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A3 simulation

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A3 zoom ins

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Lovely colour pallete for bright aliens. It will make them pop on front of the dark spacey blue.

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Disney, Dreamworks and Pixar don't ever disappoint when designing remarkable  characters.

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I think that very good to create simple and fun aliens when drawing something that is towards children.

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What is fun to observe in these characters is that they all seem to have an individual personality. That can be a very useful tip when designing cartoons.

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This italian director won the Oscar for "Call me by Your Name" and its polished art direction and photography. Suspira, tough, is the reboot of a famous horror movie that I love and the title design, the costumes and the colour pallete seem very well thought. This is something that is definitely  worth looking for.

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Suspiria - Official Trailer | Amazon Studios

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Grimaldi is a São Paulo letter artist who made a career in lettering. His work is so inspiring because of my love for typography and because I've been training my calligraphy since I was younger. This is definitely something that can be part of my personal practice as a graphic designer for its painting techniques are extremely useful when making art on walls and larger scales.

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Todas as fotos foram tiradas por Filipe Grimaldi de processos durante curso de Caligrafia e Lettering no SESC Pompéia em 2016/17

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About photography and painting.

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Photo Paintings " Quotes " Gerhard Richter

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Photo paintings, Abstrakt, 1992.

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Witches Sabbath, Luiz Ricardo Falero

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Unknown, engraving

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One of the main characters of Goya's personal practice were the witches. He made at least six compendiums about this theme and they inspired by Spain's rigid laws against witchcraft.

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The Past 1838.

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Destruction, displaying the fall of Rome 1833-66.

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-https://loja.masterink.com.br

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When I saw my friend borrowing this book from the library, I was instantly inspired by the delicacy of the line art in those object/building drawings.

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Re/forma shows how a single element can change the whole space.

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Museum

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Is a brasilian artist who is interested to study what is to be a painter and a creator. I've seen his work in the exhibition "Feito por Brasileiros" made inside the old Matazarazzo Hospital in 2014 and the contrast between the old/new wall and their stories is an amazing reflection.

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Tendo visto uma década inteira de pinturas de Daniel Senise em exposições, bem como alguns trabalhos em andamento em seu ateliê, pensei que conhecesse seu trabalho em primeira mão. Mas me vi, fascinado e intrigado, a dispender um tempo considerável diante da instalação que Senise fez para a exposição do Made by... feito por Brasileiros, no antigo Hospital Matarazzo - exposição da qual participei como curador convidado dos EUA. Por meio de visitas quase diárias, aprendi mais sobre o mistério da arquitetura e a profundidade das quais o artista é capaz de utilizar. Como se caminhássemos dentro de uma de suas pinturas, sua instalação atravessa um cômodo decadente do Matarazzo: a metade esquerda mostra os 20 anos de decadência com um retângulo limpo e intacto no meio da parede; na outra metade, limpa e intacta, a decadência da parede original ecoa em um retângulo. Trata-se de um diálogo que se trava entre dois retângulos paralelos, um nítido e limpo oposto ao seu semelhante agredido e maltratado. A instalação é formalmente elegante e emocionalmente ressonante... Como um relacionamento esgotado, como uma longa vida vivida. Uma poética minimalista e maravilhosa.

Testemunhar diariamente a instalação de Senise melhorou meu entendimento sobre quem ele é e de sua trajetória a uma importante e eficiente recepção internacional e perfil do mercado. Akio Aoki, da Galeria Vermelho, diz que "a força de Daniel Senise no mercado - seus trabalhos curtam entre USD $ 60,000 e USD $ 120,000 - se deve, em parte, ao fato de ter sido amplamente adquirido por colecionadores particulares notáveis e instituições públicas poderosas - Ludwig Museum, Köln Germany; The Brooklyn Museum, Nova Iorque (EUA); Museo de Arte Contemporâneo (MARCO), Monterrey (México); Stedeljk Museum, Amsterdã (Holanda); Coleção Cisneros, Caracas (Venezuela) -, incluindo a pintura Ici et ailleurs [Aqui e alhures] doada pelo Credit Suisse para a Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo".

Daniel Senise nasceu no Rio de Janeiro e tem um ateliê na cidade. Além de uma extensa trajetória de mostras no Brasil, a recepção internacional à obra de Senise é forte e foi avivada pelo fato de o artista ter morado e trabalhado na cidade de Nova Iorque por longos períodos. Ele participou de inúmeras bienais internacionais, como a Bienal de Havana, em 1986, em Cuba, e também a Bienal de Veneza, em 1990, na Itália; de exposições em instituições como o Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris; Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Nova Iorque; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Sofía Imber, Caracas; Museu Ludwig, Cologne. Teve, ainda, trabalhos expostos em mostras de galerias internacionais em Amsterdã, Buenos Aires, Lisboa, Londres, Nova Iorque e Paris. O artista é representado pela Galeria Vermelho, em São Paulo, e pela Galeria Silvia Cintra, no Rio de Janeiro.

