Just look at this goddamned beautiful thing. #typewriter
I'm Leonie Connellan, a print-based artist from Melbourne, Australia. I make art about the relationship between science and storytelling. See more of my work at www.crumpart.net
The Art Assignment #4: Never Seen, Never Will
“The end was contained in the beginning.”
Leonie Connellan. Hand-knitted typewriter ribbon.
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I made this small knitted möbius back in 2011, but I don’t recall showing it to anyone up until now. I made it with the typewriter ribbon I used for an artist’s book I made, The snake book that ate its own tale, but it was on a whim and I never had a purpose or a name for it until now.
I’ve never seen a black hole. I never will. Gravity says no. Still, I’m fascinated with these distortions of spacetime that draw in matter and prevent any escape. What does a black hole look like? What does it feel like? What does it sound like? Are black holes a byproduct of our universe’s formation, or its cause? Is there any hope for the information that enters a black hole, or is it gone forever?
I’m slightly embarrassed to admit this, but at 35 years old, I’ve finally started reading Nineteen eighty-four. I read the line I used as the title and immediately thought of this artwork. It’s the piece of the puzzle I’ve been waiting for. I’ve been trying to come up with a Newspeak title, a translation of the sentence I’ve used, but I can’t construct it adequately. As my friend Tim said, I was trying to express a complex thought with a language specifically imagined to eradicate nuance: an impossible task.
This sculpture is haunted by the ghosts of information fed into the typewriter I’ve owned and used for almost my entire life, reborn as a loop of loops. The möbius has no start, no end, no front and no back. The end is contained in the beginning. Unstart is start.
Going through a bag of my childhood stuff that my parents gave me a couple of months back. Along with a hilarious leaflet of essential 80s bridesmaids dresses, they included my typewriter manual. Hurrah!
The Neverending Typewriter Story is done! The Neverending Typewriter Story is done! Now I just need to fold the final 40 pages before Friday…
24 pages on the typewriter today. I think this is my absolute limit.
106 to go.
By the end of the week, my wrists will be the strongest in the world. Or they will be broken.
Sleep. Run. Breakfast. Internet break. Now, back to the typewriter to type the same sentence over and over again for hours.
Being an artist is very, very exciting and glamourous.
15% of the way through my book.
(Each page takes me 20 minutes, so I guess I’ve been working on this for 10 hours so far.)
The typewriter/weaving chart experiments. Don’t quite know where this is going, but I like it.