Workshop with Jo Budd

My Jubilee weekend was spent working with the Textile Study Group at Hawkwood College with our guest tutor, Jo Budd.

Jo is a super tutor and transformed the bare hall at Hawkwood into an industrious and inspiring working studio.We worked on a several different resist methods (emulsion paint, binders, manutex) of decorating fabrics. Needless to say I produced a lot of different fabrics but few resolved pieces as time ran out on this busy workshop. 

Initially we tested all the media and methods and I was cruelly teased for my strict and methodical way of making my trial samples seen below, placed in sequence. I made the marks by scraping a notched edge of credit card and trialled different fabrics ranging from scrim and fine silk to chunky silk hessian, using the same pattern of marks.

 

Jo also showed us interesting ways of resisting dyes using just water.

We then selected from our range of fabrics and made a few tentative compositions. The composition below is painted silk habotai and silk hessian.

 

The piece below has a ground of painted cotton fabric with added strips of my figure drawings printed onto vellum (see posting on 20th April).

Jo is an experienced artist who uses textiles to make very large scale pieces and also tiny miniatures. This one ‘Blue Boat (Cry Dock II)’ is 245 x 345 cm. I first saw this piece in ‘Art of the Stitch’ at the Commonwealth Institute Embroiderers’ Guild exhibition in the 1980’s. It was quite a ground-breaking piece for its scale as well as the painterly way in which Jo applies colours to her fabrics and the lack of decorative stitch, although she assured us that all her fabric pieces are hand stitched around the edges and no  bonding methods are used. http://www.jobudd.com/