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please complete this form and add to your 'lane' by 17/1/23

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link to One Drive folder with some samples of past essays

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Visual Statement S2: Project Proposal PPT

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Visual Statement S2: Project Proposal PPT

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tarot, magic, spirituality and it's communities.

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Final idea last two pages "Deck of Grief"

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A more refined version of my project idea

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Visual Statement - Semester 2 Proposal (Hannah Clarke)

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Dec 23, 2015 - Tumblr is a place to express yourself, discover yourself, and bond over the stuff you love. It's where your interests connect you with your people.

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clay
wooden blocks
play sets
houses
play mat
identify age group
testing materials

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please add suggestions for workshops in this column and I will talk to the Tech Dem team to arrange

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Please put your name down if you would be interested in trying the laser cutting machine

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Please put your name down if you would be interested in learning bookbinding techniques and paper engineering

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Please put your name down if you would be interested in printmaking workshops

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Please put your name down if you would be interested in a ceramics workshop

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artists book
response to places of abandonment
photographs, prints, drawings, text/poems
ask SF if can sit in on Book arts module Friday mornings

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4 different wallpaper designs
1- colouring in
2- interactive in some way (magnets?)
3 toys on wallpaper
4 pattern

small scale room sets

workshops digital skills
printmaking- block printing and tetrapak printing
paper engineering/paper models/laser cutting

IKEA room sets

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Painter Gail Potocki creates contemporary Symbolist arwtorks utilizing the techniques of the Old Masters in the 21st century.

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referencing tarot,
7 deadly sins
Greek Gods
find reference to create costumed portraits
think about composition
maybe photograph staged portraits in studio?

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batik- ask Pete and Dan if we have the equipment

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batik- ask Pete and Dan if we have the equipment

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Ashleigh

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/09/mexican-artists-reclaiming-the-meaning-of-pinata

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turquoise and silver body glistens, with variations of color that suggest feathers. There are two eyes and a ruby-red mouth, but no beak and no sign of wings. This whimsical bird-like creature looks like a sculpture, but it is, in fact, an incredibly detailed piñata - made from cardboard and paper.

Roberto Benavidez, a Mexican-American artist hailing from Texas but now living in Los Angeles said his ornate piñata oeuvre is inspired by Hieronymus Bosch, a Dutch medieval painter known for his fantastical creatures.

"I want people to see these and see a piñata. I want my work to expand the breadth of what 'piñata' means to people," he reflects from his studio.

Benavidez's works are firmly directed at the art world. After studying sculpture, he switched from working with metals to paper because it was cheaper and more accessible. Since then, piñata has allowed Benavidez to explore concepts such as identity, gender, race, sexuality, beauty and sin.

"If people think of it as a piñata, then they don't value it. That's a narrative we need to change."

Two piñata sculptures. At left is a blue feathered birdlike creature with no wings and a red gaping hole instead of a beak. At right is a gold four-legged animal with a long neck atop of which sits a traditional colorful piñata donkey head.

Piñatas are usually found at discount stores and party shops in the US. The colorful creations are ready to be bought for children's birthday parties, where they will be smashed for their hidden, sweet bounty. Culturally, "piñata" evokes the idea of a craft, something cheap, fun and fit to be obliterated.

It's partly for this persistent image that a growing number of Latino artists are working to broaden and elevate how Americans view piñatas and its history. Some are carving out a place for piñatas in the arts world, while others use the object to make pointed social and political commentary.

"It's (the piñata) hugely symbolic of our culture, but here it's been appropriated and taken on a different meaning. I want to reclaim it and elevate it in people's minds," said Justin Favela, expressing his frustrations with the hijacking of piñata culture.

His artworks are an institutional critique, highlighting that art made from ephemeral materials has a place on gallery walls.

In the mid-2010s, Favela made headlines when he covered a Las Vegas Hotel in brilliant pink and green crepe paper. He followed that up with two full-size car piñatas. The bright green, purple and silver lowriders appeared in group exhibitions in Los Angeles and Arkansas, and are among his most recognizable works.

"The car is such an American symbol, but the lowrider and the piñata are very much symbols of Mexican and Latino identity," Favela says. "I was interested in that tension and looking at the contribution Chicano culture has made in America."

Favela has recently been producing highly detailed "piñata paintings", inspired by the 19th-century landscapes by Mexican artist José María Velasco. His versions see him cut and paste pieces of bright paper as a nod to the originals of Velasco's art. The result is striking, hyper-colored paper landscapes.

For Favela, Velasco is a case study in the ongoing influence of colonialism in Mexican art and goes as far back as the 16th century: art by natives was deemed folk art, while European works were considered fine art. In the case of Velasco, while he was Mexican, his art was celebrated because he was trained by an Italian master. His resulting Mexico landscapes were therefore highly romantic in the European tradition.

"Mexicans are given very temporary spaces to occupy in the art world. That might have to do with the materials we use, but this, frankly, is a double standard. There are Picasso's on cardboard hanging in galleries, why not piñata?" Favela said.

Piñatas are synonymous with Mexico, but its origins lie elsewhere and have always melted into the culture of other countries and regions, said Maria Camba, a Spanish PhD candidate and a piñata maker herself researching the cultural and historic value of the object.

Camba travelled to Mexico and found the history of the piñata was scarcely documented. "That was a PhD right there," she chuckles, "it's a strange thing - there is little literature, but we know they are extremely popular objects because of their ability to generate festivity and rites of passage."

In ancient China, a tradition existed of putting seeds in clay pots in the shape of an ox and smashing it during New Years to herald good fortune for the growing season. A common belief is that the Venetian explorer, Marco Polo, brought the concept to Italy in the early Middle Ages, but Camba's research suggests that something like piñatas were already used in parts of Europe.

"Mostly in Italy, there was already piñata-type objects which held a sort of pagan importance," Camba says. "In the middle ages, we can guess there was hybridization with the Chinese tradition, and it also moved from being associated with paganism to christianity. You see it in Italy, where a 'pignatta' would be smashed to close out the annual carnivale right before Lent to let out sweet foods."

This type of piñata crossed borders and found reception in France, Holland, Belgium, Portugal and, above all, Spain. When the Spanish missionaries arrived in Latin America, they brought the tradition with them, this time covering clay pots with colorful paper.

"It was used by the Spanish in the early Evangelization of Mexico, to attract them would be faithful among the indigenous populations with something colorful and something they might understand," Camba says. It worked because indigenous Mayas and Aztecs already used piñata-type objects to worship deities.

In Mexico, the piñata took on the form of a spherical clay pot adorned with colorful paper with seven pointed cones (representing the seven deadly sins). "It represents Satan wearing an attractive mask (the colorful paper) to cast a spell on humanity. The idea is that you smash it to restore good to the world," Camba says.

As it took hold in Mexican culture, it gradually lost its religious bearings and soon spread to other celebrations and took on new forms. As it gained momentum, it became consigned to the world of pop art. Simultaneously, in Europe, the piñata was diminished, thanks to the Spanish civil war and the world wars which weakened the rituals where piñata once took centre stage.

"Piñata has this incredibly complicated history - with a very deep European tradition that often gets glossed over," Camba says.

It's a sentiment that's shared by Benavidez.

"It's why I wanted to remind people of the religious and European element in the Bosch works. I often wonder if more people knew of this history if that would make a difference in the respect piñata gets in art circles," he said.

For Diana Benavidez (no relation to Roberto Benavidez), piñata is a means to bring people's attention to important social and political issues affecting Latino communities. The San Diego-based artist recently exhibited her works alongside Favela and Roberto Benavidez in an LA exhibition celebrating piñata artists in the western US.

"We all had something different to say," Benavidez said, "For me, I was interested in using piñata to provoke conversations, the difficult ones that people don't want to have. I'm not really interested in the cliché smash it open at a party piñata; mine are political."

Benavidez, a Mexican American woman, grew up along the US-Mexico border, shuttling between Chula Vista, California, and Tijuana. On the trips through the border, she remembers piñatas sold by vendors jostling next to the car.

As a young adult, she started a visual arts degree and when it came time to decide on a medium, she felt drawn to the piñata after reflecting on the object's quiet but potent influence on her childhood at the border.

A recent series, Text me when you get home, is a collection in the shape of objects that women carry to defend themselves should they be attacked. It was inspired by Benevidez's own assault that occurred in broad daylight. The piñatas include a large can of pepper spray, a rape whistle, a jangle of keys, and a broken one that reads, "She was asking for it".

"It's 2022, but there is an epidemic of violence against women in this country, especially colored and Latin women," she says. "Not much gets done, so we do what we can to protect ourselves."

The series, she says, was inspired not just by her own experience but from the horror she says is unfolding across the continent. Indeed, in the US, the number of missing Black and Latina women has spiked in recent years, while gender-based violence along the Mexican border has been described as a femicide.

"It's uncomfortable, isn't it?" Benavidez said, showing some piñatas from the series and some new works that focus on the border crisis.

There is a disconnection between the happy colors, the idea that there should be sweet treats inside, and the deeper message of the work.

