Feedback - Assignment 4 - with my reflections

My first comment - on assignment 4

For this feedback review I will comment in a different colour throughout my tutor's text. This is to respond to the specific points. On the whole she has provided positive feedback, so I am satisfied, but occasionally I have been surprised at some omissions, and I will mention these here and there.

[Tutor's] Overall Comments

Lorna in general this is competent body of work where you have developed your abilities and understanding of textiles.  All the samples you have sent me have been made with care and attention to detail.  There is a pleasing use of colour and texture in your weave pieces.  The work could be better organised with more labeling that includes your name student number and which assignment the work belongs to.  This will help enormously at assessment.  Your learning log is organised, it includes both your work and any research you have done.

 

LG: this is quite good commentary and I am happy with this; the note about the lack of labelling does not worry me, I will be labelling up everything for the assessment.

Assessment potential

I understand your aim is to go for the Textiles Degree and that you plan to submit your work for assessment at the end of this course. From the work you have shown in this assignment, providing you commit yourself to the course, I believe you have the potential to succeed at assessment.  In order to meet all the assessment criteria, there are certain areas you will need to focus on, which I will outline in my feedback.   

This is a standard comment that seems to be included in all feedback

Feedback on assignment

Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Quality of Outcome, Demonstration of Creativity

I think from your learning log you have not sent me all the work from assignment 4.  I suggest that you are clear with your tutor about what you have sent and what you may have left out.  This helps in making informed judgments and giving the appropriate feedback.

[LG: not sure why says this here - I had sent her an email prior to submission saying I would not be sending two items that did not fit in the box with the rest of the work, and she had said that was OK in a reply email.]

The sample work you have sent has been made to a high standard of craftsmanship.  There is consideration to colour and texture.  You have used some interesting materials in some of the weaves including the one with the central blue square.   There is evidence that you are skilled and conscious of the quality of your outcomes.  What I suggest you need to work on is your creativity.  Your blurry photographs are really interesting.  They are energetic in limited but pleasing colour palettes.  Here I feel I am getting a taste of something that stimulates and excites you that is quite individual.  But I feel you are struggling to express this in your drawings and textile work.  To be honest this is the tricky bit but it is also when you get it right the part that will get you a good degree. 

 

LG: This good feedback, I am glad she thinks my work has some technical quality, I try to work with quality in mind (up to a point though, especially in machine embroidery) - but then I have woven for a bit. I have enjoyed doing the photography and I agree that they could be worked up, what is not said here is that I printed out some of these pictures, and I am planning to work up these more in my workbook on trees (she would not have been able to see these plans, they are still in my head).

She is also partially right about the creativity element, I occasionally think about interpretation of design, it is not easy, and I will work on this more for assignment 5. However, I am also a bit concerned about what she means with 'creativity'. As she has not mentioned my colour matching elements, and as the course handbook allowed for free design on the loom I am surprised that the texture samples are not referenced here, although she does go on to mention the green sample and its links to the leaf photographs:

You are some way there, for example in your sketchbook there is a loose drawing of a photograph of what looks like peeling paint.  You have used a mixture of media to express the hard lines of the cracked paint and the soft rust colours.  This sort of drawing functions really well as inspiration for textile work.  I suggest you explore the blurry photos in the same way.  Using different media and ways of adding them to the paper to create what you see.  When I say different ways of adding the media to the paper I mean how you use the tool (pencil, paint brush, finger).  This could be by pressing down hard or lightly, moving quickly or slowly, filling your brush with paint or keeping it dry.  Repeat drawings of the same image but in different mediums or style – this will help to develop your skill but also find the best way of drawing a particular image.  For more information about your drawing please refer to the feedback on Foundations in Textiles: Sketchbook assignment.

LG: yes, I agree with all of this, that will be my next steps for assignment 5, as well as more photography now we are entering a darker, autumnal season

You are also some way there with the green weave; it has the abstract feel of the blurry photographs.  There is movement, texture and highlights of colour that balance nicely in the space.  I suggest you continue to explore the visual world through photography, drawing and sample making.  Starting with the photo that you explore through drawing and mark making which leads to textile sampling.  Documenting the journey in your learning log.

 
LG: so, overall I am satisfied that I can build on my learning from assignment 4.
Again surprisingly, she has not mentioned any of the colour work and samples in project 8. Not that I mind, this was preparatory work for the wider project 9 work. Neither has she mentioned anything about courses I have undertaken, I am not sure what to make of this.

