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.

A new drawing space

October 25, 2014

Late autumn - and it is getting colder, darker and (recently) wetter. The clocks change tonight and it will be dark even earlier. My studio is outside. It's heated with a portable radiator that I need to switch on at least half an hour in advance to reach a bearable temperature on a cold day. The result? When I only have an hour or two it's been getting harder to get out there.

The original idea was that one of the workbenches in the studio would be the drawing bench. But that hasn't been working. Dyed cloth, sewing materials, reference books keep taking it over. Drawing is banned from the sewing table (for obvious reasons). The dye bench (which is great for drawing) is constantly occupied with dye vats at the moment. So despite best intentions not a lot of drawing gets done. What to do ...

I decided to set up a drawing desk indoors.

It involved not one but two trips to the dreaded Ikea. Don't ask.

Window. Radiator. This is bliss.

And it seems to be working.

62 Group: Ebb & Flow

October 19, 2014

I made a flying visit to Grimsby at the end of this week to see the 62 Group's latest exhibition. A 400 mile round trip from one end of the North Sea coast to the other. This was in fact rather appropriate as a significant number of Grimsby fishermen apparently migrated there from the Thames Estuary in the late nineteenth century, when the town was developing as a fishing port.

"Ebb & Flow" is a response to Grimsby's history as a major fishing port and to the excellent museum collection at the Fishing Heritage Centre in particular. The exhibition is divided between the latter and Grimsby Minster. It was interesting to see how different artists responded to the theme. Some made direct reference to the fishing industry or the port while others made more indirect reference to the theme of tides, flow or change.

The work of five artists caught my attention in particular. The first was Hannah Lamb. Her piece Baptism explored the experience of cold water swimming. It consisted of a triptych of organza panels printed using the cyanotype process. The imagery, on separate panels, showed the head, hands and feet of a woman and succeeded in conveying the idea of someone in water. But what I loved was the way Hannah also conveyed the sensual aspect of being in water. With the most minimal, delicate stitching she suggested the touch of water against a finger or a swirl of water across the toes. For me this lifted the work from being a simple image on cloth to something altogether more tactile and sensual. Hannah's blogpost about this piece is here.

Sue Stone is based in Grimsby and her pieces - two in the museum, one in the Minster - told a story about people in the town. The colour palette and format remind me of the colours of old photographs. Here too though the detail of the stitching and appliqué add to the image, so that when you look, there is far more information than in the picture alone. In Portrait of a Grimsby Girl the bricks are covered with stitched writing telling you details about the woman's life. In The Unknown Statistic, which is about the children left behind by fathers who went to war and never came back, the man is not in the picture but, across the wall is a fluid line of embroidery tracing the sense of the tune he whistles as he walks away. Close up, I was fascinated too by the stitched patterns used so effectively to show the textures of the figures' clothing.

Sue Stone: Portrait of a Grimsby Girl (detail)

Jane McKeating's piece consisted of five large panels titled "Red - a sampler". At first I thought these were painted but they are digitally printed from Jane's own drawings. Inspired by samplers, paintings and symbols in the museum, the panels trace the "ebb and flow of a red mark through the passage of time." Each panel shows a sewing machine - a progressively more modern one - stitching a length of bright yellow cloth. Apart from some white stitching, which adds texture to some of the panels, the only stitching is the red "stitched" line. As the sewing machines evolve, so does the mark, from a basic straight stitch in the first panel to a more complex computerised design in the fifth. What struck me, however, was the juxtaposition of the domestic sewing machines with the "high vis" yellow cloth, suggesting protective or waterproof clothing. So many thoughts here about the connection between the lives of fishermen on the sea and their wives, mothers, sisters at home.

In a completely different vein, I loved the work by Ann Goddard. Discarded consisted of five bundles of driftwood, twigs and rusted metal "tangled" together by shreds of vintage fishing net and wire. There is a reference to "ghost nets" - lost nets which continue to trap debris, fish and other organisms. To me each bundle was like a three dimensional drawing. There was a larger, related work in the Minster, constructed of willow and wire which had a similar effect.

Finally, I loved the ikat weaving of Christine Gornowicz, particularly the way the receding verticals emphasise the sense of movement in the horizontal flow patterns in the one below. I recommend a visit to her web site to see more of her beautiful work.

