I brought in my one remaining pinhole camera the other day. It was really disappointing – although it had captured some good trails of the sun, it had fallen sideways (my bad) and the constant switching between really hot and cold weather recently must have caused condensation to form inside the can. It’s a shame because it seemed to me to be a good way of capturing the passage of time in a static image. Never mind, I may try again.
I’m not very techie and when I was converting the original image into black and white on my phone before I got into bed last night, I accidentally created a sticker. I’ve never really paid much attention to the white line which cuts out the sticker before, but on an abstract image it was fascinating to see where it went and what it chose to cutout. I decided to screen record the process, add some filters and play around with the replay speed.
I particularly like the one above – it reminds me of paper burning around the edges.
I used the image from What Was I Thinking? as it has both curved and straight lines amidst the multiple figures, and I was interested to see what path the line chose to follow.
Finally, I wondered what would happen if I tried an image which has a myriad of shapes within it and a white line of its own, so I used an image from Carbon Dating.
I had a great time experimenting, but when I finished an hour later my brain was still trying to process it all and thinking of how I might be able to develop it. It’s proving to be a tiring day today.
No, I’m not from Essex (I’m not really from anywhere). A pejorative term used to belittle a certain group of women, used so much in everyday speech that it earned itself a formal dictionary definition: promiscuous, unintelligent, materialistic and lacking in taste. It was only 5 years ago that Oxford University Press eventually relented to a petition and agreed to remove the term from one of its dictionaries – the one used to teach foreign students English. A member of the Essex Girls Liberation Front, the campaign which spearheaded the move, is conceptual artist, Elsa James.
Nowadays, I don’t really give two hoots. In fact, I often don the mantle and wear it with pride, even though it’s not really mine to wear. I still don’t understand why it’s the only county which has given rise to such a term of speech. Once you get out of ‘London Essex’ the countryside is beautiful, just like its neighbour, Suffolk, a landscape favoured by Constable, and the accent is so totally different from the stereotype.
I was in a local bookshop the other day and was looking at their maps when I noticed that they had a bundle of OS maps on sale, and, as if by luck, they had Landranger Map No 167 ‘Chelmsford, Harlow & Bishop’s Stortford’, so I bought it.
I lived in Essex with my parents on and off for about 12 years. I couldn’t wait to leave; it was on a road to nowhere and I spent the school summer holidays, which seemed to go on forever in those days, sunbathing in the back garden with cooking oil, reading Jilly Cooper novels and dreaming of finally breaking free and moving to London or somewhere else equally as exciting, perhaps one of the destinations of the planes that I used to watch leaving trails across the big blue sky.
I’m not sure why, but my old school isn’t on the map (the map is not the territory). It definitely still exists. It should be where the 08 is. I had to travel over half an hour on the 311 bus to get to school; the bus stop was right outside my house, which meant that rolling up my school skirt to make it shorter had to be done with expert precision as the bus pulled up at the bus stop, just in case anyone was watching. Then up to the top deck where you could smoke, with my small stash of cigarettes which I had pilfered from my father’s packet of Rothmans, left on the side in the kitchen.
It was an all girl school. There was a boys’ school across the road, KEGS, and in the fifth year there was a lunchtime club, Senior Christian Fellowship, to which the boys from across the road could come. It was the most popular club.
What has Essex ever done for us?
Grayson Perry went to KEGS: he left a few years before my time. He went on to do his foundation at Braintree College of Art. That’s where I wanted to go, but didn’t. We both got out, by different roads, and to very different destinations.
Ignoring the obvious ones, there’s The Prodigy, Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Olly Murs, Jamie Oliver, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Damon Albarn, Richard Osman, and Robert the Bruce, amongst others.
Colchester is Britain’s oldest town.
It has the smallest town (Manningtree) and the largest village (Tiptree, home to jam-makers, Wilkins & Sons).
Southend has the world’s longest pier.
The world’s oldest wooden church is in Greensted.
It has 350 miles of coastline, second only to Cornwall, and the most islands of any county.
Chelmsford is the birthplace of radio.
The Mayflower was built in Harwich.
But even so, I still don’t think that I’ll ever go back and live there.
I decided to try out the ‘map’ drawing using oil paints. I liked the combination of pencil and oil paint in As I Was Going To St Ives and so I drew the grid lines on some oil paper – I was limited to A3. I put the paper on the floor and lightly rubbed over the tiles which created an interesting texture. Then I did the figures and the automatic drawing, just as before.
I’ve decided that I really enjoy making the lines and marking the intersections. My brain must truly have become disconnected from the process because, for some inexplicable reason, I thought that a quick spray of fixative would be sufficient before I applied the oil paints. Oh, how wrong I was. The solvent and graphite mixed really well – that’s the positive I’m taking from this! It needs to be the other way round, possibly, maybe, or maybe not. But time to stop and give up for the day, but not before I salvage something from the process. I’ve been thinking as I’ve been experimenting that the cutouts look really interesting in themselves, so I cut out the figures from the latest effort and did a bit of arranging on a spare sheet of paper. Interesting, particularly the figures in transparent film…
Kate McCalmont-Woods 