My searching out of the subtle gossamer of spider webs involves a kind of peering, a gazing and glazing of the eyes onto planes of nothingthereness, onto thin air; it asks a for a scrying of planes of space, a light visual touching and glancing, gleaning for invisible threads. Photons bouncing off the lines creating appearances and disappearances of silvery threads, and for my eyes to see them they have to almost feel, to relax and not focus on objects but to occupy another seeing, almost feeling out the vibratory strings of cobbe webbed space and knitted architecture with scanning gaze.Scrying is normally associated with seeking out other forms of the invisible and clairvoyant (clear vision) by gazing onto surfaces like mirrors, water, crystals, to descry and to catch sight of layering of vision that belie the everyday optic. Scrying a black obsidian mirror now housed in the British Museum, Edward Kelly seered and communicated the angelic conferences of Enochian magical workings to John Dee. When I first learnt of the mirror I was in thrawl to the glamour and esoterica of Dee and Kelly and the obtuse sigils of Enoch’s angelic scripts. I visited the museum and gazed through the display cabinet glassiness and tried to gaze onto the black obsidian, but it was awkwardly placed and of course I saw nothing. The Enochian alphabet reminds me of Cigninota, the practice of swan beak marking by swan breeders from the times when swans were central to any great feast and were almost eaten into extinction. The marks guarded the swan and would become more prominant as the swan aged.My descrying occurs during walking and bicycling but walking is best.. Gait and gaze move into rhythm in streets and parks and gardens. Corners and angles give practical and partial holds for attaching and fixing, from which to span and arch and spin out dynamic lines. But this is the peering and gazing of no horizons, it’s not a linear looking, or a perspective based measuring, it is diffuse and lateral and proprioceptive. The eyes move back, widen, the back brain settles as the the front brain relaxes. It is less grabbing, more receptive and the body borders feel less guarded and defined, interwoven and implicated into the fabric of the exterior world. Webs are felt on skin, barely and yet tellingly there. Like slight hair strands. Pressure felt and pressed onto the tensile drag lines are sensed with the acutest of nervy skin tact. Fingers and eyes, Eva Haywards ‘fingery eyes’ or peering fingering.

fertilised egg shell shattered and spilt the 3 day old embryo.

opened up egg showing a 5 day embryo in the top left hand corner

 DISSECTIONS:

These are recordings of small actions of trying to capture spider webs between my fingers to create connections between my skin, it’s topography and the silken structures. I was also thinking about gaps, bridges, spannings, attachments. Alot of nothing and alot of something.

I took the photos of my left hand with my right hand with my trusty point and shoot Canon A480 & I haven’t done anything except crop them. 

Another person taking the photos with an SLR - and some delicate photoshoping would improve the precision of viewing the filigree threads attachments to the skin terrains.

However I’m pleased with them as small performative enquiries that allow me to move between scale, different focus, orientations and notions of body. These actions very particularly work with touch and the felt as well as sight. There is a way of trying to see spider webs when hunting for them, a slight defocusing of the eyes onto a nearer plane in the search for the giveaway glints and catches of light that betray the almost but not quite invisible presence of fresh gossamer.

I’ve been collecting wild webs from in between rails and bringing them back to the lab in preperation for another cycle of tissue culture.

My methodology is crude to say the least, but it works. I’m using cable ties to make loops that I capture the frames with. I’ve also invited anyone else to collect webs and to send them to me, so if you’d like to contribute, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

On one of the webs I accidentally caught a spider which I was unsuccessful in releasing

 The next stage will be to sterilise them and then to decide how best to culture onto them and which cells. Most likely I’ll try to culture each cell line individually onto the silks and then some co-cultures.

Perhaps some in liquid media and some on agar.

We’re also going to make some biopsies from chick embryos and tissue culture with them, possibly onto the silks.

These two images were taken of 5 mm glass cover slips dropped carefully onto webs inside a rotten tree trunk. The idea of installing cover slips into web structures was inspired by versions that Mel Grant initiated and made last year. Mel suggested trying this method to see if the spider would create further silken threads on or around the cover slips. More than anything I found the combination of glass and silk thread elements and structures fascinating.

 The upper image is a large web made in Cultivamos Cultura in August this year.

The lower image is a large piece of Venetian lace from the 17th century from the Whitworth Art Gallery’s textile collection.

The lace piece had several rips and repairs in it’s ground, one repair which can be seen here in the bottom left. These damaged ares and repairs across the collection appear like wounds, scarbs and scars,  the altered darned textures of the lace stand out like the altered architecture of wound tissue in skin. I wondered about returning to the collection and making an investigation of these wounds and scars in the textiles.

Of course the etymology of textile and tissue is the latin L. textura “web, texture, structure,” from stem of textere “to weave,” from PIE base *tek- “to make”, tek being the route of techné - technique, technology.

Last week I made a short visit to Cultivamos Cultura  in the Alentejo region of Portugal. It’s a new initiative that has been  created by Portuguese artist Marta de Menezes and scientist Luis Graca towards fostering and developing shared knowledges in science, technology and contemporary art.

 My brief visit was to get a flavour of the place and it’s possibilities so that I can make a more protracted visit next year.

The main building has several outhouses attached to it which have laid disused for some time, so a glorious collection of spider webs have accumulated. I became fascinated by the webs and took many photos some of which you can see here.

Farm Fountain

US artists Ken Renaldo and Amy Young made the centres an inaugeral residency for two weeks and within that time created this wonderful sculpture and installation Farm Fountain, images of which you can see here.

It’s a circuit of different living systems around the stucture of a fountain. A solar powered pump  circulates water up from the pond and into the grid of plants. The water is used by the plants and also filtered through the terracotta beads in the plant containers desceneding through the plant grid and back into the fish pond.

On their Flickr site they write:

Farm Fountain was started in our studio 2 years ago as an indoor ecosystem and local food production artwork that we hope others will reproduce. Info and instructions for the home version are available online at farmfountain.com

When I visited Marta topped up the plants, as the weather was so terrifically hot the system requited some human help. There were some great red chillis growing and a fragrant and delicious chocolate mint.