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ARTISTA EM FOCO - DANIEL SENISE | DASartes

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Tendo visto uma década inteira de pinturas de Daniel Senise em exposições, bem como alguns trabalhos em andamento em seu ateliê, pensei que conhecesse seu trabalho em primeira mão. Mas me vi, fascinado e intrigado, a dispender um tempo considerável diante da instalação que Senise fez para a exposição do Made by...

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Building Cuts

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I like the graphic aspect of Andrés work.

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Andrés Sandoval é artista gráfico e mora em São Paulo. Formado em arquitetura pela Universidade de São Paulo, desenvolve muitos trabalhos com livros. Desde 2006, ilustra a seção Esquina da revistaPiauí. Também cria estampas para marcas como L'Occitane, Coca-Cola, Melissa e Neon.

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"Walls Paper" is a 1972 art installation that contains photographs of demolished project houses around the Bronx. This also tells a new story and is interesting to notice that each different practice reflects personal views and habits of that artist. Much can be told by someone's work.

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Sandoval created a series called "Blind Walls", which was about architectural elements of São Paulo's buildings. What I like about this work is that it tells stories and particularities of this unique city, through simple colorful silhouettes.

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Is book of hours that displays beautiful colours and scenes featuring gothic architecture, made in 1413

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Graduated marketing professional (ESPM 2014-2018) and now an art student

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Since my dad is a pilot and my hometown is full of places such as Embraer and ITA, this look like appropriate souvenirs.

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Flying during the holiday season is like being imprisoned in an airborne torture chamber. The constant assault on your personal space, screaming infants, and turbulent holding patterns are enough to make anyone want to abandon all hope. But fear not, brave traveler! Here to end your airplane woes is this guide to all the best in-flight gear, laid out from take off to landing.

Bon voyage.

This $4M Super Yacht Comes With a Fire Pit and a Jacuzzi

Bluesmart Carry-On - $215
Roll up to the gate with this smart suitcase that pairs with your phone to allow you lock it remotely. It even provides weight measurements, so you're never caught with day-ruining overweight fees. (Oh, also, do TSA pre-check, for God's sake.)

Arctic Flight - $100
Kick back and relax with this hands-free iPad mount that'll affix to the back of the seat in front of you, so you're not stuck watching Something's Gotta Give or 27 Dresses the whole flight.

Ali Drucker is a jet-setting staff writer for Supercompressor. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

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All The Gear You Need To Keep Your Flight From Sucking

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Flying during the holiday season is like being imprisoned in an airborne torture chamber. The constant assault on your personal space, screaming infants, and turbulent holding patterns are enough to make anyone want to abandon all hope. But fear not, brave traveler!

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With these flags, Rivane as determined to show the country's personality and the conflicts which they were inserted.

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Since Rivane is an artist thay studies the connection of the space and the human, she is a good reference to look into for this project.

Tabloid Story (Dining Room)

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Is a respected brazilian artist that makes reflections about the relation between the space around us and the human presence in it. She uses common and simple materials to talk about certain themes and their relationship with the audience and the physical space where it lies.

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Rivane Neuenschwander, 2012 - Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural (PT)

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Reference site for Felix personal practice review and analysis. Useful to understand his themes and who he was as an artist.

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Quotes

there is no private space anymore. Our intimate desires, fantasies, dreams are ruled and intercepted by the public sphere"

"Meaning can only be formulated when we compare, when we bring information to our daily level, to our 'private' sphere. Otherwise information just goes by. Which is what the ideological apparatuses want and need. 'You give us thirty minutes and we give you the world.' A meaningless one. So public life and private life. In our culture, we live in a world of interrelations. As Lenin said, 'everything is related to everything.'"

"Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that's why I made works of art. "

"I think more than anything else I'm just an extension of certain practices, minimalism or conceptualism, that I am developing areas I think were not totally dealt with. I don't like this idea of having to undermine your ancestors, of ridiculing them, undermining them, and making less out of them. I think we're part of a historical process and I think that this attitude that you have to murder your father in order to start something new is bullshit. "

"Something I tell my students is to read once; then if you still have problems with it, read it a second time. If you still have problems, get drunk and read it a third time...and you might get something out of it."

"Let's move forward to a certain degree, in terms of the kind of protest art that says all Capital is bad, Bennetton is bad. We know that! We really do know that. We don't need a gallery space to find out something we read in the news."

"I think if I started this list of influences again I would start with [Bertolt] Brecht. I think this is really important because as Hispanic artists we're supposed to be very crazy, colorful-extremely colorful. We are supposed to "feel," not think. Brecht says to keep a distance to allow the viewer, the public, time to reflect and think. When you get out of the theater you should not have had a catharsis, you should have had a thinking experience. More than anything, break the pleasure of representation, the pleasure of the flawless narrative. This is not life, this is just a theater piece. I like that a lot: This is not life, this is just an artwork. I want you, the viewer, to be intellectually challenged, moved, and informed."

"When you read Greenberg you can get lost in page after page on how a line ends at the edge of the canvas, which is very fascinating - I love that, I can get into that, too. But when some of us, especially in the younger generation, get involved with social issues we are put under a microscope. We really are and we have to perform that role, which includes everything. It includes the way we dress to where we are seen eating."

