Studio visit

April 6, 2015

I caught up with a friend this weekend who came to see me in my studio. Bronwyn happens to be a talented photographer ... and she brought her camera. It was fascinating to see the space through her eyes - I particularly liked some of the details she picked out:

My studio used to be our garage. It has no windows, just a door opening out into the garden. I have an inspiring view of one end of our hedge and not much else. No distractions! I have three main work areas - one for clean work (mainly stitching); one for wet work.

The third used to be for drawing, but that activity has now moved inside the house, so it is now general purpose ... but holds an ever-growing collection of found objects. These would take over if I let them ...

Every available space is used for storage - hand-built shelves and cupboards, plastic crates and Ikea. But I keep large areas of wall clear, covered with foam-core, to use as pin boards. I pin up work in progress, samples, photographs and drawings. There used to be a lot of images of other people's work for general inspiration, but I removed almost all of these. I prefer to have my own photographs - often cut up or edited - and drawings - so that the walls are now an extension of my sketchbook.

All the photos in this post are by Bronwyn Oldham. Bronwyn's own work focuses on flowers - but not as you might normally imagine them. She portrays them as they age and wither, when the petals take on new textures and colours; and flowers and leaves shrink or distort into new forms. She makes you see how they are just as beautiful like this, if not more so. I particularly like the way the petals and leaves seem more cloth-like as they age.

Unfinished work

March 31, 2015

This is my studio wall after a weekend of editing and revising work I thought I had finished.

On Friday I pulled out some unfinished work from last year, intending to finish them. Several pieces - they just needed a final layer of stitch. I pinned them all up on the wall alongside some finished pieces from the same group and stepped back.

There's something about coming back to your work and looking at it afresh after some time has passed. You see it more clearly. I didn't like the proportions of one piece ... but there was a way to fix that. I took it down, unpicked it, removed a border, straightened an edge, restitched. Pinned it back on the wall. There were two other pieces I now thought a little uninspiring. Another where something wasn't quite right. Decision time - leave them ... or ...

I took them down. I dug out the L Shaped pieces of card I use as "windows" and some strips of white cotton and started testing different formats and ways of cropping. I pulled out more cloth to try out different colours and marks. Better. I started cutting, tearing and pinning. I took pictures with my iPhone as I went (out of focus ... sorry). Photos are more objective - I can often see what isn't working in a photograph faster than just looking at the piece itself.

I was inspired to pull out two or three more pieces that I had never resolved - these had never even made it into the "ready for stitching" pile. Each one had a germ of an idea, I just hadn't made it work. In one, it was as though each end belonged to a different piece - and at one end it looked as though I had just kept adding more pieces to try and make it work. I cut it in two. Started removing pieces. Now the two sections didn't have to relate to each other it was much easier to see what needed to be done.

Another piece - a large one. The borders did nothing for the centre section and there was a touch of terracotta that didn't relate to anything. Plus the proportions and size were all wrong. I still liked the bit in the middle though. So I started removing the rest - stripping it back to essentials. I cropped the whole thing down. Paler borders. Plainer. Everything fell into place. Now it worked.

When I got stuck on one piece I switched to another. I kept stepping back and looking until I could see what I needed to do. I worked backwards and forwards like this all weekend. The downside is that I didn't "finish" any pieces of work, although I re-made six or seven. But it was so worthwhile. I am much happier with these.

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.

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.

A daily practice

February 7, 2015

Often when I spend time on something that doesn't directly contribute to making work - reading, drawing, mark-making - my mind starts running on all the things I think I should be doing instead. Which pulls my attention away from what I'm doing and creates a conflict between what the experience could be and what it actually is. I think part of the value of a regular practice lies in assigning time for something and giving it your full attention. Giving yourself a chance to notice something you didn't already know. I'm not always particularly good at doing this.

So, at New Year I started a daily mark-making practice. The aim being just to explore my own marks and give myself a chance to experiment. To avoid the New Year Resolution thing, I started the day I went back to work instead. And I committed to 40 days - long enough to see the impact yet short enough to feel achievable. I knew that to be sustainable it also had to be easy - so that on the worst day there would be no excuse for not maintaining it. So there was only one rule - one page a day, any mark, any medium. A single line would count.

I'm using a homemade sketchbook, about 5" (13cm) square, which is filled with different types of paper (a good way to use up offcuts). I've been using whatever tools and media are on my drawing table, which at the moment is conté crayon, fountain pen ink, sumi ink, some white paint. Most days I manage more than one page - the record is twelve. On some days, I have rapidly made some marks five minutes before bedtime. It's amazing how often those aren't the least interesting pages.

A happy side-effect has been handling my drawing materials every single day, which helps to get past any mental block about drawing. Indeed sometimes the mark-making has transitioned seamlessly into drawing - I've tried something out and then pushed my mark-making book to one side and used the same ideas in a more considered drawing.

