As a background to my blog page, there needs to be something interesting, but not too overwhelming, happening out on the edges. I went back and re-manipulated several pics and came up with some more, and although my final choice may be none of these, I feel I am getting closer to something that I will be happy with.
As I said the other day, I’m working on a re-design of my website, though it is more correct to say that the technical work is being done by the wonderful team at Gloderworks who built this now 10 y.o. website. The current background is based on Timetracks 1, which began the Tracks series, and led to some new thinking about my art. It reflects where I was then, just as did my first (19 years ago) and subsequent sites. I still have some more rewriting to do, and choices to make on what I really want the website to convey.
I’ve been looking at other textile artists’ websites and blog pages in many different styles. There are lots of combinations of bio, cv, galleries, exhibition news, publications, class schedules, blogs, archives and most have a contact page. They range from very formal to madly, crazily, informal. Some have plain white, black or other colour backgrounds. Others have some kind of texture, subtle or bold, and some are so lively and full of visual stimuli that it’s hard to see the main focal point. It might be an age thing, but I’m looking for something uncluttered, almost ‘minimalist’.
I spent much time yesterday looking at quilted works and some landscape pics in my photo files. I manipulated some of them in fairly faint pencil sketch mode so they are not intrusive, and compiled a file of about 15 possibles plus several hand drawn liney things that I’m thinking over. However, thinking I was a bit clever, saving these as very faint B/W pencil sketches when I put some of these up to show you, they looked just too severely washed out of colour, and rather boring, so I’ve just left a couple for the record, and it looks like an afternoon of a fresh round of manipulate+saves coming up!
It’s time for some lunch!
A few years ago I developed a power point presentation for a lecture to a textile group about my textile art, and how it developed with inspirations and influences from the Earth’s surface. About 70 carefully chosen slides of the quilted and embroidered textile art I’ve been making much of my adult life are in this presentation, A Journey Through Landscape, and this image (Sunburnt Textures) graced the title page slide:
I studied undergraduate geography and some geomorphology, and as a result of marriage to an exploration geologist, I have travelled through, lived in and on a variety of landscapes on several continents. Colours and textures, shapes and processes of landscape formation all provide inspiration to my designs. As an adult my personal interests have expanded to include the history I eschewed as a child, and include anthropology, primitive art forms and ancient history.
Looking at the fabric and thread part of my art, I can say that various kinds of embroidery were done by the women in our family, so I began to embroider and stitch decoration on things at a young age. I came to patchwork later, in my 40s, and though my brief affair with traditional geometric patchwork in the late 80s was an intense one, and we parted amicably, it left me with several enduring marks I’d call influences rather than scars. Lines and shapes the basis of cut and pieced fabric known as patchwork – which is my favourite textile art technique from a wide range of other textile art skills. As a result, then, I love compositions of line, shape and colour, and love compilations of repeated units known in traditional circles as ‘blocks’ that build up into an overall patchwork design. I love hand and machine embroidery, and hand and machine quilting. Well, quilting IS an embroidery technique, anyway.
So you may wonder where all this is going. I’ve been doing no actual making for several months while I was recovering from a surgery, and haven’t written in my blog, either: but I have been thinking about it all. After ten years, I’ve decided it’s time for a major website re-vamp. I will be altering what is shown and how it is presented. I want newer work up front or on top however you think about that, with plenty of archives people can explore if they want. To please those who want good close ups I’ll have some click-throughs for those details that my wonderful photographer Eduardo Baldizan captures so well. With a wet and windy weekend ahead, I am keen to start work on the revision.
“Simpson Desert Sunset” is about 30cm x 20cm, a freeform bargello needlepoint, highlighted with masses of french knots, dates from approx 1979. The frame is not visible.
Browsing online recently, I discovered the beautiful textile art of Canadian artist Chung-Im Kim .
Born in South Korea, and for nearly three decades resident in Canada, Chung-Im’s art interestingly and successfully blends her cultural past with her cultural present. Traditional Korean bojagi are some of the cultural roots to which Chung-Im periodically returns for inspirational refreshment; and in one body of work these well-known traditional textiles have become canvases for print and stitch compositions. But it is her dimensional, sculptural work with felt that blew me away, with alluring titles of groups of work in her portfolio – pre-grids, grids, free grids, living geometry and miniatures.
