November 2nd Last weekend I was in London, going to two workshops run by textile artist Shelly Goldsmith, in response to Richard Tuttle’s ‘I Don’t Know. The Weave of Textile Language’. Starting at the Whitechapel Gallery, investigating the quality of line was a good way into this retrospective show of some of Tuttle’s work, all of which has an emphasis on textiles. We were then let loose in an upstairs room to create mayhem, making and installing our own ‘lines’ out of fabric and thread, and incorporating heat transfer images. Great group of people, with varied backgrounds, and all ready to get stuck in. This is the part of my line that I liked. After the workshop I wandered into Kader Attia’s installation ‘Continuum of Repair: The Light of Jacob’s Ladder’. Like the Tuttle, how could I resist a title like that?! Just great, fascinating, intelligent, many of the things I was groping for through my Nature of Mending project were articulated here.
I can’t really describe either the Tuttle or the Attia, so I won’t try, but got a great deal from both, visual and cerebral. Sunday the workshop re-convened at Tate Modern, to contemplate Tuttle’s installation in the Turbine Hall, which I think is pretty horrible, and I wasnt totally alone. But we got to create chaos again in another upstairs room, this time deconstructing a garment we had brought, and creating something. All very art- collegey but great fun.
Here is a detail from my black silk piece (I abandoned the heat transfer, a technique Shelly uses to brilliant and thought provoking effect, but I was hopeless). The woven ‘name-tape’ is a section cut from a whole long length of text that Shelly brought, left over from one of her pieces, and again, finding the phrase about repair, just had to pounce on it. (Hope it’s visible) One of the extra treats of the day was being in the Tate’s education room, high up at one end of the building, with extraordinary views 
Home on Monday, then on Wednesday a visit to Museum of Somerset as part of the Discovery Room project which is now well under way (more about this v. soon) and another extraordinary treat, looking at and holding very very ancient ceramics. This one is about 2,500 years old….
What a week!