Somewhere around the 25 day mark I looked back through what I had done. I noticed how often I had defaulted to two or three "formulae" - the habitual marks I make when I am not working from a source. My natural handwriting in a sense. This was interesting in itself but I started to look for ways I could disrupt these patterns. Not change the marks themselves necessarily but force myself to use them differently. In my case this was partly about my use of space and varying the line quality. I'm experimenting with masking parts of the page, erasing, rubbing or scratching back, drawing over wet paint - looking at what effects this has on the marks and how it changes what I do.

I have seven days to go. I think I will start another forty days after that - same rules, same principles, perhaps with a different technique or medium - but I think the main thing is just to keep going.

Some others who have experimented with a daily practice:

Fiona Wilson - 365 days - a print a day

Leslie Morgan - a collage a day

Karen Thiessen Lent - 15 minutes mark-making a day for 40 days

January

January 26, 2015

I've had some good studio days recently. I've started several pieces of new work - although I think of them as a continuation of the work I was making last summer rather than truly "new". It feels good to be making again. A relief actually. Because, looking back, I feel as though I've been stuck for the last six months.

However I'm feeling clearer about what I want to do next. Which makes it easier to work out how I'm going to get there. I will need to spend some time experimenting and sampling to find ways to get the effects I want and, more uncomfortably, I think I need to let go of some of my favourite techniques for a while. They won't give me the look I am after and also I think I have got into too much of a routine with some of them - it's all a little too predictable.

Without giving much away, this is the list I've written in my sketchbook:

edges: blurred, diffuse
layered, textured
aged, decaying, worn, eroded
change
merging and disappearing
mist, fog, shorelines, reflections

It's a guide, not a prescription. We'll see where it leads.

In the meantime, some good advice I was given was to keep making my existing work while I develop the new. So there are five or six new pieces coming into shape on my studio wall. I am liking these muted colours very much.

Winter

December 14, 2014

I have been away for most of December. The studio is cold and littered with half-unpacked work and supplies from workshops I've been to. The most recent was one with Matthew Harris at the Committed to Cloth studio. The starting point was text - treating handwritten text as a form of drawing. We played with this until our drawings no longer resembled any intelligible writing. I had a lot of fun experimenting with three dimensional drawing using wire and torn shreds of cloth. I loved the shadows this cast on the wall or the table.

At one point Matthew warned us we should expect to feel a little lost as we began to experiment and move away from our starting points. This certainly proved to be true! That feeling of not knowing where you were, what you were doing or where things were going was unsettling. It was an interesting experience to be consciously aware that I was lost and observe myself trying to find my way again! The way my mind started searching for connections to things I already knew or ways of making what I was doing intelligible (to myself, that is). Which, of course, is how we learn. And if we never allow ourselves to get a little lost occasionally, we never move forward.

When I came home I started re-reading Rebecca Solnit's "A Field Guide to Getting Lost". She talks about how for artists "the unknown ... is what must be found" - it's where the work comes from. But I also recalled this point:

“Explorers ... “were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time, many of them knew their instruments pretty well and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way.” ”

— Rebecca Solnit (quoting Aaron Sachs): "A Field Guide to Getting Lost", chapter 1

The willingness to explore and find new things requires a willingness to tolerate the sense of being lost. But some robust skills to build upon and having some sense of where you want to go can make the difference between just being helplessly confused and finding a way through - in artistic terms as much as in exploration.

Meanwhile, Winter arrived here at the beginning of December. The wind moved to the north and the temperature plummeted. The last leaves are clinging to otherwise bare trees. The first regular frosts have appeared - silvery edges to the leaves and frozen puddles. The sky has been a study in grey - sometimes stormy, sometimes like pearl - and occasionally pale, cold blue. Sometimes the only colours in the landscape are a myriad of different greys with a shot of brilliant green of moss on a wall or winter crops in the fields. Some people think this is a dull and dreary time of year but I love the colours and the way the landscape changes in winter. Everything is stripped to its bones and you can see the underlying structures of the trees and the land. All the lines are emphasised.

I've been in Norfolk for a week - long walks on the marshes, by the sea and across fields. Plenty of opportunity to appreciate the winter landscape.

Amazing light effects - low sun under a bank of cloud over the roadbeds at Cley

Twilight.  A very low tide in the Blakeney Channel (seen from the Morston side) made it look as though we could almost walk across to Blakeney Point. — Twilight. A very low tide in the Blakeney Channel (seen from the Morston side) made it look as though we could almost walk across to Blakeney Point.

Morston.  Low tide.  One of the landing jetties for the seal trip boats. — Morston. Low tide. One of the landing jetties for the seal trip boats.

Beautiful colours and lines - a decaying Gunnera leaf

Fragments

November 4, 2014

I spent almost the whole of last week at West Dean on a short course with Michael Brennand-Wood. The park and gardens were in their full autumn glory. Early morning walks started in fog or mist and ended in sunshine. I love the way the mist obscures background detail and emphasises outlines - like a Chinese painting ... but with sheep.

