Working

January 17, 2016

In early December I planned out all the work I needed to do. An exhibition in February means work has to be ready for framing … around now actually. It was all perfectly possible on paper. But it’s one thing to block out time on a plan and write “stitch work”, for example, and quite another to actually do it. In the studio I surveyed the pile of work I needed to finish and felt slightly terrified.

A deadline is a wonderful thing for getting focused. I dropped or deferred everything that did not contribute to getting the work done (including this blog) and settled down to work. Apart from a couple of days with my family, I stitched all the way through Christmas.

It goes something like this. I pull out each piece of work and lay it on my studio table. In this case I had already stitched them all to a backing fabric. Canvas this time (I had my reasons but never again – my poor fingers). I lay out different threads on top of the work until I have a palette I want to work with. Silk, rayon, cotton – some matte, some shiny. Mostly very fine in weight. I look at the piece of work for a clue as to what to do and where to start.

Mostly I work with the marks on the cloth, sometimes I work against them or look to add marks where there are none. I will have an idea what I want but not usually a plan for the whole piece when I start. I will know where I want the emphasis to be but otherwise I will ask myself as I am working what the piece needs.

Occasionally there is a piece where I don’t know what to do. When there is a type of mark I haven’t worked with before. Or the marks in the cloth are so subtle that I am really not sure what to add – or whether to add anything at all. In this case I just try something. If it doesn’t work, I pull out the stitches and try something else. Change thread. Larger stitches. Smaller ones. A different kind of mark. Dense layers of marks – or sparse and widely spaced. I take photographs – sometimes it’s clearer what you need to do when you look at an image of it.

For two weeks I worked like this for six to ten hours a day. I listened to music or radio documentaries. Sometimes I worked in silence. If this sounds relaxing, I can’t say that it was. There was a tension between the slow, patient hand work and the underlying sense of pressure to get everything done. This was a consequence of working to a tight schedule, not the experience of slow stitch. And there wasn’t time to play around or experiment too much.

As I worked, ideas came to me – things I want to try. Not just stitch ideas. I jotted them down in my sketchbook so as not to lose them and kept working. I was mildly frustrated that I couldn’t afford the time to stop and do other things. Which made me ponder the value of both work and play. I remembered how earlier in the year I was frustrated that I didn't know what to do and was not “working” and used play and experimentation to keep myself going. The work I am doing now derived from that period.

Anyway I am now preparing a pile of finished work for the framer. I have some admin things to do but otherwise I will soon be through this phase of work. Then I am going to do something else for a while.

Exhibition details:

I will be showing some of this new work in an exhibition alongside paintings by Stephanie Stow and Elaine Cox at Bircham Gallery in Holt, Norfolk from Saturday 13 February until 9 March.

I also currently have some work in a mixed show at The Bank in Eye, Suffolk. The exhibition, Abstraction of Form, runs from Tuesday 19 January until 28 February.

Close focus

July 19, 2015

Limited space and limited time mean I tend to focus on either one thing or another in my studio. It's hard to switch back and forth too quickly between screen-printing, dyeing or stitching. So although I have developed more monoprints since my last post, I was conscious how much I still needed to do to get work ready for exhibition in September. So I am back in stitch mode.

I joked to friends that I am "panic stitching"! An exaggeration, because in practice I have plenty of time, but there is that (rather helpful) sense of a looming deadline that is driving me to get the work done. I know I won't feel completely settled again until it is.

The stitching phase is so different from any other part of the process. It means spending hours at a time with a single piece of work, studying minute marks on the cloth and deciding stitch by stitch how to respond to those. I can be quite fidgety and so it can be hard to settle down at first. Listening to good music helps. Another tactic I've found is to set a timer for one hour and work until it goes off. All the usual distractions have to wait until then, by which time it's reasonable to have a short break anyway. In practice I've usually settled by then and am happy to keep going.

I'm stitching the largest pieces first so the task will get easier and progress faster as I go on. The first two are always the hardest as I work out my approach. False starts, trying things out, changing my mind, starting again until I'm happy it works.

In the meantime the experimentation hasn't completely stopped. I've reviewed and organised all my samples, pinned everything up on a wall to have a look and done some drawing. Plenty of time to think about all this while I stitch.

Stitch details

April 12, 2015

I have been immersed in stitching a group of new work. This involves hours of sitting closely with each piece, listening to music or iPlayer radio documentaries while I stitch. I made a decision with this group that hardly any of the stitched marks would be functional. The cloth is held together with invisible stitching and the visible stitches are there solely as marks. This gave me more freedom to play with the edges of the cloth. Sometimes, it looks as though the stitches are holding pieces together - but then they tail away or wander off somewhere else.

I also experimented with stitching from the back. While the results have some of the loose, erratic quality I like, I think I could have pushed this further. Too cautious this time.

