Another tapestry on the way

I am planning another small tapestry. This is going to be mostly black, but to create the 'life' of the piece I will be using a soft pastel bluey-green.

Here are some of the yarns I will be using (not the green on the right, that is for a the tree project):

 

And here's a sample in progress:

Not a terribly good picture, it lacks definition, but you can see I am working on blends and textures here. While I am working to finish the tree project this tapestry wil be on hold for a little while.

Tex 1 - Assignment 5 - Theme book continued

I have tried to keep the theme book going while I was working on the tapestries. It now has sections on rugs in interiors, examples of trees and landscape painting, and a bit of art work I have been working, including colour matching and mixing exercises. 

Here are some examples of the contents:

 

 On the theme of gothic architexture as vertical 'tree'-like structures

 

Photographs and colour mixing tests

 Preparation for the spring-inspired tapestry piece, photographs and colour mixing

 A couple of scribbled flowers

Another page of the book looking at trees growing in a churchyard

I have quite liked working in the book, and will probably continue having a theme book running alongside my other workbooks. The tree theme has not yet been exhausted and there is plenty more to do on it. However I am running out of time on this project so will be submitting a book that has not yet been fully filled.

The 3rd and final piece I am developing as part of assignment 5 is the book cover for the theme book. This is not really the final piece, but more an addition to the theme book. I have used some phorographs from a beech wood, and a sketch I drew up based on one of these:

And here is the project in progress; I have been laying out strips of opaque fabric over some transparent, shiny organza, laid onto a dyed blue base fabric:

I sewed some suggestions of leaves onto the base and have placed the brown 'trunks' over them. I am planning more of these leaf suggestions, however first I need to do something about the trunks, which have only just been attached using automatic stitching from my machine:

So, this is clearly work in progress, and needs a lot more work to it, I am just hoping that I get it done in time - my course is coming to and end in February! You can see some cotton base fabrics, a bit of furnishing fabric (tree trunks) and organza to reflect light. Hopefully this enables some subtle contrasts in matt and shiny to lie close together to add interest to the surface.

I am reasonably satisfied with the final book cover. It fits well, the embroidery is not too thick and its looks good enough:

In sewing the 'tree' elements and 'leaf' details the fabric pulled together in places. I had ironed on some vilene on the back, but did not use a frame and so there was a bit of unintentional 'pleating'. However in the end these creases along the width of the piece have worked well, as they add to the texture, add some shadow effects and three-dimensionality to the surface. As the thing scrunched up I had to attach a 'frame to add to the size of it, and used some dyed cotton in a colour I hadn't really liked. The brown fits in with the tree theme, so that also has worked reasonably.

I used a lot of different green coloured threads (8 or more) and a slightly lower number of browns and green for the tree trunks (6 or a few more), a couple of areas had loose silk and other threads scattered and attached with stitchery to suggest more dense foliage. I like the idea of using the stitching both as line and as mass colouring and I used this across the applied fabrics. The pictures don't show the work off properly, it looks pale in the bright light, but is actually quite rich and glowing from the colours and organzas. 

I have submitted the work now, two days before the deadline for final submission of the whole course, and thin the book cover probably took a bit longer to make than I expected.

The cover folded over the book is held together by two strands of machine stitched cord. Closed together like this the tree theme is obscurred a bit by the framing fabric. I still think the verticality of the trunk theme continues though.

Tex 1 Assignment 5 - Starting to weave the tapestries

Having had a longish break to undertake some study and exams for work I have started weaving a couple of final pieces for assignment 5. I had originally wanted to weave four pieces to make a small series suggesting trees changing through the seasons, but due to the delay and the slowness of the weaving process I have decided to make two pieces - one designed aorund the magnolia stellata in our garden, and the other an improvised green piece using a technique I learned, but have never woven.

This latter piece is an improvisation on the theme of green leaves and light flitting through leaves and branches in the breeze, as in this photograph:

In this image the greens are quite bright and yellow hues feature strongly, however my green yarns, homespun and commercial in wool and silk are not necessarily going to be of these shades, although some are.

Here are some of the yarns I have used, and as you can see, some are quite similar to those in the photographs, but others are softer and colder with blueish tinges:

I am now in the process of weaving this piece. The technique draws on a method that Fiona Hutchinson taught us on a summer school some years ago. She uses it to great effect, weaving very finely, inspired on the theme of sea and sky. I have chosen a slightly wider sett than she uses for her smaller pieces, and improvise choices of greens and browns, weaving both block colours and colour blends. The piece is woven in longlish strips with some attachments between each strip; and each strip is woven separately, so that I can work colours vertically and can choose blends and colours as I go along. I had planned this work for some time, and hopefully the final thing will evoke the movement of leaves in dappled light.