It would be good if there could be some sort of debate about what 'creativity' means. I believe that the making process itself is creative, I think what the tutor is trying to get at here is the actual designing and 'artistic' process which of course I am still a novice at.

Learning Logs or Blogs/Critical essays/Research Material

Context, reflective thinking, critical thinking, analysis  

Your learning log is easy to navigate and articulate.  However I suggest you include less surplus information.  For example

“We had a day out in Chichester recently. I had been promoting this to my husband for some time now, as soon I will be travelling to near there quite a bit, so before the journey becomes commonplace, I thought it would be good to do it for pleasure. And there are antique shops there, which we both like visiting...”

Concentrate on the artwork you saw and what you thought of it.  For example why were the St Ives paintings dull?  Was it the colour, texture, form, etc.?  You ought to be analysing the work so that you can learn something from it.   When looking at an artwork spend some time looking at it – several minutes.  Think about what you see, the materials used, the composition and how the artist has achieved their outcome. 

I didn’t realize there was a Marc Chagall stain glass window in Chichester.  What was it like?  Did it still have the dream like qualities of his paintings?  Did his strong use of colour work well in the window?  Was there anything you learnt from the window that you could bring to your own creativity?

 

LG: Hmm, I have to admit that I was quite tired after the Chichester visit, so did not want to spend much time writing in detail about the visit. In the blog I had separately included an object analysis of a brooch and a short analysis of woven obi, but these have not attracted any commentary. They were ways for me to practice short object analysis, but were not expected by the course book - I wonder whether the learning log should only be about the required learning material, or how far one can move beyond it?

Your reflections of your own work when prompted by the questions in the course material are thorough and enlightening.  You could do with examining your work more closely in the other areas of your learning log.  Start with description – materials, techniques, composition and then (this is the important bit) go on to discuss how well these elements work together.  Are there some parts of a sample or a drawing that are stronger than others?  What would you change or develop?  I also suggest you write in your learning log more regularly, very time you have worked on something even if it isn’t finished or you are not that happy with.  

Assignment 5 work on trees is a nice big topic to choose.  I suggest you use the feedback from this and the sketchbook assignment to improve your drawing and the creativity in your sample making.  Try not to be in a rush to make the final piece.  At assessment we will be looking at how you use your research, drawing and sample making to come up with an idea for the final textile sample.

LG: OK - the note about writing more commentary has been made before. Writing the learning log takes a long time, and writing more reflective thoughts is going to be more time consuming, when I am also going to be drawing more. I work full time, I am frequently tired when I get home from work, soon I will be doing some voluntary work which will be a stretch, so I reserve judgement on whether I can manage this additional work. This is about balancing my energy resource with time and demand of the course (goodness me how that sounded like something I sometimes say at work!).

Suggested reading/viewing

Context

I recommend Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon.  This small book is packed with easily digestible information about how to do research and act upon it. 

Drawn to Stitch: line, drawing and mark making in textile art by Gwen Hedley and Mark-making in Textile Art by Helen Parrott.  These are both excellent publications with tips and inspiration on how to use drawing in your textiles. 

 Pointers for the next assignment

• Include a contents list and labeling
• Invest some time in improving your drawing skills
• Use your drawings to come up with textiles sample ideas
• Analyse the work of others
• Reflect on your drawings and samples
• Reflect on this feedback form in your learning log

Well done, Lorna I look forward to your next assignment.

LG final comment
So, a reasonable feedback and good advice for next steps, thank you to my tutor for these comments.

The recommended reading is fair, I have the Hedley and Kleon books already, so will re-visit these, and look at the Parrott. I will try to get in more observational drawing, continue to look at art and design through visits, do courses and continue to write about it on the blog. How much more writing I can do is a question to be addressed when I get to it, maybe it is more about saying the right things at key points, rather than to just add more narrative with little meaning.

Japanese 'tapestry'

This post will be a very brief foray into a weaving technique called tsuzure which they use in Japan. It is a kind of tapestry technique, although some items I have that is made in this way seem to have long floating wefts on the reverse, rather than the discontinuous weft sections seen in a western tapestry. That is not to say they do not weave like that as well, my first piece of tsuzure woven fabric was made in this way.