"It's a riot when I show these pieces in a museum because people aren't supposed to touch the art much less take it with them. At the 1991 Whitney Biennial people would ask the museum guard if it was true that they could really take a piece from the stack of paper. The guards got into it."

"When people ask me, "Who is your public?" I say honestly, without skipping a beat, "Ross." The public was Ross. The rest of the people just come to the work. In my recent show at the Hirshhorn, which is one of the best experiences I have had in a long time, the guards were really in it. Because I talked to them, I dealt with them. They're going to be here eight hours with this stuff. And I never see guards as guards, I see guards as the public. Since the other answer to the question "Who's the public?" is, well, the people who are around you, which includes the guards. In Washington people asked me, "Did I train the guards, did I give them a lecture?" I said, "No, I just talk to them when I'm doing the work." They said, "You know we have never been to an exhibit where the guards go up to the viewers and tell them what to do, and where to go, what to look at, what it means." But again, that division of labor, that division of function is always there in place to serve someone's agenda."

"But as we know aesthetics are politics. They're not even about politics, they are politics. Because when you ask who is defining aesthetics, at what particular point - what social class, what kind of background these people have - you realize quickly again that the most effective ideological construction are the ones that don't look like it. If you say, I'm political, I'm ideological, that is not going to work, because people know where you are coming from. But if you say, "Hi! My name is Bob and this is it," then they say, that's not political. It's invisible and it really works. I think certain elements of beauty used to attract the viewer are indispensable. I don't want to make art just for people who can read Fredrick Jameson sitting upright on a Mackintosh chair. I want to make art for people who watch the Golden Girls and sit in a big, brown, Lazy-boy chair. They're part of my public too, I hope."

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Felix Gonzalez-Torres Overview and Analysis

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Quotes there is no private space anymore. Our intimate desires, fantasies, dreams are ruled and intercepted by the public sphere" "Meaning can only be formulated when we compare, when we bring information to our daily level, to our 'private' sphere. Otherwise information just goes by. Which is what the ideological apparatuses want and need.

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Untitled

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Was a very romantic cuban artist who opened his heart when transforming his emotions into art. After the death of is lover Ross, Felix became fascinated with the possibility of showing his take on love, loss and other poetic themes.

This is a great reference because of what he represented as an queer artist and his legacy on gay culture and art in general. Even more, for the souvenir project, it's a great example of transforming our personal experiences into art pieces.

Untitled.

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This can easily be turned into a postcard

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Ed's work inspired me greatly because of its content, the way he twists and bends the pictures he got of this strange locations.  Of course the same common thread of thought can be seen in his personal practice, like with the previous two artists, but his designs seem like proper merchandise.

What I learned from him is that I can give a personal feel or atmosphere to my souvenirs that are relatable to my vacation experiences and personal memories.

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Moscheta's 2015 project "Arrasto" was about collecting minerals from Tiête river banks. It is a good reference because it's another example on how collecting stuff related to places can be displayed as an art piece, for they are full of meaning. This whole idea can be characterised as the souvenir.

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Arquiteturas adormecidas sobre um vetor entre duas cidades

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Flavia is a brazilian artist from São Paulo who has a deep relation with the places she visits. Her work is often related with photographic registration and this is important because its key to connecting an experience (the place visited) to artistic experimentation.

Her project "Sleeping Architecture" consists in actions created to change abandoned places, which provides uniques experiences to each viewer.

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Look into root shapes and ways of reproducing their textures into the poster. It also can be photography of ancient trees or black and white cuts of their twirling roots.

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From singer outfits to record sleeves, music and design have always gone hand-in-hand . The history of rock concert posters started in the 1960s in San Francisco, a poster was made for...

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Dark Matter

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Psyco Barn is a great example how Cornelia values her creative process and adds thinking to everything that she does.  This revisiting of ideas can be very useful when brainstorming and registering your own work.

“I like the idea of the barn being this lovely wholesome thing about the landscape and the countryside… and then the Psycho house is the opposite; it’s all the dark, psychological stuff you don’t really want to look at,” she says.

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Is known for having work related to violence. She keeps her work and sketchbooks so she can observe the common "thread of ideas".

"It works not only as a metaphor of the creative process in general, but of Parker’s own methods in particular: holding disparate fragments of surprise in singular tension, and delighting in the new shadows that are generated."

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'I have never fitted neatly into the arts section, I don't think," Cornelia Parker says, with the briefly explosive laugh that punctuates most of her efforts at self-analysis. "I've always wanted to kind of trespass elsewhere as much as possible."

We are standing in the building site that will shortly be the entrance to the new Whitworth Art Gallery at Manchester University, surrounded by scaffolding and rough concrete and hanging wires. The gallery, which has been closed for 18 months, will, I'm assured, be completed by the time of the grand opening, in just over a fortnight's time, but at the moment that idea sounds like a fairly implausible piece of conceptualism. Parker, who is the star turn of that opening - which will involve among other things a homemade meteor shower - is a great enthusiast of materials and processes, an instinctive fossicker of order out of chaos and is, as such, very much in her element.