"We've got to keep challenging the piñata stereotype," Benavidez said. "That's not to say we shouldn't smash one and have fun at a party, but if we (artists) show anything, it's that piñata is so much more."

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'It's hugely symbolic': the Mexican artists reclaiming the meaning of piñata

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turquoise and silver body glistens, with variations of color that suggest feathers. There are two eyes and a ruby-red mouth, but no beak and no sign of wings. This whimsical bird-like creature looks like a sculpture, but it is, in fact, an incredibly detailed piñata - made from cardboard and paper.

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think about scale
interventions in landscape- take models and photograph them
display large scale photographs

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drawings of shoes
'list' composition
line drawnigs
taken trhough to watercolour and pencil
look at Carson Ellis

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large scale digital paintings
posters to raise awareness of litter in 3 environments
sea
riverbank
forest

stretch goal- develop ideas for larger scale work eg hoardings on buildings/shop windows- takeover of urban environment

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tiny creatures
victorian slides
try tetrakpak prints of your drawings

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a fictional town is a good way to develop this idea.
make some prototype models
think about how photography can convert your 3d work back into an image- dramatic lighting etc

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When Jessica Dore was growing up, her mother had a tarot deck from which she'd pull cards - much to the mounting mortification of her daughter. As a child, Dore went along with it as fortune-telling fun. But "as an adolescent, it was sort of like 'Mind your own business'", she says wryly.

It meant Dore was at least familiar with tarot. The deck of 78 cards, split between major arcana and minor arcana ("greater" and "lesser secrets"), is used with varying degrees of sincerity to divine past, present and future. "But I never had any sense that it could be something that would be of value for me in my life," Dore says.

Then, a decade later, Dore threw a dinner party to which two friends brought along a tarot deck. They gave her an "amazing" reading, she says, that cast new light on a hard time she was going through. "The cards made me feel seen and understood in a way that I wasn't used to." The experience opened her mind to the potential of tarot to shift perspectives and illuminate possibility. She acquired a deck of her own, and started pulling cards after work each night.

Jessica Dore holds tarot cards at her home in Pennsylvania. 'You're not predicting the future - you're really just exploring.' Photograph: Caroline Gutman/The Guardian

At the time Dore was in her early 20s, a poet with a communications degree working as a publicist at a publisher of self-help and psychology textbooks. She had been struck by how the research she encountered through her job could help people to gain new insight into their thoughts, feelings and behaviours - if only they knew to seek it out.

Tarot, she thought, could be a similar conduit to awareness and introspection. These two strands - barriers to self-help, and tarot as a path to it - travelled together in Dore's mind, culminating in a "strange and unlikely marriage": she became a licensed social worker and full-time tarot reader.

On Twitter, more than 130,000 people (along with 52,000 on Instagram) follow Dore's daily draw of a card, which she then connects to psychological concepts, legends, myths and miscellanea as a prompt for introspection.

She links the five of cups, for example, to cognitive flexibility training, proposing expanding one's thinking as a path away from triggering thoughts; while the sun card could illuminate healthy responses to rejection.

Today's card. Sometimes it's helpful to reframe difficult experiences in a more "positive" light, but it's tricky to do so w/o treating painful thoughts & feelings as wrong or inferior, or trying to avoid them. What if u could know there are many ways to see it & feel how u feel. pic.twitter.com/60mD60ABOL
- Jessica Dore (@thejessicadore) October 23, 2021

Now Dore has expanded on her cerebral writing on "the human experience through tarot" in a book, Tarot For Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance and Growth. With this practical, carefully referenced guide, Dore brings together the scientific and the arcane, two spheres long believed to be antithetical - but increasingly less so.

Tarot is among a range of mystic practices to have seen a mainstream resurgence in recent years. Most obvious is astrology, now almost adjacent to psychoanalysis in our shared lexicon - but there's also psychics, reincarnation, supportive spiritual energies (such as with manifesting), and even witchcraft.

In 2018, the Pew Research Centre found that six in 10 Americans (both with religious affiliations and not) held at least one new age belief. Among the explanations given have been the internet connecting subcultures and people with alternative views, fashion houses bringing their imagery to the fore, and the decline in Christianity and community in the west.

Above all, this new dawn of the new age has been framed as a response to widespread anxiety and sociopolitical instability; as an attempt to find meaning in an impervious, chaotic world.

It is now possible to book tarot readings directly over Instagram - @thehoodwitch Bri Luna (who has 470,000 followers) and @thelionnessoracle Alejandra Luisa León each charge around $140 an hour - or learn to read the cards yourself, with free resources such as Brigit Esselmont's @biddytarot community, or the Labyrinthos online school and app.

Jessica Dore: 'The cards made me feel seen and understood in a way that I wasn't used to.' Photograph: Caroline Gutman/The Guardian

On TikTok, tarot cards are drawn by algorithms. Even the Sun newspaper recently published its own guide to major and minor arcana, a surefire sign of steady online search traffic for spiritual guidance.

But tarot as practiced by Dore does not so much provide answers as it generates more questions. "You're not predicting the future - you're really just exploring, looking at the images and activating the imagination," she says over Zoom from her home in Philadelphia.

Dore likens drawing cards to yoga: a daily discipline of self-care, containing "profound spiritual data" to be experienced rather than intellectualised. "I came to tarot needing to figure out how to take better care of myself, how to check in with myself, to show up for myself," she says. (Indeed, Dore does two hours of Ashtanga yoga each morning, after 45 minutes' journalling - if the unexamined life is not worth living, hers is hard-won.)

When she started her nightly ritual of drawing cards, Dore found that what emerged gave shape to her thoughts and feelings in the same way as a writing prompt might. The eight of swords - communicating a sense of feeling victimised, or trapped - for instance, might cause Dore to reflect on whether she was avoiding any difficult emotions.

As well as serving as a prompt for introspection, the cards' storied past made Dore think of history repeating - circular narratives and mirror images through literature, folklore and legends. "It felt very nourishing for me, just to be like: 'Someone drew this illustration; someone created these various interpretations - that means that I'm not alone.'"

Considered in this light, tarot has more in common than one might think with therapy. As Dore points out, Carl Jung studied archetypes, symbols and synchronicity in seeking to understand the human psyche.

Today, cognitive behavioural therapy - widely used as a treatment for depression and anxiety - focuses on changing the way you think in order to support your wellbeing. And other evidence-based models lean heavily on metaphors to bring about change (acceptance and commitment therapy).

As a set of images and ideas derived from ancient wisdom, tarot has similar potential for transformation and growth, says Dore. She refers to the American psychologist James Hillman's definition of "psychologizing: whenever reflection takes place in terms other than those presented".

Dore is clear about the limits to this: tarot is not therapy, just as she is not a therapist (though she received clinical training as part of her master's degree). But that is not to say there is no therapeutic benefit to projecting our inner lives on to a card.

"Language can get you stuck, and it can get you unstuck," says Dore. "Tarot is a set of metaphors that can help somebody understand something: I could just say it to you, or you could look at an image and it might really sink in."

Various pieces of artwork and old glass bottles at Jessica Dore's home. Photograph: Caroline Gutman/The Guardian

After nearly 100 years of work to ground psychology in evidence and empirical studies, we might see such idiosyncratic influences as outside the scientific scope. But all through human history, spirituality has factored into concepts of mental health and wellbeing - not necessarily reductively.

One upshot of the 21st-century embrace of "wellness" is mounting awareness and acceptance of the real benefits of non-clinical practices such as meditation, yoga, spending time in nature, journalling and mind-altering drugs.

Tarot might be seen in kind, says Dore - as an intervention rooted in a mystic tradition, like mindfulness. It is possible to accept "other ways of knowing", she suggests, without denying or undermining science.

Certainly, the care and palpable sense of responsibility with which Dore approaches her work might surprise those who see tarot as essentially exploitative, the pastime of the cretinous and the credulous. The dismissal of tarot - and likewise astrology, another interest popular among young women - is often suggestive of whose suffering is taken seriously.

Dore does not see herself as working within an explicitly feminist context. But she suggests that people who don't feel represented in accepted paradigms, or included in clinical settings, could benefit the most from alternative approaches to healing. (Dore completed a year-long internship at an eating disorder clinic, where the cards were used to "amazing" effect.)

"For those people who don't feel spoken to by some of the interventions that are evidenced-based, tarot makes a doorway for people to show up and say: 'Here's what I need', instead of telling them: 'Here's what you need'," she says.

The goal is not to throw out facts, truth or science, says Dore - but to make room for magic, long "relegated to the edges". Her preferred definition is from the anonymous Christian author of the Meditations on the Tarot: using the subtle to influence the dense.

In psychological terms, that could simply mean greater awareness of how our thoughts and emotions (the subtle) shape our actions and behaviours (the dense).

In a world that did not draw so hard a line between science and spirituality, Dore suggests, "maybe we would better understand our behaviours as consumers, as activists; the jobs that we choose, the things that we spend our time doing. What are these things serving? At what altars are we worshipping? It seems very idealistic - but that's the way I think about it."

