Biscuits

 

The theme for NWBA this month is biscuits.

I associate factory biscuits with committee meetings and tea breaks, especially the drama group I belonged to for the best part of thirty years (St Andrews and Tanterton Allsorts to give it its full name).

I wasn't sure what to do for this so I started line drawings of biscuits,

 

collaged old scripts and scanned and printed the drawings, 

 

 glazed with acrylic paints,

 scanned  a section and used image processing to put on text and print out the covers, 

finally folded and put under weight .

 

The thick collaged paper is not ideal for this type of structure but given I had no idea of what I was going to do when I started drawing I’m quite pleased with it
 

Witch Balls

I’ve recently taken part in “All life is here”, a project at the Lancashire Archives , making  a visual response to quarter sessions petitions from the 17th century.

Because of the short time scale for this work, about 2 months, I chose to use as my inspiration the seven documents from the period that were accessible on line as a transcription and accompanied by a good quality photograph.

All seven referred to people accused of witchcraft.

Whilst wondering how to tackle the project I vaguely remembered hearing about witch balls and on googling it I found they were real.  They are hollow spheres of glass, hung in cottage windows in 17th and 18th century to ward off evil spirits and witches.

This gave me a circular format to work in. 

Whilst researching further I found a copy of The History of Witches and Wizards (printed in 1720) in the Wellcome foundation’s online resources. I didn’t want to copy from this but decided to use this woodcut style to make illustrations to some of the stories in the archive documents.

I added illustrations of the type of plants that would have been used by healers, again in the same woodcut style, that I derived from historical herbals that were around in this period.

I also decided to use part of the original script of each document.

I decided to use the prints to make two different outcomes, a simple line of double sided prints, one for each document, with text on one side

  and an illustration on the other and a spherical book incorporating the same double sided prints.

 

It's been a while

I realized today how long it's been since I posted anything. I think now life has opened up we've all got so busy again.

I'm not going to try and catch up with stuff I've been doing over the last couple of months (most of it is family and allotment related, not art making) but just to get started here's a picture of some of the double sided prints I've just finished as part of a project at the Lancashire Archives. When dry they'll hopefully become a book and a hanging thingy.