Weaving in the time of COVID

 What’s on my loom?

Being a bit distractable it often happens that I end up working on more than one thing at the time, never mind the knitting project that waits for bouts of TV watching. I have just finished a largish black piece using leather (40x60 cm). It was very enjoyable weaving that, I loved the way the rug yarn worked with boucle mohair and lurex weaving yarns. Now to work out how to hang it…..

At the moment I am working on a small white tapestry that is at a sett much finer than I usually use and it is slowly, very slowly, progressing. I am not the most patient person in the world, and as I work as well I like to feel I am achieving something in my spare time, which is why I usually work on something a bit more chunky that builds up more quickly (‘quick’ is a relative term in tapestry weaving to say the least!). Although the fineness of the white tapestry is interesting, it is quite flawed - I have been using homespun yarn mainly, all manner of fibres in the weft, but mainly wool and silk. Homespun can at times be uneven and so it splays out the warp and has surprisingly made the piece wider as the weaving progresses, rather than narrowing which is the most common problem in tapestry weaving).  And if I think about the weaving speed, or lack thereof, this piece is quite testing: weaving for say, 3-4 hours in the afternoon on this piece which is about 21 cm wide I manage just about 3-4 cm across its width – so either I am a slow weaver or the thing just demands a different way of thinking about making. The making process itself becomes the thing, I can’t force it or become too impatient for it to be finished.

To move things on a bit I am therefore also weaving a sample in greens with a bit of blue, brown and purple at a more sensible sett. I am quite excited about this, as it is in preparation for something large. 

Paris - Sheila Hicks at the Pompidou Centre

Well, what can one say other that when you hear that a major exhibition of Sheila Hicks' work is on show you have to go! 

I just adore Hicks' work, and as fibre art seems to be having a bit of a revival she and other fibre artists are being shown - with Olga de Almaral being shown in Bruxelles and Annie Albers at the Tate Modern in the Autumn it is a good time to catch up on seeing the actual works that one otherwise just ends up looking at in books or one the web. So off I went to Paris for a night so that there would be one full day for the visit to the Pompidou Centre. I stayed in a small hotel near by, with tiny rooms and even smaller shower cubicles which you had to squeeze into. 

Here's a view from my hotel room to the building opposite:

And as the very first thing to see at the Pompidou Centre was of course the Hicks' exhibition, Lifelines - I took lots of photographs but do not want to infringe copyright so will not include any here. But I can tell you that it was quite a spectacular show, with many large scale works and a lot of her minimes, the small weavings she weaves on a small mobile loom - these spanned her whole life of making, so there were weaving from 1958 or so and onwards.

There was a lot of colour in this work - and it was quite a controlled use of colour, palettes led by main colour keys and lovely textures of woven, wrapped and untangled rope-like materials. There were a long series of films covering her more recent her career from the 1980s onwards. I spent a couple of hours in the gallery, watching all the films, studying the smaller works and wondering at the larger wrapped works.

I could spend a lot of time describing my exaltation at being at this exhibition. How wonderful to have been around at a time when the fibre arts movement was at its early beginnings as Hicks was, to be given the opportunities to travel, meet fascinating textile cultures in the South and Middle Americas, to experience encounters with architecture and sculpture, photography and yarn and synthesise all these impressions. Hicks' work was really ground breaking sitting alongside the other textile Modernists of the 1960s and -70s as the early voices of monumentally scaled work that related to space in particular ways. 

In one film she discusses discovering the use of the repeatable textile module and using this in many different permutations. Various works were described in the films and impressions of her work methods. The exhibition was really a gift and something I will try to remember for a long time - and it gets even better: she was sitting nearby my table in the museum cafe, and I summoned up the courage to go and ask for her signature in the catalogue I had bought, and she kindly wrote a dedication in it! I am so thrilled that she was so generous and didn't seem to be bothered that someone quite excited came up to her like that.

The rest of the photos will show a few impressions from the Pompidou, starting with the grafitti in the women's loo, where people had written into the grouting between the times, which showed a but of inventiveness:

On the 5th floor there was a very nice outdoor gallery of sculpture or sculpture garden. The day was very hot so the water that was the reflective base for the sculpture was a cooling relief.

And a pigeon also found the water useful, he landed just in front on me and drank plenty, creating his own small figure in the water.