Felt is made from a large variety of natural, synthetic fibres and blended fibres, with wool felt considered to be one of the oldest textiles in human history. Late last year I wrote of an interesting exhibition by some international feltmakers in the textile biennial here in Montevideo, and though I have found and bought some beautifully crafted felt things down the years, I’ve still never seen anyone actually making felt, and have never seriously considered it as a ‘raw material’ for my own art, though I am aware of artists such as Rebecca Howdeshell US, Siv Goransson UY and Australian Nancy Ballesteros.
Chung-Im describes her materials and process as industrial felt screen printed with digitally engineered images, which she presumably cuts into, and then assembles the remaining pieces by hand, for which see this image. So I googled ‘industrial’ felt, and now understand ‘felt’ to be a huge field, more varied than I’d ever thought about, and of large scale manufacturing of felted fibres of various kinds and blends with industrial applications including carpet underlays and gaskets for use in some machinery. The most interesting site I spent time on provides sizes of pre-cut and rolled felt from small custom shapes, various page-sized sheets up to huge rolls of various widths and thicknesses, depending on the buyer’s requirements. I immediately began developing a mental list of ‘buyer’s requirements’ to ask about, and it almost makes me want to ditch my woven fabrics and clear studio space for some industrial felt supplies … No, I doubt I’d take such a radical step, but some ideas a percolating, and as I do have some small pieces of craft felt around, some time I might paint, monoprint or stencil something on it of my own design, or look into getting something printed, as a canvas for embroidery, perhaps. Felt as a non-fraying material with some body or stiffness is inspiring…but I digress.
These works really opened my eyes to the potential of ‘grids’, and to the realisation that I may have been interpreting ‘grids’ too narrowly, despite several posts on the subject, like this one . Isohyets, topographical maps, aerial photos, erosion patterns, in fact all kinds of contour lines associated with diagrams, maps and charts all come flooding into my mind when viewing these works.
These and many more works on her website show inspiration from landscape shapes and patterns of surface textures.
Another interesting group of work is titled ‘living geometry’ , containing pieces which I initially thought could have been filed with ‘free grids’, because all their grids are certainly irregular. However, on further reflection, I realised the difference in concept is that these pieces appear to be growing right out of a surface in a very organic way, suggesting they are alive.
The combination of smooth, printable surface and stiffness that lends itself to sculptural goals, reminded me of the wool felt sculpture/garment exhibited by heather Brezo Alcoceba of Spain, which I mentioned in the post of 14/11/2017 last. (scroll well down) In this pop-over shoulder cape kind of garment, the wearability of which was not immediately obvious, it now occurs to me that that very 3D surface has a strong connection to the idea of irregular grids.
I’d like to thank Chung-Im Kim for supplying images and giving permission to use them in this article.
My readers know I dip into Pinterest every now and then, sometimes browsing and procrastinating for hours; but this morning I was a little ahead of my loosely imposed daily schedule so took ‘only a few minutes’ …. then felt moved to write a little on this, create and resize a collage pic to illustrate this, and so really, nearly an hour has flown ! But shortly I’ll head back to more quilting on the one I’m half way through.
To me, Pinterest is an ideas source, just like what journalists call a morgue – collection of files and clippings for reference. I’m so glad I don’t have bulging drawers of paper clippings gathering dust somewhere – thank goodness for computers. I watch out for interesting edge treatments, presentations, lines and shapes, contemporary hand stitch, holes, and a few other categories for which I have boards. I just checked and among the 13 boards I have one for recipes – which I really don’t collect at all, hardly ever consult the cookbooks I have, and instead focus either on family favs or on the spot creativity.
With the exception of the broderie lace upper right, included because I own it and it inspires me (holes) the other sections on this collage are samples I have probably tried out for reference having seen something relating to them on Pinterest. This morning I saw and saved some contemporary hand stitch that reminded me of mending, and several things on paper which took me browsing into a couple of interesting bloggers’ sites that seem to have been abandoned several years ago – that’s always a bit disappointing. But, hey, Life intervenes at times, and I’ll look further to see if they are still producing, perhaps in another medium. But my hour’s nearly up, so that’s all for today 🙂