Here's an example of an obi woven in this way

 

And another in an abstract floral design

 

 

So, the pieces I have that are made in tsuzure technique are all obis. An obi is the belt Japanese women tie around their waists over the kimono. The weave makes the obi a quite solid fabric, and as you can see the woven image is typically woven in one end of the obi across the part that will be visible after being folded appropriately. At the further end there are perhaps two smaller facing woven images, across the part that is folded in half.

There are excellent videos on Youtube that shows how obi are mounted and folded in dressing in a traditional Japanese way. I have selected one on how to tie a Nagoya obi, which you can watch here. And here's another showing how to tie a fukuro obi.

The obi is in a very fine silk weave, and the long sections of the obi that do not have a tapestry section are plain woven. The obi shows signs of having been used, as there are folds from where it has been tied and folded across the wearer. The pattern section of the obi can be of many different motifs - traditional, abstract, floral, figurative, in fact any symbol or design that might have inspired the weaver. Youtube also has a very good short film of a weaver demonstrating tsuzure weaving, which shows an elderly man at a horizontal loom, that looks a bit like a cloth weaving loom, and he uses small bobbins containing a very fine silk yarn.

The Japanese weaving industry has suffered a decline in the later twentieth century, and in order to retain some of the skills there is an educational area within the traditional textile manufacturing area Nishijn in Kyoto that can be visited to see how weavers and fabric designers work. I haven't personally visited this place, although I would like to, there is something a bit sad about a once-glorious textile art now being mainly visible as a tourist spectacle. The industry has traditionally been organised around small family weaver makers working on obi and other precious textiles that are supplied to centralised manufacturers (Hareven, 2003). Hareven's book is an anthropological study of the weavers of traditional Japanese textiles rather than a book on the textiles themselves. It is a vehicle for the voices of the small weaver families to give them the space to talk about their work and describe how their lives have been shaped by their trade and skill.

I am always in awe at how wonderfully simple, but always so exactly right, Japanese packaging is. The people who sent me the obi use a postal bag made of brown paper, in which the obi is either rolled or folded into a neatly folded piece of bubble wrap.

And this time there was an additional piece of packaging which consisted of large sheets of white paper, a couple of sheet were folded into a bag which was in turn placed into another folded container. The sections were stuck together with smaller triangular pieces. Here are some pictures which I hope show this construction:

Not sure this shows how the sections were attached, but this is where the pieces join:

Tex 1 - Project 9 and 10: final sample as pre-work

You may already have seen pictures of my small pre-sample for the final sample in
project 9.

 

I have decided not to pursue the idea of the surface of an opalescent shell, as this would just be a disappointment as the work would be a bit too much about the yarn in the weave and less about representing the shell. I still think I want to use the soumak technique of increasing the weft to make a surface relief. And so, since my recent focus has been on trees, and the final piece is in sight, I will use this sample to work through greens, i.e. look at how the undulating surface might suggest moving leaves, the bulk of bark or just plain green surfaces of light and colour, suggesting the essence of light passing through leaves.

 

This means I can work more freely, not be worried about whether I can grasp the smoothness of surfaces, but work with the feeling of the three and nature instead. That is such a relief, and much more the way I work in any case.

 

In preparation I dyed some cottons and linens in a green, which included the warp yarn:

 

 

The colours are much stronger than seen here, but you can see that the sisal took the dye very well. It is unlikely though, that I will use the sisal yarn in the tapestry.

 

I used this picture as my reference:

 

And here's the work in progress. The bottom section is a flat eave with a mixture of eccentric and plain weave where I started to blend various greens, browns and sandy coloured yarns - both handspun and commercial. The yarns are almost exclusively wool, although later I added linen and a cotton ribbon yarn. Again it is hard to see the green warp, but I quite like the green warp thread. The one thing to notice compositionally in this picture, is how straight the line that indicates the start of the soumak section is. You will see later, that I tried to soften this, as it was a bit too diagonal and not quite 'organic' enough for any suggestion of leaves.

 

A close-up of the soumak in progress. At this stage I was working with 8-9 strands of sometimes quite thick weft threads.

 

A detail to show the first transition from the plain weave to the soumak. The first line of soumak was done pretty systematically, carrying the weft over just two warps each time. After that I increased the warp numbers over which the weft was carried up to 4 or 5, and these jumps were more random.

 

The final sample is a bit bigger than I had originally foreseen, as the middle section of flat weave had not been part of the plan. That is OK though, as it helps bring out the relief in the two parts of soumak weave.

