Month: April 2019

Ex1.2 Personal experience – outcome

I chose to use a stick as a representation of measurement of the journey. It reflects the colour banded way posts of the valley walk, a totemic staff.

The wrappings represent stages of the journey. Even surburban houses, historic Tudor buildings, a little touch of industrial building and then the slow wilding of the route up the valley, branching off to the waterfall wildness. I attached and wrapped wire for the return journey through the woods. The twig and wire are the same shape as the route on the os map.

I experimented slightly with using dyed ripped squares of cotton voile to represent the ruggedness of the valley. My moody lifted as I got higher from the valley floor so the fabric is lighter. The squares are not even like a map but wild and untamed.

Does it answer what is being asked of you? how can you develop your ideas ? What are you trying to achieve in your samples/ art ? have you achieved it? if not why? how can you revisit the work to improve.

I&P 1.2 personal experience

Adventuring is one of my favourite things. Bag packed, takes me back to childhood when I would often fill a bag with essentials – paper, pencils, novel, sweets – and retire to the willow tree or the garage roof for some peace.

It was in this spirit that I set out to discover. I tried not to plan ahead too much (but took sweets) this , with hindsight not planning can be both a benefit and a hindrance.

I thought to wander and collect along the way to where I wasn’t deliberately aiming to see where I got too. However I was not inspired to hang around the quiet home road and as walked through the late 60’s surburban street , moving towards the high street, passing a Tudor house I felt drawn back in time and moved inevitably towards the call off the hills.

In a couple of hours I covered several millennia.

Lesson 1 – it’s all very well taking a range of media and papers but stopping to remove from my rucksack was a pain. Particularly in the manufactured environment I found my phone camera and a5 sketchbook were all I used for the first part of the journey. I made more effort to stop at chosen points that caught my eye in the valley.

Lesson 2 – on returning from the walk I realised that many of my ideas for recording were time or distance based, neither of which I measured. I’m interested in sampling from specific points on a journey – this could be time, distance, height, at every bird call, every yellow , or purple. I could record at every footprint – the benefit of this would be to act as a filter for collecting. A hinderance would , I can imagine selecting a filter would be a difficult decision for my rambling mind.

Lesson 3 – if I know that I may want to collate sketches and gatherings , it would be best to use loose leaves of paper – I photocopied pencil sketches rather than rip them out of a5 sketch book and this does not give a satisfactory result.

I embraced the idea of collecting sounds , making marks in my notebook of bird sounds and water running, and captured video clips of water falling and the accompanying sounds, loved this but have yet to edit them together.

There is a predominance of grey in my photograph of the narrative of my journey, most of my sketches and mark making were black media on white paper.

The collective words/phrases that I could use to describe groupings are:

Fissures, timeworn/weathered, cloaked by nature, layers, patterns in nature, linear forms, borders/boundaries, surface,

Background colours of nature, a myriad of greys and browns, none uniform but mottled or reflecting – no smooth flat panels of colour. Pops of colour caught my eye, Berry red, moss, emerald, ochre, many shades of green.

1.1 Identity and labels – A new piece of work

An analysis of my new piece of work. Looking south. Based on the landscape view from my kitchen window. I have started a sketchbook that I can leave on my table with the intention of becoming more free with sketching. I’m not at all pleased with my first sketches but it has meant that I have observed the changing light and colours of the trees, currently it is a little stand of larches turning golden that are catching my eye,as we fall towards winter.

The composition of the hill sloping downwards and the sun( or blood moon) low and heading west, half and half sky and land – a balance of the seasons.

Back lit – letting the light in

Materials Church Stretton is virtually litter free, which is a great joy to me. I have previously worked quite a lot with found objects . Inspired by Richard Rauschenberg’s walks around a city block to gather materials for his collage/assemblage/painting pieces. As I walked around my new neighbourhood I found an orange rimmed clear plastic lid that appears to be from a disposable cup, on the way back I fished a bit of builders plastic waste from a skip.

Slim pickings – rare treasure. I used very thin plywood for the joining exercises in MMT and have a little left. I selected it for this piece for the stiffness, the wood grain – like contours in the landscape, and its direct representation of the wooded slope.

Cotton perle thread is strong and has enough volume to be visually obvious without being too bulky to obscure the holes in themplywood.

The slope of the hill has become a mass of autumn browns, dead bracken, tree bark and dried heathers . Apart from a stand of larch, mostly green, turning to gold.

Nicholas Hlobo uses this slip stitch as a joining technique . By cutting out a stand of individual larch trees and using slip stitch to rejoin them, I have created a block that is slightly larger than the original hole, I think that the resulting corrugation gives movement and focus. The cast shadows gives visual interest. The shadows move with the moving light – like the turning of the day.

Similarly the cup cover – late sun or blood moon? Can cast shadows across the sky and depending on viewpoint can appear in different stages of fullness.

Viewing the constantly changing landscape of the distant hill from the bottom of my kitchen window I have observed how the sky folds behind the skyline, a line of silver that seems neither land or sky, the stitches are angled towards the west, encouraging the passage of the moon rather than hindering it.

I have really enjoyed the impulsiveness of this piece of work. I didn’t overthink it or seem to plan it too much. Material selection was a little serendipitous and a little of what was close to hand.

This shows me the value of focussed research and the critical reflection process

1.1 Identity and Labels – Analysis of my own work

Analysis of my own work – with regard to identifying a crossing of boundaries between disciplines.

It is already becoming clearer to me from the first part of this exercise that the boundaries between disciplines are movable and faint.

I loved the MMT course and most of the work produced crossed some boundaries that took it out of the purely textile realm.

Hatchlings which was my final piece is photographed here as a temporary instillation on an outcrop of rock that I can see far in the distance from my window. I used textile processes to experiment with surface and colour, casting to produce the forms, the twigs were gathered on the walk to the rock and loosely woven into a nest. Egg like, though they can’t hatch , inspiration that formed ideas was taken from the landscape ‘hatching’in my mind. It felt a risk to submit as my final piece , It felt as though I may be crossing a boundary to far, risk taking , it was a conscious decision to pursue the idea as it was so strong in my mind. Returning to the place of conception gave me a profound sense of completion.

I experimented with stitching textiles together to form a surface for casting and was really pleased with the resulting textures, then I broke it! Stitching it back together with wire gave it a more sculptural feel, I was pleased with the effect of using a hard material to stitch the hard surface of the resin. The back of the piece I find more interesting than the cast surface, I like the abstract surface , the intersection of lines and the green ink contrasting with the blue fishing line. The design on the front was based on the chalk cliffs, the reverse speaks of the chalk seabed.

I have mended this rock by using stitch, because the blanket stitch has not penetrated the stone it is as though the stone is wrapped in a blanket of air. It has an air of Japanese Kintsugi about it. Elevating found stone to sculpture using a textile technique, rather than chiselling or taking away material it is more of an additive process. It encourages reflection on the permanence of our natural world.

making this was an interesting process, I saw the rock broken on a path and was immediately drawn to mend it. Wrapping randomly didn’t feel quite the right approach so I considered a stitch that would work and naturally fell upon blanket stitch. This was an impulsive act rather than planned. A response to the landscape. Land art, sculpture, textile.

The task to join edges was fascinating and I indulged my need to peel fruit in one strand and reassembling it by stitching it back together, i then found some leaves and wondered how many segments would make a sphere, combining paper segments with a spiral stitched join completed this trio which I consider to be textile pieces. I then joined 6 squares to make a cubes using pine needles threaded diagonally, I would consider this piece more of a sculpture. It seems further removed from a textile piece.