Winter lines

December 13, 2015

New inspirations and ideas brewing.

I've said before that I like winter. The linear quality of bare branches. The subtle range of winter greys. The way everything is exposed and reduced to essentials.

One walk this weekend was initially really unpromising. Poor light, a cold wind and rain showers made photography difficult. But then I started focusing on the graphic qualities of the bare trees against the flat grey sky and I was away. I became interested in the different branch patterns, the edge of the tree line and the negative spaces.

On a different walk (with slightly better weather) the best part came towards dusk when we passed a lake. I loved the way the tree reflections were exaggerated and broken by the water.

Even as I was taking all these photographs, I was thinking about drawings - abstract, monochrome ones. I said this was prompting new ideas but in practice I was making connections to some old ones too. But then isn't that always how it is?

I shall be spending most of Christmas stitching new work. But I think some drawing might provide a useful contrast to this.

Found marks and ambiguity

October 12, 2015

A visit to the RHS garden at Hyde Hall this weekend. While everyone else was admiring views through the gardens, autumn flowers or leaves, I was peering at tree trunks. I was drawn to the variety of marks and patterns on the bark of the birches in particular. The lines suggest stitches. Or signal traces - morse code, electronic pulses. There's just enough suggestion of some kind of order without repetition. The way the lines were interrupted or changed by other marks - lichen, cracks or scars - also interested me.

Something I have been reading:

“There is a human need to make sense from the random confusion of the world, to process our perceptions as we experience them, and to structure them as best we can. ... vision is an active process in which the brain attempts to make sense of the information it receives from the eyes. ”

— Derek Horton, Introduction "Drawing Ambiguity" (2015)

Exploring this process of perception and interpretation is at the heart of what I like to do. But at the same time I think marks and imagery are more interesting if they never quite resolve themselves but remain somewhat unexplained. Ambiguity leaves room for a wider range of interpretation. As soon as they resolve themselves into something definite it closes off some of the possible layers of meaning - which is far less engaging in my view.

“Ambiguity is a property of the interpretative relationship between people and things or ideas (or representations of them). ... In other words, things and ideas are not inherently ambiguous; rather, ambiguity arises in their interpretation.”

— Derek Horton, as before

The interpretation placed upon marks or images relates as much to the observer's own experience and concerns as anything in the imagery itself. I may have certain intentions for my work but am sometimes surprised by the things other people see. This is both rewarding and challenging. In some ways it is more challenging when I am working with marks that are less abstract. I like to retain that tension where the observer is not quite certain how to interpret the imagery. But the opposite problem is avoiding the kind of wilful obscurity or mystification that is merely annoying:

“... ambiguity’s value is determined by the quality of interpretation and the meaning that is derived from it. Ambiguity is not a virtue in itself and it can end up being merely confusing, frustrating or meaningless”

— Derek Horton, as before

Plenty to think about while I develop and refine the pieces I'm working on in the studio.

A daily practice - part two

March 20, 2015

So immediately after I finished the first forty days of mark-making, I started a second. And since by the end of the first I was working almost exclusively with conté crayon, I decided to switch to ink - my favourite wet medium. I chose another home-made sketchbook - a larger one this time (8 inches square) but, like the first, filled with a mixture of different types of paper. Same principle as before - a minimum of one page a day, any mark. And so I began again.

Then ... frustration! Nothing I did seemed to work out. After becoming really comfortable with the conté crayon all I seemed to get now were ugly, splodgy marks and puddles of ink on the page. And there was another problem. I had to wait for the ink to dry before I could turn the page! So not only did I not like what was happening but I couldn't move on and try something else straightaway.

One of my favourite studio rules is that whatever it is I'm doing - dyeing, drawing, collage - I set out to do at least 10 variations of it. This is because I often find that it's the 7th, 8th and 9th variations that are actually the best - the things I hadn't even thought of when I started. I like to work quickly and encourage the ideas to keep flowing from one sample or drawing to the next. And that's how I had been working during the first forty days ... and now I couldn't.

By the evening of day two (note the extent of my patience!) I was on the verge of running down to the studio and cutting a pile of loose sheets of paper to work on instead of using a book. I talked myself out of it. Partly because it was late and I was tired. But mainly because I reflected that if this was how it was to be, that was going to be part of the practice and I needed to adjust to that. It would mean slowing down and being more deliberate. Taking more time to consider what was happening before moving on.

The first week was painful. I was interested in bleed effects but kept using too much ink or too much water. So my marks would start out looking gorgeous and then degenerate into a splodgy mess. Oh yes, and the wet pages took ages to dry. I had to change my approach. Below are the most acceptable results from that week.

In week two I was placated by some good results from combining Indian ink or Sumi ink (both water-resistant) with the fountain pen inks I favour. There were some pleasing resist effects and contrasts in texture.

