I Feel Unproductive Because I've Not Managed To Finish Anything, But Here's What I've Been Working On.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.