A love of getting things done runs deep in her. Now 58, she grew up on a smallholding on the Duchy of Lancaster estate, not far away in Cheshire, the awkward second of three sisters. Her family had lived in their tied cottage for many generations. She was, as she says a few times in our conversations, her father's designated son, tinkering in the farmyard or mucking out pigs or laying hedges after school. "I was my father's sidekick in a way," she says. "He was a very dominant, forceful character."

It was a role she seems to have both accepted and been determined to subvert. A lot of her art involves collaboration with serious grown-ups - scientists, military men, ordnance experts - but the result is triumphantly playful and often anarchic. The piece with which she made her name, her famous blown-apart shed, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, the shrapnel suspended after a controlled big bang, is a case in point. It works not only as a metaphor of the creative process in general, but of Parker's own methods in particular: holding disparate fragments of surprise in singular tension, and delighting in the new shadows that are generated.

Cold Dark Matter will be reassembled in one of the newly whitewashed hangar-like galleries here, and you might say the piece is also, happily, the genesis of Parker's retrospective show. Dr Maria Balshaw, the irrepressible gallery director at the Whitworth (and all-round Manchester culture commissar), saw the work in London when she was 22, and recalls it as love at first sight. "It blew me away," she says. "I had seen a lot of abstract art but this was something different - something genuinely emotional and exciting." Balshaw had a career as an academic but she always had a thought, once she came to the Whitworth in 2006, that she would love to invite Parker to do a show.

When the new space was planned here, that thought became insistent. The gallery, Balshaw suggests, has a unique relationship with the university, and she believed she could use that collaborative spirit to persuade Parker to be the first artist to occupy the new space. "I had sat next to Cornelia at a dinner a few years ago," she says. "When I raised the question of her doing something here her first question was 'Who could you introduce me to?'" Balshaw and curator Mary Griffiths held that thought.

They came up with the answer at a Manchester United football match a couple of seasons ago (Balshaw had been invited to watch from the executive box of Tom Bloxham, the Urban Splash entrepreneur and university chancellor). Also invited that day was one of the university's Nobel prize winners, Konstantin Novoselov, co-discoverer of the world's first "2D substance", graphene, sheets of which are one atom thick. When Balshaw next spoke to Cornelia Parker she wondered if she would like to meet the creator of the world's thinnest (and strongest and most flexible and most conductive) material. How could she say no?

Parker says she and the Russian émigré scientist sparked off each other immediately. "I loved the idea of working on a nano level," she says. "The idea of graphene, something so small, being a catalyst. Its power is enormous." A keen student of place, Parker sees Novoselov and his research partner, Professor Andre Geim, as the true heirs to the unique innovative spirit of Manchester, the spirit that fostered the industrial revolution and later led, for example, to Ernest Rutherford first splitting the atom up the road (a Mancunian spirit which Maria Balshaw characterises as: "Fuck it, let's give it a go!")

Parker loved the fact that graphene had originally been isolated in the Manchester labs using Scotch tape to pick up single atomic layers of graphite from a drawn pencil line. She once asked Novoselov (a keen calligrapher) what he thought the difference between their disciplines was; the physicist suggested there was little difference, they were both "at the extreme end of creativity". Thinking about those extremes, and about the post-industrial landscape of dark satanic mills around the Whitworth, Parker came across some William Blake drawings in the university's collection. Her mind makes connections intuitively and she had the feeling that the creative impulse Novoselov outlined could be a reawakening of that original combustible Romantic spirit, a new Jerusalem, if you will. Further, graphene itself seemed symbolic of that possibility - the "miracle" substance promises among myriad other applications to hasten a "green energy" revolution in its ability to capture hydrogen for fuel cells from the air. "Who needs fracking when you have graphene?" Parker asks.

Anyhow, she had Novoselov harvest graphene from one of Blake's drawings. "He got a microscope and a tiny pair of tweezers and with the conservator hovering over him he collected something from it," she recalls. "With graphite there are always loose flakes that move around, fall in the gutter of sketchbooks. Blake used very hard pencils, which was ideal really." On the Whitworth's opening night a firework display ("of very Blakean fiery, fearful symmetry"), will be set in motion by Novoselov breathing on the graphene from Blake's drawing and setting in motion an aerial reaction. Among the fireworks Parker will have fragments of meteorite fall to earth, time-honoured portents. "There will be a photo to capture the moment," Parker says, "I was thinking of calling it Breath of a Physicist. I think Blake, who was always looking out for comets, would have loved it." All of this is planned for the night of Friday 13 February. What could possibly go wrong?

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Black Path (Bunhill Fields), 2013, a cast of the path at William Blake's grave. Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery

The pyrotechnics will be, Parker hopes, a proper prelude to more fizzing energies in the show itself. Not content with Blake as firestarter, Parker explains to me how she is also bringing a piece of Jerusalem to the gallery. For a while she has been taking casts of the cracks in pavements, using a rubberised solution, and then casting them like hopscotch ladders in filigree bronze. On a recent visit to occupied East Jerusalem for a Palestinian arts festival, she covertly took a cast of a stretch of ancient marble pavement, dodging Israeli police, and smuggled it home in her suitcase. It will be placed alongside a matching cast from the paving around Blake's grave in Bunhill Fields, in the city of London - "And did those feet..."

