The Top Poem Is 'The Divine Image' From William Blake's Songs Of Innocence. The Lower Poem Is 'The Human

The top poem is 'The Divine Image' from William Blake's Songs of Innocence. The lower poem is 'The Human Abstract' from Songs of Experience. Half way through finishing the lower piece I realised I should have done it upside down rather than just right aligned. So that at any one time only one of the poems would have been the correct way up to read. Live and learn.

More progress.

This is something I made a few months ago now, whilst procrastinating and avoiding other projects. I guess it's a combination of my Iliad project, and another piece I was working on - The Text Gazes Back (of which there are photos on my website: www.theclassicist.co.uk).

It's the emotional states of characters throughout book one, represented by emoticons. Every row represents a different scene.

This represents about five hours work. It's not the sewing that takes so much time, but the jumping around, finding the next spot, occasionally undoing, realising you've forgotten a solitary N somewhere and finding the thread out again just to fill in that one letter. This is just under half of the planned piece. It's William Blake's 'The Divine Image'.

This is the beginning of an art project called 'Mycenae'. At the end of the Mycenaean era, when the palaces burned to the ground, the permanent records of the people - written in leather - were burned along with everything else. But their temporary records, written in recyclable clay, we're fired in the heat and thus preserved by the same act that destroyed everything else. Life loves irony.

The project here is to take temporary communications (or things we perceive as temporary) - email exchanges, instant message conversations, text exchanges, even snail spam mail - things we don't mean to preserve, and imprint them on porcelain tablets, firing and preserving them.

I'll admit one tablet by itself really doesn't look all that impressive. This is a project which - if it works at all - will work because of the scale. Imagine hundreds of those tablets covering a whole wall, each one containing incidentally preserved fragments of peoples' lives.

12/36. One third done. It's really nice to have a project that doesn't take months/years to complete.