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.

Standing at the edge of understanding

February 5, 2014

“The feelings you get, that thinning out that comes from going into limbo, out to the edge of your understanding and stand there reaching, reaching into a thin layer of unknowns, stuff to swim through without body or substance, without breath, without substantiation or reassurance, never knowing where it leads or what it’s made of, or what it’ll be like, and you float and struggle and gasp, it brings nausea and fear, strange body functions and doubt - much doubt - it’s like falling but never arriving anywhere, never hitting anything unless it’s a new concept, just the fear of falling - but from this leap comes real creation, for when it finally arrives, when it lands, when it is grasped, gasped, inhaled, coaxed into existence, it’s the craziest, most wonderful thing in the world. It’s better than anything else. It’s like falling in love not gradually but in a single moment. It is that moment of the realisation of love, not where it leads or how long it’ll last or what it means, just the heart-beating, stomach sinking, painfully-grabbing moment of Yes! This is it - then it’s gone and one lives with the taste of it having been. You always have some end result, but it always needs to be renewed, refreshed, never having the same original freshness of the first moment, the first kiss of creating.”

— Agnes Denes

More about Agnes Denes here

Memory on cloth

January 31, 2014

The conversation usually goes something like this:

They look puzzled. “What is shibori?”

I try. A Japanese term. For a range of techniques that involve manipulating the cloth and then binding or stitching it to create a resist before dyeing.

…

I give in. “Like tie-dye”.

Light dawns.

Techniques involving bound or tied resists are found in many parts of the world, including India, West Africa, Indonesia, Central Asia, South America. In Japan, they date back to at least the 8th century and probably beyond. Sometime in the 14th century, Japanese dyers also worked out how to make stitched resists and how to protect selected areas of the cloth from the dye – opening up a whole new range of pattern-making possibilities.

There is no equivalent word for “shibori” in English. The closest description would be “shaped-resist dyeing”. “Tie-dye”, with all its rainbow-dyed-t-shirt associations (in my mind, anyway), doesn’t begin to capture the range and sophistication of techniques covered by the Japanese term. Yoshiko Wada, who wrote two books on the subject, describes over sixty variations and there are certainly more. There are people who have dedicated their life not just to shibori but to just one type of shibori. And there are Western artists who have learned Japanese and studied with Japanese masters to perfect their own interpretations.

Against that background I don’t claim to be a shibori artist. But I do use shibori techniques. Initially I taught myself from Wada’s book, “Shibori: the inventive art of Japanese shaped resist dyeing”. Her instructions are so meticulous that, with patience and lots of experimentation, it wasn’t too difficult to achieve interesting results. Other books and courses (most recently with Jan Myers Newbury, who taught me arashi shibori) and lots more experimentation have developed my understanding.

Images from Yoshiko Wada's book

Pleated and stitched resists are the method I like best (see this). Depending how I space the pleats and the stitches I can achieve a range of linear patterns – from fine, straight, parallel lines to wavy, broken ripples. I also use arashi (pole wrap) and itajime (clamp resist) techniques. And shibori lines over cloth that has already been painted or screen-printed with thickened dye add a whole other set of possibilities.

There are shibori techniques that can be done quickly but stitched techniques are usually slow. It takes me 30 to 40 minutes to pleat and stitch a quarter metre of cloth. What makes it worth the trouble, are the characteristic soft edges and organic marks that result. They resemble ripples in the sand, the grain of wood, reflections in the water. The nature of the process means that the dye only reaches the parts of the cloth that are left exposed. So, when you undo it, the marks provide a record of the folds and creases, which mimic the processes that shape and mark surfaces in nature.

Found shibori

It is possible, with experience, to work out how a shibori-dyed cloth must have been folded by studying the marks – “it is the memory of the shape that remains imprinted in the cloth” (Wada). Memory on cloth – with all the metaphorical possibilities that offers.

What I like is that even though I have quite a lot of control over how I manipulate the cloth, in the end I have to let go of the process and allow the cloth and the dye bath to do as they like. I never know exactly what I will get and that’s half the fun. As Wada says, “Chance and accident … give life to the shibori process.”

More about this: World Shibori Network

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.