Walking around the gallery she explains, 19 to the dozen, how those sculptures will act as touchstones for the other work around them - photographs Parker took of statues of female industry in London's Threadneedle Street under protective chain mesh; the gold of a tooth filling stretched into a fine wire having been threaded through a needle ("it is easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven..."); embroidered samplers made of overlapping lines of the dictionary definitions of fundamental oppositions - "good" and "evil", "passive" and "aggressive", "conscious and unconscious" - all hand stitched by prison inmates ("I'm just waiting for 'war' and 'peace' now," she says); line drawings of simple geometric shapes made in her own blood; examples of her " bullet drawings " in which the lead of bullets is drawn out into a fine wire mesh. In some senses each of the pieces is a cool abstraction, a nod at minimalist art, but a knowledge of its history and context makes it something more human and visceral.

Within that cat's cradle of associations Parker has had more than her fair share of eureka moments: in Bethlehem she filmed an Arab man who spent his days making crowns of thorns for Christian tourists. "He had been doing it for 33 years," she says. "He's in this place where he lives surrounded by barbed wire..." Usually the ironies are not so naked.

"Sometimes my process seems very scattergun," Parker says, "but I never worry whether it is all going to link up. And I don't care if people don't make all the same connections as me." She rather hopes they make patterns of their own. "I want the work to be dead simple and not really polemical. I want it to be read by more than just a small target audience. I want to be porous and provocative." When she showed some of this work in China the combination of bullets and squares had one connotation; in the light of the events of the last few weeks, bullets and drawings seem to have another.

Pulling the strands of Parker's own life together is a similarly dynamic process. Our conversation at the gallery is the second time I've spoken to her in a few weeks; we first sat down before Christmas after I'd watched her deliver a lecture to several hundred sixth-form art students about her work. All that time, I've been trying to think who she reminds me of. There's an element of Mary Poppins about her, but she is more grounded than that. She describes herself sometimes as a "pleb" or a "peasant girl" but there is something quite proper and confident about her presence too. Watching her speak to her the students, hugely enthusiastic in the face of their affected indifference, the adjectives I write in my notebook are "fearless" and "gung-ho". At one point she put up a slide of herself in a steamroller, flattening a bunch of busted brass instruments, for her ghost orchestra piece. She never lets good ideas get away from her: "You only get one life so it seems to me you might as well do the things you want to do," she says. "If people say 'You can't do that', you can be sure I will do my utmost to do it."

She was recently told by her London GP for example that he wouldn't take her blood for use in art (even though, as she pointed out, she often gives it for science) on the grounds that it would be "self-harm". Fortunately she found a doctor in Manchester with no such qualms. The resultant drawings ("Self portrait as a square" etc) are like any blood oath, a reminder that she really means it.

Parker's art does not often feel so obviously autobiographical, though her obsessions point to some preoccupations that have stayed with her from childhood. One of the rooms at the Whitworth will be called "the War Room". Long before poppies cascaded at the Tower of London Parker became interested in the poppy-making factories that worked year round for Remembrance Sunday, staffed by veterans in Richmond and Aylesford. On a visit she found that the poppies were stamped out of long swathes of red crepe paper. The cut-out material left over fascinated her. She will drape the war room with it, a huge tent of 350,000 crimson poppy negatives; a counterpoint, in some ways, to the exploded shed.

"I imagine it as quite a contemplative space," she says, envisaging how it will look. She mentions that her own background was "quite a lot about war stories, spoken and unspoken".

In what way?

She laughs her laugh. "Well, I had both sides of it really. My grandfather was in the trenches in the first world war. And my mum was in the Luftwaffe."

Parker's mother grew up in Karlsruhe. She was 17 when the war started. "She never really talked about it," Parker says, "but it was all clearly pretty horrific. She was a prisoner of war for a couple of years after the war. She became quite mentally ill later on, I think as a result of what happened to her then. And I suppose that feeling was a big part of my childhood."

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'If people say "You can't do that", you can be sure I will do my utmost to do it.' Cornelia Parker, photographed for the Observer in her London studio by Suki Dhanda.

How did her parents meet?

"Well, my father had been ill with Crohn's disease and had stayed at home during the war supervising German prisoners of war who were working on his land. He got on quite well with them. In about 1948 my mother came over as an au pair to the estate manager for a couple of years. My father was still living at home with his parents at 33 but he somehow persuaded her he was the best thing since sliced. My poor mum wanted to start a new life in Canada and they tried that but came back. I think there was a lot of prejudice against her and a lot of unspoken trauma. I can only conjecture about what unspeakable horrors she witnessed, but I'm sure that's what happened. I was born in 1956."

