Category: little fluffy clouds

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“This is the world’s largest collection of anatomically correct fabric brain art”

So goes the opening line of at the web site of The Museum of Fabric Brain Art. It’s probably safe (but I can’t prove it) to say it’s the world’s only collection of anatomically correct fabric brain art. “As featured in Science and Knitting Help“.

This is just too exquisitely wonderful for words. Science and Knitting Help. Juxtapositions don’t get much better than that.

There’s a knitted brain, ffs. With a zip. At the corpus collosum. (So it says on this site which has more information about the artwork in question and an accompanying animation and poster. I would have just said that the hemispheres can be zipped together.)

Apparently Karen Norburg “began knitting a brain to kill time when she was undergoing clinical training in child psychiatry”. She’s also a Medical Research Fellow, when she’s not knitting. “Building a brain with yarn and knitting needles turns out to follow many of the same pathways as actual brain development,” she says.

That is so many kinds of holy wow I’ve actually lost count.

The original link is from the ever-gorgeous Mind Hacks. I’m really profoundly pissed off to be unavailable to be a participant in Mr Mind Hacks (aka Vaughan)’s research. The dates for volunteers to do their stuff are exactly those of my long-anticipated photo-etching course. To think, I might have been in with the chance of a brain scan all of my very own. Dammit dammit dammit!

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The starving cat and the pizza Margherita (with a knitted back)

Cat is no longer denying himself food. He’s now so hungry that some time during the night he scaled nearly seven feet of bookshelves to hunt down the remaining half of a pizza Margherita I’d put up there out of harm’s way because there was no room in the fridge. He loves tomato, when he’s himself. Also bread. And cheese.

He must have knocked the whole thing off its perch and this morning we came down to find the board and covering on the floor but not an atom of pizza. Unfortunately I assume that, appealing though it is to think of the animals forming a cartoonesque team to predate on the leavings of humans, as soon as the pizza hit the floor it immediately disappeared into Maizy. She is certainly looking more than usually rotund today with that combination expression of self-satisfaction and hang-dog guilt that can only be seen on the face of, yes, a dog.

A final (this time round at least) trip to the vet early this morning. Another injection and a pill. He’s put on weight. He’s playing. He’s curled, as I type this, in his accustomed position on my lap with his head in the crook of my left elbow.

hmmm feeling a bit better now

His spine is still knobbly but there’s a layer of flesh, albeit thin, between it and his fur, which is back to its usual extraordinary silky softness.

So, one gets better, another gets worse. Secondspawn, who was home yesterday with a cold and sore throat, is home again today feeling worse. Still, nursing the sick is conducive to knitting. Yesterday I finished the back of the austenesque. It’s only short and aran weight wool knits up in seconds.

the back of the austenesque

On, on with the left front!

The possibility of a fur trim still remains. If Cat doesn’t stop eating outrageously expensive tins and sachets of choicest organic talking fowl hand reared by virgins in the garden of eden and get back to the dry stuff that comes in 15 kilo sacks, and soon at that, then he’s for the collar and cuffs.

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Louise Bourgeois rocks. Hard.

Too tired for words. Rather breakable right now. But it was just wonderful to go to the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Tate Modern with a wonderful friend. And… the camera!

cell 1

There is its shadow poking, in a rather sinister fashion, into one of Bourgeois’ “cells”.

Here’s part of another cell. That blue and that red seem to be very important colours in Bourgeois’ personal palette.

cell 2

I hadn’t seen any of her sewn fabric sculptures before. Incredibly powerful.

head

Apparently she met my all-time sculpture hero, Constantin Brancusi, in 1950. The inspiration is clear.

brancusi phase

Couldn’t resist the (belated) halloween appeal of this hanging sculpture, at least from this particular vantage-point. Move in any direction, though, and all was changed utterly.

hanging

The big (huge) spider sculpture which was commissioned for the opening of the Tate and dominated the Turbine Hall is back, straddling a substantial area outside the building. It is, of course, called Maman (mother). This spider is small, about the size of my camera, but was something I could relate to powerfully nonetheless.

spider

And here’s a picture that isn’t someone’s art, merely a street. But I liked the way the building and its reflection talked to each other.

mind the gap

It is so, so good to have the camera back. And I shall be going back to the exhibition if possible. It’s unmissable.

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Temporal borrowings

“Among the millions of nerve cells that clothe parts of the brain there runs a thread. It is the thread of time, the thread that has run through each succeeding wakeful hour of the individual.”

Wilder Penfield via Mind Hacks

And I celebrate my own life, remember many Octobers melting into misty Novembers. Dark afternoons, fireworks illuminating inky skies, fires roaring in hearths and gardens. Remember the excitement of sparklers shared with friends, my father lighting blue touch papers and retreating. Uneasy now in this time of change, and uncertain who it is about to turn 45. But steadied by the golden thread of all my Autumns.