The rest of each day was spent working intensely in the workshop studio. The theme of Brennand-Wood's course was subtraction, erasure and conjecture - what happens when information is taken away or physical details removed or rearranged? At what point does this process of subtraction result in something new? Now, this post isn't directly about the workshop - I will be digesting what I did and what I learned from that for a while I think. However the work we did (mine and others') plus discussions within the group did lead me to think about fragments.

“Fragment:
1. A part broken off or detached from the whole
2. Something incomplete; an odd bit or piece
3. To break up into fragments ...

In order for an object or form to be perceived as a fragment there must be a clear sense of a whole. ...
There is an instinctive tendency in humans to establish a relationship between elements wherever possible. Even subtle clues are often sufficient to trigger connections between one unit and another. ...
Fragments introduce the notion of mystery or puzzle-solving.”

— Tim McCreight "Design Language"

Fragments have a particular aesthetic - think of ruined buildings, patched or worn textiles, broken ceramic or corroded metal. These things have a past. And it is the signs of wear, age or use that often attract us. But our need to make sense of them - to fit things back together, whether in our imagination or in reality - can create its own problems of interpretation. In the absence of complete information, we make assumptions, guess and impose our own beliefs about how the original thing should look. Sometimes this will create a new identity for the object we're trying to reconstruct. Sometimes this will exaggerate certain features, taking them out of context in a way that actually makes the object more abstract.

In the same way, our minds record fragments of information and we piece them together in the way that makes sense to us. This applies to how we experience being in the landscape too. When we are actually there we are immersed and surrounded by sensory impressions. But in order to process this experience, we focus on particular fragments of those impressions - specific sights, sounds, smells - we remember a place in fragments. Or so it seems to me. And likewise, the photos I take and the objects I pick up preserve physical fragments of that experience.

Found objects are usually themselves fragments - things that have been used and discarded; things that have been weathered, shed or dropped as part of a natural process of ageing or growth. Part of their attraction is sometimes that physical connection with something - the animal's bone; the bird's feather, a place. But the finding can be as important as the object. It's not the same when someone gives me a stone or a shell as opposed to when I find it myself. The objects I find are associated directly with a place and time. Sometimes very specifically, so that it is enough to look at the object to remember other details about the day I found it. Whereas when someone gives me something they have found, the association is with the person, the circumstances of the giving and whatever they tell me about it. So the found object is not independent of the context in which it is found.

These thoughts are fragmentary. I can sense that they are interconnected in ways I don't fully understand - part of a larger idea. Meanwhile I am looking at images of objects that are fragmented or pieced together from many smaller pieces. We'll see if this leads somewhere.

Liminality

September 27, 2014

After my last post someone mentioned threshold theory to me. This has its roots in anthropological studies of rites of passage, but in educational theory a "threshold concept" is one that, once understood, changes the learner's view of the subject:

“... there are certain concepts or learning experiences, which resemble passing through a portal, from which a new perspective opens up, allowing things formerly not perceived to come into view. This permits a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. ”

— Ray Land, JHF Meyer, Caroline Baillie, preface to "Threshold concepts and transformational learning" (2010)

These are the difficult bits - the things that are hard to grasp and challenge the learner's existing ideas or understanding. But they are also the parts that make the difference between a working understanding of a subject or true mastery.

“Difficulty in understanding threshold concepts may leave the learner in a state of “liminality”, a suspended state of partial understanding, or “stuck place”, in which understanding approximates to a kind of “mimicry” or lack of authenticity.”

— Meyer, Land & Baillie - as before

This totally makes sense to me in terms of where I find myself. I have these individual pieces of inspiration, skills and knowledge and a sense of reaching for an understanding that will bring them all together .... that is tantalisingly just out of my reach. And to reach it, I may have to let go of some of my existing approach ... which is discomforting. In the meantime, there's that sense of dissatisfaction - that nothing is quite in its place.

“A threshold has always demarcated that which belongs within, the place of familiarity and relative security, from what lies beyond that, the unfamiliar, the unknown, the potentially dangerous. ... all journeys begin with leaving that familiar space and crossing over into the riskier space beyond the threshold.”

— Meyer, Land & Baillie, as before

But while it was fascinating to me to come across this thinking and to see how it relates to what I'm doing, the real lightbulb moment related to a different aspect. I realised just how strongly I'm attracted to things that encapsulate that liminal edge - the space "in between" where one thing becomes another.

Tide turning.  Snettisham (June 2014) — Tide turning. Snettisham (June 2014)

In the landscape, it's where the tide alternately reveals and conceals the land;

all the edges disappearing ... Holkham Bay at sunset with the tide turning (July 2014)

... where the sky merges into the sea so that you can hardly see the horizon;

... where dry land merges into mud and then water on the marshes.

It's also those other transitions - where one season begins to turn into the next, changing light at dawn or dusk, marks of ageing or decay ... I could go on but you get the idea. I like the fact that the edges between these things are not clear or distinct. There is an ambiguity, in which you know that something is changing but it is a pattern of one thing flowing into another - not a clear stop / start.

