6.10.21 - Lace Market and St Mary's Church Graphite Rubbings

This afternoon I went for a walk around the Lace Market and St Mary's Church to gather some graphite rubbings from the area. I liked how the leaf rubbings turned out last week so I wanted to try doing some based on artificial forms as a contrast to the natural ones.

 

I made this from a plaque outside a building, it looks like a ghostly collage which is cool and I like the sharpness of the letters, the edges came out really well defined compared to some of the other structures that I worked from because it was made of durable material and looked quite new. I initially overlapped the shapes just to fit them on the paper but I really liked the effect so I did more of this in my St Mary's Church one below.

The text on the left is taken from a bench outside the church, and I like that the letters are negative shapes and you can see the grain of the wood around them. There is also a decorative rose which was carved in stone but that didn't create an obvious print maybe because it was weathered. The Church image is from one of the podiums around the lace market with tactile 3D images for visually impaired tourists to see the attractions with. I really like how the gothic structure looks against the modern text - it is meant to say 14th Century but I must have missed the 1.

This pattern is from the exterior walls of the church and I like how you can see the diagonal lines on the stone which wouldn't usually be noticable, it puts emphasis on the man-made aspect of the project theme.

There are a lot of examples of company and manufacturers names embedded in the city's infrastructure, and this one is from outside college on one of the glass things in the floor. I think gathering these will give me a lot to work with if I want to incorporate text into my future pieces. 

This was another 3D image for tourists and I think the negative space of the windows looks interesting and slightly spooky, plus the repetitiveness looks very industrial reflecting the Lace Market's history.

I found some interesting tombstones on the path surrounding the church, this rubbing is of an angel or cherub's face. It came out slightly unclear because of hundreds of years of being walked on and smoothed by the weather.

The text at the top of this image is from a drain pipe which had been painted over with years worth of layers, distorting the letters, but I can see 'Made in Great Britain' at the end. The swirling pattern is from another elaborately decorated tombstone.

This is from one of the buildings on Kaye's Walk, it had certain accented stones with this unusual texture in them which reminded me of the patterns that appear on water, so I think it looks very natural compared to the other pieces.

Over all I'm happy with these experimental works but I would like to do more of the collage-like pieces with overlapping imagery and text because I find those ones most visually and compositionally interesting. Doing this has also made me pay a lot more attention to the small details around the city, whether they are decorative features or manufacturers hallmarks- the urban landscape is covered in them.