Textiles 1 - Assignment 5 tutor feedback

After each assignment we receive feedback from our tutor. The OCA asks that we publish this on our blog, so here it is. I have had mixed feelings about the course overall and how distance learning works in the creative arts. Text in blue is my commentary, text in black is my tutor's words:

Overall Comments

Congratulations in completing this final part of Textiles 1: A Creative Approach.   It is clear from the work you have sent me you have worked hard to use the design process to develop ideas and final textile pieces.  You have used research material to inspire drawing work in a range of mediums.  However there is a lack of evidence that you have worked through a number of textile samples in order to come to conclusions about the direction of your final design.  Having said that your final weave piece is a clear development of your blurred tree photographs. 

Feedback on assignment

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

During this assignment you have created a theme book based on trees, exploring their forms, colours and design potential through drawing and collage.   Though your drawing skill still needs developing you have used it regularly to explore your theme with some success.  There is a pleasing use of mark making to explore the structure of trees, for example the page where you use lightly painted some what watery lines accompanied by splashes of colour in blue and pink.  I suggest you develop this loose style further, using mark-making exercises to develop your style.  Mark making video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LrZGoW6-iw

Comment: yes, I agree, I am still a novice at drawing and have not done as much as I had intended. This last module fell at a time when I was also doing professional studies and an exam for my work, and I have to say that splitting your mind into work and art is not easy when there is pressure on.

I try to work loosely when I draw. I find that as a new person to drawing I get quite tight and worried about drawing which takes the enjoyment away from it. So I try to be more playful, although it is difficult. So, useful feedback.

Throughout your theme book you have used collage to develop and play with ideas.  I particularly like the collage you have built up using different green papers in a linear arrangement that reflects the image opposite of a pine forest.  There also appears to be a conscious effort to investigate texture through collage that works well in this project. 

It would have been good to see a group of textile samples that came from this work, placing the samples alongside the work to illustrate how your ideas developed.  It’s possible you conducted your sampling earlier in the course, if this is the case I suggest you organise your work in way that explains how drawing influenced you sample making. 

Comment: I didn’t have time to do much sample making. I was nearing the absolute final date for submission and decided to work straight on the loom as I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to make. It is worth repeating here that I primarily work through process, i.e. I work with the material and experiement as I go along. The course material suggsted we could work through process and I chose to work in this way, which is my preferred approach. I knew what colours I wanted to use, and the technique (in the case of the green sample) I wanted to try out. There was little point sampling when the final thing was itself a sample and the process of working through it was the main concern of this method. It would have been different if I was planning something that needed careful thought and working out for example in terms of size, blends, representation or interpretation, but that was not necessary in the case of either samples as they were worked through on the loom. Tapestry weaving is a slow process and there is quite a bit of time to think during the work.

You have sent three larger textile samples (including the book cover) with the rippled weave being your final piece I think.  This is quite an exciting piece of textile work with its free use of colour and energetic texture.  It clearly is a development of your photographic experiments.  It has been crafted with care but also feels like an inquiring piece of work that captures the blurry movement in your photograph.  

Comment: Originally I had intended to make four pieces for the final work, to reflect trees through the seasons. This was a bit ambitious in the end and the two woven pieces I have included represent an exploratory work that resonates with the ‘summer’ theme that is based on the abstracted photographs my tutor mentions, and the ‘spring’ theme, based on the photo-manipulated images of magnolia stellate from our garden. The feedback is useful and clear, I am encouraged that the work is seen as careful craft work, that is my intention with creating samples, and final work.

What are your thoughts on this body of work; blurred photo, drawings, colour palettes, collage and textile sample conclusion?  What did you learn about the design process? How did the drawing work affect your thinking?  Where did your ideas come from and how did you respond to them?  Was the final outcome what you expected, not just in regard to techniques but also in its aesthetic?  This reflective thinking and recording that thinking is an essential part of the course, making up 20% of your mark.  I suggest you include a reflective piece of writing of about 500 words on your learning log to conclude this journey.

