Reflections on feedback received

The OCA asks us to show how we may have reflected or acted on feedback received from our tutor. I thought that rather than pasting all the feedback in from all assignments, I would comment on the feedback elements that had substantive contents, so that I can work out whether these will be useful for the last assignment.
 
Feedback from assignment 1-3
 
Overall I think the feedback I get is positive. Tutors (I have had two on this course), have commented that my commitment is coherent, that I choose good exhibitions etc to visit and that my learning log is consistent and clearly laid out.
 
My work is' thorough' one said, and I have worked experimentally on samples. Connections between my own work and that of other artists was given favourable comment, and I get a feeling that my work style and process is OK.
 
Tutor 
you have used drawing to explore photographs as a way of generating design ideas.  This is an excellent way of working and I encourage you to continue to develop this method of working.

On the learning log - one tutor said I was using an academic style, the other said that it is 'articulate and reflective in a loose functional style'. So, not sure what to make of this. One also said that I should spend more on my practice and less on writing, while the other said that I should include all my information from the workbook, and to describe my work more fully. Well, this is a finely balanced thing. I have throughout stated that I will not put any images on the blog that carry risks of breaching copyright, I will be placing links to other people's work instead. And in terms of describing my work, I find this a difficult thing to balance - the blog takes a lot of time to complete, it is a slower process to write than to talk, which is a short-coming of not having face to face tutorials with the work in the room to discuss with a tutor. 

Learning points

In assignment two the advisory pointers included:

Explore a theme, create mind maps and observational drawings to respond to through your assignment work.

Further, from assignment three:

●     Continue to work experimentally with your materials

●     Maintain the development of your online learning log

●     Draw and mark make regularly in a personal sketchbook

●     Consider doing a section of the Foundations for Textiles Course.

For my second assignment I also got some surprising feedback - The tutor thought I hadn't machine stitched into soluble fabric to create new fabric before. I am not sure what made her say that, I had used that technique for my textiles A-level (the final exam piece she had seen in a separate email), and she also suggested I might stitch into my final printed sample, which I had done. Of course she had not seen the final sample, but I am sure I had explained this about the piece in the blog. 

Further:

Tutor:1

You have mentioned that you’d like more time creating the work; perhaps this is worth considering? I’d like to see you extending your pieces, when something has gone well, recreating and extending it whilst neglecting what was no so positive about a piece until you have reworked a piece several times with reflections at each stage. 

 

Tutor2

I suggest you explore the colour you use for your samples in more methodical way by creating colour palettes.  Use either paints or a computer programme like Photoshop to make colour chips arranged in suitable palettes.

 

On the final learning points and advice on artist's work to consult provided - this is a funny one. Some of this advice relates to a given assignment and is given in retrospect, and once one is entering another assignment when the feedback arrives from a previous assignment the skill set being tested has changed or may warrant a different approach.

And, not surprisingly, both tutors encouraged drawing more. I do agree with this, but the issue is two-fold - time and skill. I have a busy job and am tired when I get home. I have had some lulls in the course work for that reason, and find that when I get home and work on samples there is little time for additional work on drawing. Hence I voluntarily asked for, and was advised to do, the sketchbook work as I thought that might inspire me further. I will probably do the drawing course after this one to gain in confidence with my drawing skills.

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.

Sketchbook course continued

I showed some site specific photographs in support of the sketchbook course in the earlier post on sketchbooks. As I mentioned, we were asked to do pictures of a journey from life and I have preferred to look at a portrait of a place. So off I went and did a few sketches of this place I feel a sense of peace in. This is a churchyard around an medieval priory that once was an abbey. What I like about British churchyards is their rambling and random organic way of growing, with trees once planted and then left to grow freely with the resultant meadow flowers and long grasses growing up around gravestones, ancient walls. I grew up in Denmark where the grave yards are very trimmed, precise places. Hedges are short and shorn back, each plot is allotted and defined, clipped and gravelled, and when you no longer pay the lease for your plot it is allocated to someone else and there is then more trimming and clipping, making it a very orderly place. Not much space there for nesting and territorial robins. Plenty of living cemeteries in the UK though, so I like to find these almost abandoned places where human culture and nature often seem to live peacefully side by side.

Just a couple of photos to show the site again:

And here some of my sketchbook (the concertina one required by the course):

 

 

You will notice I have used water colours and watercolour pencils a fair bit. There is some value in that medium as it allows for the light and the reflective nature of colour to really shine through. I also used oil pastels and scraped into those, but that renders the page very heavy and has a different purpose which is less about light and more about colour and texture. I would like to learn more about water colour, it is a great medium to design and draft with.

 

Other sketching

 

I also have another sketchbook which I used while on holiday. Here I practiced still life using blue and grey glass objects, and the second image is of freer work using the randomness of the pigments applied and drawing with pen on top.

