The new work is moving right along, and yesterday while I managed to stitch half the the squares I got through several lengthy podcasts and about 1/2 a recorded book on the Ancient African Kingdoms (from Captivating History) The earliest civilisation we ever heard about on the African continent when we were young was Egypt, but other significant civilisations rose and faded from view on that continent over many centuries before those mighty Egyptians; and it was the same with South America, about which I learned even less. But I digress.
Squares individually stiched and fastened off at the back.
Each motif takes perhaps 3 minutes from start to finish, and this photo makes it clear I don’t do the steps in exactly the same order every time!
I took this pic of a bit of the background yesterday, and gave it to chatgpt.com, asking it to “Design a pattern with these marks”
The response was “It looks like the image shows the backside of an embroidery project, with thread marks forming abstract, angular shapes. I can create a pattern based on these marks. Do you want a cleaner, symmetrical design or something that preserves the randomness and abstract nature of the stitches? Let me know your preference!”
I responded with “Clean and symmetrical” to which the algorithm said “Got it! I’ll create a clean and symmetrical pattern inspired by these stitch marks. I’ll focus on geometric shapes, possibly using triangles and angular lines while keeping a structured design. Do you prefer a repeating pattern (like a tessellation) or a central, standalone motif?”
I answered “do one of each” and after 3 or 4 minutes, this image appeared –
A really interesting pattern to use some time.
I am pretty chuffed with this suggestion, and think it could be a really interesting pattern to use some time. Note that the algorithm already knows that I prefer the hand drawn, slightly organic, look rather than dead straight lines … Now, what about that second, standalone image ? After 2 hours it’s still working on it🙂
SAQA has a Global Exhibitions call slated to open this week; and as it closes at the end of April, I need to get moving on the entry I’ve been circling around and thinking about for a while. I wanted to get my Art Quilt Australia 25 entries ready for photography before I have a go at this one, and I’d really like all three works to be photographed in the same session in two weeks’ time, but might have to make two trips to Eduardo’s.
The exhibition, “AI: Artistic Interpretations” is being promoted as an opportunity to use artificial intelligence as a tool in an artwork combining human artistry with technology developed from human inputs – or works that are a response to Artificial Intelligence and digital media.
A few days ago I spent a little time exploring what happens with some very basic assignments for chatgpt.comto come up with some linear diagrams according to information I gave it. I kept some of the results in a file I set up on Pinterest – I won’t go into all the instructions I gave it, and there were quite a few results I ditched. But as I got used to working with what reads like a human composed text in response to my requests, I found it interesting how the algorithm learned from my comments and began anticipating more efficiently what I might like. In turn, I learned to be more succinct with more carefully worded requests! I think the algorithm and I got along fine. In that Pinterest file there are some with curved lines, others without – it was hard to get the algorithm to present me with a much simpler line diagram, but anyway the black and gold one with the touch of Art Deco that I asked for in the lower left hand corner of that Pinterest page really influenced my thinking. Despite all that, I have turned back to the favourite stitched square motif which I adapted (in 2022) from one of Vera Molnar’s early generative designs using a computer driven plotter…
Printed dull gold squares, stitched with metallic thread.
I’ve not used this stitched square in the past year or so, but will use it again for this new work. Overnight I’ll decide whether to use black, silver, gold, white, or red thread, as tomorrow I really need to start that stitching!
Detail, “Neon Nine Patch“, square c.1.5cm
2022 SAQA Spotlight auction piece, 6″ x 8″
And one day soon I will reurn to chatgpt.com and spend some more time exploring. I watched an interview on a business show this weekend with someone high up in the running of AI courses for Coursera.Inc, the open online course provider. Probably worth looking into because they have some free courses, and the speaker claimed that the demand for classes has increased some amazing 800% over this time last year! At this stage in my life, I’m thankful I’m not in a job that demands I master this stuff. there must be many 50+ year olds under huge pressure! But I do need to be tuned in, a development my offsprings have welcomed. Learning something a bit demanding keeps the aging brain active. Bridge and AI are both like new languages, think, and I came to Spanish late in life. they’re all a means of communication, and I’m not brilliant at any of them, but putting in some effort is the important thing, right?
It’s interesting to occasionally look back over the pages of this blog to see what I was writing about some years ago. The results vary, as sometimes I come upon an opinion I held but have since changed my mind on, but other times I’m amazed at how some strongly held opinions are still exactly the way they were back then. Occasionally I’ve found mention of something I meant to follow up on but didn’t, most often because I’d completely forgotten about it. At times trivial and other times significant, my blog’s an important record for me as the nearest thing I keep to an artist’s journal or diary.
I started blogging about 20+ years ago as a record of living as a-stranger-in-a foreign-land, combining travelogue jottings with fibre art elements. From what was probably its peak popularity about 15 years ago, blogging has given way to the presence of other social media such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. I still maintain mine, as over that time the artist diary function has become much more important; and heck, we don’t travel as much as we used to, anyway!
Today I picked a page at random and found it was published on March 27th, 2015. I read the other two posts for that month, and saw that each covered some aspect of Life and my fibreart with relevant links to where I am today. As a lot can change over a decade, I decided to start this occasional series.
