take a look – work by members of Stitch Textile Artists a masterclass of textile artists who meet at Ammerdown Centre three times a year and who I have the privilege of tutoring.
Tuesday, 9 April 2013
Thursday, 7 March 2013
Designing by chance … with the purple umbrella and a dice
This title would make a wonderful one for a mystery play and this TSG workshop with Matt Harris was a bit of a mystery from the beginning. Requirements: an item to de-construct, a dice and drawing materials. My chosen item was a rather beautiful, very old, silk umbrella given to me by good friend, Mary Youles.
After a lot of struggling with pliers and lethal, pointed tools, every single piece that went into the umbrella's construction, was laid out on my table like a row of surgeon’s instruments.
Arranging the components was a design task in itself. The next stage was to number each item and then to throw the dice to select just three items. These were combined in some way to form a drawing tool – we were NOT permitted to choose ‘just the right combination’! This ‘indeterminacy’ was the premise of the weekend and each stage was dictated by the throw of the dice and not personal choice. For a roomful of artists and designers this was excruciatingly painful initially until we started to ‘let go’ and accept the results of the indeterminacy of the dice. In fact, it was quite refreshing to have decisions taken away from you and to learn to ‘make do’ with whatever the dice dictated rather than perhaps making choices that were very predictable to our individual working practices.
Several drawing tools were made (dice-determining of course) and then drawings made of the item itself. These were in response to a list of words, rather than the visual object, which were drawn up before and during the deconstruction.
The dice continued to dictate decisions in further development work as we cut up drawings and re-constructed them.
A further rewarding experience was completed back home by assembling deconstructed pieces and work produced on my pin board – this time - without the use of dice.
Monday, 25 February 2013
The purple silk umbrella
The starting point of the drawing weekend – first – deconstruct your chosen item -
More pics tomorrow of how this became my drawing tool.
Saturday, 16 February 2013
Slowly into stitch
I could continue making marks on paper and manipulating surfaces forever but I felt I should bring ideas of fabric and thread into my thinking.
I looked at a sample fragment from a recent piece that suggested a possible connection with the mass of small marks in my drawings, masses of tiny ripped photo fragments that had been stitched together in long ‘strings’ making a lacy structure. The distance between the photo fragments could be altered to give variety to the density of the mass. Also other fragments could be stitched together in ‘strings’.
Another previous method to suggest movement was made on multiple layers of the same image, cut into narrow bands and fragmented alluding to a refracted image. The silk organza pieces were painted with sweeping lines and when dry layered and threaded together with long stitches that went right through all the layers. I had a bit of fun getting the camera close into dramatic angles of this sample suspended on a window to show the interesting effects photographically which are disappointing in reality.
Onwards to explore another way of layering these fabric pieces. I undid the stitches and started again. This time I folded each piece in half and threaded the folded pieces together as in a book. The movement was more evident in this formation but perhaps too much!
An interlude to look at the delightful ‘avocado rolls’ by Alice Fox http://www.alicefox.co.uk/ and I thought I would roll a strip and double dip dye in the sunset colours of a drawing. Although I haven’t developed this dyed strip of linen scrim yet, it’s waiting for that special moment of time for me to manipulate it in some way. I like the way this long strip of fabric creates it’s own sweep just by being there. Now this thought offers something!
Notebook
I can do a lot of thinking at odd moments of the day and although I might not have time to follow up these ideas, I have been making quick notes in a small postcard sized notebook. This is tucked into a bag when out and about – on a bus journey or waiting at the dentists - can give me some precious thinking time. These pages remind me of the glimpses of ideas that I can follow up later. These pages aren’t especially beautiful but I like the miniature writing and diagrams that are crammed in to each page giving me keys for future work.
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