 

 

On this picture the sample has not yet been cut off the loom. And the colours are not as strong as in reality, so it looks a bit flat here.

 

I will list a few things I learned:

• That it is OK to freely play with blends for the sake of experimenting, but if I was aiming for true colour matching I would have had to test the blends against my picture source more carefully
• That I should probably have drawn circles for the blue areas which are more like squares standing on end
• That the soumak swallowed a lot of yarn when it got to the thicker sections - I was on 8-9 strands of weft of different thicknesses, and the weft actually needed some strong bulky yarns to get the density needed
• This technique was quite fast, I wove the whole sample in a day
• The top section of flat weave was done in the evening in front of the TV at low light. This was not helpful - I was tired and couldn't see the colours as well as I should for making judgements and choices of wefts, although adding some single strands of contrasting weft was important and has left a livelier effect than had they not been added

The back of the soumak section looks great, and if I could find a way of weaving in the weft ends I would try to work to reveal the back as well:

 

 

On the back the areas where the weft has been looped around the warp there is a knotted effect, and the warp stands proud from the soumak surface on the front and gives this visible vertical effect. I like this effect on the reverse very much.

 

Tex1 Project 9 - samples in tapestry weave

The tapestry section sets out firstly to teach us basic techniques, and secondly to explore different materials experimentally within the tapestry language. I have done a little tapestry weaving before, so I have tried to get through the first sample quickly, using the materials I had at hand, rather than working too hard a colour choices etc.

First techniques-based sample in progress:

 

I have not designed anything onto the warp, but am developing a sort of system on the hoof, using yarns that are at hand. This picture shows some new things I have already learned such as eccentric weft and variations on pick and pick, but I also wanted to test the white linen as a warp - this is strung double for strength, but it is not of much value with the yarns I have used here; what I mean is, it is not visible and the linen would be good to use in a piece where the warp could be shown. By creating a border I am practicing joining, which is looking good so far. I have joined the border on every three passes and this is just right for the thickness of the yarns being used. The other thing that is being tested here is the use of knitting yarn. Apart from the linens (there is a natural medium thick linen in soumak which is not visible in the picture) the wools are all fairly open spun, soft yarns. These are not usually good for tapestry as they lack the body of a robust weaving yarn (often the weight of the wool fibre will be higher), and I predict that the final piece will be a bit floppy. The other thing I am accidentally testing here is weaving without starting a row of knots. I was taught to use a row of knots as a foundation for a tapestry, but I was watching a film while I was warping up to start, and clean forgot to set the foundation straight. This will probably be a problem when I cut the sample off, we will need to see.

 

Further work on the techniques sample

 

Here you will see that I added another border after I had done the pick and pick, and the row of knotted dots. We are also asked to try out the ghiordes knot, which I learned as a rya knot when I was a child, using a ruler to ensure equal length of each tuft. In Denmark in the 1970s it was fairly popular to have a rya rug in the living room under your coffee table. We had one, and my friend's parents had one. They were usually in a geometric patterns, and you can now buy these as 'vintage' items. Back to the sample; I added the knots in the centre and decided to add into this another contrasting colour (wool dyed in onion skins) to create a bit of life in the sample. The knots are made of four strands of hand-spun wool, a fine blue cotton, first another space dyed wool, which I later replaced with a space dyed hand-spun silk. I like the knots very much (surprisingly as I do not care for hairy carpets and felt ambivalent about the rya rugs of the 1970s), but they work well here in contrast to the flat weave of the rest of the sample. Right now I am not sure how to finish these sections of knotting as I approach the last section of the sample.

 

 

 Here's the final sample

 

 

Overall it is a useful sample, it suggests a design that might become a rug - but then there is a direct line between the flat weave of tapestry and for example kilim rugs and knotted works, so probably not surprising. I still like the shaggy bit, it makes the surface interesting. The band at the bottom works in connection with the colours in the pile, and the bright hidden centre gives a sense of something to be revealed. There are also things to learn from this though. Compositionally I do not like the three borders where they meet in the top corners. They look too straight (a bit like op art) and of a different aesthetic to the lower sections which are more 'craftsy'. You can also see that the warps have spread and the piece is slightly pushed out towards the top half. This is likely to be because I used thicker rug yarns that may have expanded the spaces between the warps.