The building reflected in the water 

Spinning and dyeing

Throughout the autumn I have been spinning. My working life is very busy at the moment so when the evenings and weekends come I have been trying to do stuff that will be relaxing. And Spinning is always relaxing, soothing and still productive. I was given around 3 kgs of carded Jacobs sheep wool by someone. It was very old but still good, although the carding was pretty ropey and there were lots of lumps in it. I decided to dye it and had a great dyeing day doing mostly greens and blues, but also some rosy reads. This has provided the bulk of my spinning resource from October to now, and I also spun some staples in a variegated colour scheme (blue-green and yellow-red) which I have spun as novelty yarns, either plying it with a handspun or a commercial single wool.

Here are some of the examples of what I dyed and spun:

 

The top skein is the novelty yarn, a thin version using some left-over staples, I also made a different yarn that had much thicker staples in it. The skein below is the spun yarn from the slightly lumpy Jacobs wool. It too the dye very well and as most of it was quite course and I am not that good at spinning knitting yarn I decided that I would just spin lumps and all and then use it in tapestry weavings.

 

 

Here's a detail of the novelty yarn. I have this thin commercial single wool yarn in blue (not sure it is indigo, but it is that sort of colour) and used it to ply with the staples of the blue-green. This was a very satisfying process and the  result looks and feels great, now I need to see what it is like in a weaving.

 

The colours in this picture do not reflect the livelier green of the actual yarn, however you can see how coarse the Jacobs is and you will see that I spun it very hard and so it is not a perfectly balanced yarn - my plying technique could be improved a bit.

 

I also have a fair bit of very dark alpaca. In tidying up some of my stash I unearthed even more of it, and this needs to be spun. At my Guild of weavers, spinners and dyers we had a bit of a stash-share and I got some dark brown silk noil which complements the alpaca very well.

 

So I plied these fibres in different permutations - pure alpaca and alpaca silk plied, which has created some smooth yarns with a bit of sheen. I also had some dyed silk which I spun into some of it to create interesting textures.

 

 

The alpaca-silk yarns.

 

The silk-alpaca yarn is to the right here, and the other green yarns are spun from left-overs, merino, more silk, something I don't remember.

 

 

This is a close-up to show the textures of the different mixes, you might be able to see that the merino yarn on the left is Navajo plied so it is a bit thicker.

 

 

The silk-alpaca in detail to show the different thicknesses, this was also Navajo plied which was not easy as I was spinning in the silk as I went along which turned into a knotted mess at times along the way.

 

 

West Berkshire and North Hampshire Open Studios

This May has been a month of exhibition and making at the Open Studios. Together with two other artists we have been showing at City Arts in Newbury, which as an old chapel has large spaces to fill.

In order to fill the space in interesting ways the last two months or more have been spent making hangings and felt pieces. These have been hung together in a bit of an installation and I have used some tables to show other things, as well as a table for me to work at. It has all worked out well, and I have had time to do some tapestry weaving whilst there.

Here are some impressions from the exhibition:

 

This is an overall view of one end of the exhibition space, you can see the hangings, the folded book hanging from the ceiling and some of the tables.

 

These two pictures provide details of the green hangings, with a drawing (top) and green felt piece (below)

This image shows an interesting effect in the book: perforations from stitching lets the light through

 

 

A view of the full length of the book

 

A table set out with experimental pieces, felt and embroideries

 

A second table set out with small tapestries, sketchbooks and drawings on the theme of trees.

 

A view of the other end of the exhibition space with the table we have been working at - my friend came for a few days to learn tapestry and I have been working here on a small piece.

 

And finally - a couple of bookcases have been very useful in displaying the small tapestries. I had bought some perspex stands to show them off in a gentle sort of way, and you can also see the weaving frame ready to be used with a couple of reference books.

 

 

It has been an interesting event: the number of visitors has swung, with an increase over the bank holiday Monday, and I have been pleased that some people asked whether I give courses, which suggests that some are interested in the work. What people haven't done is bought anything. It is not a climate conducive for people to spend, and as textiles are relatively specialist I did not really expect many sales. I think people still prefer paintings or prints as primary art works for the home - textiles as decorative items are not common and my works are necessarily easy or ready for hanging. There has been a lot to learn during this last month and I am pleased to have been part of it, what will happen next year is another question and something I need to think about quite hard.

 

 

Craft & Design day

Farnham Maltings recently hosted a day of talks by craft makers and a representative of the Crafts Council on the maker's career and business development options.

I was very surprised at the low attendance - it was a free event and getting to ask the Craft Council questions and hearing of opportunities for development is not that common unless you count whatever is out there on the Internet.