Here is the piece in progress on my Mirix loom - the pictures does not really represent the colours as they are in reality, they are more clean somehow, and the blueish hues suggested here are really green:

This piece is woven mainly in wools in the weft, some plied with silk on a warp of blue linen. I like dyed warps. Traditional tapestry weavers speak of weft-faced weave, as indicative of tapestry, but very good tapestries have been woven showing the warp, and a dyed warp can help in the finish of the piece. If it is of a certain colour it might add someting to the end result. The final piece will be quite a textured sample, with a three dimensional feel to it, so in order to make this a good size I need to weave quite a bit more than is seen here.

A bit about process and materials

As this piece is process driven and designed in the course of the making I thought I might add something about how this work has proceeded. When I weave I think a bit about what is happening with the work as it grows, what decisions I need to make and so on. One obvious thing to consider is the materials and how they work together. As each strip is made up of either a single thickish yarn or blends of different colours and thicknesses I have tried in most instances to create similar thicknesses across the piece. That has not always been possible and so occassionally, where strands have been thin, I have needed to adjust the weave by adding additional passes. It won't matter once the thing has been drawn together as will be clear later, but another issue was also how soft some yarns are. Tapestry yarns should ideally be firm and worsted spun to ensure they create clean beads on the surface of the woven fabric. A bead in a tapestry is the spot where the weft crosses the warp and is the visible dot of colour on the surface of the weave. Some weavers use this when they design photographic realist pieces where a bead is used as a pixel of colour in a digital image.

And yes, as a diversion, it is interesting to note that the language of a craft has its own terminology, for processes, ways of setting out the work in progress and each element of the weave. I have never really bothered with this type of language before as I was self-taught in the Danish language and so just got on with the process, but I guess that when you need to describe something accurately these terms become useful.  Anyway, on the softness of yarns: soft hairy yarns do not necessarily create clearly defined beads and may leave the surface as bit indistinct, and I am sure there will be areas like that on the final thing. 

This leads to the issue of whether a final piece should be designed using a single yarn type across the whole piece. In the past weaving workshops wove large tapestries to certain designs, and places like the workshops at Aubusson continue to weave in this way, creating tapestries that can be reproduced in small batches and so need to have consistency in yarns and colours. This means that careful planning of yarns and colour matching is necessary to enable reproduction. There is an excellent film on Youtube that demonstrates this: The Art of making a Tapestry. If you have more time I have gathered some films together on tapestry that may be of interest, check my Playlist out: Tapestry and more.

So, commercial tapestry studios and some professional weavers use particular yarns and manage their works by careful calculation of yarns and dyed batches. Although I do buy some new yarns, rovings for spinning and do dye some of these, the bulk of my yarn store is made up of oddments from other people's stashes when they have had clear-outs, charity shop purchases and whatever offers I find on e-Bay. The world is already full of stuff, of perfection and reproducability and I think that collecting discards, secondhand and left-overs from other people's projects is probably a solution I would prefer to work towards. This allows me to feel that I contribute a bit towards sustainability of the environment and a way of working that weighs re-cycling and re-use with consumption of the new and mass-produced. Work created through improvised, yet reflective making, considering the use of the already-extant and not necessarily using materials purposefully designed for a project makes more sense in a world full of readily available stuff that often ends up on a fire or in a landfill (consider the waste of fleeces that have become of so little worth that farmers just burn them if they are not sold).

Using space-dyed yarns

Some of the yarns I have are space dyed (purchases from stash clearances) and I have been wondering how this would work in tapestry. One book I read said one should not use space-dyed yarns as the colours go grey and muddy when woven, and it recommended using only pure colours, possibly in blends. But in weaving narrow strips or short lengths, the space-dyed yarns come into their own, as short lengths of the colour sections in the yarn may become a single width in the weave, which means you can do 'automatic' pick and pick weaves without worrying about weaving with two different strands. It is of course not necessarily a controlled weave, but when the design is as fluid and flexible as the one here, it is almost preferable that unexpected colour mixes happen - nature is not calculated when shades moves across leaves and the ground is covered in budding new sprigs. Also, by using a continuous second colour throughout in a blend with the varigated yarn the whole is synthesised and melds together well.

Process

Choosing yarn and colour is part of the decision making early on in designing a tapestry, but throughout the weaving decisions have to made at different stages of the process. The best representation I have seen of this was a silent film Joan Baxter made of herself weaving (it can be found here, but it is a bit pixellated). In it she wears a camera on her head and you can see how she chooses colours she had previously blended and wound onto bobbins, how she then decides where they would go on the tapestry and how she then weaves, occasionally adding colours, judging how the colour would lie in the work. In my sample I have had to decide where the merged sections would lie, whether to retain a single hue per strip (I did not choose this going with colour mixes across the whole piece), and decide how to finish and start each new colour section, whether to use soft and harder yarns, how long to weave it, and I now need to decide when to stop and how to finish each strand, as I am not sure yet what to do with the warps once the whole things has been pulled into place.

