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Week 13 - Pop Up Exhibition

Unfortunately I was unable to stay for the entire exhibition, but thanks to Karen I was able to set up early, and then managed to make it back in time to see the other works and hear some speeches. It was great to see everyone else’s work completed. Everyone produced such unique artefacts using all kinds of sources and media. It was a really rewarding way to conclude a semester’s worth of work!

Sewing together and finalising piece

Finally finished! I sewed the all the squares together, carefully pinning and sewing four in a row, and then attaching each strip of four onto the next. Finally, hemming the edges. I am quite happy with the results. I really like the way the Pom poms turned out.

Final Stages

Pom Poms finished! Time to start sewing the squares together

Adding the final touches to my work. This is the final stage before sewing all the squares together. Each Pom Pom represents the time spent in one place. There are ten strands to each hour, so the Pom poms with a higher density represent more time spent in one place. I have also used colours within the Pom poms to represent my mood over the course of being in that place, using the same colours as used in the movement stitches

Finally finished plotting my movement. Now to stitch the time spent in each place

Making progress. This is taking a very long time!

Just finished plotting time taken.. now ready to sew!

Almost ready to stitch

Final preparations for the construction of my final piece. I have traced my routes from a map onto tracing paper, and then traced each onto their respective fabric squares. I then plotted my data on mood throughout the day onto the tracing paper so that I know which colour to sew and where, using a little key shown above.

Next stage is construction, finally!

Formation of patchwork where colour represents weather over a period of 16 days. (I decided to collect data for another two days after my two-week period so as to achieve a 4 x 4 square quilt

Final stages of planning

Testing out methods and deciding on a key that I can use to plot the data onto each square.

Towards the end of the production I will then make a nicer, refined key to be used as reference with the final piece.

Colour of fabric is to be used to show the weather of each day, where the colour of the thread is to be used to represent my mood throughout the day.

Different stitch techniques will be used to represent the method of travel, where the thickness of the yarn will represent the time taken to get from A to B.

For the colours to represent mood, I deliberately selected colours that worked in harmony with the colour of each of the three fabrics, and also visible against them so as not to blend in too much with the background.

Research - Strava Art

Another area I came across throughout my research was an art form called Strava Art, where the artist uses a GPS tracking device to draw images, most commonly used by runners and cyclists.

David Taylor is an artist know for creating images while cycling with a GPS tracker. I find these works interesting because it is similar to what I am looking at, but in a way it is the reverse. Here David Taylor sets out with a pre-mapped course in order to create a specific image. The image he wants to create determines his movement and interactions with the space around him, whereas in my case, my movement and interactions with space determines how the artwork appears.

Further information: http://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/latest-news/seasoned-strava-artist-reveals-his-latest-masterpiece-197479

http://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/latest-news/five-best-strava-art-139034

Research - Daniel Palacios

Something I came across when researching artists who use life-logging as their chosen media.

In his series ‘Whatever happened, Happened’, Daniel Palacios visualises the flow of visitors to exhibition spaces and installations, mapping them onto wood through laser cutting. The result appears similar to the rings inside a tree trunk. These works appealed to me as I too am interested in looking at the way as humans we interact with space, and I enjoy his use of natural materials and textural output.

Further information: https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/lifelogging/whateverhappenedhappened/

Week Eleven - Mapping

I started mapping all my activity over the past fortnight onto a printed map of Melbourne, to work out how much of the map I would need to use, and what I could crop away to achieve the best possible readings. Surprisingly, the crop of the map I printed out on the first go just from esimatation, perfectly fits my activity over the fortnight of collected data.

I then began cutting squares of fabric sized to the proportions of my data, and am almost ready to start sewing and producing my artefact.

Week Eleven - Production materials

Over the last two weeks I have been collecting my data, and am finally ready to produce my artefact. I was hoping to have already made a start on the production while I was still recording my data, but was still caught up in planning, fine tuning and trialling my idea.

This week after class, I went out and purchased some fabric that I can make squares out of for my patch work.

I chose to nominate a colour to the overal weather of each day, and looking at my data I saw that the last two weeks could be separated into three catagories: Sunny, cloudy and rainy

I looked in a number of fabric shops to find specific colours but the options were unfortunately limited. In the end I went with yellow for sunny, a dark blue for rainy and a deep grey for cloudy, so that there is an immediately visible difference between the three.

I also purchased a number of coloured embroidery threads so that I can start sewing my tracks from the last two weeks.

Week Ten - Seminar Workshop

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

In today’s workshop we were asked to take a story, song rhyme, etc and extract data from it to visualise. I chose the famous tongue twister about the woodchuck chucking wood and made some data visualisations from that.

Decision making - final project

After mapping out my data day by day on paper, I realised that there is a clear pattern between the days I am at uni and the routes I take. Because of these similarities, mapping each day out one on top of the other would be too repetitive and many of the days would merge into each other and be lost. Although this would create an interesting outcome, I am thinking that it would be easier to see a pattern by mapping each day on a separate piece and presenting them together in chronological order. This allows me to have the possibility to create a sort of patchwork, using a square for each day.

Either way, it will be a lot of work constructing the piece and I will need to start right away.

Testing and trialling

Today I have been trialling a few embroidery techniques and experimenting with different symbols, colours and forms I can use to represent various elements in my data.

I am hoping that in mapping my data I am able to achieve a very colourful and textured work with an abstract appearance.

My technique is far from perfect and there are quite a few visible mistakes, but I am taking the opportunity now (while I am still collecting my data) to trial some embroidery methods so that I am confident by the time I start constructing my final piece.

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