Anyway, I quite like going to Farnham, it is always worth going to the New Ashgate Gallery and getting to see how makers had developed themselves and their work was worth a visit. Some of the makers at the talk were quite far down their career paths and were experts in their fields, in glass for example. There were perspectives from makers whose work went beyond borders, to North African filigree jewellery work, and there were young people who had graduate a few years ago. All makers had some connection to the University of Creative Arts, Farnham, and there were also an opportunity to learn a bit more about their MA so I was pleased to have gone, because that is one option I have been considering for some time in the future.

In the Q&A sessions topics such as working with galleries, how to develop your skills and what you can do to move on with your career were discussed. It is interesting how there is such a gap between the people who train in art colleges and people who do craft as a hobby. When I look at what some of my Guild colleagues make and look at what professional makers do there is sometimes very little difference in quality, but I guess one of the key factors is motivation - hobbyists are not necessarily wnatign a career in their craft, they may be at a stage in their lives that making is a way of developing themselves and their creativeness, and whilst professional maker are compelled by the same or similar motivation, they seek a lifestyle that will allow them to earm a living making. Certainly at the craft day the makers talking there were more keen on their own expression than commercial compromises, although there were gentle suggestions of thinking about what market niches your work fits into.

When you are as far down your life as I am am for example, having spent a fair bit of time in education already and now working, looking at taking up full time education in the crafts or arts would be such a huge step that it would need serious thought. But, working full time also means that developing your level of skill takes so much longer, and the benefit of being in a nurturing environment such as an art college, with all the materials and technology in easy reach are missing. Developing a critical slant to your work that is also enabling is difficult to establish when you work by yourself, and perhaps that best thing to do is to find some groups to join that are at the level or even just beyond the level you aspire to be at. At least there would be a social network behind your work, and as one of the speakers explained, being in a groups harnesses resources and helps get exhibitions and so on.

So there was a fair bit to inspire further thought, and also some pictures of fine works that the makers had made that were shared with us on the day. I try to find out as much as I can about cultures of making and getting a view form the insight of how to develop your professional life in the arts, and this day was a good introduction to some of the issues that arise on your way if choose that way.

 

UCA symposium and Dorothy Caldwell - A course at the Royal School of Needlework

This was a treat. In the same week two related great textile events. The University of the Creative Arts, hosted through the Crafts Study Centre in Farnham, organised a symposium on damage and repair, entitled 'What do I do to make it OK?'. This was a symposium that followed an exhibition of the same name with a number of exhibitors who also spoke on the day. And then at the weekend Dorothy Caldwell taught a class at the Royal School of Needlework, I guess as she was already over here to show some of her work at the exhibition and to attend the symposium.

Symposium: What do I do to make it OK? 

This event consisted of a number of quite different talks by different types of presenters: academics, artists, makers, researchers and community artists. The idea of damage and repair was interpreted quite widely from broken communities, repairing the soul, to more literal meaning of repair through mending. 

The first keynote speaker was Bouke de Vries. A high end artist with an interesting background in fashion and ceramics conservation and now working in sculpture. He showed a lot of his work in a chronology of his development as a maker, including works based on the Dutch still life genre and some quite humourous pieces, including a Marge Simpson as a Madonna with a number smaller Simpsons at her side. This was one of the better talks and others that stood out for me were: a talk by a community artist (Claire wellesley-Smith, author of 'Slow Stitch'), whose challenge in a deprived area of Bradford was tangible, a talk by Celia Pym on repairing stuff in a dissecting room, a presentation by Fredie Robins on her knitted work, which included some repaired by Celia Pym, and a great talk at a time when energy levels were short, on women's memories of repairing, mending and the tools of sewing, including button boxes and darning mushrooms.

I was really happy to have attended this event. It is rare to get a whole day of such good speakers. I would have preferred that they had had fewer speakers and given people longer time to speak. There were some talks that were poorly targeted at the audience, and others that needed to have practiced beforehand, and at 20 minutes for each some of the talks whizzed through. There was a lot to think about and wonder at, and you sometimes questioned what might come next for some of these artists. 

The exhibition was also quite stimulating. There were examples of Pym's work with repaired socks hanging on the wall, some of Caldwell's smaller pieces and other works using, for example found objects and juxtaposing them with natural materials such as shiny silvery packaging for tights from which dried grasses were suspended, drawings and other works.

Royal School of Needlework: Dorothy Caldwell

The Canadian artist, Dorothy Caldwell, is a well-known name in the world of quilting. I saw her work a few years ago at the Festival of Quilts. Her background is originally in fine art, in painting and print making, and she works with her textiles in a painterly way, thinking carefully about materials, how fabrics are composed and asembled and moving beyond the quilt, to works on paper. She is interested in textiles from daily life, the simple stitching made by ordinary women as they create the materials stuff of everyday life. The course was based on her considerations of kantha quilting and she gave us a talk of a study visit she had made to India looking at the application of this technique, as well as showing her own work.