Set against that background Parker's grandfather "would regale the family every weekend when he came round about life in the trenches in the first world war in graphic detail, about how they lived on potato peelings and so on. He kept himself sane, he said, by doing embroidery, and knitting. A lot of the men did - there is some of their work in the Imperial War Museum..."

This, of course, in turn teases out an element of her thinking behind her embroidery project with the prisoners, that sense of craft as therapy. She likes the idea of narrative threads, of one thing leading to another.

The dictionary-definition samplers are actually, in this way, a digression from the other major project that Parker has been working on - in response to a request from the British Library to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta on 15 June this year. Her idea has been to create a scrolled tapestry of the Wikipedia entry on the Magna Carta, which will be 13 metres long. As well as a desire to make the digital analogue, she says she loves the fact that the Wiki page on the original covenant is a constant work in progress, attracting 150,000 visits each month for tiny edits and arguments about the precise history and semantics of the document. The tapestry will be the work not only of her 66 prison inmates but pertinent sections will also be stitched by hundreds of people with a working interest in the encoded liberties and their preservation - from Shami Chakrabarti and Peter Tatchell and Wiki founder Jimmy Wales to invited bishops and politicians and royalty.

"We like to think of the Magna Carta as a settled historical document," she says, "but it is of course in constant need of renewal in each generation. We are living in an age where legal aid has all but been abolished by politicians. Eight hundred years on from the Magna Carta we have a government actively campaigning against the Human Rights Act. There are so many things I feel the need to be ranting about. I am getting angrier as I get older."

She has that sense that some of the freedoms fought for in the 60s and 70s are being erased. Though she has always, she says, felt herself an outsider to any art establishment - she studied at Wolverhampton Poly rather than Goldsmith's, and though sometimes co-opted was never a convincing YBA - she enjoyed that golden period of free education at art school. If the funding structure was progressive, the sexual politics were less so, however. "If I had to sue everyone who touched me up at art school in the 70s I would never be out of court," Parker says. "One old tutor used to regularly strip in the pub at night and quite often give you his dick to hold. I am still in touch with him. He was very sweet. I imagine that would be sexual harassment now..."

When she first came to London she lived in squats and rent-controlled accommodation in properties in Shoreditch now worth millions. "I never really made any money at all until I was 40, which was fine." She lately sold her first studio to buy a house in more suburban Kentish Town, where she lives with her husband, the American painter Jeff McMillan, and their teenage daughter. I wonder if she thinks about her art as overtly political?

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Cornelia Parker: 'I don't want to tick anyone else's boxes'

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'I have never fitted neatly into the arts section, I don't think," Cornelia Parker says, with the briefly explosive laugh that punctuates most of her efforts at self-analysis. "I've always wanted to kind of trespass elsewhere as much as possible."

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Yggdrasil Woodcut by Maria Arango Diener

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Yggdrasil Woodcut by Maria Arango Diener

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This work gives me some confidence to try the woodcut, for the result of this artist is precisely what I am looking for.

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This manual ways of representing this nordic culture fits perfectly on the contextual aspect of when they were usually made hundreds of years ago.

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The sacred world tree Yggdrasil is one of my favorite imagery from norse mythology. It represents the viking idea of the Universe and its nine different worlds.

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The Mammen style is a type of Scandinavian animal art found from the late 10th Century to the early 11th Century named after finds from the chamber tomb at Mammen in Jutland, Denmark

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I think that the Scandinavian's had Art Noveau qualities that were very present as decorations and flourishes to their halls, swords and engravings. It's the most characteristic aspect of their artistic past artistic practices.

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The Big Jellinge Rune Stone (side B), Jylland

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Runes were an alphabet used by the Scandinavians in the viking culture as a form of writing. It was said that the god Odin gained this present for sacrificing himself on the sacred tree of Yggdrasil.

This language suits perfectly in the personality of the band and is precisely the aesthetics I'm going for the posters and the album cover.

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Runes are heavily associated with Vikings. Not only did they leave thousands of runestones behind them that still dot the Scandinavian landscape, but they also carved runes during their expeditions, forever marking Greek statues and walls in magnificent temples. What are the runes, where did they come from, and do they possess magical powers?
Runes are shrouded in mystery and have influenced a lot of people, ranging from J.R.R. Tolkien to modern practitioners of magic. Where do they come from and when did runes appear for the first time?

It's a huge topic so we'll settle with the basics: Fittingly the word 'Rune' originates from the Germanic root run-, that means "secret" or "whisper". A lot of people are still intrigued by them and it's easier than ever before to find quick information using the internet. Unfortunately, the information available on the internet (and in a lot of books for that matter) isn't always complete, or even correct. This misinformation is often mistaken by many as the historical truth. One of the main problems is that the runes taking up most of the space weren't even used during the Viking Age. Another problem is that the information available usually describes how these pre-Viking Age runes are used in modern divination systems. In other words - it's quite easy to be misinformed if you're interested in Viking Age runes.