 

I made a diverting sample of needle woven yarns on an open weave onion bag

 

 

Running stitch is a bit like weaving, moving the needle up and down through the fabric. The yarns made the fabric more robust-feeling, and the browns to blues to greens all have affinities.

 

 

Samples using different materials as weft

 

After the techniques sample we are asked to create a sample using unusual materials. I made two samples to try different things out. I experimented with creating a paper yarn using narrow strips of tissue paper and spinning them on the spinning wool. These were then plied into a two ply. This paper yarn was then used in a  soumak line in the 'grey' sample.

 

 

The small ball of yarn on the right here is the home made paper yarn, to the left some plastic which is highly adhesive. This came off some new frames and is used to prevent damage to the frame in transit. It was not easy to weave, in fact it was a pain to weave through the cotton string warp.

Here's the sample using the plastic 'yarn', the paper yarn and I also used a ripped polyester scarf as well as a plasticky ribbon. Both sections were woven double, but the section right contained the outer seam of the scarf so it was a bit less dense as a weft than that on the left. This makes the 'beads' of the weft smaller and denser.

 

Next, the other sample, using natural fibre yarns, including nettle yarn woven in double floating wefts to show off the fibre better,  elastic bands, sisal string, wool, cotton, linen and a cotton tubular knit yarn lain in as a floating weft with the hand-spun white wool-mohair towards the top. The final weft was a coarse un-dyed linen. At least these samples allowed for the warp to show. the one above used a cotton wrapping string, the bottom one used the double linen used before. Both warps were quite hard on the fingers but they look quite good.

 

 

The back of the sample shows how I have finished the sample, by weaving in the warp threads. This was a technique I learned from Fiona Hutchison, the Scottish tapestry weaver, and which is described in Joanne Soroka's book (2011). This way of finishing makes a neat edge and allows for the sample to stand proud with no distracting knots, frills or any other loose ends.

 

I thought I might also manipulate a picture of the weave to create something separate and unique from the structure

As you will see, there is a something suggestive of shells in the curves of this picture, and that points to the final sample I have been pondering for a while.

Final sample

I have thought quite a bit about the final sample, as I have for a while wanted to try out a technique in soumak that I explored in a class under the tapestry weaver, William Jefferies, a couple of years ago. At the time I made a small sample, but I have often thought that it might be used in different ways for different types of expressing a particular form, and in various scales. For a first 'proper' sample in the technique I wanted to use the lines and shapes of shells. I know that shells are a favourite source of designs for textile people, and I think that this might be because they have simple organic shapes that are harmonious in their proportions and they are useful for repeats as well as single shapes. Anni Albers (1965) used shells as an example of a design source in her book on weaving design, and this might also have spurred others on to looking at shells in their work.

In any case, the final sample is unlikely to look like shells, but will contain some essential elements of the shell texture. In preparation I have spun some silk and plyed it with wool. Well, at least some was wool, Wensleydale wool, which I love for its hairiness, its sheen and its smoothness, but I also had some packs of a mixture of alpaca, nylon and merino fibre, so that was also part of the ply in some of the yarns.

Here are some of the yarns I spun - the bottom one is unlikely to be used in the shell sample as it contains a purple silk ply that contrasts too harshly with the smoother yarns, and shells have essentially very smooth surfaces. The soumak technique, as it will be applied in the sample, will allow for the yarn to be seen in its substance, so that the plyes should be visible and the shininess of the silk be apparent to evoke the pearly surface of the shell. I have also not decided what the colour will be of this, I may play with Paintshop Pro and see what colours can be derived from the cream notes in the shells.

 

 

A couple of shells I have looked at came from some strange spoon type objects left by my grandmother. They are quite large and very smooth. The handles have been removed as they were broken and unsightly. What is not so clear on the pictures is that one shell is very concave, while the other is shallow. The technique I will use will work on the relief of the surface of the tapestry, so the curve of the shell will be represented in an undulation of the surface of the piece.

 

These last two shell pictures show the softness of the lines in the shell surface. There are lines running along the shape of the shell in two directions - from the place where the shell would have been attached to its counter part out towards the peripheral edge, and a set of soft curving lines following the lines of the shell's roundness.

 

As you can see the shells have a warm orangey creamy colouring on their outer sides, and on the inside a whiter more grey tone. In the concave shell there are iridescent greens and pinks. The wool-silk yarns are naturally cream-white so perhaps I should not manipulate the colour of these, but this is something I need to think further about as I work with the photos of the shells some more. I find that I am not usually good at staying within a monochrome range and almost always end up adding colour in some way.