And these are just the visible manifestations. I can also see links to ideas that are important to me about the boundary between knowing / not knowing; processes of change and transition; and the nature of our relationship with the wider natural world.

Salts Hole at Holkham.  (September 2014) — Salts Hole at Holkham. (September 2014)

Salts Hole (above) used to be connected to the sea via a network of saltmarsh creeks. It is now cut off by a ridge of sand dunes and pine woods that has taken many years to form. The water is salty enough to support saltwater creatures such as sea-anemones, even though it is now almost a mile from the sea. The brackish water both reflects the sky and conceals what lies within the pool. It is both transparent and opaque. It is the essence of a liminal space. In many cultures, pools have been seen as gateways (thresholds) to another place - the underworld, underwater lands - and as a symbol of the unconscious. So many layers of liminality.

I want to develop this. It's already there in my work, but I think I can do more with it. Which suggests a way forward.

More about threshold concepts (pdf)

More about the anthropological origins of ideas about liminality

A sort of hiatus

September 15, 2014

I don't think I really know what I'm doing at the moment. I'm questioning lots of things about my work. And pondering several, as yet unresolved, ideas. I'm not sure - yet - where my work might go next; but it feels as though something is shifting. This is not exactly the most comfortable place to be.

I know the worst thing I could do would be to stop working. That would just increase the frustration. So I figured I might as well use the time to try new things and prioritise the experiments and play - rather than force myself to make more of the same just to satisfy my need to feel I'm "Working". So while I'm in this awkward between phase, here is a round-up of what I have been doing recently.

Colour mixing. This is partly preparation for another colour study. I figured that while I'm not doing anything else I might as well progress this. This puts me in research mode - logical, analytical - rather than creative, but it's all part of building the underpinning knowledge.

Experimenting with folded forms. I came across a book, aimed at graphic designers, that looks at many different ways of folding printed material. So I tried out a few. I liked the different ways pages were revealed or concealed. They suggested different ways of telling a story. I was thinking about book forms.

Painting pages with ink. Sometimes this is all I feel like doing. I used scraps of lining paper, newspaper, packing paper and painted them with washes of ordinary fountain pen ink. Diamine make this in lots of different colours. It behaves a lot like dye, which is probably why I like it. I enjoyed just washing one colour over another and seeing how they changed as they ran together on the paper. Turning wet pages over and laying them on top of each other meant that they stained and marked each other. I like these accidental marks.

I also like the accidental marks that end up on the sheet of paper I always lay underneath to protect my work surface. Accidental drawings.

Then I started playing around with the painted pages. Folding and layering different textures, colours and marks.

Until I ended up with all these on my studio wall. I like the way the paper behaves compared to cloth - more structural. Inspired by my earlier paper folding experiments, I was folding and wrapping pages around each other to hold them together. Then I stepped back and looked.

The middle one with the leaf print was one of the first ones I did and it bothered me. Although I like this kind of imagery in other people's work, it confirmed for me that in my own I prefer the imagery to be more ambiguous. In fact, studying what I had done, I could see that it was all about lines and edges, overlapping colours and textures. I like the way many of the lines emerge from and disappear into the background. And, as with the folding experiments, I also like the sense of things being hidden and revealed between the different layers.

I doubt these paper pieces are particularly light fast but I am wondering whether they could be developed into "work" in their own right. Perhaps they will influence what I do next with cloth too.

Drawing. In between all this, I've started drawing my flint collection. Using different media, different scales, close up details and larger more abstract impressions. Just observing and playing around with the marks and colours. Lines, edges and marks again.

I'm sure all of this will feed into my work one way or another.

Colour study phase two: colour families

August 31, 2014

After my last post, of course I got back to work. I still feel I'm avoiding something - dyeing is very much in my comfort zone - but work is work.

The main activity has been dyeing colour families based on the complementary pairs I developed in June's colour study. There are different systems for doing this - the one I use is based on Leslie Morgan's - we share a fascination with this kind of study. The basic principle is that you dye three (or more) strengths of one colour and then over-dye the results with three (or more) strengths of a second, distributing the different values from the first round between the vats for the second. The outcome is twelve different values and hues out of three dye vats. This is the system I use for shibori-dyeing. It means I get a palette of shibori-dyed cloth in different colours that are all related to each other.

My colour studies are not usually about producing exact recipes for individual colours. They are more about finding sets of colour relationships. Because that is how I think about colour - no colour occurs in isolation, it has a "family" of related colours and it will look different depending on the colours you see it with. Often when I see a colour I like, it is as much about the context - the background or associated colours that set it off.

If I use a photograph or an image as a design source for a colour scheme, I don't necessarily try to match the individual colours in it. I will do some colour mixing and compare the colours in the image to the swatches in my dye book but what I'm looking for is the family (or families) of colours that will create a similar effect. There was a period when most of my work was based on the colours of a favourite painting by John Piper and for several months I worked predominantly with the family of colours I could generate from just two - Royal Blue and a rust orange that I mixed myself - extended with some Black and Dark Brown.