Origin of the runes: In Norse mythology it was the god Odin who was the first one to gain access to the runes through an act of self-sacrifice. After hanging for nine days and nine nights from the world tree Yggdrasil he finally saw the runes swirling around in the dark waters below. What if we'd set mythology aside and look at historical evidence...what does it tell us? It all began with the Germanic tribes, from as far up north as Scandinavia, that came in contact with Roman culture through their merchants and warbands. Upon returning to their northern lands they brought with them many impressions that in turn influenced and changed Germanic culture and religion. The Old Italic scripts of southern Europe are an example. They would undergo a change into the first runic script - the Elder Futhark.

If searching for information about runes, one will most likely encounter the earliest Germanic runes known as the Elder Futhark. They have, however, nothing to do with the runes used by Vikings. The Elder Futhark was invented around the 1 st century and originated in the Old Italic scripts that our own Latin Alphabet also is derived from (the similarities between the Elder Futhark and the Old Italic scripts are striking). Just as our Alphabet is named after the two first letters (A=Alpha, B=Beta), so is the Futhark named after the initial phoneme of the first six rune names (F, U, Th, A, R, K).

The classical Elder Futhark consists out of 24 runes, all confirmed from the Kylver stone in Sweden. The stone could have been used by a rune carver to practice his work on, or to teach an apprentice how to carve the individual runes. It's a fantastic example of how the actions of one person can keep an entire world informed 1500 years after his death The might and influence of Rome eventually declined, but the impressions left in the Germanic culture persisted and took a life of their own. An indigenous runic mythology was born as they fell under the domain of Odin, the god of all things magical and mysterious. The Elder Futhark was also embraced as the writing system used by the Germanic tribes during the Migration Period, from the 2 nd to the 8 th Century. They weren't common knowledge though, which is reflected by the fact that only some 350 surviving inscriptions remain.

Younger futhark - Viking age runes: Winds of change blew in Scandinavia by the end of the 8 th Century, which is when the Viking Age began. The Scandinavians had by then perfected their shipbuilding techniques, which allowed them to explore the world by its seas and rivers for trade, raids and conquest. The Scandinavian language also underwent a change as 'Proto Norse' evolved into the 'Old Norse' spoken by Vikings. Not even the runes were left untouched. The Elder Futhark was reduced from 24 to 16 runes to reflect the changes in the language, thus becoming the Younger Futhark.

Where the Elder Futhark was sparsely used, the Younger Futhark became accessible to nearly every man. Runes were carved on possessions to show ownership and left as early graffiti, both in Scandinavia and abroad during expeditions. However, the most prominent use of the Younger Futhark was on the more than 6 000 runestones, out of which the majority still dot the Scandinavian landscape. Many were risen as memorials over kinsmen and comrades who had passed away, or as reminders over great deeds. As time passed, the Younger Futhark evolved and different variations tailored for specific uses appeared. An example is the simplified version called 'Short Twig Runes' that is believed to have been used for carvings on wood. 'Stung Runes' on the other hand began appearing occasionally around the year 1000 to separate different sounds. A dot was basically added to the runes i, k and u, resulting in the sounds e, g and y. The 16 rune Futhark was in practice thus extended to a 19 rune Futhark. This technique was exploited further in the Middle Ages when the runes developed into an alphabet.

Rune alphabet - Medieval Runes: As the Viking Age had ended in Scandinavia and the Middle Age began around the year 1100, the runes saw a change as well. The Younger Futhark developed into an alphabet, where each phoneme of the Old Norse language was given a sign. Dots were added to existing runes and several new runes made an appearance. The Medieval Runes were used until the 15 th Century, when they were replaced by the alphabet we know today. The use of runes persisted to some extent until the 19th-20th century in isolated Swedish communities.

Runic magic of the past: Were runes used in religious and magical practices? There is indeed historical proof of runes having a magical purpose besides being a writing system. This was noticed by the Romans some 2000 years ago when Germanic tribes used various forms of divination, such as carving signs onto sticks that were thrown onto the ground. What those signs were and how they were interpreted is, however, not known. The Migration Period saw the use of the Elder Futhark for magical purposes. Various combinations of runes were added to amulets and other items. Unfortunately, it's not possible to identify what a lot of these inscriptions meant and all that remain are more or less educated guesses. There are certain entries that stand out though - such as the word ALU that appears on several artifacts dating back to 400-800 AD. It's the most common runic charm word of the time, but it's origin and meaning are disputed. Most scholars agree though on that it represents a form of amulet magic.
"Grass cures the scab and runes the sword-cut" (Odin in the Havamal)

The Viking Age also saw the use of runes for magical purposes and a number of items with magical inscriptions have been found. In addition there are runestones that have curses and other carvings that indicate that the runes in fact were considered to hold magical properties and powers. Various sagas also mention details that reveal the use of runic magic, such as the Ynglinga Saga, where a King recites his visit to the temple in Uppsala where: "...the chips fell in a way that said that he would not live long". The Poetic Edda, that is a collection of Old Norse poems and texts, is the richest source of runic magic that can be associated with the Viking Age. In it Odin tells of the use of runes for divination purposes.