62 Group Website

Ebb & Flow Facebook page (with more photos and details of the artists and their work)

If you can't get to Grimsby before 2 November, the Ebb & Flow catalogue is available here

Colour study: neutrals

October 12, 2014

The last colour study gave me an idea. But before I can try it, I need a selection of browns and greys I can use. Because previous studies have focused on over-dyeing, I needed to do some colour mixing.

I looked at previous studies, both those done with thickened dye and in the bucket, and selected nine different ratios of red : yellow : blue that showed the potential to result in a neutral. I knew that different combinations of primaries would give different kinds of neutrals. I also knew that some ratios would be more likely to result in a neutral than others.

Once I started, I also became fascinated by the effect of changing the relative strength of the dye concentrates themselves. This is something I've experimented with before but this was an opportunity to explore it more thoroughly. Sometimes this could make the difference in whether I achieved any neutrals at all.

Above is an example of what I mean. These three sets all used the same primaries (scarlet, golden yellow, royal blue in this case). In the one on the left the relative strength of the dyes was 1:2:3 (weak red, strong blue); the middle set is 2:2:3 (strong blue); and on the right, 2:3:2 (strong yellow). Not in this picture, I also did a set of 1:1:1 (equal strength) for each set of primaries. The same dyes, the same mixing ratio in each row, different relative dye strengths. Once I'd finished, I found that the ratio of dye strength most likely to give neutrals, for any combination of primaries, was either 1:1:1 or 2:3:2.

In the picture above, each row represents a different mixing ratio of red : yellow : blue. In this case, the primaries were scarlet, lemon yellow and royal blue. I started with nine different ratios but gradually eliminated those that rarely resulted in a good neutral so that by the end I was using just six. In the best cases, any of these six could give a neutral. But across all the combinations of primaries I tried (six in all), the most reliable mixing ratios proved to be 3:2:1, 2:3:1 or 3:3:2 - i.e. the third, fifth and seventh rows in the picture above.

And the best combination of primaries? Scarlet / Golden Yellow / Royal Blue produced warm neutrals and has a bias towards green. Or Scarlet / Lemon Yellow / Royal Blue, which gives much cooler neutrals and has a bias towards blue. Magenta or Scarlet / Golden Yellow / Turquoise were also good, but only if you strengthened the yellow so that it could stand up to the turquoise.

Unsurprisingly, the worst combination from this point of view was Magenta / Lemon Yellow and either Turquoise or Royal Blue - which both yielded a lovely range of violet (above). So the next time someone tells you that mixing all three primaries together will result in "mud", challenge them to try it with those three. And if they challenge you, strengthen the yellow and mix in a ratio of either 2:3:1 or 3:3:2 and it's possible to get a grey - a blue-grey but still grey.

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

Ann Johnston: The Contact

August 9, 2014

At this year's Festival of Quilts in Birmingham is an exhibition of work by American quilt artist, Ann Johnston. Until now, I've known her work only through her books. Her two books on dyeing are some of the best on the subject as far as I'm concerned. They manage to be comprehensive (in terms of the range of dye techniques they cover), totally sound on the technical aspects and yet easy to use. I've had my copies for years and still refer back to them.

The exhibition presents 16 quilts. As the accompanying book explains, "The word "contact" refers to a place where geologic units touch each other." Many of the quilts represent geological features - veins, intrusions, geological processes - close up or impressionistic images of the rocks themselves or abstract interpretations of the processes that lead to their formation.

Other quilts present images of the mountains of the Sierra Nevada themselves. Because "..."contact" also conjures up a human influence on the landscape. The forests, the rivers, and even the mountains themselves have been shaped forever by people seeking their fortunes." For this was gold mining country and many of the quilts refer to this.

One of the impressive things about this body of work is the stylistic variety between the different pieces, while they remain totally cohesive as a group. Bold pieces built of simple forms in strong, plain colours hang alongside more complex, designs built up of highly detailed visual textures. Abstract images alongside highly realistic pieces. It worked because there were clear relationships between the pieces.