 

 

 

More marks for the sketchbook course - continued

 



The other exercise on the sketchbook is working from a customised book. I have already shown some pictures from this book, but here a few more. The book is an old cookbook. The artist I considered was Cy Twombly. I like his doodling style. What is quite interesting is that if you think too hard about the doodles they don't really work, while when you doodle with a different mindset, e.g. in meetings or on the phone, you get a different set of marks or motifs showing through (probably with a bit of subconscious free thinking thrown in). It is actually quite hard to free the intentionality of doodles when faced with a page to fill. Besides, Twombly's marks were not really doodles, although they do have a sense of free association about them. Here are some more mark making from the cookbook:

 

 

Testing printing with a spongy object that came with a Christmas present:

 

Here are some of these doodles - not easy, I ended up just mindlessly making waves and 'flowers'. Not interesting in themselves, although the layering of different colours onto text was quite effective, and the changes from a wet brush to a drier mark changes the quality of the patterning.

 

Tex 1 Part 5/Assignment 5 preparation - Theme book - trees continued

So, work continues on the theme books. I have been photographing trees as you may have noticed if you look at other posts (and I guess that if you want to see all the tree work together please select the 'trees' items from the labels). There is also the ongoing work on the sketchbook assignment I chose to do alongside to try to get into drawing on a regular basis (unfortunately that is less successful as I juggle work and feeling tired when I get home in the evening, nevertheless, have a look at the sketchbook post for updates in that area).

Here are some pictures of my theme book I progress, the paper for the book have been sewn together and I am now working in it, the binding is still to come:

 

 

 

Some of the work in the theme book are just free doodles to warm up in the hope that some will be useful of give a feel of the idea of trees, whilst other are based on photographs I took:

 

 

I also made a small concertina sketchbook to take me to my art group. There is a very beautiful churchyard around the hall we use, and I sat there one evening painting trees, whilst a parent bird was busy feeding her young, there was much commotion above.

The front of the book to set the scene:

I looked at a large looming yew tree, which in life is very dark, but I had a go at a very wet on wet picture which rendered it quite light, but it is effective. I liked the wet on wet; I found that you have to work very quickly and be sure you put the same level of paint on across the page, otherwise it gets too overloaded and it knocks out the proportion of the pigment. I am a beginner in watercolour, but enjoy it once I get going. One of my art group colleagues thought the light in this was good.

Here's an attempt at stitching a tree into prepared mulberry paper:

Since the yew tree picture worked so well, I thought I would do one on mulberry paper and the stitch onto that - so here's the prepared paper:

I went out one evening and took some photo of leaves moving in the wind. Then I have selected details so that mostly they become mostly abstractions.

First a picture showing three different trees growing in a roadside hedge area: oak, ash and birch

The next images are of details of leaves, areas where light shone through, where the camera was moving and the leaves were fluttering, and more detailing. Some of these pictures work quite well as single, or individual, pictures. Too many in a series and they start seeming a bit too similar. I guess a useful exercise would be to print and cut up some, try to draw or paint others.

 

 

This one is quite interesting - the edges are harder - you can tell the organic nature of the tree, but the lines have become edgy and sharp in the detailing and in the sharpness of the light. There is something a bit collagey about it.

And I really quite liked these. You get a sense of the moving leaves, the wind moving things about, and yet, they might be something else - the light in the greens and the organic lines make them a bit otherworldly.

I don't know why, but recently I 'rediscovered' Pipilotti Rist. the video art film maker. She had an exhibition in London I saw some years ago, and there are interesting film excerpts and interviews with her on Youtube that are worth looking at. She works in film to capture all elements of sensual experience - vision, sound and there is something quite aesthetic about her films, whilst also being a bit grating at time - creating a tension to keep you alert to say, the poison in Paradise. Whether her art is feminist is open to discussion, she uses the female form in her work, but then that has a long art historical tradition; I think it is likely that she is more concerned about notion of pleasure and feeling. There is a lot of water, fruit and other coloured things moving across very large scale screens, sometime projected onto ceilings for spectators to enjoy lying on the floor. The colours are enhanced and extremely strong, and as the images often go out of focus as she zooms in and out there is blurring, focus and blurring in continuous movement.

In getting a bit into photography when thinking about the life of trees, and I think this last picture here evokes something along the lines I mean, I may have remembered Rist's work for its intensity of colour and life, and the constant movement and sounds she brings to her films. Photography by contrast is still and fixed, it captures a moment rather than being a movement over time. You can create aesthetic effects with photography that also evoke feelings, but they are not accompanied by sound, so as the spectator you may only have your internal monologue to rely on when looking at it.

Tex1 Project 9 - samples in tapestry weave

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

First techniques-based sample in progress:

 

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

 

Further work on the techniques sample

 

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

 

 

 Here's the final sample

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Samples using different materials as weft

 

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

 

 

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

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

Final sample

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

 Reference

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