Here Dorothy is showing a kantha quilt she has brought back from India. She was considering the iconography of the work, how stitching was used and the way the women's co-operative used the kantha tradition to tell meaningful stories for the women in the present.

She laid out some of her work and sketchbooks for us to look at, and to learn from her processes. This was quite interesting, to touch someone else's process and see how she experiments with materials and tools.

The course consisted in a few short drawing exercises, including drawing marks based on sounds gathered in the grounds of Hampton Court and drawing lines and impressions from walking and observation.

 

I picked up all manner of sounds including planes overhead, birdsong, people talking, swans and crows squawking and crunching pebbles underfoot. There was a very keen robin sitting on top of the topiary and I managed to zoom in on him after my drawing exercise.

We were provided with a pack of materials and thread and given some drawing paper to use. Above you can see some of the sound-marks I recorded using pen and charcoal.

Here you see the work in progress, a sample with couched thread, the drawing and some of the threads I used.

Overall this was a very useful course to inspire further work. Dorothy suggested we were doing a five day course in a single day, and I am guessing that if spread out, having more time to think and to prepare various stages we might have had time to finish things and to experiment further. As it is the course was a useful trigger for thinking about next steps.

Dorothy Caldwell's work considers the landscape and the materials in it. I find it interesting  that the combination of the thought pattern concerned with ethnic traditions in making with a concern with the stuff of the landscape (marks, colours, earth) creates her unique artistic language. 

I think it it worth remembering that we can use references in all manner if different ways, not just a literal reinterpretation, but let the idea of some of the sources be channelled through experimental work, drawing and working out of ideas that concern us. I would like to think about that a bit more. When I see certain textile artists with good ideas, that are then repeated over several years in almost the same way I wonder about renewal of work, how one develops and grows and shifts. To bring this thought back to Bouke de Vries' talk: what he showed was that there is always something new to explore, interesting sources to work out, and that even one's training need not be limited but can be built on and re-generated.

A course in acid dyeing

I organised a course in acid dyeing by Martin Weatherhead for my Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers which ran over a 2 day period. The aim of the course was to create a colour card of carefully calculated gradations and mixes of colours. If there was time left over we would then be able to dye, and aim to colour match something - I suppose in case of any future projects that need a particular colour scheme. I went on the course so that I know how to be systematic about dyeing, but I know that deep down I am more experimental and will try out things that will not be repeatable, and so just use whatever is at hand when that day come for a project to be developed. This is mainly because I work with materials over representational work. Colour matching is something one might aim to do once a specific project is defined using particular colours.

This was a terribly busy course - the first day we managed to dye most of the samples, with the second day devoted to mixes to get browns and shades of green. I think we probably worked at speed and accuracy suffered somewhat, we ran out of wool and vinegar, and on the second day the wool was barely wetted properly so the uptake of dye was a bit uneven in places.

So what did we learn?

• Wetting wool with warm water and a bit of soap for 20 mins or longer enables uptake of dye
• Water, dye solution to a particular dilution, vinegar is heated with the wool, stirring at the beginning to enable even distribution of dye onto the wool (or other protein fibre)
• Dye solutions can be calculated and mixed to enable any colour needed to be dyed (apart from black and white), mainly using the primaries, violet
• Leave the dye bath to heat up to boiling point, then turn off the heat source and leave to cool naturally, as the dye apparently takes optimally at 80 degrees and it spends more time going through the right temperatures on the cooling phase
• Keep records meticulously and accurately - if you want to reproduce the colours in the future
• Don't hurry these steps otherwise you may not get the results you need(!)

 

Dye baths on the second day, a red-range with small amounts of turquoise (left) and blue (right)

 

 

Dyed wools drying an approximate colour order

 

On the second day the skeins were wound into balls in preparation for cutting into short sections for our colour cards

 

I was not planning on doing this course, but am glad I did. It taught me a few things that will be useful when I come to dye my own yarns for some future projects.

 

The final shade card looks quite good:

 

 

 

And now to the admission of a horrible mistake I made. I was not feeling well on the second day - had a terrible headache and quite frankly could not think straight. When I got home I thought I better give the yarn another rinse, as the vinegar could make the wool brittle. So I put all my yarns into the washing machine in pillow cases and put the machine on the rinse programme with extra rinse - well, what can I say?! the wool felted and the whole bunch came out in various levels of fulling, apart from the silk, and the superwashed wool.