All the quilts are made from cloth that Ann Johnston has dyed, painted or printed using a wide range of surface design techniques. Inevitably, I was drawn to studying the detail of these. I was particularly fascinated with her use of monoprinting and resists - and Ann was very generous in explaining how she had achieved some effects. I also noted how she worked back into the painted cloth, using appliqué and stitch to alter and augment the dyed marks. But over and above these technical aspects, I really admired the mastery with which Ann had orchestrated the different patterns and textures in her fabrics to produce the effects she wanted.

Above (clockwise from top left): details from "Cracked and Cooked"; "Black and White"; "Vigil" and "After the Ice". All work by Ann Johnston.

I was also able to hear Ann's lecture "The Stitches Matter" in which she talked about the way she uses stitch to add layers of marks, line and detail to her dyed cloth. I had already noted that her approach to stitching each piece was quite varied from one to the next but always well considered in terms of the effect she wanted to achieve.

For more information, go to Ann Johnston's web site, where you can order copies of the exhibition catalogue along with her other books. Ann has also produced a DVD, Color by Accident, which expands upon her book of that name and is well worth having.

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.

Colour study progress

June 22, 2014

A short hiatus. I went on holiday - and flooded Instagram with photos of Norfolk skies and tide lines and sunsets - and then lost three days of studio time, waiting for dye supplies to arrive. I wish I could say I made good use of the lost time but it seems I don't respond well to my plans being thwarted!

However, I've been making maximum use of studio time since to progress this colour study. At any one time, there has been one batch of cloth in rinse buckets and another batch sitting in dye, while I'm trimming and sticking swatches into my dye books. I'm now about half way through and am starting to see results.

The aim of the exercise is to explore over dyeing of complementary colours - which should yield some neutrals. There are some good, rich browns but overall I seem to be getting a bias towards green. I think this is because I have increased the strength of the yellow and blue dyes to stand up better to the red. I've decided to stick with this for the remainder of the exercise to maintain consistency of the results. Of course it helps that I like green - if I was getting loads of purple, I would probably be changing the recipe. I think it is interesting in itself to see how I can influence the colour by doing this.

My dye book is starting to look exciting. It's worth remembering that the product of this exercise will be the sample swatches in this book. All the dyed cloth is simply a by-product. Albeit one that will leave me with a glorious range of colours to use as needed. Although people who love bright colours would probably weep to see me turn them into sludgy browns and greens ...

Beginning a new colour study

June 8, 2014

I have just started a new colour study exercise. It's going to be a long, drawn out one and this is just the beginning. It always starts with lots of planning - working out ratios, fractions (never my strong point), quantity surveying (do I have enough cloth, soda ash, dye ...), etc, etc. I envy those who can just dive in and start but I always feel I have to figure everything out first. That's just how my brain works.

The Plan is to use a system based on a method for dyeing a colour wheel, with lots of over-dyeing based on complementaries, to generate neutrals and semi-neutrals. And this time I am vat-dyeing - which will avoid the problems I've had trying to translate colour studies done using thickened dye into the bucket. So it's going to be worth it ... but there is a daunting amount of work to do to get there. I've just finished the first round ... of fifteen. Possibly this is slightly insane ... Oh, and this is stage one! Stage two will require a different system to widen the value range. Yeah, definitely insane ...

Torn edges - pile of cloth torn to size, waiting its turn

New work on show

June 3, 2014

I delivered six pieces of new work to Bircham Gallery on Saturday for their Early Summer Show. This is on for the whole of June and, looking at the list of artists, I'm delighted to be showing in such great company. However, if you can't get to North Norfolk, you can also view - and buy - some of my work on Bircham Gallery's web site.

The new work includes some of the pieces I've been writing about on here recently. There are some new themes developing - more about this soon - and I've also been playing with the format. A lot of my work has used a long, horizontal format, which appeals to me because of the sense of movement from one side to the other. To me this gives a sense of change or progression.

However, it's good to shake things up occasionally and so recently I've been trying out different formats, a vertical one in particular. I've used both for the two "mountain" themed pieces that are now at Bircham Gallery. To me, the vertical layout has quite a different feel. If a horizontal format is about movement, a vertical format is about pausing and taking the time to look at or contemplate something. There is a sense of stillness - a single moment captured.

