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Braille is something very tactile and people have said to me how much they want to touch my work but felt they shouldn't because, traditionally you aren’t allowed to touch art.

I thought this was interesting and decided to take away the opportunity to touch the braille all together, creating a bit of a sick joke about it.

along side all of my work with such a negative background, I wanted to work on something a bit more positive.

I started to carry a little notebook in my bag in which I repeatedly made notes about my surrounds to later be translated into braille. Eventually when I have enough braille descriptions, I plan to bind them together and make a book

still translating the screenshots, I stitched this before stretching it so I had little idea as to where the text would end up on the finished product.

This one is interesting because it actually looks like it could be a messenger bubble which gives me an idea for a series.

at first I felt I’d stitched each line of braille too close together as it doesn’t really look like braille anymore but I realise now that in doing that, I’ve obscured the text further, and in turn hidden the message even more.

Experimental piece.

I’ve always found the backs of each piece of stitching really interesting. I like the way that all these patterns are created and because this is the result of stitching braille on the other side, to me its as if I’m creating a whole new language to obscure the message further.

after discovering a website where I could buy boxes of stretcher bars I decided to experiment with stretching my stitching.

a common suggestion since I started working with braille and morse code was that I attempt to eliminate margins on the edge of the page or canvas which I found on a flat surface was virtually impossible. However, by stitching into a piece of linen or calico and then stretching it, I can do exactly this.

It is impossible to eliminate the margin completely when I’m stitching because the French knot will just tear straight out of this fabric if I go right up to the edge with it. By stretching it over a canvas frame, the stitching spreads around the edges of the canvas and the edge of the fabric is hidden behind the piece, therefore eliminating a margin.

This also makes the piece look like a snapshot of a piece of text rather than a standalone piece of writing, which I though was interesting because it was based on screenshots.

After it was suggested to me that I try using better quality canvas, I didn’t want to give up days of my working time to build a new canvas from scratch, nor did I have the money to do this so I painted over an old painting from one of my first year projects and then stitched into this.

Again, this piece is a translation of the screenshots I received over the Christmas period.

Once again, using the same colours as the last piece, I chose colours representing purity and romance to contradict the nature of what the piece actually says.

I actually re-painted this canvas before I started the first piece, during a period when I was experiencing so much anger and frustration over the screenshots I received that I stuck a paintbrush through the canvas, making a hole in it that I decided to leave, after sticking it back together with paint. I felt this just worked with the piece and the negative connotations behind it.

This was an experimental drawing.

I was struggling with the placement of each knot, and finding that some knots ended up too close together or some letters ended up too close together making it harder to tell which letter was which so I decided to try gridding up my guidelines in an attempt to help this.

Whilst this works, I decided not to continue doing this as I felt that it didn’t feel ‘organic’ enough for want of a better word and decided to continue in a way that actually does the opposite of this and obscures the braille.

#experiment #art #artist #art student #Rebeccacaveart #Falmouth university #Falmouth school of art #fine art #communication #communication project #non verbal communication #non-verbal communication #braille #embroidery #embroidery hoop #stitching #linen

2nd Year, Term 2

Continuing on from last term where I started to explore other forms of communication, This entire project has been done in braille.

My work has been based on the idea that social media blurs the line between private and public and the way in which we approach social media with such naivety.

This interest began after I received screenshots of a “private” Facebook conversation between two people I thought were my friends, saying really unpleasant stuff about me. They thought that I would never see this conversation because they believed Facebook messenger to be private.

Nothing online is private, not messenger, not twitter dm’s, nothing. All it takes is for somebody to get hold of your password (easily done) or for you to leave social media open on an unattended computer, or even just for your phone to fall into the wrong hands, and all your private messages are out there for the whole world to see.

To believe that anything online is private, I believe is a very naive approach to the internet.

This however got me thinking about my work and how all of last term I would joke that I could say what I liked because nobody would be able to understand it but that isn’t strictly true. There are people who can read braille, who can read morse code, and even if they can’t, they can look up an alphabet to translate it.

