Golden Spider Silk

In London again yesterday, this time dropping in to The Victoria and Albert Museum to see the Golden Spider Silks.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/g/golden-spider-silk/
This new display is of a cape and shawl woven from the silk of the Golden Spider. The silk is extracted from the spiders spinnerets, 24 spiders being harnessed into stocks each morning! Louise Bourgeois would have loved this, the stuff of macabre dreams which I feel sure would have fed into her work!
On reflection my own work this week seemed to anticipate the workings of a organic creature spinning undisturbed in a dark corner of an attic.

On the fringes.

Edges, borders, fringes carry the fascination of insubstantiality and creep constantly into my work. A glimpse of something out of the corner of an eye; the twist of a flock of Dunlins flitting across the river....there and not there....the flickering of a memory...caught and lost....
 

 

....the marks of time...a trip to 'The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman' by Grayson Perry.

A trip to London yesterday with an insanely mad dash for the train which somehow added a surreal edge to the whole day.
Managed to get tickets for the Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at The British Museum. Grayson Perry picked out some interesting artifacts to place alongside and interact with his own works. My favourite of these were a group of four mourners from A.D. 700-50. Time had pared these small figures to bare, faded almost nothingness....the essence perhaps of the bodies with which they were buried.
Time erases as well as scars.

In my pod making this week I felt that something of that marking of time was left on the skin of the work. A moment of otherness.

Under my Skin...again....

I wonder what it is about the nature of skin...the shrinking wrinkled withered-ness of dying plants and the aging of human skin....that I find so visually and symbolically interesting?

 Skin continues to inspire me in the making of work this week.
The tactility of the fabric and its translucency serve me well. As always, there but barely there.....skin....