Tarot cards, part of a deck of 78. Photograph: Caroline Gutman/The Guardian

As it is, the current trend for tarot has seen it absorbed and repackaged by the mindless forces of capitalism it aims to counter. Where Pamela Colman Smith - the illustrator of the ubiquitous Rider-Waite tarot deck - died penniless and uncelebrated, there are now tarot decks themed from everything from cats to Disney villains.

Urban Outfitters sells a tarot-themed colouring book (or "personal growth colouring journey"), and a "spiritually uplifting" cocktail set, with "tequila-inspired meanings for all 78 cards". At the higher end, Dior debuted "tarot dresses" for its spring 2021 couture line. You can even have your cards read at Selfridges of London.

As the German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote in 1953, of the popularity of astrology: "the kind of retrogression highly characteristic of persons who do not any longer feel to be the self-determining subjects of their fate, is concomitant with a fetishistic attitude towards the very same conditions which tend to be dehumanizing them".

Dore, too, writes of the chariot card and the limits to willpower: "Capitalism isn't built to teach pathfinding; it's built to teach compliance within a preset path." But she suggests that tarot could reveal another way - as stories and symbols have always done, separate from any question of whether they are rooted in fact.

"I would challenge you to consider that this set of images - that are derived straight from mythology and folktales and fairytales in many cases, and even religion and spirituality - might also have meaning too, if you can step out of the rigid mindset."

Even if magic is a leap too far, in "reclaiming the imagination from the grips of doubt and rationalism", tarot may at least allow us to imagine a better world: the first step to creating it.

An ideal of tarot is to experience the "totality of things", says Dore: where nothing is black and white, even seeming opposites are identical in nature, and "all things, no matter how seemingly conflicted, can exist together". This bears striking resemblance to many Indigenous world-views - increasingly being recognised as vital in the fight against the climate crisis.

The Extinction Rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbrook and feminist scholar Angela Davis have likewise spoken of something akin to Dore's definition of magic in their activism: the possibility of achieving what seems impossible now.

Tarot simply asks that we hold ourselves open to it, says Dore. "The beautiful thing about tarot is that you will meet the card where you're ready to go."
Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance and Growth by Jessica Dore is published by Penguin Life/Viking for $27.00 US / £14.99 from October 26, 2021

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When the mystical goes mainstream: how tarot became a self-care phenomenon

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Tarot used to be seen as the domain of the credulous. It's now seen as a means of coping with the present, thanks to psychology-minded practitioners like Jessica Dore

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It was once seen as the preserve of fairground fortune-tellers spouting platitudes from a booth, and ageing hippies with a fondness for Aleister Crowley and the occult. Now, the art of reading the tarot is back in style, with books, artwork and onstage readings captivating a new generation of fans.

Instagram is full of beautifully shot tarot spreads, with cards showing the High Priestess or the Wheel of Fortune very much to the fore, while tarot-card readers are the heroines of crime novels such as Ruth Ware's The Death of Mrs Westaway and EV Harte's Dolly Greeneseries, and enthusiasts can get decks featuring everything from Alice in Wonderland to Game of Thrones.

Brooklyn artists Kahn & Selesnick crowdfunded their recent project, the Carnival at the End of the World tarot deck, through Kickstarter, while Rough Trade Books has just published the Autonomic Tarot, an experimental 30-card linocut tarot deck collaboration between writer David Keenan and artist Sophy Hollington.

Young Adult author Maggie Stiefvater has created her own tarot deck, the Raven's Prophecy Tarot, which references her bestselling Raven Cycle series. And Litwitchure, created by best friends Fiona Lensvelt and Jennifer Cownie - billed as a Literary Tarot Cabaret and Consultancy - was a hit at the recent Port Eliot festival, with appearances due at other festivals, and even a podcast planned.

"Jen and I had been interested in tarot since we were teenagers wearing too much eyeliner. Then, a few years back, we signed up for a three-month course through Treadwell's Bookshop and began reading for friends and people at parties," says Lensvelt, 31. "What started out as a way of getting free glasses of wine became something different and more interesting - at Port Elliot we interviewed authors on stage by reading their cards, and it worked really well."

For Lensvelt, the increased popularity of the tarot is part of a wider trend towards mindfulness. "There's a real sense of community in using it, particularly among younger women," she says. "People think it's about predicting the future, but it isn't. It's about the present, and it can be very empowering. It's no surprise that a lot of the online communities are driven by queer people or people from minorities, segments of society where people feel as though they're not seen or heard, because tarot allows you to consider a problem, give a voice to it, work it through and see where the blocks might be. It can give voice to problems or fears."

Novelist Caroline O'Donoghue, whose musical side-project Greyhounds, Greyhounds, Greyhounds includes a song about tarot as a vehicle of revenge, agrees. "Throughout the ages, the idea of magic has given hope to people who have none, or the sense of power to those who feel that they have no power, and the tarot definitely taps into that," she says. "Women and minorities, people with a lower locus of control, are far more likely to visit a psychic or a tarot-card reader because they're more open to the idea of things they can't control."

I've had people sobbing when I've read their cards, people telling incredible stories

Nor is it simply new twists on an old art that are touching a nerve. Sales of the most famous tarot pack, the Rider-Waite, created in 1910, "have suddenly shot up, tripling those of five years ago", says Judith Kendra, publishing director at Rider Books. She attributes the increased interest to "political and social uncertainty [leading] people to turn towards the spiritual and mystical in a hunt for answers".

"There's definitely a sense that people feel lonelier or have a lack of certainty in their lives, a massive void that has left them looking for other ideas," says Daisy Waugh, who in addition to writing the Dolly Greene Tarot Detective series under the pseudonym EV Harte works as a tarot-card reader, offering consultations from her home or via Skype.

"People are clearly looking for other ideas, and I think tarot allows us to consider where we fit in the universe. It works as somewhere you can go in with a problem and come out feeling clearer and better about the world."

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Tarot cards from the Rider-Waite deck. Photograph: Alamy

Keenan, whose Autonomic Tarot was born out of a poetry-inspired desire to experiment with the form, agrees that tarot-reading is about offering a space for "an intimate conversation to take place".

"I've had people sobbing when I've read their cards, people telling incredible stories ... it allows an intimate space to open up, the sort of intense connection that you really don't get on social media," he says. "Even the big, harsh cards like Death can be comforting and almost beautiful. They give you agency and say yes, something difficult might be happening but here's how to use it as an engine of change."

And even the more sceptical can find themselves, if not converted, at least open to new ideas. "I didn't know anything about tarot before writing The Death of Mrs Westaway," says Ware. "I thought it was all about telling the future and predictions and making money off people's fears. I went in very sceptical and thinking I would find it all hooey but instead I came out with a huge amount of respect for tarot readers and tarot as a practice. A good tarot reader doesn't tell you what's going to happen, they simply allow you to think your question through in a different way."
Topics

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A new generation follows the pack as tarot makes a comeback

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It was once seen as the preserve of fairground fortune-tellers spouting platitudes from a booth, and ageing hippies with a fondness for Aleister Crowley and the occult. Now, the art of reading the tarot is back in style, with books, artwork and onstage readings captivating a new generation of fans.

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741.6092 HAN, Level 3: Main Collection Uni High Demand 720-999

a good example of how you can extend your idea by creating characters and thinking about the kinds of shops you want to create

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Discovering Scarfolk - Library Search, Library Services, University of Worcester

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Scarfolk is a town in north-west England that did not progress beyond 1979. Instead, the entire decade of the 1970s loops ad infinitum . In Scarfolk, pagan rituals blend seamlessly with science, children must not be seen OR heard, and everyone has to be in bed by 8 p.m. because they are perpetually…

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you might extend the monster idea looking at some of these contraptions, all made from discarded items. Gupta is trying to teach science to children through these toys, and the interactive nature of a toy is something that you might consider when thinking about the messages you want to communicate in your work.

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Gallery of Arvind Gupta's Fun Science Toys hosted at ArvindGuptaToys.com - Page by Samir Dhurde

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Tourist trappings: why we all love a tacky souvenir fridge magnet; Miniature clogs, pretzel paperweights, tiny cathedrals... What do our kitsch holiday mementoes tell us about modern tourism -- and ourselves?

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Tourist trappings: why we all love a tacky souvenir fridge magnet; Miniature clogs, pretzel paperweights, tiny cathedrals... What do our kitsch holiday mementoes tell us about modern tourism -- and ourselves?

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The V&A holds a very large and varied collection of artists' books, all of which can be accessed in the National Art Library at the V&A South Kensington.

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Manchester Met special collections  have excellent collection of artists books (2nd floor of library) worth a visit...

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Manchester Met special collections  have excellent collection of artists books (2nd floor of library) worth a visit...