Comment: I am a bit confused about some of these questions. I put a lot of effort into describing my process for the ‘stellata’ piece, looking at the image and choosing wools, selecting colours, working in sections etc and referencing Fiona Hutchison’s work for the green sample etc. I will add some more words into the blog in a separate post, and will consider the aesthetic dimension. Some supporting wording is also included in the final reflections section. Maybe my blog isn’t clearly set out?

Research

Context, reflective thinking, critical thinking, analysis  

For this assignment you have conducted an in depth study into trees, using this as your theme to inspire design.  This spread nicely into architecture in particular church interiors.  You have collected the information in the form of photographs and cuttings.  It is nice to see you have mixed paints to create colour palettes from these images.  You have also used drawing and collage to explore the potential of the images too.  These are all really good ways to explore your research material so I suggest you continue to do this in your future studies.

Comment: yes, I like collaging, using texture and working out colours, good to hear she likes this technique. I went on a Cas Holmes course on creative journal making which was a good introduction to how to work with papers, samples, sketches etc. I think the box I made for the sketchbook course earlier in the year was useful in that respect as well. I believe that I pick up impressions from many different sources, including from an in-visible source such as music, and they all leave traces in the subconscious that get worked through when I am developing my ideas in some way.

You have also gathered imagery and information about other practitioners, for example Fiona Hutchinson whom you explain you met taking part in one of her summer schools.  You include some lovely imagery of her work, including sample pieces on her studio wall.  To get the most from this experience and from other workshops and talks you have attended it is vital to explain what you have learnt.  Not just in terms of techniques but also ways of working - how an artist develops their ideas, their design process, how they use drawing, sampling and times of reflection.  From this you ought to spend some time considering how what you have learnt will affect the way you approach your own creative process.  This critical reflection is essential when studying towards a degree but it will also assist you creating more meaningful and considered textiles. 

Learning Logs or Blogs/Critical essays

Context, reflective thinking, critical thinking, analysis  

Further to what is written above your learning log is well organised with imagery of your work and details of techniques and methods used.  I suggest you develop you critical thinking skills by writing about how your ideas come about, how you respond to these ideas through drawing and making and then write an evaluation of drawings and the things you make.  This will assist you in gaining a good mark at assessment and it will also encourage a deeper understanding of your own personal design process.

Comment: OK, this is a similar comment to the one above about writing about process and ideas generation. I mentioned that I felt I had done this already, but will do a bit more. There is something personal about idea generation and process development that I feel should not always be revealed and disclosed to the world, and I am still not sure what it is that is being asked here. 'Telling all' is almost turning oneself inside-out in public, and although there is a movement for people to open all to the world on the web I do not necessarily want that. There has to a space for one's own self and quiet making. For example, one of the course tutors whose course I attended was quite sensitive about her process and did not want this shared with the world on another person’s blog.

My first tutor on this course thought I should spend more time making and less on writing - I have since been asked to write more. I have spent several years in university undertaking critical writing on art and design, and reviewing design thinking (design history to MA level), and I continue to have to think hard and write in my daily work. 

I believe that practice is itself a mode of expression, and yes, there should be words attached, but in the design and art disciplines surely making, as praxis, should be the primary mode of expression. The work is the embodiment of the learning and the thought process. Perhaps this is a limitation of distance learning that there is no immediate discussion of the work. In classes with tutor feedback and real presence we discuss the work using language to describe and reflect, but it is an immediate and responsive environment to support the work and we find essences in the spoken rather than writing long realms of text. Writing so much on a blog feels artificial and can become a chore, it ditracts from the work to some extent. Add to that the expectation of participation in on-line environments (sometimes with more self-revelation) and there is little time left for making.

For me it is the process that is the important thing above everything else.

Pointers for further study

• To work within the time scale provided by the OCA (you work arrived 2 days after you course finished) – yes, I submitted late, but that was due to work pressures and over-reaching my project
• Develop your drawing skill – agree – I am going on a couple of drawing courses at West Dean college soon, and will take life drawing classes locally to where I live
• Include your reflective thinking and analysis of the work you make – Hmm, see my comments above
• Write about what you have learnt during workshops, talks and when looking at your research material.  – again, I thought I had done this. I am keeping the writing slim-lined and will try to write just enough, as I still think the making takes precedent over writing.

