May 2010 - loveFibre :: colour to touch

context and originality (or ‘who said it first?’)

In her comments on my fabric manipulation assignment, my tutor mentioned that when writing about my work I should ‘extend [my] frame of reference to include the work of other artists and craftspersons’ – to show that I’m aware of contemporary and historical textiles and to show how I’m influenced by others.

I must admit I sometimes avoid looking outward very far, for fear that I’ll find someone else doing just what I’m doing. I have had that experience once or twice, and I know it’s happened to other people too. I don’t mean copying – I mean that strange phenomenon where several people in far-flung places all start doing the same thing at the same time.

But, how important is that desire to be different? We have this strange Western obsession with originality (or I do anyway). Yet my most treasured comments are when someone has said my work inspires them – which I take to mean that something about it passes into their work or their way of seeing. And I don’t actually mind if people copy something I’ve done, if it’s in order to learn something or take something further – not in a commercial context, and I hope not without acknowledging it! As much as I can, I try to share my processes as I go along anyway. So I should surely take off those anxious blinkers and pay more conscious attention to who might be inspiring me, whether it’s in technique or style or philosophy. As my tutor says, ‘No-one works in a vacuum.”

So thanks, Julie, for mentioning Alice Kettle’s recent Place Settings series – it set me off on a trail of discovery. Here’s one of Alice Kettle’s collaborative pieces with Helen Felcey. There are more on her website under the ‘New Proj’ heading. I think these pieces are absolutely beautiful, lovely lines that move between the cloth and the ceramics, delicate shimmery spoons and cups set against the scribbly textures of Alice Kettle’s embroidery.

A search for place settings in art led me to some other works too. One was Judy Chicago’s famous piece “The Dinner Party“. I had read about this celebration of the lives of women throughout time before, but the power of the web means it’s now accessible in a 3D tour where you can virtually wander round the table. Quite awe-inspiring in its scale and execution, even just on-screen.

The second piece I found is a work in progress – also a large-scale installation – weaver Eleanor Pritchard’s Place Setting. This will be at Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham, from 12 June – 26 September 2010. Eleanor Pritchard says the work is ‘essentially a project about dining’ – her guest list includes all kinds of people from aristocrats to nursery maids. I’m glad I recorded the idea of narrative stitched into napkins in my ‘hospitality’ theme book before I found this site – that originality thing again! One of my ideas for the hospitality piece was to machine embroider the words of asylum seekers, their responses to receiving welcome, as white words on white fabric, ‘hidden away’, ‘revealed in the opening up of a napkin at the beginning of a meal’, ‘hard to read but if you look they are there’. I decided on placemats, not napkins, in the end, and I may not use the writing idea (though it’s still in the mix) but the uncanny similarity of intention remains. Eleanor Pritchard’s embroidered stories are central to her installation and will reflect the lives and narratives of her guests in 24 damask napkins. That is just a part of this work, which I think is going to be amazing and well worth a visit if you are within reach.

The last piece I found, which again has some elements in common with my theme, is not a large public work, rather a personal gift, but public nonetheless by virtue of being on Flickr – Samantha‘s lovely, quirky set of 6 ‘mismatched placemats‘ for a wedding anniversary gift. If I tell you I had already decided that my ‘hospitality’ piece would be 6 mismatched placemats and that they would be blue and white, you may guess that I did indeed start to feel a bit worried at this point! In fact the resemblance ends there and is actually quite incidental, but it does show that very few ideas are really unique – however hard you strive to be ‘original’. So I think I’ll stop fretting about that and just enjoy the connections!

Speaking of enjoying connections, I occasionally make a Flickr gallery, it’s easy to do and a great way of collecting some lovely and interesting work together in a complementary way. With blue and white very much on my mind, here are two to share with you: blue and white cloth and blue and white cloth 2. I hope they make up for the lack of pictures in this post!

playing with colour

One final post about the ‘Textile Structures’ module – though actually it’s the first exercise – working from a visual source and analysing colour, texture and proportion. Choosing an image and first painting blocks of colour, then wrapping card with yarn, is intended to make you look closely at the colours and their qualities and proportions. I lost some of the lightness of the image in my painting and in the yarn wrapping but regained it, I think, in the fabric wrapping, which is much more visually textured.

I liked the result of wrapping with fabric a lot so I made another, this time just working with the colours in the fabrics. When it was done I realised that the sketch book page on which I’d used up my left-over paint would make just the right background for it!

Wrapping is often used solely as a design exercise but an artist here on Tiree has made it into her own very distinctive art form. Susan Woodcock creates evocative seascapes and landscapes, full of colour and movement, combining paint and textiles in a way that perfectly captures the island atmosphere. Her husband Colin Woodcock, is also an artist, a painter whose work explores ‘the interplay of land, sea and sky’, and is filled with the beautiful light that is so special to Tiree. Together they run the Blue Beyond Gallery, where Colin also creates his dramatic raku pottery. Every week in summer you can go to watch the pots being fired – a fascinating process – and very hot!

tied up in knots

I’ve enjoyed all the exercises in the ‘Textile Structures’ section of OCA Textiles 1. One exercise involved making a frame and wrapping, binding and interlacing materials in an improvisational way to create areas of solidity and space, light and shade. I made a little frame from bamboo skewers lashed together and using white and natural yarns and threads, traversed the space with knotting, binding and needleweaving. I used a book by Ros Hills – Colour and Texture in Needlelace – to learn some new stitches.