On March 27th 2015, I wrote about a fairly phlosophical article on the late Australian writer journalist Clive Palmer musing on the importance of the memories and souvenirs we all gather over time. It’s particularly a Baby Boomer issue, and one that Mike and I currently face. He and a colleague came to Uruguay in the late 1990s with financial backing to explore for gold. Rather than pack up our Perth W.A house and move everything over here, or lease the house out, for a high risk venture which could have bombed or run out of funds before the year was up, we decided to leave it ready to walk back into, as it was, in the care of a live-in house sitter. Without going into details of that 20 year period, in 2019 we sold that house, tossed and donated a mountain of stuff, and put the rest into storage, planning to return the following year to find another house more suited to our older selves. However the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, and those contents including furniture, albums and shoe boxes of photos, books, mineral and other collections are all still in storage there. For various reasons including medical, our return was delayed, but we’ve since decided to remain in Uruguay. We could somehow divest ourselves of most of that stuff, but a small portion would be important enough to consider bringing over here. That whole thing is rather daunting, and part of me relates fully to what Clive Palmer said memories and souvenirs.
Another post https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=3039 recorded the significance of learning improvisational patchwork in 1993 which became my main construction technique until early 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic’s arrival suddenly mandated heaps more time at home. I’ve always loved hand stitch, chiefly as embellishment; but thanks to the pandemic, the explorations I now had time for encouraged hand stitch to become perhaps the most technique in my textile art today.
“Bush Colours” 2019 With gold hand stitching.
In the third post that month , https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=3057 I wrote (with lots of pics) reviewing a lovely exhibition of Mexican crafts at a favourite museum here in Montevideo, which I’ve often mentioned – the Museum of Pre-Colombian and Indigenous Art Such exhibitions remind us how mass produced every day objects in our lives compete with similar traditional but much more costly craftsmen-made objects in every medium, including metal, wood, fibre, ceramic, leather, glass and more. Most countries today have dedicated formal and informal organisations whose mission is to research, preserve and pass on the knowledge of traditional crafts of their regions, before that knowledge disappears. Such exhibitions are part of this effort, and I love visiting them.
Grids, lace, networks and similar structures represent a metaphor in fabric and thread for my concern on the state of the world today. They represent to me those structures comprising the points of reference we’ve all come to count on for reliability – those stable international alliances, social mixes and balances, and financial structures that have affected our lives for decades or even centuries. Many have been or are under threat of being distorted or even ripped apart by the geopolitics of our time. If you stress or pull a lace fabric, it will eventually tear.
Down the years I’ve occasionally pondered on the nature of lace – whether it’s the pattern of holes that are important, or the matrix in which the holes appear. My personal conclusion eventually was that the defining characteristic of lace is the pattern of holes, and the material between the holes is not important.
To me, each of these leaves could be said to be a form of ‘lace’. One fell and was altered by insects (I’m not sure about any cause/effect here) and the other’s holes were genetically programmed into the leaf. There are plenty more examples in Nature – plant leaves with holes for which insects and birds in particular are responsible (I’m posting more pics on my Instagram account shortly @schwabealison) and some corals and sea sponges come to mind.
Yes, I realise some readers could fairly reasonably be thinking I’m pushing this ‘lace’ connection a bit far, but if you reach for your dictionary you’ll probably find variety of definitions for lace, varying between those points of view, and most frequently the definition is given in terms of fabric and thread, followed by some the most popular types such as Honiton, Guipure, bobbin and needlelace. The lace boundary is a bit blurry because some counted thread needleworks including Hardanger, drawn and pulled thread works are lacy in effect, yet not commonly referred to as ‘lace’.
Browsing on Pinterest with the search subject “networks” brought up some images I hadn’t seen before, including a wonderful one which took me down a rabbit hole into a Royal Academy paper on the artist Gergtrude Goldschmidt, known as Gego, 1912-1994. I was taken by the author’s comment that Gego herself never thought of herself as a sculptor, but an artist whose proccupation was line. She worked in both 2D and 3D, and her “Her intricate ‘Drawings without Paper’ series are small sculptures whose shadows create secondary ‘drawings’ on the wall on which they are hung. The larger suspended works not only seduce with their form but leave unanswered questions about whether one should look at the lines that create the work or the empty spaces they define.” (Adrian Locke, R.A., 2014) I have sometimes wondered about which is the more important part of lace – the matrix or the holes? A few years ago I concluded it’s the pattern of holes, regardless of the material those holes are in https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=6976
Another favourite artist on my mind at the moment is Vera Molnar, a Hungarian artist (pioneer of generative computer and kinetic art) who apparently frequently declared her life to be about squares, triangles, lines, and that she was mad about lines. I blogged about her a couple of years ago. I’ve been very influenced by her computer generated squares surrounded by slightly off-kilter lines because of a small bug she put into her computer algorithm. Intrigued, I developed a stitch motif that I’ve used in my work a number of times –
With the upcoming SAQA Global Call AI Artistic Interpretations opening soon, I’m thinking about all of this, and today’s search brought up the term ‘neural network architectures’ in a video clip presented by a bright young man using big words and terms that I’m only justkeeping up with! Lots to think about and some sources of inspiration there, definitely.
This research is all food for thought as I finish the binding on the current work … but it doesn’t mean it’s nearly finished! For various reasons, I decided that this current work, c.110cm x 84cm would be better made in reverse order. So first, the front, low loft batting and the back, were layered, basted and machine stitched (ie quilted) with a metallic polyester irregular grid. The edges are currently being faced (one more side to go) and then the cutout blob shapes will be placed at many of the grid line intersections and stitched into place before finally adding the hanging sleeve and signature.
6in. x 8in. textile sample/snippet, SAQA Spotlight 2026(See previous post)Placing the metallic finish 2cm-3.5cm discs in this manner might be the hardest part of all.