 

Here's the dreadful pile of yarn:

 

 

The green and pink wool is quite felted and the wool has shrunk in all skeins. In the case of the green that is not really a bad thing, as the wool was quite loosely plied before fulling. Now it is a denser yarn and will be better for tapestry weaving, although it does have a hairy surface. The wool-silk ply has fared worse though. I wanted those skeins to be smooth and that is no longer possible, the wool shrunk and the silk had stayed as it is, making the yarn more fluffy. I had dyed some a pale coral red to go into the shell tapestry, I will need to see how this works when I blend it.

 

So what did I learn there? - not to make radical decisions when unwell, and certainly not any decision that suggests an easy short-cut when it plainly will not work. I know how wool behaves quite well, and this issue could have easily been prevented. Nevertheless the wool is still usable, so all is not completely lost.

 

Tapestry weaving workshop with Weftfaced

This weekend I went on a workshop with Caron Penney and Katherine Swailes. They are, or have been, tapestry weavers at West Dean College, and make work in their own right. This workshop was a mixed ability class, and there were people there who had never woven before and other who had woven for many years.

The course was run in Arundel museum, many miles from where I live, and it took two hours to get there, over rolling hills, along fast roads and through pretty villages. Hampshire is so very English in its landscape - hedgerows, woodland and arable fields. It was a very enjoyable trip. I listened to John Stein beck's The Pearl as an audiobook in the car. It is a great story, I read it when I was a teenage, enjoyed it then, and it is gripping, touching and true throughout the terrible tale it is telling.

Anyway, the class was split in two depending on what we wanted to learn: Penney was introducing tapestry weaving to newcomers and spoke on blending and interpretation of designs. Swailes works intuitively and experimentally with materials, which is the way I am inclined, so I joined that set to learn some new techniques, working on the surface of the tapestry. Katherine Swailes showed some samples she had made. In one case she had placed black wax behind a small piece and heated it with an iron to make the wax melt into the fibre, and oil had then seeped fro mthe wax wider into the tapestry creating a dark halo effect. She had also done the same with another sample, but instead of ironing it she had zapped the piece in the microwave for a minute which had melted the wax onto the back of the piece and burnished the fibre around it. That was quite effective, the burned fibre was tonally darker but blended well with the unburned base fibre.

 

A table of reference material - a book on Coptic tapestry, Katherine Swailes' samples, a frame loom with samples in progress for demonstrating technique.

It seemed to me both of them work with very simple motifs, paring designs down, down to elemental shapes - whether geometric shapes in Caron's case or working with the structure of weaving techniques in Katherine's case. There were a number of techniques to learn, including creating loops on the surface, carrying over floating wefts and weaving some of these as crosses.

 

I decided to use the day to practice some of these techniques to learn them properly and have a record of these. Since my work on this course is moving into trees I chose to work with greens. Hence the foundation fibre was a blend of pale green, thin wool and a white linen (I love this linen, it is from Texere Yarn, I have some at home and look at it longingly from time to time, waiting for  project to come along when I can use it). To keep things easy I went for a 50-50 mix of these, with the exception of a centre section where I reduced the green and added a linen strand to create a contrast to the loops which became tufts of bright greens.

 

Here's the sample:

 

From the bottom - crosses of floating wefts, loops cut open to create tufts, wefts carried over in greens and gold, and the top elements started as random vertically inclined wefts. This last element was not terribly successful, so when I got home I added to the padded nature and randomness by embroidering strands over it. On the photograph you can't see the green wool in the background very well, but it was there to balance the whole. I liked that, it softened the pure white. One person did weave with a pure white slightly heavier weft and the beads (the bumps of weft lying on the warps) cast bluish-grey shadows across her sample. Katherine thought the tufts were an 'explosion'. I liked that, I wanted some drama in the thing, so often samples are just a flat record, but here I was striving to create a 'nice' sample, so that it would be a more pleasurable thing to refer to.

More exhibitions - open studios and degree shows

Open studios

It is that time of year again - the artists and arts organisations in my area open their doors to visitors, and this gives you an opportunity to look at what they are now doing, whether they are changing direction or in some other way showing new works.

With limited time I try to find places to go that show several artists at once. This means you can cover more work, that going to someone's house, and spares you any embarrassment that might be in being a single visitor and finding the work uninteresting.

There is one small group of three artists who show together every year, who hold their exhibition in a very beautiful place that alone would draw me there - the sun was shining, it was warm and the grasses, meadow flowers and birds all evoked the height of spring. The three people are respectively a flower painter, a ceramicist and an architect who is a talented water colourist. I like the variety of their work and they are good at showing both shared projects and individual works.