So the point of this latest colour study was to test the potential of the pairs of complementaries I had found in the last to produce interesting neutrals and semi-neutrals. I started with the warm primaries (Scarlet / Golden Yellow / Royal Blue), which had demonstrated the greatest potential for producing brown. Then for the sake of comparison, I moved on to the cold primaries (Magenta / Lemon Yellow / Turquoise), not expecting them to produce many neutrals, but was pleasantly surprised by the range of cool greys and blues that did result. The combined results are pinned to my studio wall in the photo at the top of this post. I love how each family has its own personality colour-wise. In the second row are six versions of the same family, as I experimented with the effect of changing the relative strength of the primaries.

When you arrange the results in a grid, the neutrals (if there are any) are almost always along the diagonal - where the "parent colours" are equal in strength and cancel each other out. Either side of that diagonal are subtle semi-neutrals - colours that are definitely blue or green or red rather than neutral, but muted, softer versions of the pure hues. If one of the "parent" colours is stronger than the other, sometimes the neutrals are shifted to a different diagonal, nearer to the weaker "parent".

I extracted the neutrals and semi-neutrals and arranged them into palettes as above. This was when I could really see and appreciate these subtle colour combinations. This is what I would be likely to work from in future. In principle I could reproduce individual shades, but in practice I'm more likely to use them as a basis for decisions on which combination, strength and ratio of dyes to use and tweak the results according to what I need.

As is the way, doing this prompted some small eureka moments and further ideas to explore. So, while I thought this would be the last major colour exercise for this year, I have an idea for a third ...

Procrastinating

August 17, 2014

This week I tidied my desk. Then I tidied my study. Then I tidied my studio. It may not look that tidy but any time the floor and most of the work surfaces are clear counts as tidy enough for me. In general I tend to feel that a spotless studio is one where not a lot of work is happening ... but on the other hand I love it when the studio is clean and I have lots of space again.

I'm not a tidy worker. I like to leave things out when I'm working on something. I like to be able to see everything. After a while, surfaces get taken over by piles of this or piles of that. When I urgently need some space, a pile gets moved to the floor. As long as everything stays in its pile, I know where it is.

But I don't like clutter. Eventually it just frustrates me and I have to clear up. Of course, when I do tidy up, I spend about a third of the time cleaning and putting stuff away and the other two thirds looking at things. The random drawing I had dismissed that now looks rather interesting. Accidental fabric combinations that suggest something new. The book or article I haven't got around to reading. It has always been this way with me.

And all the time I have been clearing up this week, I am perfectly aware that the other thing that is going on here is that I am procrastinating. For a few weeks now I have been finding it really hard to settle. I have worked, but it has been piecemeal. Nibbling at the edges. Better than nothing of course, but I've been frustrated with myself, feeling that I'm not getting on with things; not making best use of my time.

I realised that the problem is that there are too many things I want to do. I listed out in my sketchbook all the ideas and experiments I want to try. It's a long list. I also want to spend some time drawing. Meanwhile, back in the house I have a pile of things to read, watch and write about. And there is work in progress to finish. So when I do have studio time I find myself torn between the playful, experimental things versus the things I feel I "should" be doing. The result is that I haven't made real progress with anything ... and it became easier to tidy my desk, my study and then my studio than to do something more creative.

The clutter in my studio mirrored the clutter in my head. Now the studio is tidy I need another clear out, following much the same principles. I need to take care of the things that really must get done because that nagging "you should be doing x" feeling is what's stopping me from settling down to the more interesting stuff. But perhaps I can operate the same 1:2 rule - a third of the time on the "musts" and the "shoulds"; the rest on the experimental things that may lead nowhere ... or may move my work forward.

One corner of my studio in the late afternoon sunlight

Summer school

August 3, 2014

I spent last week in London doing a Summer School course with June Fish at Central St Martins. Aside from the fun of getting to work in CSM's fully equipped dye and print studio for a week, this was an opportunity to explore different types of dye and application techniques. We covered lots of ground. Not everything will make its way into my practice but there were two techniques that really appealed to me and have potential for development.

The first was painting directly onto the silkscreen with thin dyes - a technique I knew about but hadn't tried before. It's a form of monoprinting I suppose. Now I have done this with thickened dyes ("breakdown printing") but those need much longer to dry and the effect is quite different. I really liked this and could see this being a way to interpret some of my ink drawings.

The second technique involved wax. June demonstrated basic wax resist using batik wax, which I found frustrating to iron out of my samples. However I knew I had some soy wax and began to wonder about combining this with clamp resist (itajime) or pole wrap (arashi) techniques. I know other people have had success with this.

Now, because soy wax has such a low melting point I had to iron out the wax before the dye could be steam-fixed. When I removed the clamps and pulled the cloth out flat, the effect of the wax against the (damp) dyed cloth was just stunning:

After processing (removing the wax, steam-fixing, washing out) the effect is more subdued - the inevitable difference between damp versus dry cloth - but still interesting. Clamp resist is ideal for workshop conditions because it can be done quickly - but I'm not sure how I feel about the geometric patterns.