After realising the similarities between these, I decided to combine them by translating the screenshots into Braille and ultimately, the braille became the equivalent of the password used to access these messages online.

The original idea behind my work was that it would be sensory and people could touch it.

a point was made to me by a fellow student that my work makes you want to touch it but natural instinct tells the viewer not too because we know we’re not supposed to touch someones art work. It was said that it would be interesting to watch the way that over time, people touching it would discolour the thread.

This piece reads “please touch me” in braille and when displayed would have a sign next to it encouraging viewers to touch it and to run their fingers along the braille

(unfinished)

Bad video editing with a side of make up i forgot to take off the night before.

it had been suggested to me that I try making a video piece out of blinking morse code patterns. The idea itself I thought was great but this piece I’m not sure about. Maybe with some more editing and a bit of work it will start to look better.

I don’t really understand what I’m doing at the moment. I’ve never used video editing software before.

#communication #communication project #make up #eyes #blinking #morse code #be a unicorn #video art #experimental #work in progress #unfinished #art student #art school #fine art student #university #non verbal communication #brown eyes

I decided to try stitching the message from a bully again, this time in braille. I tried to keep it very precise by pencilling in lines across the back of the canvas using a ruler to make sure they were all evenly spaced and then used these lines as guidance to help keep the braille in straight lines and keep each letter the same size. I think I prefer the braille message from a bully to the morse one because it looks neater and cleaner.

Message From a Bully

Recently, I was struggling to come up with ideas for things to write in my morse code and braille pieces when one of my old school bullies popped up on facebook with a message which I have now turned into artwork.

I overestimated the length of the message and how much space I would need to stitch it when I started this piece but even so, I feel like this worked well. The blank space at the bottom of the page makes it feel like it could be an extract from a book, or a quote or something.

The combination of morse and a facebook message also link because both are very private. Both can only be read by certain people. Morse can only be read by those who know the morse alphabet and facebook messages can only be read by those with access to them.

I started to experiment with creating colourful surfaces on the linen after not being totally enamoured by the paint me jealous piece but felt that the dark colour of the linen meant that the brusho inks wouldn’t hold the vibrancy of their colours, which in places on this piece can be seen, so I tried mixing them with acrylic to help maintain the vibrancy. This worked well to maintain the vibrancy of the inks however, the acrylic made the surface too stiff and therefore made it difficult for me to trace the movement of the needle through the linen to be able to bring it through in a straight line, keeping the line of text straight.

For this piece, playing on the same ideas as the last two pieces posted about challenging the convention of the embroidery hoop, I positioned the hoop right on the edge of the canvas leaving uneven amounts of linen hanging around the hoop. In doing this, I managed to include the white strip down the side of the linen in the hoop itself which lots of people have said they like.

I then stitched the line “paint me jealous” from the same lyric as the red embroidery hoop previously posted. I wasn’t totally enamoured by this piece because it felt like it needed there to be more to it. It felt too simple, especially for this statement.

Continuing with the suggestion that I went right up to the edge of the canvas, I took a line from a song- “We’ve kinda got this non exclusive policy of determining exactly who we open up to and let into our family” which I chose to use simply because I liked it and I continuously moved the embroidery hoop around as I was stitching and then positioned it of centre on the canvas when I finished so that the French knots didn't just sit in the middle of the hoop and instead challenged the conventionality of the embroidery hoop. For similar reasons to my morse code letter on the large canvases, I selected a pale thread to use against the pale background. The pale thread was subtle and gave the piece textural qualities that a brightly coloured thread may have lacked.

Once again challenging the convention of the embroidery hoop I painted a long strip of calico with reds and oranges, angry colours, and allowed them to dry before putting the fabric in the embroidery hoop.

The night before starting this, I had been listening to one of my favourite bands and I heard the lyric “Paint me jealous, Paint me rage” which fit perfectly with my work and drawing on the same concept as the wheel of emotions pieces I matched the colours to the line “paint me rage.”

I avoided stitching inside the embroidery hoop this time leaving the centre of the embroidery hoop, where you would traditionally stitch, almost blank.

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