Tall Girl at Smoke and Ash

I realized that the past is not linear, not forever frozen and unchangeable. Rather than being a line stretching back horizontally, personal time is a column, layering vertically, down below the present. It’s like a shifting column of different coloured fluids. One floating on top of the other. And when you change one layer at the bottom all the layers shift and change colour above.

Alistair Appleton at Burning Turban

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Double dendritic delight

The latest Festival of the Trees is up at Windywillow! and it’s got two branches – a frightful one (with accompanying howl, turn the sound down if you’re easily startled) and a fruitful one. Both are well-foliaged with beautiful pictures and words. (Yes, I toyed with the idea of their being well hung, but thought I’d already ridden that one on a previous occasion. So to speak.)

(And more delight – I am going to see Orchestra Baobab when they are in London. When I was at the bottom of the pit and could barely exist at all theirs was the only music I could listen to. They hold a really special place in my heart and I am overjoyed that I shall see them play in a great venue. Last time (the only time) I saw them play was in Dakar (back in the raised-from-the-dead archives there, sorry about the unavoidable discontinuity in appearance). It was a stadium concert and they are so “old fashioned” in domestic Senegalese terms that they were about the first band on in a huge line-up and when they played audience barely covered a handkerchief. So I was right at the front! In London the smallish venue will be crammed full of devoted fans so the atmosphere will be wonderful, I hope. Now all I need to do is find a sitter for the boys. Also the camera is cured and I shall probably pick it up tomorrow so I may be able to take some pictures of them. And other stuff before then, no doubt. Oh joy! oh happiness!)

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A great wave of happiness

I mentioned earlier that the poet George Szirtes has contributed to the online culturezine qarrtsiluni.

I’m absolutely delighted that the editors have used one of my images to illustrate his most recent contribution, Say, which is published today.

I think it’s a really beautiful poem, please read it if you have time 🙂

(Actually delighted doesn’t even come close. But it will have to do since I’m trying to be grown up.)

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Another pre-Austenesque WIP

And I think the last such distraction before I tackle the garment itself. This is a scarf for a friend. I haven’t used much Noro yarn before and it’s such a joy and a delight. This uses Silk Garden. (The Austenesque is also Noro… whee heee! but Kochoran.)

The yarn is already exciting enough – individually dyed in beautiful, subtle, surprising shades to produce a melange of extraordinarily hued stripes. But what makes this scarf so exciting (and at times slightly dismaying) is that it uses not one but three different colourways, each used to produce a stripe in sequence. So I have no idea what the scarf will look like and can only marvel (and be faintly worried about whether the recipient will like some of the combinations) as the yarns dance together, their shades changing together and individually, talking to each other in different and surprising ways.

When I originally chose the yarns I wanted the predominant effect to be blue but the outlet didn’t have what I wanted in stock. So I rechose with some reservation from a more limited range and am surprised to see that the predominant effect is… purple! Or at least so far. And sometimes the three different balls come up with almost exactly the same colour at the same time so under artificial light some of the stripes look wider than others. But the dye, as it were, is cast and we shall continue our conversation together, these yarns and I, until the scarf is finished.

scarf

I am soooo missing my camera. The colours on the above picture are all wrong – too strident for a start. Must have been the phone over-compensating for the very poor light. It’s also out of focus. Anyway it’s enough to give a sense, albeit not a good one, of the general thing. There are even worse upsettingly bad close-ups of different sections here, here and here. I do hope the camera is back from the menders before the scarf is finished and despatched so I can get a decent shot of it. It’s much more subtle-heathery-furzy that the distressingly bright and shiny pictures suggest.

This is another gem from the fantabulous b r o o k l y n t w e e d which I originally came across when going through his flickr pictures and, in common with the other patterns he provides, if you search for the right tags you can find pictures of other people’s versions on flickr from which the astonishing power of the yarns used in combination can be seen. One thing is for sure, it’s very unlikely that there are two identical such scarves anywhere in the world. And of course this one will almost inevitably end up with some of my hairs knitted into it since they get everywhere.

It’s such a wonderful feeling knitting for other people. A profoundly mindful activity full of love. Highly tactile, since each inch of thread passes through your fingers as it journeys to become fabric, and that fabric will in turn touch and warm the recipient. And to see such warming in action (although I’m informed he pulls them off very quickly) check out Bernard in his mittens! aaaaaaaaaaw.

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Night

Last night I dreamt I salved my lover’s lips, sore with kissing, while he lay sleeping. Dipped a finger into scented balsam of beeswax and honey, curled a glistening whorl on the back of my nail. Licked his mouth carefully, like a cat would a small spill of milk. Swept the curves where mouth meets skin, followed the fullness, finger painting over tongue primer. Then kissed him gently, sharing warm balm from sweet lips.