Oh dear, I made a sample to test the materials in the construction of the shell sample and have decided I no longer want to make it! The delicate sense of the shell's surface is not at all captured in the weave - this is probably due to the tightness of the ply in my spinning as well as some of the wools I added to the blends. In any case I will not do a shell design for the final sample. The final sample will have its own entry in  a separate post.

 

The sample in preparation for the final sample. Some plain weaves, eccentric wefts and clusters of soumak increasing in bulk to create an undulating surface. The intention was that the relief effect would be created in two sections, leaning to left and right, but I no longer think that the soumak properly shows off the silk/wool yarn I spun. In fact, the top part of the sample is better, a section with some floating wefts of the silk-wool yarn and some single lines of coloured yarn. But this is not enough to sustain the last sample, I wanted it to be the relief effect that was the focus, so I will do this, but choose greens instead and consider it as pre-work for my final assignment in project 10.

 

 

Here are a couple of pictures of the  piece at different angles to try to show the relief of the lower half.

Here the starter row of knots can be seen in more detail.

 Reference

Albers, Anni, On Weaving, Wesleyan University Press, 1965
Soroka, Joanne, Tapestry Weaving: Design and Technique, The Crowood Press Ltd, 2011 

Tex 1 Assignment 4 Project 8 - reflections on constructed samples

This project ends with some questions on  the process and materials of the project:

Q  Did you enjoy inventing constructed surfaces? Were you surprised at the results? Can you see a connection between your choice of materials and the types of structures you made – regular, irregular, small or large scale? Which samples worked best – and why?

A  These exercises were kind of interesting and challenging at the same time. I knit a lot, following patterns, and so do not usually ‘invent’ structures of my own, unless I do a bit of tapestry weaving or look a bit creatively at knit. That means that this use of yarn to freely assemble something into a synthesis to become a finished object can be difficult to think through. But I am fairly happy with the samples. I have also been studying the work of sculptural fibre artists and see that Ed Rossbach’s basket woven work is described as ‘improvisational’. Maybe that is what this work is all about – and I was working along on my woven/wrapped grid, looking at it occasionally when I saw a photograph of a Rossbach basket in a catalogue I have on mid-century American crafts (Museum of Arts and Design (2011)) where he seems to have been weaving open sections developed from any direction the ‘warp’ willows might fall in his construction, and there were quite a few coincidences in the way my own work was developing.

During the making of the samples (and especially these constructed ones) the work grows on you, and by looking at them over a longish period you start to see patterns and dimensions which can be built on. And yes, materials are crucial in this – whether they are shiny or matt, solid and dense, heavy or light. I have been looking at Eve Hesse’s work recently and am in two minds about it, however what is clear is that her focus seems to have been on process and materials and that she thought quite hard about the relationships between them. The fibre artists working around that time (1960s) also seem to have been focusing on structure and how this inter-related with materials, often on a very large scale.

So in a very small way I have quite enjoyed these exercises and got unusual results out of it. My husband joked that my ‘shield’ sample was a lacrosse racket, and that is the type of response you might expect from an untraditional piece, there is a search for something familiar in the unfamiliar; but I think the robust edges of that piece in contrast to the finer threads and small areas of woven patches worked quite well in the end.

The other grid piece is developing well. It is difficult to decide at what angle it will eventually look its best. It is being woven from various sides, and you get used to looking at it from one side more than another during making. As I mentioned in a different area, I enjoy natural materials, they have a great feel in the hand, I understand more about how they respond to processes (weaving, knotting, hanging, draping and so on), and they work well with wooden frames, and independent free-standing-hanging pieces such as the low relief samples in this project.

Hard materials such as thicker linens and sisal can be used in bigger pieces. There is much potential in these materials and they can be wrapped or hung with finer more shiny materials to create interest. If there is one think I find difficult in working in this sort of free and spontaneously constructive way it is getting a feel for when something is finished. I mean really finished, not almost, or overly finished and I am not sure when that point of balance comes. I prefer to work on something until I tire of it.  With that statement I don’t mean getting bored with it, but more working on it until there is a sense of exhausting a certain stage and then putting it somewhere where it can be looked at over time until a new dimension becomes obvious and needs to be fulfilled.

Q How accurate were you in matching all the colours in your postcard: with paints?

