Textile 1 - Assignment 5 - A Piece of your own - Final reflections

Can you see a continuous thread of development from your original drawings and samples to the final designs? 

Of the two samples the first is the most spontaneous and impressionistic of the designs and follow in the same vein as my method of loosely photographing leaves and trees. I am quite satisfied that this way of working allowed for free choices of colour, with some determination of what would sit where, and trying out a new technique. In that way the final piece was really a sample, but I decided some time last year that I would make beautiful samples as much as possible, as partial samples lacking coherence leaves one a bit dissatisfied; and so in that way I think this piece was satisfactory.

The aim of the second sample was to be a more finished item. It was designed from a photograph I had altered, of magnolia flowers in the spring, where the pixels had been turned more blue than they could ever have been in reality. From these I selected various blends and placed areas of colour across the surface of the work. I knew this would become a background surface, so the designing was again fairly improvised, but the placement of coloured areas was much more controlled than the green sample had been. Choosing how the petals would be rendered took some thought and trying out. In the end I think this also worked as I could add petals and move them if they didn't quite fit.

The book cover is not really part of the final submission but has ended up being quite  substantial piece of work, so I am not how this fits in. It is machine embroidered so not a 'constructed textile'. It was good to make it, I wanted to try to make a book with properly sewn together sections and that has worked well as it proved itself as the theme book. I also like the size of the book and the final cover in its whole. I am less convinced when the book is folded up, although the cover does suggest something a bit precious lies within.

Do you feel you made the right decisions at each stage of the design process? If not, what changes would you make? 

The green sample would probably have benefitted from a bit more control of the greens I chose. For example, I could have chosen shades and tones of similar greens and yellows as in the photographs, but to be honest, I wanted a stronger contrast than just tonal variations, so I am not worried about the final selection.

I had a two month break from this work as I had exams to study for, for work. These types of breaks cut the creative continuity that I need to create a consistent piece of work. However, despite the break I had decided some time ago, when I was photographing trees and leaves, that I would have a go at the three dimensional technique and I think that was the right thing to do.

In terms of the second piece I in the end chose a different image to work on from what I had originally intended due to shortage of time. I worked directly from the photograph of the magnolia and a landscape from the early 20th century. I laid these on a table and then brought yarns across to the pictures and blended against the colours in the pictures. Then once the work was in progress I continued to blend, matching against the original colour selections, but here the design of the tapestry then changed to be one of weighing the balance of browns and blues, darker and lighter shades across the surface of the piece. Occasionally I had to undo certain areas if they became too dominant, created an imbalance or something was missing. I tried a few additional techniques such as wrapping over a single warp and in short sections across three warps, and I like how these break the surface up a bit and create a different texture to the weave. And I have to say, that I love the tapestry weaving process for the way the weave progresses, and when a certain amount has been built up I find myself stroking the surface, pulling at the edges and warps to adjust the width, checking the back and so on, I do enjoy the making and the materials and how these elements make a new thing.

If I had had more time I would have done more drawing work. I still haven't fully worked out how I figure-in drawing as part of my design technique. I like finding pictures of art from the history of art, painting, textile art and so on, and looking at the way for example landscape is rendered. I think that is very important to the way I look at colour and how I would like to think about my selection of techniques - this research seems to build up over time, some sort of inner pictures of what I would like to work on grow and intertwine, and they are then triggered when I look and feel materials for projects. I also thought that I might start using a felting machine and making small samples using that, as well as support these by wet felting and embroidery to enhance the design of the tapestries. That is, using these textile techniques in the design process before I start a piece. This is something I have just started working on - felting/fusing a black sample and then putting out a variety of black yarns and a certain pale minty greens on a table where I can walk past it and consider how this might work. This is then supplemented by looking at textile art on the web and in books, 1970s fibre art, embroidery by Junko Oki (I have just discovered and am absolutely fascinated by).

Were you able to interpret your ideas well within the techniques and materials you chose to work with? 

I am happy with the choices of materials. Wool, silk and linen are all natural materials and using second-hand or stash materials in the main, mean that I did not have to go out and purposefully buy new materials.

I have probably covered the answer to this question in the above answer.

How successful is your final design in terms of being inventive within the medium and coherent as a whole?

The first, green, sample was a test of a technique I had seen, but never woven before. It was new to me, but as it really was something Fiona Hutchinson uses I cannot claim to have invented it, although using greens and shades of brown to represent dappled light in leaves that was my take on it.

On the other hand I think that my use of fabric as suggesting petals on the Stellata piece was quite inventive, and had its roots in embroidery rather than weaving, as I think tapestry weavers in the traditional vein will normally seek suggestions in the weave structure rather than embellishing the surface.

In both cases the pieces are coherent, although placed next to each other they probably would not be seen as part of a meaningful series.

I have thought a bit about 'voice' in art. I look at some work and think how neat and precise some people's work are. Or some re-interpret similar themes many times over in similar techniques and seem never to tire of these, or others again work spatially, conceptually with esoteric themes (although I am tiring of the concepts of memory in textiles, this really has become a bit of a cliche of itself in some works I have seen - this will be seen as a bit philistine I know). Being a novice I think my 'voice' is just starting to develop. I think that in the end my work will have a certain heft that I have seen in some fibre art that uses heavier materials. In a way I am disappointed about that, I would love to be able to make small, fine stuff, but it simply is not part of my language and may never become so. I just need to accept whatever comes through the design developments I work on in the end.

