Thursday 19 February 2015

Codes and keys


 
This work entitled ‘Sea/land’ by Ian Hamilton Finlay, which I saw recently at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, caught my attention because it reminded me of cloth stitch in lacemaking. I liked the theme of the land and sea being interwoven and the idea of providing a key to explain the colour code for the different threads. I’m interested in coded communication and have worked with embroidered Morse code and QR codes to hide messages in textiles (see below).



Both Morse codes and QR codes require ‘keys’ to decipher them; the Morse code needs knowledge of the language and the QR code requires a reader on a smartphone. I also like to use layers of text that reveal hidden messages within them (see my virtual sampler post from  17 December 2014).

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