The combined exhibition of a work or two by each artist in the scheme is quite comprehensive. However I do find the work a bit patchy, the good work is still good but the bad is surprising, because you wonder how this work was passed for the show, I am not sure they have an assessment panel to select works, it seems as if everyone who wants to join gets in. So, maybe one day......

I took one useful thing away from these shows this year - I decided to learn a bit more about water colour. Look at Isabel Carmona's watercolours I liked the way she uses colour and then defines shapes with pen afterwards. I had a go with some drawings later in my work on trees. Another useful thing that I found was a small display of shared sketchbooks shown at the local museum. Here the sketchbooks were themed and a number of artists and contributed work in a defined period of time. That meant that each small book had a number of different styles in it, and one on the idea of text and texture had a contribution of text and scribbles drawn on acetate and then layered across coloured paper and other similar acetates. A useful technique to try.

UCA Farnham  Final degree show

I also went to Farnham to the art college there to see what the textile students had on show for their final degree show. usually I go to Winchester School of Art, but this year I seem to have missed it and besides, I like Farnham and the school there, and the Crafts Study Centre had a textile exhibition on which I wanted to see.

The school runs courses in textiles for fashion and interiors and the foundation degree in hand embroidery under the auspices of the Royal School of Needlework. The first display ranged from traditional weavings to contemporary prints, using computer designs and texture puff printing dyes. I liked the traditional weaves, there was ones collection in particular that looked as if the dye was natural and the weaves textured. I know this is probably a conventional things to say, but I feel relieved and encouraged that some young students are embracing the hand woven as their own, and uses it for a contemporary language. I did like the puff printing on computerised designs, but actually, when I got to the second student's use of this technique I did wonder how differentiated you could get using this material, the raised surface is interesting, but I did not see a strong diversity in the use of it.

Sadly there were not many visitors to the show - I guess a bank holiday Saturday is distracting for most, but there were many people shopping in town, so one might have wished for the students that more would have come to the show.

The hand embroidered collection of work had some stronger pieces in it. I liked the framed pieces of translucent fabric with long running and seed stitches made in fine hand spun wools and silks. There were also pieces looking at using hand embroidery in jewellery and white work, which is quite delicate. I often wish I was more inclined towards the tonal qualities of white work and I have been planning to do something on tones and texture for the final sample in the weaving project so it was good to be reminded how this work can look. There was also a work looking at textile and memory. I know this might sound a bit philistine but the memory paradigm in textile art is now so well-worn that many themes under this heading seem stereotypical and uninventive. There are/must be many other feelings and thoughts that textiles can evoke that need not be about personal subjectivity - grandmothers and mothers. I guess that is why I prefer expressive textiles about the stuff of textiles art works rather than works that aspire to speak of the deeply personal.

After the textile displays I popped in to look at the ceramics and glass work. Here I particularly liked some bottles standing on inverted wooden cones and some white balls of glass with transparent interiors of small balls of coloured glass. The opaque white exterior was then removed in a long line to allow the viewer to peer into the core of the work to see the coloured core.

TRAUMA, GRIEF, LOSS: The Art of Bereavement - Craft Study Centre

Around of the corner from the college lies the Crafts Study Centre, which houses a couple of small galleries that are often worth visiting. The exhibition was on the theme of bereavement, and yes, some statements about personal loss and the memory of lost family members were on show, some of it made in a narrative form, others abstracted. There were a series of photographs aiming at something bigger: textile remainders from dramatic deaths or accidents, heart attacks, seizures - the pictures showed stains and marks from bodily fluids and there was something visceral and human about this. These pictures were not about the made object but about the physicality of loss of human life, which evoked something more than just the bodily death. It was not a personalised statement, but spoke of the way we will all go and reminds us that we will not always be here as living, breathing bodies, although we are also more than that.

I recently went home to see my parents. My mother was very keen that I take stuff back with me, stuff that had belonged to my grandmother. My grandmother was an aspirational person who followed the Danish tradition of collecting bottom drawer stuff, including a pile of silver plated cutlery which I am not sure to whom she was collecting, as my mother was a single child living abroad at the time when she collected all these things. She was also an accomplished needle woman and knitter, but the stuff we were looking at were these forks, spoons, teaspoons. My grandmother died many years ago, but what this meeting of her objects reminded me of more than anything is her disappearance as a person in body and in mind. When my mother and I are no more she will be forgotten - and so will we eventually. It is a difficult to think about - of all those people that came before us, only a handful are remembered. In history we remember the politician, the general and the king, not the farmer's son who battled it out on the field; we see the opulent brocade dress worn by a duchess in a painting by a famous artists, but not the hand of the seamstress or wigmaker who made these things.