So much to explore, so little time. The whole point of doing workshops like this is to expand the range of techniques and knowledge I can draw upon but I also need to keep focused on the things that will really help my work and not get too distracted. When I consider all the different things I want to explore, I am quite daunted, given the time I have available. However making time for this developmental work alongside simply making more work is important - otherwise I'll end up just making "more of the same". So I need to select the most promising ideas and set aside some time to experiment intensively with them.

Ways of looking

July 14, 2014

I've had a wonderful weekend in Nottinghamshire taking a workshop with Hilary Bower. Hilary is warm and funny and there was lots of laughter and shared inspiration with others in the group. A great atmosphere in which to work. The theme was "Magnify" and, in essence, the three days involved exploring different ways of looking - that is really looking - at primary source material to extract information and ideas. I had taken a mixture of found objects from my studio - stones, dried up plant stems - as this seemed the ideal opportunity to develop ways of working with them

I ended up concentrating on these plant stems. I love the way, different aspects of the plant structure are revealed as they wither. I started tentatively, feeling my way through the different drawing exercises. As I relaxed, I became more comfortable but then found it hard to move away from close, observational drawing - clinging to my safety zone. But then, by day three I couldn't work fast enough - I was just trying to get each idea down before it slipped away. I left the source material behind as I tried different approaches to capture the elements that interested me.

Now I'm home, I've pinned my work to the studio wall to look at and reflect. It's interesting to see the progression from the initial, slightly uncertain experiments to the faster, more confident work. I can see the links to the original objects but the drawings themselves are suggesting areas to explore and develop further. I'm not worrying about developing this into cloth - indeed I like some of these as they are. Although, there are some specific elements that I'm excited about and want to try. I've cleared a corner of my studio and am going to carry on with this for a while.

Five hundred colours on my studio wall

July 6, 2014

I finally completed this colour study this week. I had planned five variations (out of a possible eight) and ended up doing six. That's eighteen rounds of dyeing with twelve dye baths to set up and rinse out each time. Even by my standards that is a mammoth commitment. I definitely need a break and to do something else for a while now.

What I learned

This was all about dye colour theory. The point of the exercise was to explore what neutrals and semi-neutrals could be achieved by over-dyeing each colour with its complementary. I also tried this with the two split complementaries.

I learned that:

The three warm primaries (scarlet, golden yellow, royal blue) are the most likely to generate neutrals (top row, middle card in the image above). You also get some lovely earthy greens.
The three cold primaries (magenta, lemon yellow, turquoise - bottom row, middle card) are the least likely to neutralise - hardly any in fact. But replacing the turquoise with royal blue (bottom, left) resulted in some interesting blue-greys.
Green over-dyed with red or red violet was more likely to result in a neutral than other combinations.
If you only over-dye once, using the complementary is the most effective way to neutralise a colour. If you over-dye twice, the results achieved using the split complementaries are richer, more interesting and you generally get more neutrals.

Testing the effect of changing the dye strength

Following my last post, where I noted there seemed to be a bias towards green, I also tested the effect of changing the strengths of each dye concentrate. This confirmed that changing the strength of each dye in relation to the others would alter the colour. I know that sounds obvious but it was fascinating to see the effect of actually doing this. Basically, if I had mixed the yellow dye stronger and kept the red and blue equal, I would probably have had less greens and more browns. And if I had mixed the blue stronger instead, I might have seen more greys and blues.

The disadvantage of this exercise was that it was not logistically possible to try out different values of these colours at the same time. So I am planning a phase two, which will involve selecting some of the colours from these results and using them as the basis for dyeing a "family" of lights and darks. Not yet though ... I need to do something different for a while!

So, why?

Effectively I have dedicated three weeks of precious studio time to this exercise. I had plenty of opportunity while dyeing, rinsing, cutting and mounting swatches ... to contemplate why on earth I was doing this. Was it the best use of my time? I could have been drawing, making new work, preparing cloth for shibori, mark-making with thickened dye, experimenting with wax resist ... all on my studio to do list.

Part of it is just that obsessive wanting to know "what will happen if ...?" - that itch to resolve the tension between knowing the theory and not knowing what will happen in practice. The reward is all those surprise results - seeing two colours mixed together result in some gorgeous, unexpected new shade. That's the playful, self-indulgent motivation behind this exercise.

But I came to the conclusion that there is a more serious purpose. I realised last year, when I did a workshop with Dorothy Caldwell, that colour is as important to my work as mark-making. And the kind of colours I want to achieve are the subtle, hard to define ones. Which means I do need to thoroughly understand how my dyes behave and how to mix those difficult colours. So the real reward for all that labour and studio time is the learning and the mountain of information I now have that I can draw upon in all my future dyeing. It's part of the underpinning research that will help me make better work.

