Charlotte
Can Blog
Charlotte Westburg's 4D design blog
MEASURING HISTORIES
In keeping with my obsession with the sewing machine, I made another piece for this class using it.
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I call this Needle Point. I was interested in the act of being mindful of the time I put into the things I enjoy. My family is a patron-of-the-leisure-time, if you will. We find entertainment to be a key ingredient for living a good life. We indulge in many things: naps, movies, TV shows, reading and most importantly, we love
our music.
I honed in on the music aspect of my family values. We have sound systems in nearly every room in our house and we use them constantly. My dad plays the guitar, he began when he was 18. Having grown up in the 70's, he has a wonderful taste for classic rock and jazz. It is my dad's taste in music that I inherited. He grew up with record players. As a typical 20 year old, I have one. All of the records I own are old musicians; witnesses to the life of my dad's younger years. I adore my record collection. Anyway, music listening is time consuming! I thought to try and symbolically...
quantify the time my family and I have spent listening to music and use that figure to depict an image of who I am. I wanted to use a needle (although, not the needle of a record player).
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I did *some math to figure the length of the grooves in a typical vinyl record. that amounts to 17,741 inches. In yards, that is 492.8. I divided that by four (because the length was much too long) to signify the western 4/4 time signature of music. This gave me a figure: 4,435 inches. I wanted to used that much thread to make my self portrait. I timed the speed of my bobbin loading (30 inches per second) and loaded the bobbin half of the length I desired... so for 1:14 seconds. I figured, once the bobbin ran out, I would have used 4,435 inches between the top and bottom threads.
*lots of
The calculations were technical, the result was a work of art. Similarly to music. Similarly to music, the thread is a constant strand that builds upon itself, it flowed like a song would. I felt the mindfulness to its technical making gave me more certainty to how I was to make it. Like the laws of rhythm.
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I saw a connection between my fascination with music and the way it informs my art making. I listen to it while I create. I am drawn to numbers and laws, yet I consider myself creative. From the needle point, I created this piece. From the needle point, music is emitted from my Jensen record player.