There are also several stanzas where a Valkyrie gives advice on how to use runes for magical purposes. Even though the Poetic Edda is collected after the Viking Age, a lot of the content is verified to originate already from the 10 th century. This isn't surprising since myths aren't born overnight. Runic magic had a revival in Iceland in the 1400s when Icelandic Magical Staves, known as Galdrastafir, began appearing. They were based on the runes and on Norse mythology, gods and folklore.

There are hundreds of different Galdrastafir and one of the most popular ones is the Ægishjálmur (old norse: helm of awe/helm of terror) . The concept originates from the Völsunga Saga where Sigurd defeats the dragon Fafnir, who bears the Ægishjálmur on his forehead. It is not an actual helmet, but more so a 'magical mark' that inspires great fear in people. Scenes from the Völsunga Saga are depicted on 8 rune stones in Sweden that are dated to the 1000s, which means that the concept of the Ægishjálmur can be traced as far back as the 10th century.

Runic magic of today: A lot of people mistake the runic magic invented in the 20 th century with something that was practiced during the Viking Age or by the earlier Germanic tribes. It is, however, important to understand the difference between them, since most modern runic magic systems have very little to do with history.

One of the greatest influences to early 20 th century runic magic and Neopaganism was an Austrian occultist named Guido von List. The man suffered a 11-month period of blindness in 1902 during which he claims to have had a vision that opened his "inner eye" to the "Secret of the Runes". He stated that this "secret" was encrypted in the Poetic Edda and revealed the "primal runes" upon which all the other runes were based on. He called these runes the "Armanen Futharkh" and ascribed them various magical powers. It wouldn't be the last time the runes were seized and warped to serve modern purposes. Modern systems of runic magic and runic divination saw an upswing in the 1980s and countless of books on the subject has been published since then.

Ralph Blum was one of the pioneers and his first book "The Book of Runes: A Handbook for the Use of an Ancient Oracle" was marketed with a small bag of runes. According to Blum himself, he was mainly inspired by the ancient " I Ching divination system" of China when he constructed his runic system. Most of the later authors follow the same pattern, where little is based on historical facts, but more so on tarot systems and other inventions. These systems and presentations of the runes, usually in the form of the Elder Futhark, are what most people encounter for the first time when they search information.

Do you want to learn more? If you are interested in learning more about Viking Age runes, make sure to choose the source of your information carefully, since there is a sea of books out there that'll just feed you with nonsense. Obviously the main thing to check is that the runes are of the Younger Futhark. If you are interested in learning more about how the runes were used for magical purposes and what powers they were given, then we advice you to go straight to the source and read the Poetic Edda. The next step is to find the right scholars who have their own theories and interpretations based available historical sources.
As said, the topic is a huge one, but hopefully you've gotten a basic glimpse into the world of runes.
Below is a short video where we visit Anundshog that holds a magnificent runestone and Sweden's largest burial mound.

Early Germanic warriors wore their hair in a so called "Suebian Knot"

Visiting Vikings carve d runes into the Piraeus Lion of Athens, Greece, in memory of their fallen comrade Horsi

Runestone ÖG 208 from Östergötland, Sweden, that uses all three stung runes

The Björketorp Runestone reads: "I have concealed the secret of mighty runes here, powerful runes. The one who breaks this monument shall forever be plagued by wrath. Deceitful death shall strike him. I foresee destruction."

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Runes are heavily associated with Vikings. Not only did they leave thousands of runestones behind them that still dot the Scandinavian landscape, but they also carved runes during their expeditions, forever marking Greek statues and walls in magnificent temples. What are the runes, where did they come from, and do they possess magical powers?

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's life spanned nearly the entire 20th century, and when she died in 2010 at a commanding 98 years old, she left behind an evocative body of work and writings in which many other artists have sought insight and inspiration.

Those texts bring context to her life's work, which was deeply autobiographical. Born in Paris in 1911 to a family of tapestry restorers, Bourgeois would see her father leave home to fight for the French army during World War I; she would always carry the memories of visiting him and of her mother's steadfastness (and anxiety) through this and other trying times to come.

In 1922, her father invited an English tutor to join the family and soon began a decade-long affair with her (among other women). His wartime absence and his infidelities, together with her mother's prolonged illness-she contracted Spanish flu around 1920, and never fully recovered-and her silence about these betrayals, profoundly affected Bourgeois. These are among the memories and experiences that would shape her life and, inseparable from it, her art.

"My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama," she once said. "All my work of the last fifty years, all my subjects, have found their inspiration in my childhood."

Here are some of the artistic lessons that can be drawn from Bourgeois's work and writings.

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How to Be an Artist, According to Louise Bourgeois

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's life spanned nearly the entire 20th century, and when she died in 2010 at a commanding 98 years old, she left behind an evocative body of work and writings in which many other artists have sought insight and inspiration. Those texts bring context to her life's work, which was deeply autobiographical.

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Spider (1997)

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One of the greatest artists in France, she was a great painter that talked a lot about her feelings, made installations about her insomnia and was a reference in feminine subjects.

The repetition was also a theme, as she felt that it was like saying something again and again.  “There is a development. The repeating of one image and another image…means that what you cannot say in words, you try to put in visual terms,”