 Pointers for assessment

• Reflect on this feedback in your learning log
• Make suitable adjustments to your work in line with tutor feedback.
• Reread your feedback forms to check you have used all the tutor suggestions.
• Look at the learning outcomes and the assessment criteria to judge whether your work has met the requirements.
• Refer to the assessment guidelines on the oca website, Research ▷ By Course Area ▷ Textiles ▷ scroll down to page 2 ▷ Assessment Guidelines: Textiles
• Aim to organize your work so that it tells the story of how you went about achieving the outcomes.  You did this by conducting research, doing drawing and making samples.

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.

Second Course at West Dean - Creative Journals

I spent a long weekend at West Dean on a course run by Cas Holmes on creative journals. Cas is known for her textile-paper works using nature as themes for her foldable work. She uses observational drawing as a starting point, and that was one of the approaches she walked us through. I will not show every single thing we did on this course, there was just so much to do and we all worked very hard.

As preparation I had brought photographs of hazy, foggy landscapes, but in the end I went with the flow of the course and made other things. I did plan to make something that would be more or less complete and am happy to say, the 'book' I made has come out well considering the time constraints and the ambition of the work (I overstretched myself rather, and worked very hard on the last day to try to get everythign done before going home).

The first day and half concentrated on creating materials, preparing papers, manipulating sketchbooks and drawing. We scrunched paper, dabbed and jabbed paint onto sheets of paper and gathered things together for the following two days of assembling and forming art work.

Here's an example of some of this work:

This is using re-cycled photocopies of previous OCA work, and some relief work on scrunched paper. I liked the piece on the left which suggested bark-like textures.

Another set of pages: The blue section on the left is some nuno felt I attached to the page using running stitch and to the right a collage using a print of a close-up image of some bubble wrap with droplets and bubbles of condensation. I was trying to make the two pages echo each other by using the running stitch to suggest spiky ice bergs or cold icy landscapes.


Here's some work in progress. After creating all these pages of coloured and collaged papers we started to sew bit together. We had done some drawing and some people used these to start off their work. I had brought some photographs of hydrangeas, a photograph of a drawing I made during the last FDAD course (Foundation course at West Dean) I did and other more abstrated images, which I mounted onto a japanese postal bag that had been chopped into section:

I used vintage threads, some of which were very fragile and would not sew properly - they broke easily, new threads, papers, including a faded paper bag, cellofane packaging plastic, tea bags and tissue dyed with tea.

 Here (above) is a piece using the faded pinkish paper bag and a some tissue used to wipe up left-over paints. This was just a practice-piece and I used machine stitch in shapes that I would probably have used in quilt-making (I am not a quilter though). This course was the first time I properly used paper as a background for sewing and collage.

 

 

On the reverse of the larger book sections I left the back of the stitching uncovered, painted gesso over some of it and splattered ink on some section. Every paper section was then sewn together using a narrow strip of linen. This was helpful as it enable a sort of hinge between the pages to enable the book to be folded together, I then painted some of it with gesso and tried to make all the sections meld into a whole by using the rhythm and repetition of colour, materials and surface finishes. I was quite happy with the use of gesso, the thinner spreads enhanced the relief of the paper which I think can be seen in the above.

This is the back of the book and a few examples of the better sections from the back. The one below is the pattern created by stitching around the photograph of the walnut that was attached to the other side. 

Another example of a section from the back:

And an end section using white heavy-weight paper onto which I attached a tracing from a hydrangea picture, a bit of commercial lacy machine embroidered cotton, tea bags and japanese paper painted with gesso and frayed. All sewn over in  a flowery design in pale violet.

Here's the final think suspended for display for the final crit/show and tell:

I was quite interested in this way of working, of not being confined to a book necessarily, but using loose sheets of paper as a foundation. The idea of working fairly big in different media and using different techniques on individual sheets which can be assembled later may be useful in creating workbooks when planning tapestry and felt projects. You can't be fiddly with felt samples, and tapestry may also lend itself to be put together with other things to think about how it could be developed differently from conventional ways of thinking about this old technique. 

