Each Code Is An Individual Letter Of The Alphabet; So Far It's Letters A - L.

Each code is an individual letter of the alphabet; so far it's letters A - L.

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.

More progress.

Added some drizzle stitches.

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.

your august 15 post, i have a question about. im a former crafts grad. did you crochet the piece, dip in slip then fire? i ask because someone at school was doing something similar, and I haven't seen much of this done but really interesting!

Yup! That was pretty much it.

I used a cheap acrylic yarn (because wool is expensive, and it seems a waste to just burn it), which let off a *lot* of black smoke as it burned off. I used a crochet hook a couple of sizes bigger than is recommended for the yarn, to make sure it was hole-y enough (both for aesthetic reasons, and to help air circulate in the firing). I dipped it in earthenware slip, let it dry out for a few days, did a very slow fire, and then glazed with a transparent glaze.