I liked the colour matching exercise. Richter’s paintings are complex and have many, many different colours in them in different proportions, but I had a go, and found my final analyses useful. I used gouache and other water based media. Some of these mixes came out well, and overall I think gouache was probably the better media.

Q with yarns/other material?

In any case there were strong colour themes in both pictures, green in one, blue in the other. I have quite a large yarn collection so could identify some good likenesses to the colours in the pictures. The charity shop is always a good source for embroidery yarns and crewel wools, and these wools come in all manner of colours, and I have collected a fair few bundles for weaving. What is equally important I guess is the quality of the yarn, alongside the colour, as a shiny, smooth yarn casts light differently from a matt one. This is important in textile design where the characteristics of the materials is one of the key factors I how the work will look depending on the techniques of making.

Tex 1 Assignment 4 - Research point – the textile artist

This exercise asks for a consideration of the textile artist in comparison to designers and craftspeople; it then goes on to look at a couple of textile artists whose work we admire or find inspiring.

In the previous research points we were asked to look at the designer-maker, the crafts person and textile design originating at the hands of designers for commercial textiles. Where textiles are part of a crafts process the maker is integral to the process, working with a high degree of skill when struggling with their chosen materials. There is a strong focus on process and the materiality of the textile – and I would suggest that the line between craft and art is a fine one and probably quite fluid, as it is a matter of emphasis – whether on the making process or on the final outcome.

Both these stand in contrast to a designer who is hired by a commercial organisation to develop textile ‘products’. This designer may give their name to an item, or they are anonymous, as the central brand identity is determined by the organisation they work for. The central aim is commercial production for a consumer market, and so production is potentially of a large volume of stuff, whilst for artists and craft people the object is unique or made in small batches, while the object is displayed in a gallery or high end shop as a rarefied object for a discerning buyer. The object made within the crafts and/or arts world is part of a positional economy of connoisseurs, galleries, museums, art critics and auction houses, which the mass produced consumer item only becomes part of this once it has gained an ‘aura’ from age or from retrospectively applied ‘names’ of makers.

It is probably not always that clear cut – artists such as Sheila Hicks started out as an artist (paintings), but was also a designer-developer of fabrics for companies such as Knoll (Simon (2011)). Her work was bought by corporate customers for their interiors, and her installation work inspired interior designers to create ‘environments’ for displaying goods. She has a great sense of material and colour, and technique is central to the expression. Does that then make her a crafts person or is her work art?

I am aware that the fibre art movement of the 1960s that Sheila Hicks was part of is seeing a bit of a revival with a retrospective of Hicks' work in 2011, major exhibitions of fibre sculpture and tapestry in the US and France (Porter et al (2014), Bellu et al (2013)). The artists who worked in this area were in many cases fine artists who had trained at art college. Some of them, for example Hicks, Magdalena Abakanowitz, Kay Sekimachi and Lenore Tawney subsequently learned weaving in workshops of cloth or tapestry weavers, and then, when key books on ancient techniques where published, they explored new ways of looking at ancient textile techniques using material experimentally and to a scale that I am sure would not have been explored much before.
 
The definition of an artist as someone concerned with concepts and 'grand ideas' is probably not completely accurate. Crafts people moving into the arts arena work with ideas, but using their technical skill and expertise to express this, whilst artists may have started in one area and then moved into another, such as textiles, but then they over time gain the skill and understanding needed for their chosen area. And some go as far as giving their work conceptual titles, which I sometimes read with some scepticism. Why suggest all manner of poetic allusions if what we are seeing is a beautiful piece of weaving? It is perfectly valid, I believe, to produce the textile in its own right and display it as a textile object, without having to legitimise it within the institutional discourses of art critics, galleries and art history and theory that carry such weight. The existence of the object does not necessarily become more meaningful by being placed within a language of theoretical constructs, but then there has for some time been a phenomenological strand in art theory that seems to place these objects within an 'otherworldly' experiential space.
 
Anyway, back to the two artists I will discuss here - I have chosen to look at the work of a modernist artist, Cornelia Forster (1906-1990), a relatively unexamined painter, print maker and tapestry artist who learned her weaving in the French tradition, and Sheila Hicks (b.1934), who comes out of the US based fine art sphere. Both use colour as an expressive medium, both use textile media, but one was not a widely know artist, and the other has had a long and continuing art career with a prominent profile in the art and textile world. 

