Susie Monday . El Cielo Studio

Bus and street reflections, St. Petersburg

SPACE is one of big time favorites.  I work from and within spaces whether I am working on an art quilt, art cloth or, wearing one of my other hats, as a museum and exhibit designer.  As a textile artist, I like working with unusual spaces, and often my work is shaped or irregular, simply because that seems much more interesting to me than a rectangle or square. It may be one of the reasons I like textile arts in general -- the spacial use and ideas are much more diverse than that of the space of a painting -- which is all created by illusion of depth of field -- the one kind of space I'm NOT that interested in.

Here are a few of the photos from this summer's Scandinavian travels that have particularly strong use of SPACE. (This is part of a series of nine photo collections that record different aspects of the Sensory Alphabet -- a tool I use for organizing images, working creatively and collecting input and organizing new ideas.

The British Museum with Kings Crossing in the background

Arcade, St. Petersburg

Berlin, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Berlin

Church on Spilled Blood, St. Petersburg

Sometime around midnight, somewhere in the Baltic SeaPerhaps the most stunning and interesting photographs from my recent travels in Scandinavia were those with strong LIGHT content -- not only because photography is all about light, but because the quality of those 20 plus hour days of daylight were so potently active as to our psychic relationship to the space and time. Daytime has a much more expansive meaning when the sun "goes down" at about 11:30 pm and rises at 3 am, and truely, it never is really dark. The white nights of Russia, Finland, Sweden certainly color the activity and spirit of the places. Even though we were ship-bound in the evenings and nights due to our sailing schedule, it was easy to see that the lives of all the ports went on way into the wee hours. There were truely more hours in the day to do things and in general, people seemed intent upon enjoyment of all the pleasures of daylight. Guess it shapes your summer when you know 18 hours plus of dark is coming all too soon!

Linda in a Light exhbit at the Design Museum in CopenhagenConservatory at the Sculpture Museum, Glyptotek, in Copenhagen. Along the River Neva, St. Petersburg White Nights

More from the ship

Carved type from the V&A, London

Now that business is posted (if you missed the latest on the workshop front, either download or go back a day for details) I want to continue my posts of photos from the summer's wonderful journey through Scandinavia. I'm posting these by Sensory Alphabet category --just for fun, and because this blog serves me as a kind of collection jar for memorie, studio actions, future ideas and playdates with ideas.

So today's idea is LINE. Here are some of the photos I took that jumped out of iphoto:

Potsdamplatz, Berlin

Stockholm horizonVasa rigging, StockholmRepainting the line

Bridge between Sweden and Denmark

Tallinn street scene

The line the wall made, Berlin

Berlin