Here be Snapdragons: My West Dean Summer

This summer I treated myself to two back-to-back residential courses at West Dean College near Chichester.

The college is located in a stunning house set in huge grounds that used to belong to Edward James, a surrealist poet and philanthropist. He was a double inheritee (from his father and his unlce) patron of Surrealist artist and there are several original Dali pieces at the house. There is an interesting documentary about him on YouTube

The courses I took were Jeanette Appleton's Exploring Colour and Transparency in Felt Making and Cas Holmes' Tracing Shadows - Dyed and Stitched Textiles. Both tutors were superb and I'd highly recommend them. As well as the location of course.

From Jeannette we learnt a softer much less messy and energetic way of felting. She advocates a pre-felting technique that uses none of this 100 rolls one way and then the next. And much less water that I was used to. You are left with a delicate, diaphanous piece of felt that has a handle I was not used to - not the thick stiff stuff, more like nuno, felt that falls like fabric. One of the best things about it is that you can do as much as you can/want, take a break and come back to it later.

She encouraged us to think in 3s - e.g. coarse, soft and something else - what is that third thing? Texture, contrast, colour, dimension? She also drew attention to the mark-making properties of felt.

Something that has had a great impact on me since is that she encouraged me to hang my pieces in three dimension in front of each other so you could see through. She also suggested looking at a space like a museum or an exhibition hall and thinking: how could I respond to it with my art?

I was rather prolific and came away with lots of resolved pieces - although my first piece was 'permanently borrowed' by someone!

Here's some of my work in Jeannette's class:

Felted pieces - one texture based and one colour based

Cutting things up to assemble

Felting the back

The piece coming together

A bit of rolling

The final piece that someone liked so much they borrowed it

The next piece coming along

Nearly finished

Detail of the mark-making capability of felt

Tacking threads left to show through

Hanging my finished pieces in a row

Two more finished pieces

Cas Holmes is a fan of recyling, reuse and repurposing - use what's around. In her first tutorial she used a fish skin from supper! We did heat transfer printing which I have totally fallen in love with. Lots of block printing and a little bit of sun printing because the weather was not at all condusive.

Cas encouraged us to build up a 'stock' of semi-worked pieces and audition them for resolved work which I am doing lots of now. The drawback is that I'm finding that things that would be samples are becoming 'stock' and I'm reluctant to stick them in my sketchbook.

I'm also a bit precious about taking next steps with 'samples' in case I mess up. Cas' philosophy would be that anything 'messed up' can be repurposed and auditioned for new work at a later time.

And this is what I came up with in Cas' class.