Wiwaxia Hat

 

Wiwaxia, a scaly spiny invertebrate were common inhabitants of the Cambrian & early Ordovician seas. No one is quite sure if they were scaly worms or mollusks, but I was quite sure if you scaled up (no pun intended!) their 5 cm long bodies they would make quite a fabulous hat. One of the fun things about contemplating ancient fossil is that colour is rarely preserved so no one can disprove my (admittedly quite unlikely) idea that the scales has multifarious patterns. So this piece is really wearable multimedia textile art. It works sculpture or hat.

When I make art to tell stories about science I am often literal and direct to communicate clearly. If I make art for or about me, it’s much more metaphorical. Though depicting an extinct animal might easily be #SciArt, this is more about my feelings of experiencing lockdown. I can’t quite explain why I felt like “f— it, I’m making a wiwaxia hat” is how I felt, but it was. This was work I could actually do while wrangling my child for remote school, when very few other things were possible. Each scale and spine is block printed and hand sewn.

 

Carving, while working at the same table as a busy 7 year old was tricky. I felt like I said, "Don't shake the table" incessantly. Printing while supervising school would not work at all. But, I could cut and sew by hand,  hand-printed scales and spines I prepared the previous evening (after my son's bedtime).

Compare this work with my print on the same subject:

Wiwaxia linocut by Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14" on translucent washi with bark inclusions and collaged assorted washi scales and spines.

Thanks to my husband Roger Hallett for the photos!
 

 

Logos, the cosmos in art, & the history of science from print to textile form

This is a peak at the linocut which formed the basis for a logo I designed for a small English furniture company called Galapagos Designs. The specialize in German furniture from the 50's. My lovely customer stumbled upon my portrait of "Darwin on Galapagos" and liked the look of the tortoise. She requested a similar tortoise with a specific German chair, within a circle. The final logo has some further work I did with their name and slogan, in Photoshop. I can share that when their website is complete. I've enjoyed working with her and making this print. I like the whimsical idea!













The Etsy blog posted a great little article last Friday, called Art Scouting: The Night Sky. If you know me at all or have perused this blog more than once, you'll know that an article about the place where art intersects astronomy and a round up of representations, both representational and fanciful, of astronomical phenomena is just my thing. So, I was really pleased to see my "Imaginary Antarctic" screenprint included, especially amongst the works of so many wonderful printmakers. The author even sent me nice little note saying she thought it was a gorgeous depiction of the aurora.



















This is my linocut portrait of Mercator, famed 16th century Flemish cartographer and originator of the ubiquitous Mercator projection (the last of which just flew to Chicago with a friend... though I think I'll print a 2nd edition). You may recall, I was really pleased to be invited to submit of of these prints to the City Museum of Sint-Niklaas, in Belgium, who were hosting a year long exhibit in 2012, to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Mercator's birth. Recently, they wrote to me to say they would be sending me a knitted version of my print. Nothing could be less expected. It arrived today.






 









This is without a doubt, the single most unusual item I have received in exchange for my art. I don't know what to do with it, but I love it. (That's a metre stick for scale, by the way).

Barter with surprises!

This is my awazing swap package from Tanis! Lots of handmade felt and Nepalese textiles and lace and prints of her work and

a couple of Japanese silk scarves which go with the one I got from MotherII and this gorgeous tree on handmade felt which is the softest thing ever:


It felt like she's been here and thought to get me more of the things I like, but she's just that clever.

I sent her a zebra print and a seahorse and jellyfish pillow and assorted fabrics and prints on fabric. So the neat thing is that we will each be able to encorporate the other one's prints on textiles into new things, and see what the other one does.

bedroom wall continues to gain ornament

bedroom wall continues to gain ornament
Originally uploaded by the.minouette

Me: minimalism, not so much.

With a face like a mirror and frozen toes...

treecozy8
Originally uploaded by tanisalexis

I tried to get out of here yesterday afternoon to go renew my passport, to no avail. N keep calling and the visiting Taiwanese student kept asking me questions (actually, I really like teaching, but sometimes you just want to leave). LR asked if passports weren't by appointment - which says something about the relative scale of our home nations, and made me smile at the thought. So first thing this morning I took the King streetcar down Roncesvalles, across King to Victoria and went to the Passport Office. It's -14C but it feels a lot colder today. I had to squint at the signs because my glasses fogged up. You must wait in line to be pre-screened and receive a number in order to really wait. Unlike most people, I passed the pre-screening quickly- having done this several times and being able to follow written instructions. I even (of course) had a book to read for my wait. Last time I renewed my passport was in Victoria- where I wanted to hit the belligerent man in front of me, bellyaching about having to line up for 15 whole minutes.* When my number came up, the lady fretted about my photos. She told me in a barely audible voice with a thick Russian accent that the highlight on my face made it look like someone had severed my ear - how charming - and that there was a shadow under my chin! She was good at her job though; she managed to be personable and make me feel like the copy shop had done me wrong, rather than Passport Canada. She gave me a special pass so that when I returned I would not have to wait again. I asked her where was the nearest location I could get new photos and, though she told me, she insisted that I should take the passport photo rejection form and demand my money back from the copy shop.

I walked back down Victoria St to the photo shop and waited my turn for photos. The man said it would be 15 minutes, so I went for a walk and did my banking before returning. When I returned later he said there was a highlight on my face and he would have to take another photo. They had taken three photos before satisfied at the copy shop, so by now I am feeling freakishly pale and reflective. He said they were really fussy about highlights, and I couldn't argue, so I had to wait a further 10 minutes. When I got back to the Passport Office, the man at the front of the pre-screening line glared at me, but was too non-confrontational and Canadian to suggest I was jumping the queue, which would at least have allowed me the opportunity to prove him wrong. However, now I had so many forms I was showing the wrong one to the Commissionaire (who was understandably bewildered with my "photo rejection form" in lieu of my get out of jail free no waiting form). I had to search through my entire purse before I found it, piling random bills, scraps of papers, a screw driver set and assorted oddities into my hat. By the time I got out of there, I was pretty cross, having spent three hours on a simple errand.

I walked by the Dundas Square and was confused by the crowds. There were maybe 150 people there, in the cold, watching the US presidential inauguration on the big screen. I can understand watching, but I couldn't understand watching out-of-doors. Here at work, people are listening on the radio.

I thought about stopping at the copy shop to demand my money back, but by the time I got there I was frozen, hungry and just wanted to be done with this expedition.

When I got to my office, I found my friend Tanis' tree cozy project which cheered me up immensely. In Vancouver, "Granville Street is currently undergoing a redesign. If you've wandered through the area recently you'll notice that the trees that lined Granville Street between Drake and Cordova Streets are now shoulder-high stumps.

The planting of new trees is scheduled to be complete by the end of 2009.
In the meantime, it's January, and those stumps look pretty miserable.
What say we decorate them?"

tree cozy 12
Originally uploaded by tanisalexis

Check it out here and here. Mmmm... street art and trees. Nice. I am quite heartened that someone loves the tree stumps. I love finding unexpected guerrilla urban art; I love that someone cares about the tree stumps. I suspect these trees, like the tiny Chinese vocalist, are simply deemed not sexy enough for the Olympics; but Tanis and her fellow artists love the stumps. The one illustrated is wrapped in a gorgeous piece of textile art.



*Victorians; lovely, friendly people, strangely insensible to living in Canadian paradise, and fond of bitching about Toronto. Occasionally you just want to pelt them with non-existent snowballs.