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Highlights of the collection include:

Works by Ed Ruscha including Twenty Six Gasoline Stations, considered by some to be the first modern artist's book

Early bookworks by Dieter Roth, showing experimentation with the structure and physicality of the book

Books in the tradition of livres d'artistes which reflect fine printing and craftsmanship, such as those created by Ron King and Ken Campbell

Photobooks from the 1960s to the present day offering a survey of the contribution of the photo book to the genre of book art

Concrete poetry and books with an emphasis upon typographic layout including works by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Simon Cutts, Victoria Bean and Sam Winston

Work produced by small presses such as the Moschatel Press, set up by Thomas and Laurie Clark in the early 1970s, through to Bracketpress, set up by Christian Brett and Alice Smith in 2005

Paper engineered books which demonstrate the use of folding and cutting techniques to create sculptural forms with examples by Deb Rindl and Mette Sofie Ambeck

Thematic strengths, an example being the relationship between narrative and land in the work of Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, Andy Goldsworthy and Erica Van Horn amongst others

You can search the collection online using the Search link below. To view it in person, you can either drop-in to the Reading Room during our opening hours or book an appointment in advance. If you'd like to bring your students to see some of the collection, enquire about a group visit.

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Creative experimentations with the medium of the book

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article about Victorian microscopes and fascination with 'tiny creatures'

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article about Victorian microscopes and fascination with 'tiny creatures'

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Interest in natural history may have reached its peak in Victorian-era Great Britain, and a major driver of the craze was microscopes. As they became more powerful and more affordable, microscopy became an increasingly popular hobby. Gazing through these "magic glasses" rendered previously unseen worlds, which teemed with tiny living creatures, newly visible. When it came time to describe what they were seeing, people frequently turned to the language of the fantastical.

"Naturalists and lay users readily used a vocabulary drawn from fairy literature to... convey the incomprehensible strangeness and minutiae of the microscopic world," writes the historian Laura Forsberg in " Nature's Invisibilia: The Victorian Microscope and the Miniature Fairy" ( Victorian Studies 2015). "Though the link may seem incongruous, a surprisingly substantial body of Victorian scientific literature and fairy stories connect microscopes to fairies."

"The slime from a rock-pool teems with fairy forms darting about."

In an 1846 lecture, the naturalist Charles Kingsley explained, "in the tiniest piece of mould on a decayed fruit, the tiniest animalcule from the stagnant pool, will imagination find inexhaustible wonders, and fancy a fairy-land." In 1861, before becoming president of the Royal Microscopical Society, Henry Slack described a group of protozoa as "a tree from fairy-land, in which every leaf has a sentient life." In her lecture "Magic Glasses and How to Use Them," later published in an 1890 collection, the spiritualist popularizer of science Arabella Buckley declared: "the slime from a rock-pool teems with fairy forms darting about." Under microscopes, Victorians couldn't help but perceive a real-life fairyland.

"Like the microscope, the fairy offered Victorians a means of imaginatively reconceptualizing the natural world as a place of minute wonders; the microscope revealed real, living particles in the crevices of nature, while fairy texts imagined mushrooms and flower buds populated with miniature fairies," Forsberg explains.

Microscopy simultaneously demystified the natural world and rendered previously undetected creatures visible. For a Victorian, being able to see what was once hidden implied that there was yet more about the natural world to be uncovered and discovered. When the world of fancy risked being entirely debunked by newly discovered rational-scientific explanations, people began ascribing fairy-like characteristics to microscopic creatures as a way to re-inject a sense of divine mystery into nature. In this way, fairies often acted as a replacement for God in popular science books: the wonders of fairyland substituted for the majesty of creation.

"Writers of imaginative literature frequently used scientific discoveries to give credence to their fanciful inventions," Forsberg writes, noting that in particular, "fairy authors and illustrators drew upon microscopic discoveries to lend a sense of reality to their unbelievable imaginings."

In Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture, author Laurence Talairach-Vielmas makes a similar observation: "If science appeared to disenchant the world, scientists increasingly explaining away the mysteries of natural phenomena, Victorian popularizers [of science] played a key part in presenting the natural world as enchanting and entrancing: although the wonders of science could account for the mysteries of nature, nature nonetheless remained a fairyland."

Since natural history and other science subjects weren't widely studied in school during this time, books on these topics "belonged to the world of the nursery, a realm of women instructors," Talairach-Vielmas points out. Many texts from the time that marry natural science and fairies are geared toward women and children, such as John Cargill Brough's The Fairy Tales of Science: A Book for Youth (1859), Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1863), or Arabella Buckley's The Fairy-Land of Science (1878), among others.

The orientation toward children added to the popularization of the concept that fairies are miniscule. The idea that fairies are anything but tiny may seem odd to us now, but at the time, they tended to be thought of as being about the size of a small child. Shakespeare hinted at the idea of tiny fairies in his plays, but the idea didn't really take hold in Great Britain until around the nineteenth century. Talairach-Vielmas asserts that both Kingsley's and Buckley's fairy-laden science tales in particular were "attempts to play with scale in order to adapt to the diminutive world of the child."

But the effect was not confined to the nursery. Multiple scientific advances of the time- such as those that helped make microscopy and telescopy available to the general public-conspired to upend the Victorians' sense of scale in general. Some writers of the era began to lament the loss of belief in fairies caused by the rise of rational thought. But Forsberg observes that "the same scientific discoveries that eliminated belief in the child-sized fairies of superstition also opened up the possibility of fairies on a miniature scale." Not to mention that the concept of miniature worlds "captivated both readers of microscopic literature and audiences of fairy texts." So, by "tethering fairy imaginings to recent microscopic discoveries," these magical creatures enjoyed a cultural renaissance.

Given the intended audience of these texts, it makes sense that illustrations were a key feature. The fairy books thus had an impact not just on literature and the sciences, but also on the visual arts. Painters and other creative artists of the era viewed this newly uncovered microscopic fairyland as an opportunity that practically demanded imaginary reconstruction.

"The microscope revealed myriads of shapes and creatures so utterly unfamiliar that writers on the subject resorted to flamboyant prose in order to render them intelligible. This had reverberations not least for the visual arts," the art historian Ursula Seibold-Bultmann explains in " Monster Soup: The Microscope and Victorian Fantasy" ( Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 2000). "The metaphors chosen by authors attempting to describe the microscopic world soon developed a visual presence, with supernatural features being projected even onto illustrations in supposedly scientific contexts."

Seibold-Bultmann believes it's no coincidence that the golden age of British fairy painting overlaps chronologically with the Victorian microscopy craze. But she also can't help but wonder whether looking to the real world for inspiration was liberating or perhaps limiting to the creative arts.

For the sciences, at least, the injection of fairies and other fantastical elements appears to have been a good thing. Fairies were used to champion the value of imagination, curiosity, and an open mind as essential components in scientific inquiry. They also helped show the power of fantasy and entertainment in engaging young learners in otherwise dry subjects.

But it wasn't all fun and fancy. As often as fairies were trotted out to underscore the wonders of the natural world, they were deployed to express doubt in scientific findings. And the microscope itself was used to argue both for and against the existence of fairies. The microscope, thus, embodied a dichotomy, fulfilling two seemingly disparate purposes: an instrument of serious scientific study and a gateway into the realm of miniature living beings.

Forsberg cites the 1858 short story The Diamond Lens to illustrate how the fairy represented humanity's complicated relationship to nature. The story tells the tale of a scientist who discovers a graceful, delicate female creature in a droplet of water under the lens of his super-powered microscope. He falls in love with this "sylph," and spends all of his time gazing at her, rejecting regular-size human women. Eventually, the scientist sees that the creature is dying because he has let the water on the slide dry up. His selfishness has led to her demise.

Fairies perhaps represented an attempt to assuage the tensions between science and spirituality, a balm for the myriad crises of faith that had arisen as a result of evolutionary theory. Since neither could be seen, some amount of faith was required for belief in both a Creator and in the new scientific theory of evolution. Besides, evolutionary science seemed to suggest that magical transformations of all kinds were indeed possible, so perhaps people were capable of both spiritual and physical transformation.

"Rather than opposing one another, scientific discoveries and fairy fictions reinforced each other's imaginative appeal," Forsberg notes. "By combining scientific observation with fanciful imagination, both the fairy and the microscope produced a sense of wonder."

The Victorian predilection for portraying microscopic creatures as fairy-like left an indelible imprint on the natural sciences. Forsberg suggests that, in this way, the microscope permanently transformed people's imaginative relationship to nature: "[H]aving once gazed through the microscope's lens at a sample of pond scum and seen the dozens of miniscule creatures living there, the user might imagine in any body of water the billions of microscopic creatures concealed from view."

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Under Victorian Microscopes, an Enchanted World - JSTOR Daily

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Interest in natural history may have reached its peak in Victorian-era Great Britain, and a major driver of the craze was microscopes. As they became more powerful and more affordable, microscopy became an increasingly popular hobby. Gazing through these "magic glasses" rendered previously unseen worlds, which teemed with tiny living creatures, newly visible.

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teaching children about microbes is important as the pandemic showed they impact on our daily lives. Perhaps think about the wider importance of your subject and develop ideas for classroom activities alongside the tray puzzle? How else can you develop your drawings of microbes into educational content

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Crawling through a giant nose in the Secret Life of Snot may have inspired you to make your own 'sneeze gun' and use it to investiagte how far a sneeze goes, a sure way to engage children in an investigation to see how viruses spread. In Plaque Attack!