Brown ... again

January 13, 2014

I was going to call a halt to this colour study but, having gone so far, it seemed a waste not to see it through. So it was back to colour mixing again this weekend. I abbreviated the system I had devised but even so, by the last few rounds I was losing the will to live. The constant repetition of measure, mix, test, clean tools, repeat. Concentrating so as to avoid mistakes - did I just measure two parts or three? If in doubt, scrap that one and start again.

So, why was I doing this again?

The original aim was to work out my own recipes for brown. Well, I achieved that. I now have 5 different standard mixes worked out. Two cool browns, two warm red browns and a kind of brown ochre.

As a bonus, I also mixed some lovely greys. ... And who would guess that the difference between a warm grey and a cool grey would be magenta . Now I've done it, of course I can see how that would work - but I don't think I'd have figured it out in advance.

And I think that was the larger benefit of doing this. Learning to understand my dyes better and reinforce my grasp of colour theory. To mix brown and grey I had to master how to balance the relative value and hue of those bright primaries so that they would literally neutralise each other.

For light relief, I used up left over dye as I went along, making marks on linen. I don't normally use linen but I'm interested in working with more textured cloth and I think the results have possibilities ...

Mark-making on linen

The plan of what might be

January 8, 2014

“Sometimes he feels as though the plan he is holding in his head is so fragile that the slightest jolt might make it come apart. In the five months that have passed since he stood before it at St Gall, the fabric has become eroded as though some earthly edifice had been left out in the rain. Even on the journey back he felt that he was losing it. … With every breath the memory becomes fainter. …”

— Charles Ferneyhough "Pieces of Light" Ch. 7

The Plan of St Gall is a manuscript, "five sheets of parchment sewn together with green thread", depicting an entire Benedictine monastic complex. It was never built and scholars argue about the original design, purpose and nature of the plan. Ferneyhough is interested in it as a possible example of a mnemonic device, using the Method of Loci , which uses visualisation to create a framework to organise and recall information. In this method, which was known to the Greeks and Romans, the individual memorises the layout of some building or place, linking the items he wishes to recall to distinctive features of that place. When he wishes to remember, meditate or reflect upon the material, he literally walks through the place in his imagination, allowing the features and layout of the imaginary building to awaken memories and associations. He "sees" his thoughts.

Ferneyhough's point is that this is a view of memory as something more than simply memorising facts - it is a creative, constructive process in which the meditator (quoting the 12th century Hugh of St Victor) "delights to run freely through open space … touching on now these, now those connections among subjects" in order to generate new thoughts as much as remember existing ones.

More on this idea - Mary Carruthers "The Book of Memory"

“His thought is a multicoloured pageant, of ideas behind words behind images, combining and recombining like clouds on a windy day.”

— Charles Ferneyhough "Pieces of Light", page 140

All about … brown

January 8, 2014

Brown is the colour you don't want when you're colour mixing, right? Mix three primaries together and you end up with "mud". But … adding brown is also a good way to neutralise bright primary dyes to get subtle, earthy colours. I've always used a pre-mixed black and a dark brown dye alongside my six primaries to tone things down.

Until last summer I was happy to just use the dark brown I buy straight from the jar. But then I had a defective batch … and of course I only realised after I'd dyed several metres of cloth the wrong colours. So, I decided it was time to learn to mix my own.

Well. There are 21 possible combinations of six primaries (if you use both the reds, yellows and blues together as well as separately). And then there are several possible ratios of each possible combination that could result in something brownish … But after a lot of experimenting I ended up with some really interesting … greens, reds, plum, violet … amazing how often you can mix all three primaries and not get "mud". But there were also lots of browns.

Which was great, but now I need to narrow that selection down to two or three that I can use regularly.

So I spent Christmas playing with dye. Not unusual in my household. I chose a few candidates from my now vast selection of browns and tried mixing them with blue or black. I was looking for the ones that would give me a palette with lots of cool toned neutrals (and not too much red or green).

It was hard to mix consistent shades when the combination required several dyes so, now I know that for practical purposes I need mixes that use no more than four.

These are the results. I was really pleased with the palette I mixed from the last batch - some lovely greys and cool toned browns.