The Golden Rule!

Glueing the crack in the pencil box was fairly easy - all I needed was some clamps, some white PVA glue for wood, both borrowed from my girlfriend's father, and some plastic to put in between the clamps and the wood to keep the edge straight on the wood - which I improvised by using one of those CD-shaped clear plastic bits that come with every CD cake-stand.

Tim had told me that I needed to stain the wood a few times first, to get the wood slightly darker than I want because the shellac would lighten it slightly, which required my first purchase - a bottle of Button Polish (shellac), which cost me £3.40 from the local hardware store. I couldn't find any on Freecycle -or at least not this week - it is not allowed (ethically) to put up the same 'wanted' post more than once a week - and I couldn't find anyone I knew who had any, so in the interests of getting the job done I had to buy it. But, now tht I'm getting into the idea of restoration I plan to restore the old walnut table I have inherited from my late grandma, which I am presently sitting at whilst typing away! It has a veneer though so new skills will have to be learned!

I applied the stain, several times, waited, sealed it with a thing coat of shellac, then cut it back with very fine sandpaper -which I have plenty of laying around the flat as I've recently decorated. You sould wait 24 hours between each application of shellac and I wanted to move on to re-etching the inch markers so that I could prepare them for the gold leaf.

As I began to re-etch the markers, very carefully, with my stanley knife, I realised that the stain had made it very difficult to see the numbers, which gave me an idea.

Numbers represent our need to control our world and this discourse seeks to categorise our world into purpose and process. It is an empirical stance. However, I think that creativity works differently to this - it is about intuition, rather than facts - and the fact that this is a school tool made me reminisce about sitting in the classroom, geting bored by the constant drumming of information, when all I wanted to do was draw and daydream. I've often thought that too much emphasis is placed on scientific / factual based subjects at school or by employers, and recently the governments 'Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy' policy also focusses on the importance of developing creative skills, with the view that they fundamentally underpin our ablity to excel in the workplace. Although this is pleasing to hear, personally I fear that the focus is slightly skewed towards science and the digital arts rather than visual arts per se, but anyway, I digress!

The point is that life's not all about facts and figures and working 'for the man' as it were, it's about enjoyment and interaction too - which is the place where the arts are a prominent part of our lives.

I decided that, because alot of the original markings were now so faint, I would change them by removing the periodic marks and gradually including more and more artefacts as the rule progressed, with angled marks, differences in marker width and length, shapes, missed marks, removed sections and at one stage a complete removal of an inch to the opposite side of the rule, ending with a depiction of the golden spiral, which to those of you who enjoy math, will know reveals the golden ratio - which is the interstice of art and mathmatics. Many of the most beatiful art works and architecture have use this concept and to me these represent the marriage of logic and art, of efficiency and creativity. This aspect of the piece makes reference to the value of both art and mathmatics, or rather a creative marriage of the two, as well as the gold leaf to represent the golden age of capitalism, which is now encroaching on anything in its wake that doesn't display efficiency, accuracy and profitablity and which is, in my humble opinion, creating a very ugly world of digitality (digital Britain).

Art injects beauty back into our lives through creative expression, and so using digital networks to help create art seems fitting because by utilisng the thing (the internet) in which I see the tensions of the modern age, (alienation v's mass communication / freedom v's expoitation) I am attempting to re-address the balance between creativity and efficiency - in my own small way.

So it's off to the digital world to find enthusiasts who are willing to give me the benefit of their skills, for free, so I can inject some value back into this otherwise purely functional object.