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perhaps think about making some ceramic objects as part of your project?

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Hand built stoneware Altar Multi layered glaze with 22 karat gold lustre 3.5 x 4 inches approximately Signed One of a kind Made with love and care Free North American shipping

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https://merzbarnlangdale.wordpress.com/

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poetics_of_Space

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The Poetics of Space ( French: La Poétique de l'Espace) is a 1958 book about architecture by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. The book is considered an important work about art. Commentators have compared Bachelard's views to those of the philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Bachelard applies the method of phenomenology to architecture, basing his analysis not on purported origins (as was the trend in Enlightenment thinking about architecture) but on lived experience in architectural places and their contexts in nature. He focuses especially on the personal, emotional response to buildings both in life and in literary works, both in prose and in poetry. He is thus led to consider spatial types such as the attic, the cellar, drawers and the like. Bachelard implicitly urges architects to base their work on the experiences it will engender rather than on abstract rationales that may or may not affect viewers and users of architecture.

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home.... Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts-serious, sad thoughts-and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

-  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Bachelard also discusses psychoanalysis and the work of the psychiatrist Carl Jung. Comparing the psychoanalytic and phenomenological approaches to his subject matter, he sees merit in both, but finds the phenomenological approach preferable.

The Poetics of Space was first published by Presses Universitaires de France in 1958. In 1964, the Orion Press, Inc. published the book, with a foreword by the philosopher Étienne Gilson, in an English translation by the writer Maria Jolas. Beacon Press republished the work in English in 1969. In 1994, it republished it in a new edition with an added foreword by the historian John R. Stilgoe. In 2014, Penguin Books published an edition with a foreword by the novelist Mark Z. Danielewski and an introduction by the philosopher Richard Kearney.

The Poetics of Space has influenced the philosophers Paul Ricœur and Edward S. Casey, and the critic Camille Paglia. Ricœur was influenced by Bachelard's understanding of the imagination. Casey identified The Poetics of Space as an influence on his work Getting Back into Place (1993). He wrote that Bachelard shared Heidegger's "emphasis on the importance of dwelling places." However, he added that neither Heidegger nor Bachelard "adequately assessed the role of the human body in the experience of significant places." Paglia identified The Poetics of Space as an influence on her work of literary criticism Sexual Personae (1990). She has commented of Bachelard's "dignified yet fluid phenomenological descriptive method" that it "seemed to me ideal for art", and described Bachelard as "the last modern French writer I took seriously."

Joan Ockman gave The Poetics of Space a positive review in Harvard Design Magazine. She compared Bachelard's views to Heidegger's, and wrote that, alongside works such as Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) and his essay "Building Dwelling Thinking", The Poetics of Space was a key text for the architect Christian Norberg-Schulz. She also compared Bachelard's views on epistemology to those of the philosopher Thomas Kuhn and described him as an influence on the philosopher Michel Foucault, finding it apparent in Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). Danielewski compared The Poetics of Space to the critic Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (1973), the essayist Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1983), Steve Erickson's novel Days Between Stations (1985), and Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day (2003).

Other authors who have praised The Poetics of Space include Gilson, Stilgoe, Kearney, and the philosopher Gary Gutting. Gilson credited Bachelard with making "one of the major modern contributions to the philosophy of art". Stilgoe praised his discussion of "the meaning of domestic space". Kearney described The Poetics of Space as "the most concise and consummate expression of Bachelard's philosophy of imagination." Gutting credited Bachelard with subtly explaining the meaning of archetypal images.

Bibliography

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The Poetics of Space ( French: La Poétique de l'Espace) is a 1958 book about architecture by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. The book is considered an important work about art. Commentators have compared Bachelard's views to those of the philosopher Martin Heidegger.

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https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/leonora-carrington-7615

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Mary Leonora Carrington (6 April 1917 - 25 May 2011) was a British-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the women's liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s.

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Mary Leonora Carrington (6 April 1917 - 25 May 2011) was a British-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the surrealist movement of the 1930s.

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objectives
man made structures that are being taken over by nature
exploring atmospheres of decay
thinking about the 'psychic architecture' of space.
genius loci

interventions
made objects
printmaking

give yourself some rules

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pick and mix of religions- ethics of this
candles, crystals, ganesh, star signs- aesthetics of new age culture
exploring different communities
New Age as a focus- commodities and aesthetics
Cultures of tarot
Theosophy

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https://www.ghettotarot.de/

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Welcome on www.ghettotarot.com

See the traditional tarot cards come to life in this creative, provocative, modern deck. Inspired by the creativity and strength of the citizens of the ghetto, the Ghetto Tarot will guide you in changing your perception, turning negativity in your life into positivity while discovering the power of your own thoughts.

The Ghetto Tarot is a photographic interpretation of the well-known traditional Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Set in the Haitian ghetto, these fresh scenes were inspired by those originally created in 1909 by the artist Pamela Colman-Smith. The scenes were replicated by Alice Smeets with the assistance of a group of Haitian artists called Atis Rezistans using only material they were able to find or create locally.

While Tarot originated many years ago when the circumstances within the world seemed very different, they still resonate today with timeless symbols that can be applied to our busy modern world. And not just our modern, Western world, but also to any other continent, country or culture, including the Haitian Ghetto. So here comes a contemporary, provocative and vivid tarot deck!

The photo project aims to reach beyond cultural boundaries of prejudice and ignorance to achieve a much-needed transformation of the collective conscious perception of the ghetto whilst discovering the power of our own thoughts. Therefore the Haitian slum is presented in another light and the pictures highlight the creativity and strength of its citizens.

The photographer is certain; Only we ourselves are able to assign value or judgment to a tangible or intangible thing, which creates a positive or negative emotion. We lend a word meaning according to the way in which we were raised, our personal experiences and depending on who taught us to speak. Every one of our sentiments is a choice based on our thinking. We can look at destruction and see either despair or the start of something new. With this awareness comes the power to change the meaning of every word, action and emotion. It's all about perception.

This means we are not slaves of our pasts, we are not imprisoned by our current societal pressures, but we are free if we choose to be. We can give ourselves the freedom to create our own reality!

And if you want to find out how to change your perception... ask the cards!

In Haiti, 'ghetto' means a life in the slums. It means living without financial security. Yet 'ghetto' also means community, family, solidarity, strength and rich creativity. The Haitians are claiming the word 'ghetto' for their own. The word reached the island from overseas where it was associated with racism, poverty and exclusion. They liberate themselves of this unfavourable interpretation and are turning it into something beautiful. Their act of appropriating a cheerless word by altering its meaning is an act of inspiration.
Watch how they perceive their home!

www.alicesmeets.com

Alice Smeets is a Belgian photographer, filmmaker, artist and teacher. Her documentary photographs from Haiti are fairly well known and have won her several awards including the Unicef Photo of the Year Award 2008.

For a long time, she wanted to interpret the Tarot Deck with her photos, but taking ordinary pictures of the scenes seemed too simple. Her aim was to create a very personal deck without loosing the different spirits of the cards. Then the idea entered her mind to combine three of her passions: the spiritual world, the Haitian culture and people as well as the philosophical reflections about the dualities in our world; in this case rich and poor.

Since 2007 she has been a regular visitor to Haiti and has lived in the country for 2 years. Its complexity and spirituality have played a big role in her life. The observations of the Haitian society have brought answers to many of her questions.

So taking the tarot pictures in the ghetto of Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince was the obvious choice to create a very personal deck: moving away from the cliched images of poverty, illustrating the spirits and meanings of the cards with a touch of humor in the middle of the slum and showing colored people on the traditional, old European cards to break stereotypes.

www.atis-rezistans.com

All the artists of the group ATIS REZISTANS grew up in downtown Port-au-Prince, in an atmosphere of junkyard make-do, survivalist recycling and artistic endeavour. Their powerful sculptural collages of engine manifolds, TV sets, wheel hubcaps and discarded lumber have transformed the detritus of a failing economy into bold, radical and warped sculptures.

Alice had known the group of artists "Atiz Rezistans" for a long time and desired to work together with the group. They immediately jumped on board to create the Ghetto Tarot deck together. Being very spiritual themselves and working a lot with voodoo symbolism, they immediately understood the spirits of the cards.

The photo scenes were created by Alice, putting the models into place. The artists allowed Alice to place their art pieces into the photos. Moreover, Atis Rezistans were very helpful to find the materials needed and often created them on the spot, like the lantern for the Hermit that is created out of a old metal can or the black cat for the Queen of Wands and the animals on the Moon that are made out of used car tires. One of the artists called Claudel Casseus was Alice's personal assistant and did an amazing job.

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Ghetto Tarot by Alice Smeets - An extraordinary Tarot deck from Haiti!

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Welcome on www.ghettotarot.com See the traditional tarot cards come to life in this creative, provocative, modern deck. Inspired by the creativity and strength of the citizens of the ghetto, the Ghetto Tarot will guide you in changing your perception, turning negativity in your life into positivity while discovering the power of your own thoughts.

