A mirror in Sicily

This is just an excuse to blog our trip to Sicily, shown here partly through a mirror. Not much other glass - a few Roman remains at Solunto, and lots of lush chandeliers in the baroque churches of Palermo; 100s of them (churches, that is).

Shadows

These are the shadows a little set of glass plates made on the wall, with the sun streaming in through the opposite window. I am sure something can be done with this effect - preferably in colour.

Bookbinding

The glass connection is the stained glass fragment of a luteplayer in our room at West Dean where we have both been doing a 5-day bookbinding course - the other pictures show me tooling, Stephen paring leather, and our joint display of finished books (my table left, his right). Very satisfying. I'll be using the blue one as my next glass notebook. Strange that the glass shows a lutenist yet neither of us noticed until the last day. Not only that, but the film on Edward James has a shot of the churchyard seen through this very window.

Site visit

Well, here we are in the reception area of the hospital and here's the wall on which my spinal structure is going to hang. It's good to have seen it like this because it is going to be so different in just 33 weeks time. Both my metal artist and I feel much more confident that it's all going to work now we've seen it. And there's a good 18mm of ply behind the plasterboard so we know fixing it is going to be fine. What a good thing we thought of that weeks ago and not have a shock-horror moment now. After that, we went on to the architect's new offices (light and airy) and talked about lighting. I think it's going to be OK.

Photographer photographing Mark 2

This is why artists can't take good pictures of their own work. Look at all the equipment! Went up to Dudley today to have the sheet photographed properly and look forward to seeing the results. The blue look on his screen is an illusion. Got a preview glimpse of the catalogue for Corning with my other piece in it (very nearly chosen for the cover) and it did look pretty good I must say.

Opened out cylinder

This is the cylinder now opened out into a flat sheet with my West Midlands collaborator. We both really like this and I am putting this one forward for the Corning Same Difference exhibition. So why was I so dismal in my 'failure' posting about everything going wrong last time? Just shows that you have to work at things and find an opportunity in something apparently going wrong.