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.

Preparing heat transfer paper

Some fabrics for 'audition'

Preparing mono printing

Applying wallpaper paste to pieces so that they run under the sewing machine easily without a hoop

Imaginative use of block print sources

Heat transfer results

More heat transfer preparations

Heat transfer results

Sun printing, but without much sun

Resolved (mostly) piece containing heat transfer, block printing and sewing

Kantha course

I took a class with Amarjeet Nandhra in Recycling fabrics using Kantha.

Kantha is popular in South East Asia and features the running stitch. Kantha work has a story or narrative and people develop their personal motifs. It's often worked communally.

Key themes in Kantha

Some of the features are the personal motif, as mentioned, border patterns, puckering, a sense of personal meaning in the fabric, using thread to make connections between one part and another.

I decided to use pieces I'd already made using dyeing, screen and block printing. I didn't like any of my dyed pieces so had no sense of personal connection with them but the printed samples were ones I quite liked.

Here is how it went.

The stitch goes for a swim around my tie dye.

Really don't like this piece but I persevered. 

Amarjeet suggested I take the spiral stitch out onto the rest of the piece to unify it.

Just a small bit of running stitch added to a couple of samples to join them together.

A couple of samples from another class (trying out opaque screen printing and puff medium)

Cut up and reassembled.

The work to join nit up starts.

Using both the shape of the birds and the pattern on the background fabric to inspire where the running stitch should go.

Class work - some great ideas.

Some great inspirations

Suggested by Amarjeet:

Debra Weiss - I'm always drawn to patchwork reuse of textile scraps with overlaid stitch.

Christine Mauersberger - Kantha-esque stitch work as well as lots lots more. More here.

Arlee Barr - lots of natural dyes and reuse of textile scraps.

Dorothy Caldwell - dense stitchwork and reuse of textiles. Dorothy's website here.

The Importance of a Sketchbook

I'm not an artist and didn't know about the importance of the 'sketchbook'. There are even courses on sketchbook-keeping. I know I have to practice my life drawing or drawing in general and also keep a collection of samples that show my thinking and progress.

The problem is that I want to reuse everything, so a sample in a sketchbook feels like a waste! But I'm sure I'll get used to it. So far my sketchbook contains trials and tribulations from my CityLit textiles course.

A definition

It's helped me to define the purpose of the sketchbook as: to record, review and revisit ideas and work towards the mastery of art and design techniques.

I'm also understanding that primary observation (drawing from real life) is really important. I have yet to understand why.

My sketchbook so far

Here's how I'm doing.

That sample I made that I didn't like turned out well

Mixing and matching my samples in strips - not sure I like this; there's no real thinking behind it

Wing outstretched

Curious and beautiful shapes that appear in nature

What to do with murmurations of starlings

Quite liked this funny little bird made of wire

Eggs, and why not

I love how messy I'm allowing myself to be. That's quite a big thing for me. Nothing has to fit within boundaries. And I've stuck things down with staples, badly-applied sellotape with creases and fingerprints and clumps of glue. Better to get something done than to wait to do it perfectly and miss your moment.

Artists' takes on the sketchbook

It got me to wondering what do some of my favourite textile artists do. Here are some quotes from textileartist.org

Jane Neal

I spend a long time, sometimes years, researching and developing an area of interest by using books, images and visiting exhibitions to feed my ideas. I keep a sketchbook, often like a journal, in which I record all my thoughts and ideas, notes from books I have read, and preliminary trials and experiments. In this, I also draw ideas I have for a piece of work, and stick in images that link to my thinking or inspire me.

Aisling Smyth

I then collect loads of modern imagery and create a visual bank of inspiration. From this research I start to sketch a version of the end goal. 

Yes. I use my sketchbook as an archive of all my embroideries that went wrong.
Every week, I chop up my samples and sort into two piles: glitchy and finished.
The glitchy ones get stuck into my book and annotated as to why they went wrong.
The last and probably the most frequently occurring feature in my sketchbook is a list of aims. These could be daily, weekly or monthly. I can’t really settle until I make a list and it has almost become an exercise of habit rather than a practical organisational tool. The lists may not always be ticked off, but their existence keeps me sane, so why not?

Ana Teresa Barboza

My work starts from the notes I write in my notebook and from the things I read or see everyday in my life. I am ready to work when I have a clear idea of what I want to do and how I can achieve it. I do little proofs because embroidery work takes a long time to develop.

Alice Kettle

Q: Do you use a sketchbook?
A: Sometimes.

Another good source of sketchbook inspiration is a simple Google image search.

On a practical note, I've bought this great Artway Enviro wirebound A4 sketchbook in landscape and I love it!

And she's off

The record of my development starts here and I look forward to seeing the progress (I hope) over time.

Did you learn any lessons from sketchbook-keeping? I'd love to know.

Experimental Stitch - a Recent Course

I did a course this year at CityLit (again) called Experimental Stitch with Amarjeet Nandhra. Three consecutive Sundays.

Amarjeet is a fabulously patient tutor and has an excellent way of drawing out the best in you. Then pushing you a bit more.

In each class we covered a set of stitches and applied them in thematic ways to the samplers we were making. For instance looking at a particular stitch and taking it to extremes of scale: huge and tiny; light and dark; dense and dispersed. So imagine French Knots in thick raffia or in sewing thread, bunched together or far apart.

If you get a chance to do a class with Amarjeet, take it! She co-founded the Windsor School of Textile Art which runs lots of interesting courses.

Here were two of the samplers I made.

The postcard that acted as inspiration
(apologies that I can't attribute the photographer)

Fabric paint - taking advantage of a crease

Some stitch added - not all results to my liking - running, couched, stem stitches

Downtown - woven picot, bullion and other stitches in metallic thread on tweed - beads added after the course

Downtown - beads added along the faint blue line in the tweed

Downtown - beads sewn in between the raised stitches

Learnings

I feel I learnt to take inspiration from a source (the postcard) which was something new for me. Learning to translate inspiration from the world around you is an important skill. This may seem obvious to natural artists but it's something I had to learn. I always thought the finished product was something that flowed out of you whole. And that if that wasn't happening it meant I wasn't an artist and should just give up.

I also think I nudged a bit closer to understanding when to stop working on something. And into letting a sampler be a sampler.

One of the things I may try to do with the work produced here is cut it up and use it as part of another piece. That takes some nerve but it may be a way to kill your darlings. I would never have thought of that but for another course I took where we were asked to do just that. See my post A Class from the Past.

On another tack, I'm a bit of a course junkie. Anyone else out there who could recommend some textiles courses that push some boundaries?