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https://nippaku.wordpress.com/2015/11/12/antropomorphism-in-japanese-culture/

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what makes the figures a set
healer
fighter
mage

everyday objects
discarded things

what is their quest?

pictoplasma

sculpt using z brush/blendr 3 digital rotatbale image
then 3 print them

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Coming May 2024, Pictoplasma celebrates its 20th Berlin Conference and Festival anniversary edition with a special XXL line-up of awe inducing back-to-back conference lectures, freshly curated animation screenings, exhibitions, immersive media installations, networking, art markets, all-night parties, and the very best in contemporary character design!

Tickets now available!

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Pictoplasma - Contemporary Character Design and Art

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Celebrating the best of today's Character Design and Art - with Conferences, Festivals, Books, Exhibitions ... and an Academy!

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set of cards
journal

grief- hope

develop a character that takes you through

puppet making

use the cards as a way of capturing lots of experimentations

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https://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item107702.html

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hassall_-_Microbes_in_Thames_at_Brentford_and_Hungerford.jpg

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https://www.famousscientists.org/antonie-van-leeuwenhoek/

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Lived 1632 - 1723.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is the somewhat improbable father of microbiology. A moderately educated owner of a textile business, he learned how to make his own unique microscopes which offered unparalleled magnification. Using these microscopes he made a number of crucially important scientific discoveries, including single-celled animals and plants, bacteria, and spermatozoa.

His microscopy methods were so finely tuned that after he discovered bacteria, this type of organism would not be observed again by any other scientist for over 100 years.

Beginnings

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was born on October 24, 1632, in the small city of Delft in the Dutch Republic. His father was Philips Antonisz van Leeuwenhoek, a basket maker. His mother was Margaretha Bel van den Berch, whose prosperous family were beer brewers.

Antonie's early life was rather rocky: his father died when he was just five years old. His mother remarried, and Antonie spent some time living with an uncle. His uncle was a lawyer and helped Antonie with basic literacy and numeracy, reinforcing the education he had received in local schools. By the time Antonie was 16, his step-father had also died.

Antonie learned no languages other than Dutch, which suggests he was never expected to go to university: he would have needed to learn at least Latin for this.

Business Career

In 1648, at the age of 16, Leeuwenhoek moved to the famous Dutch trading city of Amsterdam to begin work in a textile shop. He learned his trade well and was promoted to the trusted position of cashier and book-keeper.

In 1654, aged 21, he returned to Delft, where he would spend the rest of his long life. This was a significant year for Leeuwenhoek. Not only did he return to his hometown, but he got married, and, putting his business experience in Amsterdam into practice, he opened his own textile shop in Delft. In addition to cloth he sold buttons, ribbons, and other accessories.

Over the next few years Leeuwenhoek became an influential figure in Delft. In 1660, aged 28, he was appointed to manage the operations of Delft's council meeting hall. In return for only a small amount of work - the actual physical work of the job was delegated to other people - he received a generous salary.

A man of many talents, Leeuwenhoek was also appointed to supervise Delft's wine trade and levy the appropriate taxes on imported wine.

While running his shop and working for the city of Delft, Leeuwenhoek became a qualified land surveyor at about 40 years of age, just before he started his scientific work.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's Science

The Discovery of the Leeuwenhoek Lens

Leeuwenhoek's biological discoveries were completely dependent on his ability to make lenses of extraordinarily high quality.

He never told anyone how he made his lenses. The secret went with him to the grave. In fact, to throw competitors off the scent, he used to talk about how he had to grind glass for a very long time to make his lenses. This was almost certainly not true.

People in the textiles trade had, for hundreds of years, used glass pearls - small spheres of glass - as lenses to examine cloth in fine detail. Leeuwenhoek used glass pearls frequently in his day-to-day business to examine the density of threads and the quality of cloth.

In 1665 the great English scientist Robert Hooke released Micrographia, showcasing drawings he had made of the natural world seen through the lens of his microscope.

Leeuwenhoek visited England in 1668 and most likely saw a copy of Micrographia: it had become the first scientific bestseller. Importantly for Leeuwenhoek, it contained drawings Hooke had made of his microscopic examinations of cloth.

Micrographia contains a description of how a powerful microscope could be made using a single spherical lens - similar to the glass pearls Leeuwenhoek was already familiar with:

...if you take a very clear piece of a broken Venice Glass, and in a lamp draw it out into very small hairs or threads, then holding the ends of these threads in the flame, till they melt and run into a small round globule, or drop, which will hang at the end of the thread; and if further you stick several of these upon the end of a stick with a little sealing wax, so as that the threads stand upwards, and then... grind off a good part of them, and afterward on a smooth metal plate, with a little tripoly, rub them till they come to be very smooth; if one of these be fixed with a little soft wax against a small needle hole, pricked through a thin plate of brass, lead, pewter, or any other metal, and an object, placed very near, be looked at through it, it will both magnify and make some objects more distinct then any of the great microscopes.

(In Hooke's day people sometimes wrote VERY long sentences indeed!)

We cannot tell whether Leeuwenhoek was aware of Hooke's words - he could not read English. However, it is now believed that he used Hooke's technique to make his lenses.

Hooke himself did not use lenses made by this method because they were inconvenient: the distance between the lens and the viewed object had to be very short and the observer's eye had to be pushed very close to the lens, causing Hooke's eyes to quickly become strained.

Hooke used a compound microscope (one with two lenses) which more closely resembles the microscopes we use today.

Leeuwenhoek, however, was more than happy to use small, spherical lenses to make single-lens microscopes. He kept the details of how he manufactured his lenses secret, but today we can be reasonably sure that he did the following:

used a hot flame to heat the middle part of a glass rod until molten

pulled the ends of the rod in opposite directions, forming a long, thin thread of molten glass

continued pulling the ends while the molten thread in the middle grew thinner and thinner, finally breaking

placed one of the thread ends back into the flame, resulting in the end of the thread forming a small glass sphere

This sphere was a lens, which may have required some polishing. The smaller the sphere, the greater the magnification.

When he started making lenses, Leeuwenhoek may have hoped to use them to examine textiles more closely than anyone had ever done before.

Soon, however, he felt the same compulsion as Hooke to examine natural objects in never-before-seen detail.

Leeuwenhoek's Microscopes

Microscopes made from Leeuwenhoek's tiny spherical lenses - the smallest lenses measured just 1 mm across - were easily capable of magnifying objects by a factor of about 200 - 300, while Hooke's compound microscope magnified only by a factor of about 40 - 50.

Remarkably, Leeuwenhoek could use his lenses to resolve details as small as 1.35 μm. (This meant that, for example, he could easily see red blood cells, which are typically 6 - 8 μm in diameter.)

Leeuwenhoek's Art of Microscopy

What is still uncertain even today is how Leeuwenhoek lit the objects he was studying. This was a vitally important part of his unique art of microscopy. Another was his unrivaled skill in setting up for viewing:

drops of liquid, such as blood or pond-water, or

solid samples, such as plant material or animal muscles, cleanly cut with a razor blade into very thin sections, transparent enough for light to travel through so their details could be seen and drawn.

Leeuwenhoek made over 500 tiny microscopes during his lifetime. They were awkward to use and inconvenient, which is why today we use compound microscopes. Despite their drawbacks, in Leeuwenhoek's expert hands, they revealed an entirely new biological world.

The Microscopic World Discovered by Leeuwenhoek

Leeuwenhoek was a tradesman who had no formal training in science and had never been to college.

Nevertheless, the quality of his observations was so high and his discoveries so compelling that his research became well-known through letters he sent to the Royal Society in London. These were translated into English and published in the Society's journal, Philosophical Transactions.

Interestingly, many of Leeuwenhoek's letters were read first by Robert Hooke, who was the Curator of Experiments and then Secretary of the Society. Hooke actually learned Dutch so he could read Leeuwenhoek's letters for himself.

Leeuwenhoek's first communication was in 1673, replicating some of the work Hooke had covered in Micrographia, including Leeuwenhoek's detailed drawings of bee stings, a fungus, and a human louse.

The following year Leeuwenhoek began to describe outstanding new discoveries he had made.

Single-Celled Life
In 1674, aged 41, Leeuwenhoek made the first of his great discoveries: single-celled life forms. Nowadays these organisms are grouped with the protists - these are mainly single-celled plants and animals. Echoing the initial disbelief Hooke's Micrographia had met, many members of the Royal Society refused to believe in the existence of Leeuwenhoek's microscopic creatures. It took until 1677 before their existence was fully accepted. This happened after Robert Hooke returned to his microscopes, which he had given up because of eye strain, and verified Leeuwenhoek's observations.

The Shape and Size of Red Blood Cells
In 1674 Leeuwenhoek examined red blood cells, which had been discovered six years earlier by his fellow Dutchman, Jan Swammerdam. With his superior lens, Leeuwenhoek was able to give a clearer description of the cells than ever before and was the first person to determine their size accurately.

Bacteria
In 1676 Leeuwenhoek discovered bacteria in water. The bacteria were at the limit of observation of his microscope - he estimated that it would take more than 10,000 of them to fill the volume of a small grain of sand. Such was the brilliance of his work that nobody else observed bacteria until another century had passed.