There was a sort of breakthrough around Day 16. I changed some of the tools I was using and tried new ways of applying the ink to the page and good things happened. I started to see some unexpected effects that I could get excited about. I also settled into a series of variations on horizontals cut by verticals, playing with different densities and line qualities. I recognise the inspiration of wetlands and reed beds and sometimes I emphasise it. The line between mark-making and drawing is a very thin one - at least in my case.

I had been using pieces of scrap paper as a mask - brushing or sponging ink off the edge - and around day 25 discovered I could mono print the dried ink from these scraps onto a damp page - gorgeous! I also experimented with adding torn pieces of masking tape, which takes the ink differently.

Today is Day 33. There are still "bad" pages - experiments that don't work out or where I have been careless or heavy-handed - but they don't bother me so much. Of course the whole experience has been entirely consistent with the underlying principle of my "rule of 10" - the value of pushing yourself beyond your initial idea in order to discover the thing you hadn't imagined. And the need to pay attention to what is happening and respond to it - change tools, change my approach.

With seven days to go I notice that I'm repeating myself more - recreating marks or effects that I like. Not a bad thing but I think one advantage of doing this practice in forty day blocks is the opportunity to change something each time, to stop it becoming habitual and keep it fresh. I have several ideas for the next 40 days ...

Karen Thiessen - who was one of those who inspired me to do this in the first place - wrote an update on her own mark-making practice and I was also interested in this.

The amazing view across the rain-soaked Ozleworth Valley from Newark Park

Stroud 2014

May 26, 2014

I drove 150 miles to Gloucestershire in the rain on Friday to see what I could of the SITSelect exhibitions. My sat nav guided me up the steepest, narrowest lane with heart-stoppingly beautiful views (when I dared to look) to Newark Park. I read the advice to not use your sat nav only after that little adventure, once I was safely in the car park, checking the visitor information.

Newark Park showed work by 30 artists that was distributed throughout the house. It was lovely to see work displayed in a domestic rather than a gallery setting. Seven of the artists had created work that responded specifically to the house or its surroundings. Others had been selected by SIT patrons; others were artists involved in the Select Trail. Sometimes the juxtaposition of such different styles of work made for an uneasy combination and it wasn't always obvious when you were looking at site-responsive versus selected pieces. And sometimes you weren't sure whether work was part of the exhibition or part of the house... although this rather added to the enjoyment of exploring the house.

Three artists particularly caught my attention: Caroline Bartlett, Jane Ponsford and Jo Lovelock. Caroline Bartlett's piece "A stitch in the fragment of time" played with ideas about the fabric of the building. Porcelain discs that had been impressed with cloth and lace textures were inset into thick felt and displayed in a long glass case. Fragments of lace, stitches, fur and feathers were trapped in many of the discs. I liked the sense of something fragile being preserved - and the tension of fragments that appear to have a story behind them but, being removed from their original context, you can only guess at what that might be.

Jane Ponsford's "A landscape in ten parts" was a grouping of ten bell jars containing hand made paper forms that reminded me of nests, trees, reeds and other landscape elements. The paper was stained and marked with clay and other traces from the landscape. I liked the simplicity of the individual pieces but the way these worked as a group, overlapping and responding to each other, was really engaging. Jane Ponsford's website has more details about the thinking and process behind this piece.

Jo Lovelock's "Amiticia" was inspired by the previous owner's enormous collection of damaged china swans and used copies of letters and papers to produce a paper swan and accompanying quilt-like piece. The use of letters gave a sense of the people connected with the house and the network of friendships. I liked the visual impact of the variety of handwritten marks and the shadows made by the folds. See more about this on Jo Lovelock's blog.

The next morning (Saturday), I went to see Alice Fox's solo exhibition at Lansdown Hall. I was grateful that Alice took pity on me and let me in early out of the pouring rain. I've seen Alice's work before but this was a much broader cross-section of her work.

Alice's use of found objects to make marks on cloth or paper creates a direct relationship between the marks and the place these objects come from (usually, but not always, the coast). The palette is restricted - natural cloth, rust, tea, and printing ink, which keeps the focus on the marks. She adds collagraph, other printmaking and hand stitch in response to the organic marks generated by the objects. Sometimes this turns the marks into something that reminds me of a map, or the marks in the sand left by the tide. I particularly love Alice's concertina books and the way their long, thin format somehow captures the sense of a journey or a walk. In this exhibition, there were also some larger format works on paper, which were incredibly subtle and reminded me of the marks the water makes in wet sand on the beach. There is a review of this exhibition (different venue) here.

My final visit was to the exhibition Shadow and Line at the Museum in Stroud. This brought together nine artists working in textiles, turned wood, enamel, porcelain and mixed media. This was a strong exhibition and it was wonderful how work by the different artists worked so well together, echoing themes and aesthetic qualities.

Shadow and Line - Caroline Bartlett on the left wall; Elizabeth Turrell and Linda Brassington on the right.

There was more work by Caroline Bartlett - "Backwards, Forwards" - in which she has gone back to her older work, which used pleating and folding, and through scanning and redrawing has used this to create new pieces, like stitched drawings of the originals. The results look like geological or archaeological diagrams. I was absorbed for ages in studying the range of different hand stitched marks.