Here's the final sample/piece cut off the loom

 

Having now cut off the sample and drawn it together I realise that I shouldn't have used the type of join I have. In fact, in revisiting Fiona's web-site and looking at her pieces on it, I think she makes joins that just involve twisting adjacent weft strands together, which gives a clean join and enables the pulling of the warps to be more easily done and for the resulting waves to be lighter. Anyway, in my piece, due to the many greens and heavier yarns it has not made much difference, and the weight where the joins sit just adds to the wavy nature of the tapestry. If I make a different piece in the future I will try the other joining method to check for the result using that. Now I need to think about what to do with the warps - there are a lot of them and they are very visible, although the blue warps look good as a compliment to the greens in the woven area.I see that Fiona has in most cases kept the warps, sometimes cutting them short, other times just letting them hang when the waves lie at the bottom of a larger piece. I think perhaps I should leave the warp, at the length they have from the final weave, but I will still need to think about how to then mount the final thing - should it lie on its sides to let the warps hang down? Will I mount it and set the warps on the surface of the background? These are the types of questions that lead to decisions to be made during the process. I usually leave the work a bit and look at it occasionally to enable me to think about these questions, and this is what I will do with this work as well to find a final solution.

In the end I have now decided to keep the warps hanging donw from the woven section, using the longer lengths of the warp from the top to fall behind the piece and add to the thickness of the blue warps hanging as a sort of fringe. These 
 
Detailed photographs of this piece shows how the joins are not too noticeable, and in drawing together the warps the wefts have been tightly drawn together as well. The wavy undulation the surface is hopefully now visible:

The colours are inaccurate in these pictures, the warp is actually a muted blue.

On the above picture you can see exaples of blends using a variegated yarn in blues and browns, as well as other variegated yarns, some homespun I dyed in Koolaid (an American children's drink that can give quite interesting results).

This is a fairly simple tapestry and so I have not had to make too many colour-choices, as I have kept to the green theme throughout. However in the second piece, the Stellata tapestry piece, I have had to make careful choices about colour and where they were going to be placed, side by side, in relation to other colour choices and balances across the whole and so on, that was a much more complex thing to decide on, and I also had to decide what to do with the petals of the flowers, but you will see this work on a separate post.

Thinking about the final assignment

Whilst finishing off smaller items in assignment 4, and preparing for the last sample, I am in parallel trying to think through the meaning of my 'art' work. This has been a running thread throughout; I have this nagging feeling that my work should have a purpose, not 'just' have aesthetic qualities without substance.

And since my last piece will be about trees I may try to find a way through the meaning creation on the theme of the tree - religious-spiritual, political or ecological. In that connection I have recently revived some research I did on Hannah Ryggen, a Norwegian tapestry weaver who was explicitly political. She was originally a teacher with painting skills who taught herself tapestry techniques using hand spun  and dyed wools, who worked from the 1930s to the 1960s. Early on she lived in the north of Norway, geographically separate from any avant garde or even major mainstream art cultures, but her works found international recognition when she was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1964. It has been argued that she did get impulses from world affairs through reading a left-wing newspaper of the time, and that may also have led her into fine art cultures current at the time.

What is important about Ryggen is her continuous and sincerely felt political position, which she seemed compelled to express in her woven works. She lived through decades when totalitarianism in Germany and Italy sent the world into devastation, she had a strong sense of political injustice and worked these elements into her tapestries using figurative representation of people, but also abstracted elements to simplify and find the essences in her messages. There have in recent years been exhibitions either focusing on her work or joining her work with more contemporary art, which is encouraging as she is probably a little know artist outside of Norway.

But, tapestry is so often also decorative and distant from issues that affect our world. I think I have mentioned before that some tapestry weavers have drawn out the slow deliberate weaving technique almost as a political statement in itself - seeing the slow development of the work as an inherent value during a time when so much of our life is ephemeral, fleeting and born with a rapid obsolescence that sees us creating huge amounts of waste.

Where does that leave the tapestry artist? Can I justify creating 'pretty' pieces to hang on a wall when the process is so slow and time consuming? Does the labour put into tapestry give it some value that is different from those cheaper and ephemeral textiles that are readily available from supermarkets and departments store, made in some faraway Asian country or near-by late arrivals to the European Union by under-paid labour? And what is that value - is it about quality, about monetary values, or something else?