I'm also starting to think about developing a workshop based on this. Or maybe an ebook. I'm thinking not so much of an introduction to dyeing, but more of a colour theory for dyers course. Is there a demand for this? Would people prefer a course or some kind of online option? Leave a comment or email me via the contact form - I'd love to know what others think.

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.

When things don't go to plan ...

April 25, 2014

There was no question about it when I looked in the dye vats after the first round. I had pink. Not bright Barbie-doll-pink (thankfully). A sort of greyish-plaster-pink in the pale vat ... maybe more like dull purple in the other two. Unfortunately pink happens to be one of my least favourite colours. I had about six metres of cloth divided between three vats and it had taken two or three days to stitch and bind all the resists ... definitely time for a major rethink.

First step - figure out how a dye mix that was meant to result in a greenish brown had ended up pink. If anything the mix had looked too green when I made up the vats. The two purplish vats probably reflected how I'd adjusted the mix accordingly. My guess was that the lemon yellow dye had been shamefully bullied by the (tiny amount of) magenta and wimped out on me. Which reminds me (too late) why I usually prefer golden yellow.

Yes, dyes have their own personalities. Red (especially magenta) is a bully, reacts quickly and easily overwhelms the others. Blue is slow to react, needing twice as long to reach a full depth of colour, but quite resilient once it's got there (try removing an unwanted turquoise stain). Yellow (especially lemon) reacts quite quickly but is a wimp and is easily overwhelmed by the others.

It's relatively easy to compensate for all this when you dye with pure colours, but there are good reasons for using a mixed colour in shibori. I've worked out most of my mixes using thickened dyes (more convenient) but I'm finding that a mix that works fine that way can behave differently in the vat. I think this is because of differences in the way the dye reacts with the cloth in each case. The daunting implication is that I am going to have to figure out a system to re-test a lot of my mixes in the vat.

Meanwhile, I needed to figure out how to deal with all this pink. My original plan had been three blue-black vats, which should have given me a range of dark blues, browns and greenish neutrals. But to cancel out the pink tone, I needed some green. I decided to substitute turquoise for the royal blue I had planned to use ... and crossed my fingers.

On the whole it worked. I didn't of course get the colours I'd planned ... I ended up with a lot more blues ... and I still have more pinkish tones than I want so may be over-dyeing some of these. Overall not the most successful results - although, as ever, there are some stand-out pieces.

I was also using this dye session to experiment with clamped resists, in particular, partially clamping the pleated and stitched pieces. The results were interesting but on the whole the edge between the clamped and the unclamped section is a little obvious so this needs more thought. It didn't quite work for what I have in mind. The other experiment was to try out ways of restricting the pleated shibori to just one section of cloth - without resorting to wax or similar.

The colours were really not good, so I've greyed them out to focus on the marks. The one on the right is quite exciting with lots of potential for development. Guess what, this was the only sample in the whole batch with lemon yellow on it ... in all the wrong places!

The importance of losing pieces

April 17, 2014

“It’s important that we lose pieces. You get there faster, I think, by losing pieces, because you’re pushing yourself and you know how far to come back.”

— Dale Chihuly

I have that quote pinned to my studio wall to remind me not to be afraid of mistakes and to counter my inner control freak. Although it is possible to exercise a lot of control over the dye process, that's not the kind of dyeing I'm interested in. What I like about dye are the surprises - when you finish the drudgery of rinsing and remove the resists to see what you have. Sometimes it's not what you expected (although I can usually figure out why "that" happened these days); sometimes it's a disappointment; but sometimes it's more than you were hoping for - and that's the dance around the studio moment.

There were several things that didn't work for me in the last batch of dyeing. I felt the dye was too strong and too red. I don't think I used enough soda. And, for the effect I was after, the resists needed to be tighter. I still ended up with some lovely pieces but for the second batch, I adjusted what I was doing accordingly.

I'm very happy with these. I used the same pleat and stitch technique as before but added clamps and / or binding to preserve more white. This means you can see the under-painting, which was lost on some of the previous samples. Some of the clamps were shorter than the cloth, so I experimented with only partially clamping some samples (not shown). The results were interesting so I'm going to play with this further. The dye colours were exactly the same as the first batch, but I halved the strength and altered the brown I mixed by skimping the red and being very generous with the yellow and blue - this seemed to work and gave me an almost perfect neutral.

The disappointments in this batch were some of the over-dyed samples. This time the dye was too weak to have enough impact on some of these. Lesson learned - strong dye works better here. The "failures" are going back into the over-dye pile - if all else fails, I'll scrape a dark, thickened dye over them to get some interesting darks.

These were some of the more interesting of the rest. Some of these were over-dyed. The resists were a mixture of clamp (itajime), sticks and pole wrap.

I'm now preparing more cloth for the next batch. I have some new ideas I want to try and I'm thinking about altering the colours to get some grey-greens. I'm preparing lots of pieces because then I won't worry if some don't work out and I can be braver with the ideas I want to try - you have to be prepared to lose some.

