This is the main tumblog of Silvie Kilgallon. I'm a conceptual artist and my work is largely influenced by my academic interests in classics, ancient history, translation, and philosophy of language. This blog details conceptual, casual and personal projects on which I am currently working. To see the Stitched Iliad project, please check out the Stitched Iliad blog below.
154 posts
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.
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atlanxic liked this · 12 years ago
More Posts from Theclassicistblog
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 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.
Far left is plaited braid stitch. Took me a couple of attempts to get the rhythm sorted.
And of course this is the other thing I spent my weekend working on. I'm about 25% done. Book 2 is the longest book of the Iliad, at 877 lines. I'm around line 220.
I'm working on this book a lot more slowly than I did book 1. But I wasn't also working for a PhD when I did book 1. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.
I'm hoping I can finish this whole project at around the same time I finish my PhD, which gives me 3-4 years more.
Day 37.
Added some drizzle stitches.