I enjoyed the exhibition ‘Air: Visualising the invisible
in British Art 1768-2017’ at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol. As
the title suggests there were contemporary works and well known historic
paintings by artists such as JMW Turner, John Constable, Eric Ravilious, Sir
John Everett Millais, Samuel Palmer, and Paul Nash. The exhibition was divided
into areas such as air, wind, clouds, breath and flight. The cloud pieces were
very evocative and I particularly liked Ian McKeever’s three works entitled ‘… and
the sky dreamt it was the sea’ shown in the image above. The historic paintings
of clouds by Turner and Constable were also a treat to see close up. The works
linked to flight were relevant to my current Battle of Britain commission
especially one by Eric Ravilious painted shortly before he was lost flying off
Iceland in 1942. However, flight also encompassed hot air balloons, barrage
balloons and the movement of birds. Breath was linked to several pieces of
glasswork linking the idea of ephemerality, biology, glass blowing and mist. It
was a fascinating subject and with the promise of visualising the invisible was
one I couldn’t miss. It runs until 3 September and is worth a visit if you’re
in Bristol.
Wednesday 26 July 2017
Monday 24 July 2017
Lace study day
Gail Baxter and I recently ran a lace study day for the
Crafts Study Centre at Farnham. The lace was all taken from the textile
collection at the University for the Creative Arts and we aimed the day at
those who had no knowledge of lace. The textile archive includes several pieces
of lovely lace and other smaller samples so it is quite a mixed collection. We
decided to base the day on techniques mainly to show the range of ways in which
lace can be made. We started with a talk about contemporary lace then moved on
to the collection beginning with bobbin lace including pieced laces like
Honiton, continuous laces such as Bedfordshire and Eastern European tape laces.
We then moved on to needlelace, and mixed needle and bobbin lace, of which the
College has some lovely pieces. After that we looked at the needlerun laces
including tambour and Carrickmacross, which led onto Irish crochet. We then
showed some lovely examples of Shetland knitted lace from the collection and finished
the day with examples of machine made lace and some other laces which didn’t
fit into any of the other groups. We had a lovely group of participants and I
hope we left them with a good overview of the many ways in which lace can be
made.
Thursday 20 July 2017
Laser cut lace
I’ve been looking at laser cutting this week and have
discovered that like most techniques there is much more to it than meets the
eye. For a start the machines aren’t just used for cutting but can also be used
to engrave and score materials so are much more versatile than I thought. The
book I’ve bought to help me learn about it is ‘Laser cutting for fashion and
textiles’ by Laura Berens Baker, which provides 14 very clear tutorials explaining
how to set up the Illustrator and CAD files needed to instruct the machine. I
was interested to see that you use different coloured lines for different kinds
of cut, in a similar way to the drafts for machine lace, which use different
colours to indicate different thread movements and thus the type of stitch made.
Although I love the effects produced by laser cutting I’m not sure I would
enjoy all the computer work involved, my textile work is generally an antidote
to sitting at the computer writing so I’m not sure adding more desk work is the
way forward for me, but I’ll give it a go.
Wednesday 12 July 2017
Sampling needlerun lace on net
I’ve been working on my Battle of Britain lace panel
commission this week. I’ve worked out the dimensions of the three separate
panels and how large each of my digitally printed images needs to be on each
one. The images on the two outer panels will be separated by strips of needle
run lace reflecting the missing people behind the construction of the original
lace panel. The central panel will be different from the other two and will incorporate
images, silk paper and needle run lace depicting images from the airforces
involved in the Battle of Britain. I bought two different types of net last
week and have been trying out some stitching on both of them to decide which
one to use. I still need to try out some silk paper samples on them both and
leave them to hang and see how they perform, but so far I’m finding the one
with the slightly larger mesh easier to work with.
Wednesday 5 July 2017
Silk paper and stitching
It’s interesting how one thing leads onto or informs
another. I’ve now decided to incorporate some silk paper and stitching into my
contemporary response to the Battle of Britain lace panel – not something that
was in my original plan for the project! I first used silk paper many years ago
as a way of showing my small experimental free bobbin lace cells as it allowed
them to be seen from both sides. I then started using it to make panels
incorporating lace, which allowed me to make larger pieces for exhibitions.
Also in some of those larger hangings I included other threads and beads into
the silk paper. More recently, for my ‘Dust and dirt’ hanging I made large
areas of silk paper and then stitched over the top to give the impression the
silk paper was blending into the background fabric (see the image above). A
technique I also used in the Miss Havisham veil to link silk paper and net. For
my Battle of Britain panel I’ve decided to use silk paper to reflect the idea
of the flames licking round St Paul’s Cathedral and to form the feathered wings
of a soaring eagle. So from using silk paper just as a support for my lace it’s
now playing an important part in the design itself. I need to do some sampling
to see how it will work though so watch this space!
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