Where We Live, part 4

So far, I’ve got some old tiles, heavily stitched on wool:

Now, there’s a whole bunch of new tiles (tablets, little pieces of clay) fresh from the kiln. They will be dusted, lightly colored and waxed. But they won’t be sewn on wool - they will be sewn onto the world:

(Above): It’s my very own Mappa Mundi Mashup! Here’s what it’s got:

Above): On the left is the Fra Maura map which gave me most of my composition, and the round gold frame.

(Above) The Ebstofer Map is bracketed by the head, hands and feet of Christ (I’ve enlarged the feet and one hand so you can see them). On my map, a gargoyle head is chomping down on the frame, and the feet have left a muddy boot print on the world.

(Above) I borrowed the central body of water from the Hereford Map…which gives my map two Mediterranean Seas. But I’m not interested in cartographic accuracy here (obviously). I’m trying to show a world of misunderstanding, of ignorance, of our sometimes beautiful but often wrong impressions. Somehow, after all these centuries, many of us still don’t understand our world.

(Above) The Borgia Map really only gave me the tiny inhabitants.

So, my version of Mappa Mundi is out to be printed. Then I’ll sew on the little tablets, something like this:

With any luck, it will be a powerful statement about the perseverance of community in our dystopian world. Here’s hoping. …

There will NOT be more next week. A new grandchild is due to arrive shortly and I’m going to take a (very carefully quarantine-appropriate) trip. There will be new posts by October. Stay safe!

where we live...small town

While I wait for the clay to dry so I can fire it, I’m playing around with the last of my old tiles:

Coloring them with just a bit of acrylic, then frying them in melted wax….

…gives them a lovely soft glow.

I glue them down, then baste them so I don’t have any sliding off and getting lost while I’m working. A few days later:

I’m trying to use the tablets as symbols of home, with the threads here showing the connections. Sometimes we have homes strongly sewn to one another, with whole webs of interactions, like above….

…and some homes are broken with only a few running stitches to suggest past connections. Some are completely isolated amid all the relationships.

I’m hoping to devise a language of sorts with my threads. To sew and wrap and knot the tablets in a way that (just maybe) viewers will be able to read the meanings. The business with unmapped places resonates with me, and -somehow- this is what it says to me.

More next week.