don't need expensive materials in order to make interesting work. The way a cardboard box comes apart, reminds me of a body and when opened out, it still has a memory of its former three dimensions. A memory that pokes thoughts into the flatness of any image laid on top of it. Thoughts such as those in my head that arise out of a memory of reading as a boy the H.G. Wells short story "The Plattner Story," as well as a little later Arthur C. Clarke's "The Reversed Man", both involving the inversion of a man's body. Turning human bodies "inside out", is something I now attempt to do on a regular basis, but now more concerned about hidden interoceptual feelings and attempting to visualise them. I still remember as a boy thinking about what might happen when you took a human body through a fourth spatial dimension and in my mind picturing all the guts and blood falling out as the skin was inverted. It's strange how an idea lives with you.

Thinking about how other artists work and why they might create the things they do is something I suppose most artists need to do at some point. Our ways of working are not unique, in fact the main reason work communicates to someone else, is that they have an overlap in feeling tone or type of sensual perception. Indeed it could be this overlap that builds the totality of the universe we are aware of. In my last post on OPH, it was suggested that the fundamental elements of the universe aren’t objective states, they’re 'observer patches', subjective descriptions made by observers and that subjectivity is what physics is built out of. Whether or not this is true, I'm pretty sure that is what art is built out of and without other artists we would be lost in an empty world, which is why at times I need to take a look at who else is out there. 

See also:

Anna Barratt's isolation colouring book

Barthelemy Togue

Still thinking about what I do

Our death is drawn
Drawing and healing traditions