I've also been influenced by Chinese or Japanese painting: i.e. the hand scroll versus the hanging scroll format. The hand scroll (which developed alongside the use of written scrolls) was intended to be viewed flat on a table and unrolled gradually to look at one section at a time - as if travelling through a landscape. Painters exploited the format to experiment with subjects that embodied temporal and spatial progression to give the viewer an experience that was like travelling through a landscape or reading a story.

Hand scrolls could be nine to twelve metres long and only the unrolled section could be viewed at any one time. The viewer controlled the pace at which they viewed the scenes. I'm fascinated with the idea of part of the image being hidden - you know that there is more to see but it isn't possible to see the whole thing at once.

In contrast, hanging scrolls were for formal display and the image would be seen all at once. Scrolls were fragile and so each would be displayed for only a short period and then changed for another. This format lends itself to contemplation or display of particular styles of painting or subject matter. These might still include landscapes, which would use complex systems of perspective to convey depth and distance.

More about this here.

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.

Three exhibitions in one day

May 9, 2014

My visits to London are infrequent so I like to make the most of them. Hence I've had a long day criss-crossing the city from East to West and back again to catch three exhibitions. I'm tired, my feet ache and my head is buzzing but I want to take the time to collect my thoughts.

First, I went to Clerkenwell to see Gizella K Warburton's solo exhibition (finishes on Sunday). Visit her web site to see very good images and more information about her work. I last saw Gizella's work at Alexandra Palace in 2010 so was intrigued to see how it has developed. I noticed more three dimensional work and integration of wood and slate alongside the cloth and thread. The common ground is that we are both interested in marks - as she puts it, "the innate human urge to make marks ... to decipher the meaning of our physical and emotional landscapes, and the transient nature of the warp and weft of our lives."

One of the striking features of Gizella's work is the way she never disguises the true nature of her materials. Everything, cloth, thread, wood, remains exactly what it is even as she combines and juxtaposes colours and textures. The colours are monochromatic - mostly the natural colours of her materials. Texture is emphasised - creased cloth, scorched wood, frayed edges. Even where she coats the cloth with paint or medium, whether printed or painted, the original texture tends to be emphasised rather than covered.

What fascinated me most though was the breadth of stitch vocabulary she achieves within only one or two stitch types. Her stitched marks are as important as the cloth. They are nearly all variations on knots or straight stitches, plus couching of thread directly onto the surface. But she finds so many variations within this repertoire. Thread ends are often exposed - adding to the texture. I admire the way she varies the rhythm, density and placing of the stitches with such good judgement as to what each piece needs. Perhaps I was particularly tuned into noticing this since I am in stitch mode in the studio at present.

Next I squeezed in a visit to Erskine, Hall & Coe to see their exhibition of ceramics by Ewen Henderson. I always find ceramics very inspiring - I think it is something about surfaces, texture and marks that appeals to my own instincts. Also, when I look at other textile artists, I know too much about how it is done. Whereas when I look at ceramics I think more freely about how I would achieve similar effects in cloth. I liked the textures and marks of Henderson's pieces. I particularly liked one piece where fragments of dark blue glaze seemed to emerge out of the coarse texture of the clay - I watched effect of the changing light on this for some time. I also liked the forms of his large pieces. Complex, organic forms - some of them look like a collapsed piece of archaeology. He said this about his work that:

“It explores the significance of what is broken, torn or cut, the ability of single or multiple forms to speak of either compression or expansion, flatness or fullness. It is a kind of drawing in three dimensions. I start with fragments - familiar, found, improvised - and then build up to complex structures that invite the observer to complete the circuit, so to speak, by considering such matters as memory, invention and metaphor.”

