Hold the presses it's 2013; I'm Back!

It took almost a month of vaguely thinking about things to get back to basics, back to experimenting, back to creating. As Jack would say, "Honey, I'm Home." I have the tools and skills from last year's experiments to pick up where I left off, but something was keeping me from going there and continuing the mish-mash of half finished random test with durability and lightness in concrete and epoxy. There are also a couple of reports that I need to issue to confirm and deny the successes and failures of 2012, but reviewing isn't the most fun thing to do; it's just a filler. Now I have something new to work on and no better place to launch the concept than on this under-read blog. Drum roll please, Gum Arabic as a binder for pigments to print labels in t-shirts that will wash out after a douse in the ol' bubbly.

So What, Y-Que, you might say and I agree. It's not that big of a deal, but it takes me back to where I started with fresco which was to create a dry print that can migrate into wet plaster and thus create a photo-fresco with the pigments being embedded into the plaster itself. My earliest test on this subject was with Gum Arabic and papers that I could print with and later saturate and release the prints into freshly poured gypsum based mixtures that would harden. I've perfected those techniques and am no longer infatuated with them, but whenever I can go back to an original idea and find another way to use it, then I get a thrill. The thrill is from the fact that my earlier work seems to be worthwhile and not time wasted recreating the wheel, which by the way, I also did that.

The wheel. Last year I made some structures that I could fit together using old silk screens into a structure, sort of like a cell in a bee hive. I have been moving them around and watching them bang here and there through storms and such. I liked the shapes that I made because they reminded me of a dome house, but without all the complex joints, sort of a beginner's dome house. After realizing that I often had to move these by myself I was surprised that I was able to do so, because of the light weight. Next I put two and two together and that is that a structure built in the shape of a cell, like a bee hive octagon or hexagon, could be rolled into position somewhere quite easily, even up a hill or to a remote location that otherwise is difficult to reach. I haven't thought of where to apply this yet, but I am definitely going forward with a mobile structure that one person can move like a roll-away igloo.