Spermatozoa
In 1677 Leeuwenhoek discovered spermatozoa, later concluding that eggs are fertilized when entered by sperm.

"...I observed certain animalcules, within whole bodies I saw so quick a motion as to exceed belief; they were about the size of a large grain of sand, and their bodies being transparent, that the internal motion could plainly be seen. Among other things, I saw in the body of one of these animalcules a bright and round corpuscle, placed near the head, and in which a very wonderful swift motion was to be seen, consisting of an alternate extension and contraction. This particle I concluded to be the heart..."

Lymphatic Capillaries
In 1683 Leeuwenhoek discovered the lymphatic capillaries, which contained "a white fluid, like milk."

By observing the life-cycles of maggots and fleas Leeuwenhoek proved that such creatures are not spontaneously generated, as many people believed at the time. He showed these creatures go through a process of reproduction from eggs to maggots to pupae to adults.

By dissecting aphids he discovered parthenogenesis. He found parent aphids containing the embryos of new aphids although eggs had not been fertilized.

By observing the flow of blood in tiny capillaries, Leeuwenhoek confirmed William Harvey's work on blood circulation.

The Birth of a New Science

Leeuwenhoek's discoveries, combined with Hooke's earlier discovery of microscopic fungi, signaled the creation of a new science: microbiology.

Some Personal Details and The End

Leeuwenhoek married Barbara de Mey in 1654, when he was 21 years old. They had five children, but only one - their daughter Maria - survived beyond infancy.

Barbara died in 1666, after twelve years of marriage. Five years later Leeuwenhoek married Cornelia Swalmius, with whom he had no children. It was during his second marriage that Leeuwenhoek's interest in science seems to have developed.

In February 1680 Leeuwenhoek was elected to The Royal Society in London. He took great pride in this; it meant that he had won recognition as a true scientist. He never visited the Royal Society. He was happy to continue his work in Delft.

Leeuwenhoek's second wife, Cornelia, died in 1694, when Leeuwenhoek was 61 years old.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek died aged 90 on August 26, 1723. He was buried in the Old Church in Delft.

Although he had not been born into a scientific family nor had he received an education in science, his death was that of a true scientist. He communicated to the Royal Society such a careful, detailed description of the medical condition that was affecting him, eventually causing his death, that it is now called Van Leeuwenhoek's disease. This is a rare condition which causes involuntary twitching of muscles.

Leeuwenhoek was survived by his daughter Maria, who had not married. She looked after her aging father and helped him to run the family's textile business. Leeuwenhoek had become a wealthy man and Maria inherited this wealth.

"...my work, which I've done for a long time, was not pursued in order to gain the praise I now enjoy, but chiefly from a craving after knowledge, which I notice resides in me more than in most other men. And therewithal, whenever I found out anything remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof."

Author of this page: The Doc
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Further Reading
Samuel Hoole
The Select Works of Antony van Leeuwenhoek
The Philanthropic Society, London, 1807

Antony van Leeuwenhoek and his "Little animals"
Clifford Dobell
Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1932

Bentley Glass
Review of the Leeuwenhoek Legacy
The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol 69, (1) March 1994

Howard Guest
The Discovery of Microorganisms by Robert Hooke and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, Fellows of the Royal Society
Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 58 (2), 2004

IML Donaldson
Robert Hooke's Micrographia of 1665 and 1667
J R Coll Physicians Edinb (40) 2010

Creative Commons licensed images
Image of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek at Microscope from the Wellcome Trust, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

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Lived 1632 - 1723. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is the somewhat improbable father of microbiology. A moderately educated owner of a textile business, he learned how to make his own unique microscopes which offered unparalleled magnification. Using these microscopes he made a number of crucially important scientific discoveries, including single-celled animals and plants, bacteria, and spermatozoa.

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library works collaboratively to make biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.

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important artifacts...
Sarah Crichton Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009
144 pages

Auction catalogs can tell you a lot about a person - their passions and vanities, peccadilloes and aesthetics; their flush years and lean. In Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, the 325 lots up for auction are what remain from the relationship between Lenore and Harold. Through photographs of the couple's personal effects - the usual auction items (jewelry, fine art, and rare furniture) and the seemingly worthless (pajamas, Post-it notes, worn paperbacks) - the story of a failed love affair emerges. From first meeting to final separation, the progress and rituals of intimacy are revealed through the couple's accumulated relics and memorabilia. And a love story, in all its tenderness and struggle, emerges from the evidence that has been left behind.

"Leanne Shapton has accomplished a small victory in the age-old artistic struggle to do something unprecedented. Her intriguing new novel - if you can call it that - charts the rise and fall of a relationship, not through wordy descriptions or even graphic-novel drawings, but rather via a convincingly realistic auction catalog. The reader, cast in the unfamiliar role of consumer/detective, is put to gathering information about a failed romance between the two New York protagonists, with nothing to go on but photos and brief descriptions of their belongings." - Time Out New York

"A captivating and completely sui generis creation" - T he New York Times

"[Shapton has] simultaneously invented a form - a sort of fiction-as-still-life - and probably broken the mold on it." - Time Out Chicago

"And so let's just get it out of the way here and now, before things get complicated by other releases: the book of the year for 2009 is Leanne Shapton's Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. Yes, yes, I know: there are great books coming this year... but please believe me - no other book will come close to this one. Not even remotely close." - Corduroy Books

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Auction catalogs can tell you a lot about a person - their passions and vanities, peccadilloes and aesthetics; their flush years and lean. In Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, the 325 lots up for auction are what remain from the relationship between Lenore and Harold.

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Francesca Colussi Cramer is a textile artist and designer, exploring the intersections of what is considered art, design and craft.

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memories
threads
veins
printmaking

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holiday shops and the everyday

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It's certainly not 'cool' to collect souvenirs.

Most of us who partake do so somewhat sheepishly, meandering the cluttered aisles of an airport gift shop in search of the least offensive made-in-China fridge magnet to commemorate our holiday, which was almost definitely not in China.

American writer John Walker Harrington called it in 1906 when he declared his country's "incipient mania for cherishing the useless" to be reaching fever pitch.

Tacky souvenirs, he wrote for American Magazine, "brought to this country in the baggage of tourists" and "propagated with amazing rapidity", were getting silly.

"Unless such manifestations are checked, millions of persons of now normal lives and irreproachable habits will become victims of faddy degeneration of the brain."

The mass-production of cheap(ish) souvenirs - a term that in English dates back to the 1700s - did indeed reach epic proportions during the 20th Century, in line with the spread of travel and the emergence of tourism as we know it today.

But this was inevitable. Humans have always like collecting things, and boasting about where they've been. Holiday souvenirs are the pocket-sized tokens that scratch the itch.

Academic researchers have pinpointed five categories for the items we collect on our travel: "piece-of-rock", meaning physical fragments like shells; "local products", think Swiss chocolate and Moroccan rugs; "pictorial images", including postcards and calendars; "markers", i.e. mundane objects like T-shirts and mugs which are branded with a particular location; and "symbolic shorthand", accounting for miniaturized Eiffel Towers and New York snow globes.

The first two, as the new book, Rolf Potts' Souvenir, delves into, are the sorts of keepsakes we've been collecting since the very beginning, while the last three are all mass-market products that are relatively new in form. Let's peer a little closer.

Where did it all start?

We know early humans decorated their caves and rounded up objects inside them - so in a sense it's always been in our nature to hoard items of importance to us. We were also innate hunter gatherers, routinely on the move, accumulating items along the way.

As far as recorded cases of travel souvenirs go, these date back as far as Ancient Egypt, and include those - for one - of Prince Harkhuf, who travelled to Sudan around 2,200 BC, and brought back with him leopard skins, ivory and incense to present to the pharaoh.

By the time the ancient Greeks and Romans had laid down their roots, manufactured keepsakes like painted pots and miniature silver monuments had become something of an industry around sites with particular cultural significance for travellers passing through - Alexandria among them.

Souvenirs in the age of pilgrimage

Here's where the concept really began to evolve. When we weren't busy conquering our neighbours, and long before we travelled for pleasure, it was for pilgrimage, and everyone wanted to bring home a so-called piece-of-rock as a momento: a small trophy to prove they'd completed it.

Which started to become problematic as Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem came into fashion in around 500 AD. Particularly popular was the Chapel of Ascension, a spot commemorating Jesus' supposed last days spent on Earth before ascending to heaven.

"Tradition asserted that the footprints of Jesus could still be discerned in the exposed dirt," writes Potts. "Eager to possess a bit of the dust that had touched the messiah's feet, visiting pilgrims began to spirit away fistfuls of the sanctuary floor in such profusion that the shrine's caretakers were forced to haul in fresh dirt every few weeks."

Some pilgrims were downright obnoxious in their insuppressible urge to take a piece of the Holy Land home with them. Potts cites one notorious example of the man who'd been allowed to kiss the True Cross on Good Friday, and managed to chew off a small hunk of it to steal away in his mouth.

Not dissimilar, today, is a football fan's desire to own a shirt worn or signed by their favourite player, as if said player's essence could somehow be transferred by mere touch.