Remedies for over thinking

March 28, 2014

When I start to feel as though my mind is going round in circles, I know it's time to get out of my head and do something. Anything. I'm reading a lot at the moment. This is generating masses of ideas but they are confused and abstract. I need to connect my thinking back to my work.

A flying visit to Norfolk last weekend helped. It was a stormy day and the light was changing constantly - dark, icy cold hailstorms followed by brilliant spring sunshine. Walking along Holkham beach I picked up shells, pieces of sea-blackened wood and bones - tiny rabbit bones amongst the dunes. I found a rabbit skull that was almost totally buried by the soft grey lichen that had grown up around it and held it so tight it wasn't possible to pick it up without breaking it. I wish I had photographed it because it has stayed in my memory. I was fascinated by the patterns on the shells I found - miniature shibori patterns to my eye. We saw spoonbills and watched a red kite soar over the grazing marshes, scattering smaller birds. Later, when we sat down for dinner, my notebook came out and I scribbled furiously, trying to get down the ideas that were flooding my mind before I lost them.

Another remedy - get back into the studio and start working. So I have been preparing cloth for shibori. I like to do this in batches and so I am piling up various stitched and bound pieces ready for dyeing. Some use traditional shibori methods, some are very unorthodox and traditionalists would surely frown at them. However I'm only interested in what kind of marks they generate. Most are techniques I have tried and tested before but I am also experimenting with some new ideas. One was such a pain to do that I rather hope I don't like the results so I don't have to do it again!

I am still thinking. And my thoughts are guiding my choices about how I manipulate the cloth. But I am out of my head and thinking with my hands. As I handle the cloth, I am making connections with my conceptual ideas, but my hands and my eyes are now contributing to the thinking process.

And a third remedy. Get out of the house. Talk to people. Look at or do something different. Today I went to see this exhibition by Karen Christensen - whose work could not be more different from mine, and yet I still found connections to things that matter to me. I had a nice lunch, spoke to a friend, wandered around Leigh in the sunshine and came back to my studio refreshed and ready to work.

Looking back and thinking ahead

March 19, 2014

Several pieces of my work can currently be seen in a mixed exhibition at Bircham Gallery in North Norfolk until 2 April.

Then I realise (detail) - currently at Bircham Gallery

Below is the artist's statement I wrote for them:

“Helen Terry creates abstract textile works using dye, mark-making and hand-stitch.

She grew up on farms in Hertfordshire and has spent most of her life in East Anglia, dividing her time between the Essex estuaries and Norfolk coast and marshland.

Helen works with cloth because of the way it can be manipulated and changed and hold the traces of what is done to it. Generally beginning with white cloth, she scrapes and paints layers of dye onto it and experiments with shibori processes to add layers of colours and marks. Helen then tears, folds, layers and stitches pieces of dyed cloth into a larger whole that conveys a sense of a story or journey.

Helen is inspired by found marks - whether natural or man-made - particularly the kind that reflect the wear and tear inflicted by time and the environment and suggest something about the history of the object. A recurring theme in her work is the way we interpret fragments and traces to create our own stories and meaning. ”

Trying to sum up what I do in those two paragraphs forced me to think hard about my work, my process and my intentions. And now with the finished work hanging in the gallery, I'm pausing to reflect before moving on. Although, having said that, the next pieces are already in progress; the ideas for the pieces after that are already developing. This isn't a neat, finish-one-thing-then-start-the-next kind of process - the work overlaps and grows out of what went before. But it's important to me not to automatically do more of the same and to have a sense of where I'm going with this.

I'm wrestling with ideas at the moment. I'm not sure whether I have something I want to take further - or how I might translate my thoughts about it into cloth, dye, stitch.

I'm conscious of the risk of making work that is dominated by the process - the pure, undeniable fun of just playing and experimenting with cloth and dye. And there is a place for that. But the risk is of ending up with work that lacks depth. Personally, I need to have some sense of what I want the work to be about, what I'm trying to convey, so that I can make the right choices and decisions and refine those accidental, organic effects into a strong piece of work.

But at the other extreme, I know there is a risk of labouring the underlying idea at the expense of the work itself - which ends up seeming stilted or unconvincing because it comes second to the idea. There needs to be a balance. I think the most successful work makes expressive use of materials and process but conveys something more. And that "something more" is drawn from an underlying body of ideas, concerns or interest.

So alongside all the practical studio work, I'm constantly looking, reading and thinking. I'm interested in many things - natural patterns and processes; ideas about connectedness; the way the mind works; communication. I don't always know how all this will translate into my work but I do it anyway. I know that it all influences my choices and the decisions I make, even when I'm not consciously thinking about this when I'm absorbed in the process.

Clearing out my studio, I came across a file of preparatory work for a piece I made nearly ten years ago. It was salutary to recognise some of the same interests but think how differently I would approach the same source now. But there's a lot I still like about the piece that came out of it.

Rebecca Crowell has interesting things to say about this and other aspects of the creative process.