1, 2, 3, 4

The next exercise asked you to construct a grid, but I used a ‘found’ one – a pallet from one of Alan’s beachcombing expeditions and added verticals of rough macramé jute to weave through and tie to. I wanted something in keeping with the materials I was planning to use to create this textile structure – rope, twine, scraps of balloons from an old celebration, fragments of net, shells, seaweed – the randomness cast up by the tide on a Tiree beach. There’s a little white fleece from the fences there too, and a little dark Hebridean fleece brought back from this woolly place on Mull across the water.

There are some detail shots of the different sections here.

I’d love, one day, to see this beach twine sculpture on the island of Gigha. I did see this dramatic figure at Machir Bay on Islay a few years ago. I love coming across unexpected art like this.

sacred in ordinary

The little tapestry that came out of thinking about laundry, sacredness and prayer rags is done (and even packaged and waiting to send off to my tutor!). It came out very close to what I envisaged. As I wrote in the previous post, I chose the word ‘sacred’ from a list in my course book, and focused on the idea of the sacred in the mundane, as expressed in Kathleen Norris’s book ‘The Quotidien Mystery: Laundry, Liturgy and Women’s Work’. I sketched a design for a stylised drying green but didn’t think I would be able to execute it technically, and then I started thinking about rag trees, which I’ve seen in Cornwall and Ireland, which led me to prayer cloths, found all over the world in various forms. I love the idea of cloth embodying prayer.

I decided to work with a combination of wool tapestry and cloth rya knotting that could evoke both rag trees and clothes lines. I auditioned various yarns for the tapestry but decided to spin my own in the end. I was trying to achieve a spacious meditative feel for the background, blending colours of sky, clouds and leaves.

Each scrap of fabric knotted into the tapestry has meaning for me, associated either with a person, an idea, or a memory. I like the result overall but I would change some of the sizes of the pieces, as I don’t think the balance is quite right – I was trying to create the kind of wildness you see in a rag tree, and if several neighbouring pieces are too similar in size it looks like a fringe and that freedom is lost. This happens in the third line down, which is the one I’m least happy with – it also breaks the rhythm of the diagonals and I think the line should be less horizontal. I was trying to create some variety in the diagonals but that one looks stolid instead of dynamic. I like the way some of the fabrics fray and curl up – this creates the ‘alive’ feeling I was hoping for. I photographed the piece outside where the wind could touch the cloth to emphasise this.

I’m not sure whether the piece works in the end or is just too literal. I wanted it to be abstract and symbolic more than representational. What do people think? I couldn’t have made it any bigger as that was limited by the size of my frame, but I wonder if it would have been stronger at a larger scale. Technically there are problems with ridges in the weaving which I think comes from using a simple frame with a single shed stick; and I would need to do a lot more weaving to find out why it twists in opposite directions at top and bottom.

I’ve also been working on my theme book for the final assignment of the course, which has an absolute deadline of 16th June. My theme is ‘hospitality’, thinking particularly about asylum and sanctuary for all kinds of people who might not be made welcome by everyone. After reading a little piece in Country Living about ‘How to Lay the Perfect Table’ I decided to focus on ‘How to Lay the Imperfect Table’. These are some of the pages from my theme book. Most of what I’ve done so far is playing with the ideas but I’m ready to start sampling now.

tapestry

The main focus of this stage of my OCA Textiles 1 course is tapestry weaving. There are several exercises, leading up to a resolved sample. The first is to try out different techniques. I used Kirsten Glasbrook’s book Tapestry Weaving which has a lot of hands-on information and excellent photos of various techniques to build into a sampler; and a book by Nancy Harvey, also called Tapestry Weaving, which goes into much more detail but is not so clear visually (at least not for me because I find it easier to see what’s happening from photos than diagrams. If you’re the other way round, the Harvey book has lots of good diagrams).

This is my first sampler, trying several different techniques, and a limited range of yarns – some plain tapestry wools (not rug yarn but the kind sold for needlepoint) and some Noro yarn. I’m trying to use up some of the materials I have already, to overcome a bad habit of always feeling I need the ‘right thing’ to hand.

The next exercise was to create something expressive using a range of different materials; I was thinking fire or more specifically ‘deep into his fiery heart, he took the dust of Joan of Arc’ (from a Leonard Cohen song I’m listening to a lot right now). This one includes combinations of fibres and found materials – sari ribbon, embroidery threads, polythene bags and plastic netting, video tape, wire, handspun yarn, cord, torn fabrics, net, beads, knitting yarns and tapestry wools. I’m noticing I lean towards working on quite a fine scale.

The third exercise was to use rya knotting in addition to the tapestry weaving, to create texture. Again the scale is small, and this uses handspun, plastic bags, net, silk and novelty yarn, inspired by the sea.

The final sample involves choosing a word from a list and working a sample based on a storyboard. At least, they call it a storyboard but that means something different to me – I think what’s wanted is what I think of as a design board. I chose the word ‘sacred’ and as I’ve recently been reading Kathleen Norris’s ‘The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Women’s Work’ that seemed like a good place to start. Clothes lines led on to prayer trees and also reminded me of this TIF Challenge piece on memory. Here’s the design board – the weaving is still in progress.