— Ewen Henderson (via Erskine, Hall & Coe)

My third visit was to Collect. From two small-scale exhibitions, each presenting a focus on a single artist's work, to a huge international fair presenting hundreds of craft objects by hundreds of different artists. I always find it overwhelming. I always forget many of the amazing pieces I see, however hard I try to take notes. So, recovering with a cup of tea, afterwards I concentrated instead on identifying any common elements that had caught my attention in what I had seen. There was something about layers and repetition. I had picked up on this in several pieces in different media - wood, ceramic, paper, metal. I was attracted to the rhythm of repeated units and the way it emphasised the edges when these were layered. The stand out piece for me under this theme was one by Wycliffe Stutchbury. For similar reasons I was interested in the texture of these pieces from the Sarah Myerscough Gallery (which I was allowed to photograph):

Malcolm Martin & Gaynor Dowling (detail)

I was also attracted to a number of pieces that took curving and overlapping forms. These were often in ceramic, glass or metal and the curves resembled the soft folds of cloth - and yet, if you did this in cloth, it would be hard to pull off the same effect without stiffening or supporting it in some way (unless the cloth is naturally quite stiff). Still, something else to reflect on.

Stone books

May 2, 2014

“Rocks are the record of events that took place at the time they formed. They are books. They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them.”

— John McPhee "In Suspect Terrain" (1983)

We think of stones as the epitome of permanence. We use expressions such as "set in stone", "heart of stone", "solid as rock" when we want to convey that something is fixed, unyielding, impervious to influence. But this is not the reality. It simply reflects the difference between our human perception of time and the unimaginable amount of time involved in geological processes.

I've been reading about the work of Ilana Halperin, specifically her exhibition "The Library" for National Museums Scotland last year. Ilana trained as a stone-carver but became interested in this relationship between geological phenomena and human life-spans. "The Library" included agates that were formed during a volcanic eruption in the year the artist was born; minerals that record the impact of a meteorite on the Earth's crust millions of years ago; etchings on "books" of mica that are millions of years old and sculptures made by the artist using geological processes in caves and geothermal springs. What is so inspiring about this is the way these works overturn our perception of the relationship between geology, biology and time.

I went back to Robert Macfarlane's "Mountains of the Mind" and re-read one of my favourite chapters - "The Great Stone Book", and particularly this passage:

“The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called “deep time” - the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years - crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body.

Yet there is also something exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time. True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger physical projects of the universe. But you are also rewarded with the realisation that you do exist - as unlikely as it may seem, you do exist.””

— Robert Macfarlane " Mountains of the Mind" (2003)

But the other aspect of Ilana Halperin's work that intrigued me was the specific history of the minerals she used. And I began to think about my own collection of stones. These are predominantly flint, picked up over the course of several years of walking along North Norfolk beaches. Each one was originally selected primarily for its marks, colour or other physical features but now I was curious what those marks might signify in geological terms.

The "outside" of the same piece - the "cortex", stained with iron perhaps.

I have learned that flint is a form of quartz (silicon dioxide) that occurs as nodules in sedimentary rocks such as chalk. It is derived from material in the bodies of marine organisms, the skeletons of which mix with chalk and organic matter in sediment on the ocean floor. It is thought that chemical changes within the sediment, perhaps related to the decay of organic matter, cause the silica to accumulate and form concretions within the chalk. In some of my flints there are mysterious veins or fragments which thus may be residual traces of minerals or organisms trapped inside the stone during this process of formation.

Inside the nodule, the stone is usually dark grey and glass-like, while the outside is often covered by a coarse, white layer, called a cortex. The cortex looks a little like chalk but is actually quartz. So, many of the patterns in my flints have been formed where the cortex has been worn away by the sea. Lots of them have a pale bluish tinge - maybe where the cortex has worn down to the thinnest "veil" over the darker interior of the stone? Many also contain other colours - black, yellow, rust - which are apparently traces of iron and other metal oxides, sulphides, hydroxides or organic material.

Knowing all this, the stone I picked up on the beach becomes a document. It holds the memory of organisms and processes stretching back millions of years and is itself part of the ongoing geological history of the Norfolk coast. The marks and traces - which remind me of maps, drawings or other symbols within my personal experience - have their own significance. And, from the point I picked it up, I arrested its ongoing transformation - if I had left it on the beach, the sea would have continued to wear it down. Now it sits on my desk in stillness, removed from its geological context, as an object of study.

I'm thinking about doing more with these - studying and drawing the marks more closely with a view to generating more ideas for imagery and marks on cloth. At the moment, though my studio is given over to making new work. I have had a fantastically productive week and my studio wall looked like this (when the sun was out earlier this week). It feels good.

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!

What I learned

So, why?

Helen Terry

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