Cornelia Forster worked in various media, some of her work being quite interesting, some pieces looks a bit derivative to me, but it is interesting for its roots in French-Swiss Modernism, and she worked in various styles and techniques, including surrealism, abstraction, painting, drawing and sculptural abstraction. What I find interesting in her tapestries is that firstly, from an art historical perspective she worked early on in the style of French work, close to the work of Jean Lurcat, who played a key role in the revival of the French tapestry industry during the mid 20th century. Her work follows the tradition of wall-hung works, woven tapestries in the Aubusson technique. What dominates the web-site collection of her work linked here, are tapestries in colour harmonies following pallets of soft pastels for example in her flower compositions, but she also had abstract pieces woven into tapestries. Colour in the decorative flower tapestries is used very sensitively. The works look decorative and do not challenge any perceived notions of this medium, which may have something to do with her commissions, but they are woven to a high degree of skill and there is a keen sense of the tradition of the tapestry medium, with a strong  mid-20th century aesthetic. Most of her tapestries have designs that cover the whole surface of the work, there is a lot of detail in some, and the designs are mainly vertical, whether the works are landscape or portrait. What I like about these works is their fairy tale quality. There is something narrative about some of them, figures appear in dense flowery jungles, or the spectator can dream themselves into fantasy jungles of vegetation.

I have to admit now, that there are very many good narrative tapestry artists to choose from, and that I chose Cornelia Forster because she is not well known and I think she should be more widely recognised, and secondly because I find her narrative representation interesting and suggestive, but know that this is not my own style. Hence I find the aesthetic attractive because it gives me something that I couldn't create myself. I see aesthetic affinities in Michael Hearld's illustrations and Klaus Haapaniemi's designs, and this is something that reading fairy tales evoke, the otherworldly, the mystical, the beautiful and sometimes the gruesome.

Now why would I then choose Sheila Hicks as my second choice, when her work is fully abstracted? Well, I got very excited about the fibre art movement when I first bought the book by Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen, Beyond Craft: Art Fabric (1973). In it were photographs of these huge works in different techniques by a collection of textile artists, quite disparate, from different countries, but the ones that stood out where Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz. I had taught myself tapestry weaving 20 years before and here were works that I felt intuitively had informed the books I had been reading at that time.

Hicks' work was inspired by ancient pre-Columbian textile techniques. She improvised weavings on a small portable tapestry frame and had worked for industry as well as becoming an important exhibiting artist. Many of her works use wrapping techniques. She works on a large scale as well as her small miniature tapestries, but there was a sense of freshness to her work that may have looked at ancient techniques, but spoke with a contemporary language. Her sense of colour is interesting, sometimes she works with harmony, at other times with contrasts. Her work includes long strands of linen wrapped with smooth, lustrous silks, and more recently her work includes chunky wrapped cushiony bundles of fabric. She has also worked with embroidery and has used elastic bands, paper, shells and other unusual materials in her work.

Hicks has had a long career, and in 2011 she had a retrospective in the US. She works from a studio in Paris, and has several assistants to help. Not surprising really, she is not young but has been working since the 1950s, and she continues to exhibit. I read somewhere that she works very hard and her large body of work is there to show for it. I find her range tremendous, and from time to time look for examples of her miniatures on the web, and they seem to be exploratory inventions using fibre mainly in all manner of colours. So, although she often uses wrapping this technique provides openings for various ways of showing off the fibre. I am not always convinced by some of the names given to the pieces, I think they are strong in themselves, they are constructed structures, independent and complete things made of fine yarns. I also find other artists' work .from the same period (1960s) fascinating. The works in sisal and rope by Jagoda Buic, Abakanowicz and Aurelia Munos were to a scale and in forms that show real vision and substance of thought in making. They are about process and material and express something beyond themselves. I think these artists really understood fibre and what it could do and wanted to make significant statements about that. There is also much fine work coming from Japan, but due to space here I will just end by linking to fine pieces of string work that Toshiko Horiuchi Macadam made for children's playgrounds.

References

Bellu, Sylvie et al, Decorum, Paris: Flammarion, 2013

Constantine, Mildred and Larsen, Jack Lenor, Beyond Craft: Art Fabric, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1973

Porter, Jenelle and Adamson, Glenn, Fiber: Sculpture 1960-Present, Prestel, 2014

Simon, Joan et al, Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, Yale University Press, 2010