Scholar Beverly Gordon remarks: "People feel the need to bring things home with them from the sacred, extraordinary time or space - for home is equated with ordinary, mundane time or space."

By the Middle Ages, perhaps in response to overzealous pilgrims like the cross-muncher, relics - tokens sold with the promise (almost always false) that they'd belonged to or have been touched by religious icons - were doing a roaring trade.

"Peasants' skeletons were passed off as those of saints, and duplicate relics - including multiple heads of John the Baptist - abounded in competing basilicas across Europe and the Near East," Potts states.

Gradually, however, intellectual curiosity surpassed pilgrimage as the main motivation for travel, and as more of the world was explored, objects were sought out less for veneration and more for education, presentation, and sheer novelty.

Those funny little spoons

"If one were to pinpoint a single moment when souvenirs came of age as an organized, globally minded American industry," Potts writes, "it might well be the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, which attracted 28 million visitors to Chicago over the course of six months."

Among the many keepsakes on offer, he explains, the most popular of all were the commemorative spoons, which sold by the tens of thousands and prompted contemporary newspapers to herald a "souvenir spoon craze".

But this wasn't by chance. It was a calculated effort, backed by a clever marketing campaign on the part of American silversmiths. In a promotional pamphlet distributed two years prior to the expo, the Jeweler's Circular Company of New York announced: "From Maine to California, from Minnesota to Florida, the cry is for souvenir spoons."

One company wove an intriguing story that the fashion in Europe among esteemed travellers was to collect a spoon from every country they visited. It was entirely fabricated, but it struck a chord, the self-invented industry cashed in, and location-branded spoons remain in gift shops around the world to this day.

Postcards

Ah, the humble postcard. Pointless really (Dear Granny, we're having lots of fun on the beach, the end) except perhaps to put a literal stamp on the fact that we're on holiday.

This is a form of souvenir which didn't spread until the late-19th Century, but once it took hold, was a phenomenal success. In the year of 1904, people in Sweden - with a population then of 5 million - sent more than 48 million postcards. By 1906, distribution company the Post Card Dealer was reporting sales of 750 million in the UK and more than one billion in Germany.

Today, post is passé, but many of us put the same effort as we did browsing the gift shop for the nicest, most envy-inducing postcard, into framing the nicest, most envy-inducing Instagram shot.

What makes a good souvenir?

Potts spent several days at the Las Vegas Souvenir & Resort Gift Show, the industry's largest convention, in the hope of answering this question.

"Most souvenirs, I learned, are designed to be eye-catching, small in size, easily portable, not too fragile, and not too expensive," he says.

"Travellers often don't think about souvenir purchases until they walk into a gift shop so qualities like attractiveness, simplicity, novelty, or humour are meant to inspire an impulse buy."

As for the more quirky and original articles, tourists aren't as keen, on the whole.

"Statistically speaking, T-shirts, hats, key chains and bottle openers sell far more, year in year out, than more imaginative or specialised keepsakes," he notes.

Summarising the entire concept neatly, one salemsmen who'd been in the business since 1971 told him: "At the end of the day, people don't get too philosophical when they go to a big tourist destination. They just want something that proves they've been there."

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The curious history of holiday souvenirs - and why we feel compelled to buy one

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It's certainly not 'cool' to collect souvenirs. Most of us who partake do so somewhat sheepishly, meandering the cluttered aisles of an airport gift shop in search of the least offensive made-in-China fridge magnet to commemorate our holiday, which was almost definitely not in China.

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Vintage Christmas Glass Ornaments Antique Catalog Page. Rare - Etsy UK

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This Digital Drawings & Illustrations item by Artgaze has 732 favourites from Etsy shoppers. Is dispatched from United States. Listed on 03 Jan, 2023

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printing on top of paper bags- bit literal as an idea

digital drawings - 3 in total

colouring book outcome?

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wallpaper creating an environment ?

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Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

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collections of shoes- what makes them a set?
think about using different media, printmaking as well as watercolour and line.
four sets of 16 shoes
dont overthinl- learn through making !
while you are drawing lots of shoes think about categories they could go into- for instance speacialist work shoes, or even silly cateogieries like shoes with birds on them!
reportage

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EXHIBITIONS

New York, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts
Ten Characters, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts 30 Apr 1988 - 4 Jun 1988 (as part of No 15, Ten Characters)

London, Institute of Contemporary Art
Ilya Kabakov. The Untalented Artist and Other Characters at the ICA London 23 Feb 1989 - 23 Apr 1989 (as part of No 15, Ten Characters)

Zurich, Kunsthalle Zürich
Das Schiff - Die Kommunalwohnung, Zwei Installationen von Ilya Kabakov 2 Jun 1989 - 30 Jul 1989 (as part of No 15, Ten Characters)

Washington, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Directions. Ilya Kabakov. Ten Characters 7 Mar 1990 - 3 Jun 1990 (as part of No 15, Ten Characters)

Toronto, The Power Plant
Ilya Kabakov/John Scott 15 Nov 1991 - 5 Jan 1992 (as part of No 15, Ten Characters)

Bonn, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
Europa-Europa 26 May 1994 - 11 Oct 1994

DESCRIPTION

The installation is a narrow, small room, more like a short, irregularly-shaped corridor with two doors, one of which is always closed.

Inside, the entire room is similar to a kind of museum. Everywhere can be seen collections of innumerable 'garbage' items - scraps of paper, rags, empty boxes, jars - gathered into bunches, packages, all carefully arranged in cabinets (there are two of them in the room), in glass display cases, glued on special cardboard stands, hanging on the walls. Everything, even the tiniest junk, has a label attached to it, an inscription, everything is numbered and catalog...

This is both a unique museum and a residential room where the resident, compriser, and master of this garbage museum lives, but there is no normal furniture visible, no empty table, nor a chair, except for a narrow trestle-bed pushed into the corner behind the dresser under a shelf with a collection of jars.

On this same shelf stands an explanation screen which tells a little about the resident of this room and about his hobby.

ARTIST`S COMMENTS

I sat for almost 30 years in my attic studio. I would leave the house early, at 8 o'clock (it was an hour away by car or metro), and I would go up to my attic, to my studio. I would walk past the trash and garbage boxes near the gate, through the inner courtyard that was dirty, covered with junk and dust in the summer, or with white, melting also dirty snow in the winter, and I would go up the back stairs (through the back entrance). As I made my way up to the fifth floor, I ran into two buckets of garbage with table scraps on each landing, one on each side, near the doors to two communal kitchens which opened onto the landings. Shouts, both male and female, could be heard coming from each side. Sometimes the doors would open and a woman would step out in a bathrobe to scrape the leftovers from the plate into the garbage bucket. I would slowly ascend higher and higher past this morning life up to the old stone steps, the edges of which were already ground down as if with a file. I would run into the janitor of our building crashing down from above with an enormous metal trough full of kitchen trash. The trough would be coming down the steps ahead of him, and he would hang onto it with a long rope so that it wouldn't fly down the stairs. I was able to put it all together with an unexpected, sudden illumination: the trough, the janitor, and the chopped off steps. For this trough, sliding down over the course of 70 years (the building was built in 1902) had ground down the edges of the stairs. "A trough grinds stone."

Finally, I would reach the last, attic landing. It was also filled with old junk, but the objects which the residents brought here (only so they didn't have to drag them to the dump near the building entrance) were large: an old oak kitchen cabinet with chiseled columns, enormous beds, a wall unit, a gigantic broken mirror in a carved frame. Every morning or almost every week something new would appear there. Stunned by the beauty of a few things, I would drag them into my studio and use them - tables, chairs, an old couch. (True, with the latter I also acquired an enormous number of bedbugs which gnawed on me mercilessly all night when I would spend the night in the studio.)

... I would open the metal door with my key and pass across the wooden plank under the very roof, among garbage and other junk preserved here since the day the house was built and brought here by the residents over all these years ... It is a long passageway about two hundred steps. At the end of this whole journey, I would open the door to the studio at the end of the attic and enter 'home.' I would sit down on the chair. I would look around. I must continue drawing, I must paint what I began yesterday, finish the work for the publishing house which they have been expecting for a long time now. But I don't do any of this. Like yesterday, and all the days before that, for some reason, I open a package with old paper and notes, and I slowly begin to rearrange these pages in senseless dissipation - this was the same kind of foolish garbage that surrounds me, but it was my personal garbage, accumulated during my stay in the attic. All kinds of junk, all kinds of scraps would radiate a bundle of memories: what happened, how that memory was connected with the scrap, the remnant...

I would write something down and place it next to another thing in the folder so that next time I could remember what moment that note related to.

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The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away (The Garbage Man) - Ilya & Emilia Kabakov

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New York, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Ten Characters, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts 30 Apr 1988 - 4 Jun 1988 (as part of No 15, Ten Characters) London, Institute of Contemporary Art Ilya Kabakov.

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animals that are associated with each deadly sin, incorporate into clothing as pattern or have them in the picture somehow- interacting of being held by the portrait subject

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Small mind map

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Christmas tapestry concept

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Litter battle tapestry concept