I Took A Day Off From Work Today. Over The Last Week And A Half I'd Written 5000 Words (this Is A Lot

I took a day off from work today. Over the last week and a half I'd written 5000 words (this is a lot for me, I'm a slow writer) and sent it off to my supervisor last night. I figured I'd earned a break, so I spent the morning working on the Iliad, and then started this project this afternoon. This is my modern embroidery sampler. The technique hasn't changed; the alphabet has.

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.

I feel unproductive because I've not managed to finish anything, but here's what I've been working on. This stitch takes so much time. The above represents about an hour and a half's work, and I'm maybe just over a quarter done on this code.

I couldn’t work on the Iliad this morning due to lack of working phone to take a picture with, so I worked on this instead.

It took hours longer than cross-stitch, but I like it.

Irritatingly, though, the QR reader app on my phone can’t read this one; and if it cant be read, i’ll have to undo it and rework it until t can. Though I’m given to believe the app I have is rather crap so I’ll try a few more out before undoing those hours of work. (And if anyone else has a QR app please feel free to try reading it and let me know if you have any luck)

Edit: my partner's QR android app can read it just fine, and that's good enough for me. Yay for not having to undo work.

“THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING A WOMAN ARTIST

This is one of our all-time favorites, which we did to encourage female artists to look on the sunny side. Women all over the world, not just artists, identify with it. One sent us $1,000 to run it as an ad in Artforum, a top U.S. art magazine.”

Guerrilla Girls, 1989.

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.