So what I am trying to say I guess is that creating a memento mori for a deceased son, as someone had done in the exhibition, is a way of holding on to that person in a personal way.
I think this is a very personal thing, and I feel ambivalent about how these things are made so public.

Talk by Emma Sheldon - textile designer

Yesterday the Guild I am a member of had a speaker visiting, Emma Sheldon. A young textile designer from a 'mixed media' background and an MA from the Royal College of Art, she spoke about her career so far and her current work in the automotive industry.

This was a very interesting and stimulating talk. She talked through her early steps in the knit and fashion industry, where she had tried various things in the fast paced culture on the New York Fashion scene.

Her student life had carried her to collaborative projects with automotive designers which had given her a profile in the industry where she now works. She has been involved in high-profile projects for Audi, Aston Martin and Jaguar-Landrover. This seems at first sight to be a far call from her experience of developing laser-cut, pleated synthetic surfaces in textiles, but actually she explained the design and collaborative process that they work through and it became clear that the design principles she learned at college she applies in the 'blue-sky thinking' environment in car design. She still uses mood boards to stimulate visions of client's needs, she works on experimental pieces to work out techniques, textures and stretch the process and she collaborates in a group of 6 textile designers to create the whole design concept of a vehicle range from colour finished, metal fittings, upholstery both front and back and any other visible surface it seems.

Interestingly she also described some of the struggles she had had on the way, how she had worried about knowing the detail behind the engineering of any design ideas she helped developed. Some where on the way she had realised though, that actually she does not need to be concerned about the engineering problem, and that that is part of the dialogue between the visual and textural design and the engineering questions that this may give rise to. She was appreciative of everything she was learning and it seemed she was open to new approaches. Her talk showed me that this is a core skill of the designer - that we need to be open and experimental with what we do. That we should never rest and just try something, even if it is just for the sake of the experiment itself.

In the final section of her talk she also made it clear that however 'high tech' her samples looked - and they were grey, metallic, plastic pieces, her actual pleating method was by hand. I am guessing she probably used the computer to design waves and details in the laser cut elements, but it was clear that the craft itself was on an equal level with the tools she employed. She said that a key thing she learned at art school was to learn the skills and craft itself and then one can break the rules, and this seems to have put her in a strong place in what she now does. I enjoyed this talk very much, it reminded me of why going to see student work and new design is always valuable and stimulating for carrying our own work forward.

January 2015- Recent exhibitions visited

Since starting back to life with work and so on, this year has started pretty well with regard to visits. I have been to London, and have seen some interesting stuff, such as the exhibition, Germany: memories of a nation at the British Museum, which was worth visiting. It provided a good little introduction to German history and there were some fantastic artefacts on show, such as a four great wooden carvings by Tilman Riemenshneider and work by Kaethe Kollwitz. Just too many people in the show, people tend to crowd around certain exhibits (especially if they are carrying the audio guide) and so you can't see or read the key information, even get near certain artefacts.

From a textile and art perspective I also went for a very quick walk-around the 1st floor of the National Portrait Gallery to find the Grayson Perry things he had worked on during his Ch 4 TV programme, Who am I? which I watched last year. There were a tapestry, a silk print, a bronze and ceramics discussing the identities of individuals alone or in groups following the themes of the three parts of his programmes. I quite like Grayson Perry, I enjoyed his Reith Lectures very much and find his work quirky and fun with some darker undertones, however I also think that he doesn't say anything new much in his work. If you follow the news and watch challenging documentaries, read The Guardian newspaper and are generally interested in ideas about cultural creations of subjectivity then this work really reiterated many of the ambivalences that such 'discourse'  encompasses (an academic term for many ways/media and voices discussing a theme or set of theme - my quick explanation, some may disagree). Not everyone will necessarily have thought about this in these terms and so there is still value in his work. Anyway, the broken and mended (in gold) pot based on the politician was quite harmless I thought. His demeanour had lacked redemption in the interviews Perry had had with him and I felt that his carelessness and non-guilt position were maybe not captured as fully as they could have been - a pattern on phalluses and the reference to the white middle aged and middle class male seemed a bit obvious. On the other hand I liked the strength of the viciousness of the dark angel of forgetfulness  on the pot describing the force of dementia. Putting the work among the great and the good is a useful way to challenge the convention of portraiture.