Or should one seek only to create about and/or for oneself? To look at one's own personal narrative, making it personal? This is something I will dismiss from my work, I am not a believer in autobiographical, introspective work oriented around the self to be put into the world for all to see.

What Hannah Ryggen's work shows is that when important things happen in or to the world that shatter peace and freedom, then it can be talked about, even in an art work that might not be seen as such by the art establishment and so be recognised by the wider public. I think that is what I have not really wanted to think too much about in my work until now - what the real purpose is. Hannah Ryggen was adopted by the establishment during the 1950s and 1960s when she was commissioned to make pieces for the Norwegian Parliament and showed her works at international biennales in Venice and across the US.

There are textile artists and designers who address issues around global inequalities, fair trade and ecological matters. Some make lively and energetic works using natural materials or objects of waste. There are strands of this in the land art movement, and there are works that place art in the natural setting or bring in nature to the art gallery, offering ways to sometimes make statements about the state of the Earth. A well-know example is the world-wide textile statement on the threat to the great coral reefs by Margaret and Christine Wertheim. This project made coral formations in crochet and created assemblages and installations of these, showing them in museums. People from around the world contributed to this work, and it tries to work in statements of women's work (textile crafts) with mathematical structures (crochet hyperbolic planes) and the risks to the earth's biosphere - an ambitious project that was helped hugely by the reach of the internet. As is many of the new crafts activist projects that talk about yarn bombing and other externally directed statements using textiles.

Reference

Steen, Albert, Hannah Ryggen: En dikter i veven, Oslo, Kunstindustrimuseet, 1986

Øystein Ustvedt, Marianne Yvenes (eds.), Hannah Ryggen Weaving the World, Cornerhouse Publications, 2015

Project 7 - The Theme Book

Project 7 is a first step into the final project in assignment 5, where a self-planned and conceived textile piece is asked for.

I have been looking at the idea and the reality of trees for some time and think that is going to be one of my ongoing and long-lasting threads for thinking about my work. My tutor suggested I do a mindmap on the theme I might work on - or maybe it was on design ideas? - so I started with a mindmap of the TREE:

The mindmap includes what I could think of in a couple of sittings and I have not included all the detail that could be thought about under the different headings. There is a long and wide-ranging cultural history of using the tree in all manner of ways - as symbol (e.g. tree of life), as a material, wood, for making things, as creating particular environments to name a few. Fundamentally trees are about life and fertility, about longevity and sometimes something spiritual and transcendent. In the part of the world where seasons are pronounced we see the changing times of the year in the trees, and here a barren tree can evoke melancholy and loss. Trees are also affected by the changes that are now taking place through changes in the climate, in rising temperatures, droughts; and where man is so follows all manner of devastation - deforestation and erosion - but also possibilities of positive ecology where land is left to recover from cultural interventions. 

A design book

From a design perspective I am now making a work book for some design themes that I may use for this project and assignment 5, project 10. There was a bundle of papers in my local charity shop which I thought could be used as a book - they are fairly large and the paper shiny, but with a good weight to it, so there are probably benefits and some limitations to how the book will work as a sketchbook. It does give me the opportunity to make a book cover which I haven't done before (the cover will not be the final project, just another sample on the way there).

Literary sources of trees

As part of this work I have been downloading pictures of trees doing amazing things like encapsulating other things, being almost suspended by their roots, being enormous as some trees are, and of course various art works by historical and contemporary artists. I have a very useful book, The Magic of Trees, Bruderlin (1999), which is a compilation of artists' rendering of trees, from an otherworldly Theosophist tree by Mondrian, to trees by impressionists and others as well as masks and totem poles from non-Western cultures.

The book Bäume, Hesse (1984), with excerpts of texts and poems by Hermann Hesse has also been inspirational. His short piece on the chestnut tree is very beautiful and there are other words of his and others on the value of trees to nourish and give meaning to life that can be found on the web (sorry to those of you interested in this - I don't think these Hesse texts have been translated into English - oh yes, I have found a site where some of these words have been translated: Hesse on the Tree).

From my own background I am digging out fairytales (H C Andersen's The Tinder Box, about magical things happening through a soldier entering a dead tree, The Fir-tree), songs and anything else I can remember. A very fond and warm memory I have of trees are of some very large trees standing immediately opposite our house. To a small person they were very tall indeed, and in the late summer and autumn winds the rustle of leaves filled the atmosphere. We used to climb the lower trees, or use the branches for bouncing and sew-sawing on.

References

Bruderlin, Markus, 1999, The Magic of Trees, Hatje Cantz

Hesse, Herman, 1984, Bäume, Insel Verlag