Stitch marks

March 1, 2015

A little while ago I was talking to someone about a piece of textile work (not my own). I made a comment about the stitching. My companion objected - they viewed the stitches simply as drawn marks. In fact, that was what I had meant - I had been admiring the variety of marks achieved and the way they interacted with the marks in the cloth. But I knew why they had challenged my initial remark and this momentary tension set me thinking.

When people talk about textiles you often hear a focus on technique at the expense of the work itself. I think many people are more comfortable talking about the materials and the way something is made than the ideas behind it, artistic effects or compositional qualities. This is all too common in the textile world but it isn't absent from the fine art world because I've heard this in exhibitions of paintings, photographs, drawings too - people deconstructing the technical aspects of the work - the way it is made - rather than the work itself. And actually there are some works where I wonder whether I would be so engaged if I did not know how they were done. Brice Marden's graphite drawings for example.

So when I commented on the stitches, it sounded as though I was talking about the technique rather than the effect. But in the same way as drawn marks have different qualities, so do stitch marks - and some artists exploit this really well. A stitch has a physical dimension that a drawn mark does not. It has a back as well as a front. It can project into space. The ends may be left trailing or standing out. It follows a trail - so that you can deduce what is happening on one side from what you see on the other. It can serve a purpose - linking or holding things together - creating a relationship between itself and the surface.

Roanna Wells created a piece titled "Withdrawn" for the 2011 Jerwood Drawing Prize in which the marks on the surface were what was left after she had removed all her stitches. A form of erasure drawing. A kind of ghost image. Beautiful and interesting in itself but the way the drawing had been achieved added a deeper resonance.

I am interested in this relationship between image, marks and surface. There are many art works that explore this in really interesting ways. Textiles happen to offer a particularly broad range of ways that artists can do so. I sometimes pause to consider why I work with cloth, dye and stitch rather than other media. The answer in my case is to do with the way the marks - both dyed and stitched - become an integral part of the cloth. They do not just sit on the surface. And the way the cloth itself influences what happens with the dye and the stitch - it is not passive.

The images above are all from previous work - in black and white to emphasise the marks. I have several new pieces of work in progress at the moment and they are all approaching the stitch stage. So it's a good time to be thinking about the kind of marks I want to make and how I want them to relate to the cloth.

Edges, threads and traces

May 18, 2014

I have been in stitch mode for a while. I have finished several new pieces of work for Bircham Gallery and have more work ready to stitch in the studio. Work is flowing well at the moment so I'm making the most of this. Never know how long it will last ...

I think I have a new favourite piece. Over these blue mountains was all about edges. Lots of minute stitching. I felt as though I was conjuring the forms of the mountains out of the marks left by the dye on the cloth. Two posts back I reflected on how the marks on my flints have their own cause, but when I look at them I interpret them in certain ways according to my own memory and experience of similar marks. And now I found myself following the same process with the marks on the cloth - their true origin relates to dye chemistry and application but through selecting and emphasising specific edges and marks over others I was drawing out their resemblance to something else.

In the top and bottom sections, stitching became a game of defining and dissolving edges. In some places lines of stitch hold down actual cloth edges; in others they merely create the illusion of an edge. I was making decisions every time I selected a thread colour, placed a stitch or ended a line as to where the "edges" were and whether they were strong or faint. Sometimes I was following marks in the cloth so indistinct that even I was not sure whether they were really there.

It dawned on me that I was playing directly with Tim Ingold's distinction between traces and threads. Ingold argues that most lines can be classified as one or the other. "A thread is a filament ... that can be entangled with other threads or suspended between points in three-dimensional space. ... threads have surfaces, however they are not drawn on surfaces." In contrast "the trace is any enduring mark left in or on a solid surface by a continuous movement."

I was using the traces left by dye on the cloth as a guide to where to place lines that I was making with a continuous thread. And while I was focusing on what was happening on the front - the way the stitches were interacting with the dye marks - something else was happening on the back. My thread was marking its pathway across the cloth with another pattern of stitches, livelier and more random than the carefully considered choices I was making on the front. Conscious, deliberate decisions on one side; unconscious, accidental effects underneath - but each a direct consequence of the other. It's a pathway - in the sense that it traces a route - but it's different from the line we would mark with our feet or draw on a map because it's marking the spaces / movement between each stitch / step rather than the steps themselves.

I like the freedom and liveliness of these accidental stitches and I'm pondering ways of recreating the effect. If I simply turn the cloth over, I will lose a lot of control over how each stitch relates to the marks on the cloth. If I copy the pattern of the stitches on the back, they will lose some of their spontaneity. This is interesting in itself! Need to experiment with this.

If this seems a particularly introspective post, this is how it is with me when I am stitching. While I am very focused on what I am doing, my mind is free to reflect. I think this is why I prefer hand stitch. It is a physical process that keeps the mind engaged in a way that's different to when I sew with a machine. Each stitch is an individual decision but there is time for the mind to explore different trains of thought. It is when I am stitching that I spend the longest period with each individual piece (and this is usually when I work out what to call it). I notice things I didn't see when I constructed the piece, new ideas emerge, new links and associations are made and I come up with new things I want to try.

