Part 3: Creating Shapes & 3D Forms. Stage 3

This image refuses to leave me alone, it even stalks me in  my sleep. Alexander Calder's Silver Bedhead,  was commissioned for Peggy Guggenheim and caught my eye during my trip to Venice in 2011. I have redrawn it and played with the imagery several times.  When I was looking for an image to use for a trial slashing technique,  instead of geometric lines, I drew a simple outline from this idea, onto a recycled sandwich of silk with various layers of fabric underneath.

Sketchbook rendering of Silver Bedhead

 Sketchbook entry of Silver Bedhead

Slashing

The next image I worked with was a peacock that I saw in India. It is the national bird of India and is a symbol of grace, joy, beauty and love. I worked some ideas in my sketchbook after my visit, then decided on trying  a weaving and  folding technique.

 Peacock in oil pastels

Weaving and Folding

Another image that has intrigued me since my trip to Canterbury Cathedral last August is the shapes in the Lantern Vault in the Bell Harry Tower. It is the work of the architect John Wastell in the 15th century.  But because it is so high up, it doesn't look like stone at all, in fact it reminds me of  overlapping Venetian fans with detailed lace work. I am not known for straight neat lines, or geometric precision so the imagery in my sketchbook was hazy. However I could see that something could be created from this imagery using a gathering and layering technique.

Bell Harry Tower, Canterbury

 

Venetian Lace Fan

Textile Holiday to Bagru Rajisthan India

Bagru village, near Jaipur is not on the tourist trail. It is a village dedicated to textile printmaking, bleaching, dyeing, resist work and block making. Jamie Malden of Colouriscious led our 23 strong group, with the help of one of the villagers who owns a small factory there.

 Local clay and rice husk resist stamping

dyeing resist cloth a turmeric colour

Beautiful women in Sari's spied on us from doorways as we snaked from tiny home-factory to home-factory and not so shy children followed our group around the village where pigs wander in the street dyed almost blue from indigo paint flowing through open drains.

 

Indigo natural dye

Bagru School children

In Chippa Mohalla  or the printer's quarter, it took us back to medieval times where barefoot men are engaged  with this three century old tradition, using multiple dyes and block printing in seemingly primitive conditions. We learned that there are two main types of hand block printing in Bagru, Bagru printing and Dabu.We watched artisans smear the cloth with a mixture of local clay and ground rice husks and then women took it to dry on the roof terraces. Later it can be block printed and again left to dry, then it is either processed or dipped in turmeric or indigo coloured water. After that, the cloth may be overlaid with more designs using natural dyes and left to sun dry before having a final rinse. Most of the cloth produced here can be machine washed and is colour-fast after a natural finishing process.

Bagru textile samples

A lot of the hand printed cloth made in Bagru is for export and companies like Monsoon are buyers. I heard of an exciting initiative when I arrived home; an American graduate who visited Bagru during his studies,  Jeremy Fritzhand is helping the villagers to market and sell their work directly to the public instead of middlemen taking most of the profit. Before our group left the village we made our way to a shop selling gorgeous hand-printed fabric by the yard, from 500 rupees or 4GBP a metre.

Turmeric and pomegranate, natural dye colours

 

 Bagru stamped cloth

Part 3: Theme Book

There are a minefield of dilemmas in life that your mother never tells you about and that is exactly how I feel about choosing a topic for my theme book.

 Celtic shape in wood block

The basis of my problem is that I love so many themes. The Illustrated Manuscripts and Celtic Art in general have fascinated me for most of my adult life. Carnival is another topic that gets under my skin, and I have 100's of images from my 10 years of living in Lanzarote.

  

Carnival

Then there is my long passion with yoga and Indian philosophy, I have practised the art since I was 21 and been a yoga teacher for 14 years; and coincidently I was accepted onto the BA course in Indian Philosophy at Lampeter in Wales 2 years ago. I declined after an agonising decision about the sheer volume of studying and reading pitted against giving up creative projects. One word can sometimes trigger and explosion of imagery and when I heard the word 'Shunyata' once during a lecture, which means something like 'emptiness yet full of possibilities', I sketched and drew until I had a solid idea to create a large mosaic picture for my home.

Shunyata

 

My everyday life is also infused with what Eckhart Tolle calls living in the Now. His book 'Stillnes Speaks' and 'The Power of Now' have had a profound effect on my life. Each day I consider one of his talks or sit in the garden meditating on the silence hidden in everything all around us. He says it is out of silence that creativity is borne, ideals are realised and things are given meaning. Even Albert Einstein once said "I think 99 times and I don't discover anything. I stop thinking, dive into a deep silence and the truth comes to me". 

Laying horizontally in a tub of  organic bath bubbles, I had a light bulb moment about my theme book. The theme book could have a working title of  'The Moment' or 'Out of Silence', or The Now'?  Because it is in my everyday life, when I am least expecting it, perhaps when I am quite, that I see and hear something I personally consider extraordinary, it jolts my senses and I have linger. I don't necessarily want to make sense of it intellectually, but to capture its essence. These things I come across can come at any time, from hearing a piece of music to reading one line of a poem, and it can only sometimes be categorised, like Carnival colours or the  imagery of Indian philosophy.

There is an internal thrill when you come upon some visual gem, at the very moment in time when it is being expressed, to me it is without equal. For example one morning I woke up and circles of bright golden light were dancing on the wall of my bedroom by sunlight playing on the angle of the the window shutters. I watched in stunned silence until the light changed and the image disappeared. I got up and the imagery went straight to my sketchbook.

Rows of worshippers beads at a Holy well, 
I could see this in stitch immediately!

Another day I was hanging washing on my terrace when some glass bricks caught my eye. Due to the activity on the other side of the glass bricks, the colour, shape and light all kept altering and stretching. I ran for my sketchbook to catch the ephemeral movement, its strange shapes and colour.

Shapes in Glass bricks

I think my mother may approve of my choice, but will my tutor?

Part 3: Creating Shapes & 3D Forms. Stage 2 and 3

Project 6: Manipulating Fabric

Stage 2 Developing Ideas

This month my creative drive has all the character traits of a terrier puppy. I have read the last rites to my sewing machine, the foundations of my home has been submerged in the equivalent of 3 swimming pools and my husband's building work has created chaos everywhere. Nevertheless creativity thrives under the oddest circumstances and I am keen to produce some work for this next project before flying to India to join Colouriscious on their textiles trip to Jaipur.

Fabric collages

Hessian, calico, muslin, and felt

Leather, suede and canvas

Coloured muslin, silk and organza

Canvas, hessian, recycled potatoe string bag and organza

Denim, felt, sequin waste, cotton, plastic and metal washers

 Stage 3: Applied Fabric Techniques

I sometimes find that learning something new is frustrating and rewarding in equal measure. Today I have been experimenting with shrinkage and tried 4 slightly different techniques using a stamped calico from my last assignment.

1. Unwashed muslin stitched onto stamped calico

2. A lighter weight muslin stitched onto calico with Avalon Plus water-soluble fabric sandwiched between the two.

3. Stamped calico stitched with felt

4. Light weight muslin stitched into calico with Tyvek sandwiched in the middle.

When the stitching was complete I used a hot iron on all samples and noted the interesting effects.

My favourite images of Lanzarote

Lanzarote, a set on Flickr.

Favourite images of my island home