MeRo Notes

illustration generate from openpeeps of mero

Making things.

sadartlearningtypescriptscala

I had been making random notes on things I'd like to speak about in week notes and then things happened in the world that made it all quite insignificant. I'm going to go ahead and share.

One of the notes I had was just the name Rozanne Hawksley. Between my last note and this one, the day before Ukraine was invaded, someone spoke incredibly eloquently about Rozanne and her work. I was very sorry to hear that Rozanne died, on the 30th December last year, she was 91 years old. The Guardian titled her obituary: "Innovative textile artist whose work expresses love, loss, remembrance and rage against armed conflict". I spent a bit of time over the past few days looking at Rozanne's work. I'm going to lift another quote from The Guardian:

"making art became a kind of compulsion, a way to express both profound, personal emotions and a more universal empathy for the fragility of the human condition....Gloves were almost a signature motif in the Rozanne’s work. A highly poetic medium, gloves symbolise touch, propriety and human connectivity. They first appeared as memento mori in seminal works that she made in the late 1980s and early 90s. Pale Armistice: in Death Only Are We United (1987), a funeral wreath of worn and soiled white gloves adorned with lilies and bleached bones, represents all ages, rank and gender and is one of her best-known works."

Making art

In wandering around the internet (I was doom scrolling again), I came across another artist I hadn't heard of, Alex Collville. Alex was a Canadian painter and printmaker who died in 2013, at 92. He trained as a infantry officer and brought his art to World War II where he painted what he saw there. Based on all that context, it will sound flippant, but what struck me about some of his work is how much it looks like it came from a Playstation 1 computer game. Check out this piece called 'Traveller' from 1992. I like that he puts the viewer in the driving seat, and that we are being guided through the painting.

Alex Colville (Canadian 1920-2013), Traveller, 1992, acrylic polymer emulsion on masonite.

Making code

Since my first day, I have learned so much. I'm using Typescript more now than I ever have. I never thought I'd have an opporunity to work with Scala, but Life/Scala finds a way. I'm getting used to a new way of deploying code, and I'm really enjoying how closely I work with everyone across the team. In the middle of my first week we got a fantastic tour of the library and collection, I got to see some amazing things and learn more about the collection itself.

I suppose this week note has tried to combine a lot of things into some pretty big themes of: life, making things that help us deal with life and death, looking at things people made and trying to code some things.