February ATCs

Well, I've been so busy posting to my other blog last week that I forgot I hadn't updated this one. I have decided to make a hanging for the Gloucester exhibition in August and count it as one of the pieces for my course, so if you wander over to Gallimaufry you can see how I am getting on.

Meanwhile - here are the ATCs I made for the February swop on Facebook on the theme of love. They are made from torn bits of magazine pages that have been scrunched up momigami style, paper bags and offcuts of painted paper that I made decorated for another project. Plus a little bit of free machining.

The other thing I have done recently is visit the RWA in Bristol which was showing two exhibitions - Celebrating Paper, and Urban Evolution - Anne Desmet. Of the two, it was Anne Desmet's incredibly detailed prints which caught my imagination on the day, especially the ones which were cut up or broken. I really liked her collaged fragments - small pieces of prints of buildings applied to fragments of glass, mirror or tiles, suggesting decay, destruction and dereliction. In her British Museum series, the prints were made on semi-transparent Japanese paper so that they came through lightly on the back. She had then cut the print into strips, turning over alternate ones and transposing them from left to right creating a new, more complex image that is still recognisable.

On a similar theme, in my local butcher's, the mirror behind the counter combines a normal mirror with one-way glass in narrow vertical stripes. When look into it, you get a fascinating combination of a broken reflection of the people in the shop mixed in with the movements of the butcher cutting and packing in the next room. I have often stood there and thought I should use it as a starting point for a design. It's on the Big List of Things To Do.