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.

Visits and exhibitions - October

Here in October the Knitting and Stitching show has been on at the Alexandra Palace. I have been a couple of times before, but this year I went twice - a glutton for punishment one may say, as I went on Friday (10th), and then on Saturday (11th), one of the busiest days.

Anyway, my friend and I went on the Friday for fun, to see what was new and interesting - we started by looking at the exhibition area, including the student awards. There were some fine textured knits I found quite good, and I think the International Feltmakers Association showed some very strong things. Ecoprinting, one of the latest trends in creative textiles it seems, was also shown on a commercial stand, and yes, there the usual suspects were, Jan Beaney and other creative tutors and suppliers of materials. Coats had a large stand dedicated to Rowan yarns and patterns and there were many, many smaller suppliers of all things textiley and equipment based.

What did I buy? well I had planned a visit to Oliver Twists to get some silk bricks for spinning with some mohair and Wensleydale fleece I have, and got a couple of fine green ones; I also splashed out on a pack of Markal paint sticks. To have a rest in the afternoon we decided to sit in on the fashion show. This was actually disappointing. Rowan showed garments from its latest pattern books, and so did other Coats brands such as Patons, but there was nothing really outstanding in the show. One might have thought that a fashion show would have pulled out all the best or most extravagant garments to show what can be done, stretching boundaries of technique or experiments in colour; instead there were uninspiring plain jumpers, the odd good Fairisle cardigan and a run of ponchos designed on a South American theme - presented to promote a particular stand somewhere in the sea of stall of the large hall.

On Saturday, when most tickets had been sold out and the crowds were thick in the aisles of the shopping hall, I went to volunteer in the British Tapestry Group's stand, which had an exhibition of professional and amateur pieces made by the Group's members, and curated by Hillu Liebelt. This was good, I met a Swedish weaver, Lis Korsgren, who had a piece showing. I had a chat with Lis about her construction method which is derived from Helena Hernmarck's work. The work is semi-representational but looks abstract close up. Her work in the show was a blue and white hanging showing tractor tracks in snow, using different densities of yarn in the weft I thought that was quite interesting, since it is made on a cloth weaving loom rather than a tapestry loom and stimulates questions of technique and visual representation.

I have to say I have mixed feelings now about the Knitting and Stitching show. It is a very good opportunity to see some current work, however the show is dominated by shopping and the craft consumerism of a huge textile-based shopping mall. There are of course many gems, I like that Slow Loris is there showing and selling exquisite work made by Chinese tribal people, it is good that smaller sellers are able to show their work and one can peruse this physically rather than looking at tiny photos on the web. However I know from experience, and from having spoken with a number of people who also visit these events, that what one takes away from the show in many cases ends up as stash, and bulky stuff at home in the work room rather something made, and that defeats the object of the making that the notion of craft is all about.

Anyway, the reason I say this is that I had been to see the Anselm Kiefer exhibition at the Royal Academy on the Thursday (9th) before, and it struck me on reflection, that I personally do not feel uplifted in a profound  way after a large crowded sales fair (whether textiles based or otherwise) as I do having experienced a great and immersive exhibition such as that on Anselm Kiefer. There were such fantastic paintings there, huge canvasses boldly covered in thick paints, ash, clay and material objects, including natural bits of sunflowers, branches and long strands of grass or reed. The exhibition was curated following a chronological line, his early work quite explicitly narrative somehow, recording and speaking of his early reactions to post-war German history, whilst the later works were grand statements more subtle in expression, despite their scale and monumental statements. He is clearly interested in certain poets and language, German landscape and forests, the materiality of the stuff he uses to build up his work. He uses words on the surface of pieces, sometimes words, at other times sentences.

To be honest I knew very little about Kiefer before I went. I vaguely knew he was important,  but I was very glad I went and saw so many poetic and finely telling pieces. Art historically there were references to Caspar David Friedrich, van Gogh and Joseph Beuys; there were nudes in large books and large installations of stuff - a mound of canvasses - the room smelling of oil paints, script on the wall. Clearly Kiefer has become quite wealthy in his later years, in recent years buying lead roofs off cathedrals and inserting diamonds into large textured lead surfaces - although modest seeming, maybe not as humble as one might have hoped during a time when those with less might think twice even going into a paying exhibition such as this one. But then that shows where my cultural capital lies, in placing a socio-cultural reading on this work when clearly the aesthetics seemed to be a priority (in the case of the diamonds and lead, a matter of alchemical processes). So, despite feeling that there was a flaw in this later work, I still loved the large landscapes of grasses, some with gold leaf, giant grasses swaying in the wind with golden sheaves of grass or reed pasted on to thick encrustations of paint. And carefully placed balances that seemed to weigh something heavy - time passing? Nature? the land?

In contrast to what these grand statements about nature, a sense of German-ness and art historical bonds evoked as I walked through the halls of the Royal Academy, a virgin spectator of this somehow romantic work by Kiefer, the days at the Knitting and Stitching show had vanishingly little to offer in speaking to something more than the somewhat consumerist aspects of contemporary textile crafts. Am I comparing apples and pears? well maybe, but I can't help thinking that if I want my work to sing it is by visiting the ideas of artists that inspiration will come, not so much from gathering overwhelming masses of stuff - the solitary reflection of ideas rather than the sensory overload of the crowded shopping hall...... However there is something fun about shopping that you can't completely ignore.