So far I have learnt a lot from these courses at West Dean. It is very useful to be able to fully immerse oneself in the work, just eat, breathe and talk art, and get handy tips and constructive contact wih practicing artists. It means that I can leave with lots of ideas and skills that I can take with me into my own work for further digestion and synthesis into something that will be part of my own language. This sketchbook course was in particular improtant for letting me work on a 'book' that would be complete piece that I 'own'. I have really only developed sketchbooks as part of submissions to external bodies and I wanted  to work out how to keep a sketchbook that is for me alone, not for communicating with other people. I think I will work on this a bit more and work on book alongside projects or in preparation for projects to be made some time in the future. Just an ongoing ticking-over sort of activity to help build visual confidence.

 

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.

Diversions

I had a bit of a dyeing day today. It was a nice day, and I had intended to go to the studio, but then I started one dye bath, and then another, and before you know it, there were three dye-baths going on.

First there were a couple of yellow acid dye baths. I put a variety of yarns in there, some blue to get green, some rosy pink to get orange, some beige and some natural wools.

Here is the range, various oranges, lemon and other yellows and the greens. The picture doesn't do the colours justice, they are in fact a lot stronger than is shown here.

Another dye bath was a violet cold water dye. This is obviously for cellulose fibre, so I dyed some linen and cottons.

This photograph does not show the colours properly. But basically there are various shades of violet, and some very pale yarns. I also included some natural coloured flax which didn't pick up the dye very well.

A finally I used a vintage Dylon universal dye to dye both cellulose and protein fibres, a bright turquoise.

Overall a productive day. My head was buzzing with plans for project including using some yarns in felt making, using discharge dyeing and embroidery on this old nightie I dyed turquoise and so on - lots of ideas just bursting to get out into the fibre.

A craft programme on TV

As last year the Danish TV channel, Danmarks Radio, is showing a programme on craft. It is set up as a competition, a bit like the craft progamme headed by Monty Don, but in this Danish series a group of crafts people, who each have a specific specialist discipline, take it in turns to host the group at their workshop or studio, and the group then has to work on a material and use tools they will not have tried before.

The first episode showed the group in a workshop manufacturing horn products. The crafts or materials represented in the group are wood, concrete, clay, silk, brass and prescious metals. The horn-maker, as host in the first episode, ran through the basic skills and techniques to manipulate and work the material, after which the group then had to first make a set project (a spoon) and then after this were to design an object each for assessment by an expert judge. The exercises are timed.

I really enjoy this programme series. We get a good idea of the design thinking behind each object, and there is a clear challenge for each maker in working a material they do not necessarily know; and in the case of the horn, certain characteristics presented their own problems which might not have been foreseen by the makers. 

In short snippets there are quick chats with each maker. They talk about the design, their aim in their choice of expression in the material or the way they may have had prejudices about the material before they started working on it. There is a clear leaning towards function. All the makers are clearly masters of their own craft; they look as if they have been working on their respective fields for many years. Some of them try to apply what they have learnt from their own discipline to the new material, which may sometimes work, others try to work with the material without a similar background, and so I guess look at the wider design-craft universe for inspiration in their made object for the programme.

Although the programme does not show any one craft in depth, it still manages to convey the way a designer-maker thinks, their meetings with the material and the energy they apply to their work. The programme is edited in a way that suggests that they are mostly open and positive to the material, even if in one case the ceramicist had reservations about horn being somehow oldfashioned and gave him a sense of 'the 70s'. 

The makers just have a go at the new craft presented in the weekly challenge, and they all seem to make beautiful objects. I am guessing that with a title such as 'Made in Denmark', there may be a brief on the design philosophy underpinning the programme. But it has the feel of giving the makers freedom to design in whatever language they prefer, and in the first programme they certainly looked as if they grasped the qualities of the material very quickly. I am looking forward to next week's instalment, it is definitely a one-to-watch, if you know the Danish language and have an interest in the culture of making by hand.