More on Tim Ingold's thinking on lines here.

Boro

April 5, 2014

Yesterday I went to see an exhibition of Boro textiles at Somerset House in London. Before I even got there, I was aware that there was a debate about the way the textiles were displayed. The exhibitor has made a deliberate decision to display the textiles stretched over boards and hung on the wall. Some feel that this is totally inappropriate. These were domestic textiles - clothing, futon covers, wrapping cloths - that are the product of a tradition of continuously patching and repairing cloth for utilitarian and economic purposes. Boro means something like "ragged" in Japanese. Displaying them in this way removes them from that context. It also imposes limitations - you can't view both sides, you lose the edges and the clues as to their original use. From being domestic artefacts with a life and a history, they become two dimensional art objects, to be appreciated for their visual qualities.

However, the visual impact of the textiles on the bright, white walls of the gallery was stunning. Misgivings evaporated as I walked into the first room. These are fascinating textiles and seeing them this way allows you to fully appreciate colour and composition. If it had been a museum show, you would expect more emphasis on the cultural context in which the cloths were made. But this is a selling exhibition and the exhibitor is consciously positioning them as fine art objects, priced accordingly.

It's an interesting tension. The catalogue poses the question "Can art transcend function?" I don't believe that the people who originally made these cloths did so with a deliberate aesthetic intention. They were made to be used. Pieces of cloth were joined together to make a larger cloth. Holes and tears were covered with patches. The stitching is functional - just enough to hold the pieces together. But at the same time, the culture within which these cloths were made featured a strong craft tradition and a very considered approach to the most everyday activities and this comes through even in these so-called "rags". On a striped patch, the stitcher has followed the lines in the cloth. On another, it does look as though the maker made deliberate decisions about the colours and positioning of the patches. It does appear that some makers were paying attention to the visual effect of what they did. But it is unlikely they were ever made to be viewed as "art".

I think it says as much about us and our own cultural context that we do. We look at Boro textiles, with eyes that have become accustomed to modern, abstract art. We recognise some of the same qualities and accept their presence in a gallery setting. At the moment though this is apparently a predominantly Western thing. While I was there I overheard part of a conversation between one of the attendants and a Japanese visitor who was bemused to find these textiles presented like this, in a gallery. In Japan, Boro textiles are not valued in the way they are by Western collectors.

Leaving aside this debate, I spent nearly three hours looking closely at the textiles themselves. I couldn't face carrying my camera around London yesterday so these images are the best I could manage with my iPhone. What caught my attention was the layering of the patches - the way holes overlapped and revealed layers beneath - and the stitching. Most of the stitching was quite rough - some neater than others but it was the kind of stitching you make when you tack things together. There were traces of the individual makers in the size and rhythm of the stitches. I noticed the stitching usually followed a "route" - e.g. the maker would usually stitch around the sides of the patch and then into the centre in a continuous line. This meant the stitch line became a kind of path. Secondly, the stitching of the patches on one side of the cloth showed through on the other - so while the function of the stitching on the side you were looking at was obvious, there was this additional layer of stitching that hinted at what was happening on the other side. Often, bits of the stitching were missing so you had to interpret what was going on with incomplete information. I find this quite exciting. Also, the layering and stitching of some pieces made me think of a map - but a map that was showing multiple layers at the same time. Lots to think about here.

The exhibition is on until 26 April and there is a well illustrated catalogue to go with it. Details here.

Also, see this article for a very different approach to exhibiting Boro textiles.

Music on. Stitching.

January 24, 2014

I am in stitch mode. Listening to a mega playlist on repeat. And reflecting on what I'm trying to do.

I like the integrity of work where the stitches that hold it together are visible and part of the finished effect, but I also like my stitching to work with (not against) the dye marks on the cloth. However I'm not an embroiderer - in the sense that my stitches aren't meant to dominate or be the design itself. For me I think it's about adding another layer of marks.

Visually, if there is no stitch, then the cloth and the dye marks have to do all the work. They have to tell the whole story on their own. If there is to be stitch, it has to add something to the story told by the cloth and the dye. An additional element of mark, texture, line, that builds upon what is already there. Maybe by emphasising or enhancing existing textures, marks (a harmonious strategy) or maybe by adding a contrast or counterpoint (a complementary strategy). But unless the stitch is to become the dominant feature it has to integrate with what's already there, not take over.

On the other hand, if the stitching is to be the dominant feature, then it pushes the cloth / dye marks into the background. As though they become the background scenery rather than the tale itself. In which case there needs to be enough stitching - or a strong enough contrast - for the story the stitch is telling to be read against the background.

I finished one piece this week. About to start another. It may require a new playlist. Meanwhile here are some close-ups of the stitching from two pieces.

Exhibition details:

Helen Terry

fabric, colour, texture, art, craft, creativity.