Of the remaining artists, three interested me in particular: Hilary Bower, Jilly Morris and Linda Brassington. I was particularly intrigued by the way they all manipulated, marked and altered the surfaces of the materials they used. Hilary Bower used humble materials (sandpaper, masking tape, greaseproof paper ...) into which she rubbed graphite, pastels and paint to create dark, shadowy, cloth-like surfaces. Behind glass, they were a real challenge to photograph.

There were two wonderful pieces by Jilly Morris where she had hand-drilled thousands of holes into inked and waxed paper to change the surface. But I was fascinated by another piece where she had explored the range of marks she could make with a printing roller. Close up, individual marks looked like extracts from a landscape drawing, but twenty strips of these linear marks combined into one piece had a huge impact.

Finally I admired the way Linda Brassington combined resist dye, discharge with powdered pigments and wax to create surfaces with such depth of colour and texture. There was a real sense of light being drawn into and absorbed by these dark surfaces. Some of the pieces are shown on Linda's Axisweb page.

Photos (in order): Caroline Bartlett, Hilary Bower, Jilly Morris, Linda Brassington.

I drove home again in dreadful weather and took most of Sunday off to recoup energy. I've seen so much and am still absorbing impressions and ideas, although thoughts about different surfaces, textures and mark-making (as ever) are uppermost.

For information about this and future events, see the SIT web site. You can also view this year's brochure online.

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.

Soft greys

April 13, 2014

Cley Beach

A short visit to Norfolk yesterday. A bright day but a band of cloud hung over the coast, filtering the light. All the colours were muted to these soft greys. We walked around Cley Marsh. The reeds, bleached by sun, wind and sea. Marsh harriers in the sky, lapwings on the field, avocets on the scrapes. The North Sea at low tide, quiet and subdued.

Arnold's Marsh

Cley Marsh

barred

reed lines

reed lines

mud lines

sand lines

and I know these colours ...

Visual Thinking

February 23, 2014

Taking photographs is instinctive for me, drawing doesn't come so naturally. But I find photographs can be too passive - it's easy to end up with masses of images and ideas about them that are too vague or simplistic. I wanted to work with that last set of photographs and push my ideas further.

In one of my books, the jeweller, Kayo Saito, describes her drawings as "image training". I like that idea of drawing as a thinking process. I'm not interested in copying my photos or producing an accurate landscape drawing. What I want is to bring out the elements that interest me, play around with them and see what I can do with them.

And so for the last week or so the studio has been turned over to drawing and collage. I printed out my photos and cut them up. Slicing them up, taking them out of context, the linear elements that had caught my eye when I took the photographs in the first place became even more shibori-like. Arranging them into new compositions is similar to the way I would work with cloth, with lots of freedom to experiment with ways of juxtaposing the different lines and tones.

For the drawing, I'm using mainly ink. Ordinary fountain pen ink - although I'm using inks from Diamine who produce writing ink in 101 colours! I love the way the ink flows and bleeds on the page in unpredictable ways. Plus I can dilute it to make the palest washes or bleach it. In other words it behaves a lot like dye.

Hmmm. There's something here about my taste for media that I can't fully control. I think I rather like how they undermine my inner control freak and force me to let go of the outcome. And I love the random, organic effects that ink or dye can produce.

I'm not worrying about where all this is leading at the moment. There's no plan. But I'm enjoying this kind of thinking. It's generating ideas about composition, marks, colour that are moving me beyond my initial response to the photographs - which is exactly what I want.

clicking on the thumbnails will bring up a larger image

Wandering lines

February 11, 2014

I spent the weekend in Norfolk, where (as ever) I took hundreds of photographs. Each visit, I usually find I'm drawn to a particular element, which can change from one visit to another. Sometimes it has been trees, other times it has been edges - the point where one colour or surface transitions into another. Often it is the lines.

Walking across marshland to the beaches, following the creeks and channels that cut their way through the marsh, I was fascinated by the line drawn by the water through the mud of the creeks. Twisting, meandering, serpentine, sinuous... On a larger scale these are repeated by the course of the creeks themselves. On the salt marsh, the edges of the channels are obscured by the vegetation, but the same turning line is there. Then, on the fields, after the heavy rains we have been having, pools had formed - and I noticed the edges adopted the same curving form. They looked exactly like the asymmetrically curving streams in Chinese painting.

There are few straight lines here. Although I did find some. Scratches on the bottom of boat hulls. Reeds breaking the horizontal surface of the water. Cracks and fissures in the cliffs. I photographed those too.

This evening I picked several of the photographs and edited them to bring out their abstract linear qualities. I faded the colour, blurred edges, lightened, darkened, until I had a whole series of monochrome, semi-abstract images. I'm contemplating developing some of these further on paper. … and I have lots of new ideas for effects I want to try with dye and resists.

Helen Terry

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