The other thing I went to visit was the Fleming collection where a tapestry is on show until mid-February, Fleece to Fibre: The Making of the Large Tree Group Tapestry. I had never been to the Fleming Collection before and it is a very nice small place for exhibiting Scottish art. It had combined the textile display on the upper floor with an exhibition of landscapes by Scottish artists on the lower floors. This worked well, and I was pleased to see an emphasis on making in the tapestry exhibit covering the whole room on the first floor. This display was divided up with photographs of the artist's studio, sheep breeds that contributed their wool to the work, cabinets with correspondence about and examples of wool used. The cartoon was opened out on the floor with a few small samples showing how the weavers tested the colour blending in certain areas of the work. There was a video discussing the making further and the inspiration the artist, Victoria Crowe, had gained from an elderly shepherdess who was depicted in the tapestry walking to her sheep in the snow. I was very happy to have found this small gallery, I discovered new artists I had not heard of before and enjoyed the woolly display, so had a very good afternoon that day.

Exhibition - Love is enough at Modern Art Oxford, December 2014

Visiting Love is Enough at Modern Art Oxford (MAO)

Visiting the exhibition Love is Enough in Oxford between Christmas and New Year was a useful thing to do to re-awaken the impulse to make. I have had a long break from textile work, although I did a one day course on collage using prepared papers in various water colour techniques and mixed media.

This exhibition was promoted by the OCA, and as I live within a reasonable drives’ distance from Oxford I try to get to most interesting exhibitions that are on there. Besides, there is a good Blackwells bookshop with a largish art book collection to peruse through as well, and the Ashmolean always has something wonderful to give, even if there is nothing special on.

Anyway, I started going through this display at the back of the gallery – usually I go up through the large galley from the front, but this time I started at the back, which was interesting an useful in this case. This exhibition seems to be one you might either think works well, or not at all. The gallery I started in looked at the comparison of William Morris’ work and Andy Warhol’s – a selection of wall paper and textile designs by Morris were hung alongside some flower prints by Warhol - and this part of the exhibition worked reasonably well, the comparison was clear and gelled. The references to decoration were obvious and fed each other. The walls were papered with Morris’ acanthus wallpaper and I do think that was a mistake, as there were very few Warhol prints and the garish synthetic pink and yellow inks used in his prints were swallowed up by the choice of Morris' natural tones of browns and dusky greens. There was nearly a century between the two sets of works and the more recent did not stand as strong.

Similarly the comparisons continued thematically: the politics of the two men, the idea of the factory, writings and interests. I am not sure that any of the other similarities the comparisons aimed to draw out worked very well. For me the comparison pointed at so may differences: an art ‘factory’ in the Warhol style did not evoke the political sentiment behind Morris’ searching for a golden age that would replace the factory of industrial society. Decades of Morris' thinking and writing on the topic of socialism by Morris was not paralleled by Warhol's, although it does seem he lived his life in New York more as an experiment and expression of a pop/modern artist, but this was based on individualism, whilst his art seems to point to meanings challenged by mass consumption.

Anyway, you see what I mean perhaps? The comparison works, but mostly by emphasising the contrasts. I liked Warhol’s early work as an illustrator for fashion magazines. The exhibition showed some small vignettes, white line drawings on small rectangular fields, from the 1950s. The type quite common at that time, lines light and expressive of fun. Again, when you look at Morris’ work you feel the gravitas of the ideas behind it. A tapestry woven with design elements by Morris and Burne-Jones of knights and angels, bringing out the medievalism of his vision is weighty with the ethics of what a good society should be. Warhol, as far as I can see, did not necessarily want to improve society, he wanted to have fun, to work with other artists, but for the sake of that art, poking fun at society maybe, desiring glamour (prints and photos of Hollywood actresses seemed to point to that), whilst yes, he did acknowledge the problems of the Cold War and how the decades he lived through (1960s and 70s were mostly on show).

The other thing that I noticed about this exhibition was the promotion by name of its curator, Jeremy Deller, who is a recognized artist in his own right. Maybe the exhibition strove to be a thing in itself, not just about the work of Morris and Warhol, but also a personal statement in Deller’s and MAO’s collaboration. To some extent that might have been the aim – I do think the comparison drawn was contrived at times, I did not think the comparison using the idea of the ‘factory’ worked very well for example.

Overall I did enjoy the show though, I thought there were some interesting things there. I would like to have seen less of Morris’ wallpaper on the walls, it looked fine but could be distracting at times. There were quite a few other visitors there. Last time I went to Modern Art Oxford to see the exhibition of Stuart Brisley’s work there were only a handful of people. Of course it could be because people were on holiday, but both William Morris and Andy Warhol have followings of people, probably at times very different groups of people, depending on which one has their preference. So on the whole an interesting show and worth a visit.

 

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.