Times of beginnings

I've been contemplating writing this new blog for several weeks now, in a spectacular case of procrastination, and I've realised that sometimes you just have to go for it, even if you're not sure what you're going to say. It's been such a long time since the previous one at the end of last year and in some ways very little was changing in Traverse's world. My relationship with my textile art to a large extent remained tenuous and I've gone for long periods without making anything, apart from occasional bursts of creative energy. I know from our Zoom chats that Deb, Dia and Vicki have also, for various reasons, gone for long periods without doing much textile art.

However, things are slowly changing and finally we've managed to meet together in Deb's studio a couple of times recently. It's felt so good to be in the studio again, working alongside each other and sparking creativity and inspiration together. We are keeping everything crossed that planned shows next year will be going ahead and also have our very first gallery exhibition coming up in January next year. It will be at Sock Gallery, Loughborough Town Hall and we are very excited!

We decided to call the exhibition 'Together/Apart -  a Retrospective' to reflect how our creative lives have been affected recently. As we wrote in our description:

“An important part of our ethos is to celebrate our diversity, share our various strengths and to grow together, working side by side. However, having recently lived through strange times in our world and working apart for over a year, we are celebrating coming together again to present this retrospective, which reflects not only work on our themes but also work produced alone, exploring loss, personal viewpoints and our emotional landscapes – together and apart.”

Here are a few sneak peeks at what we've been up to.

Vicki has been making her own printing blocks and playing with paint and embossing powder ... 

... and a little bit of fabric manipulation.

Dia has been recycling (or is it upcycling?) coffee capsules, inspired by fireworks - the first stage is playing around with different arrangements before adding stitch.

I wonder if this will be the final choice.

Another of Dia's explorations with this felted background and more fabric manipulation ...

... and some stitching on some beautiful hand- dyed fabric.

Some more gorgeous stitching from Deb ...

...and part of her latest unwearable dress - I love the colours on this one!

I have been playing around with a couple of pieces - both of them things I started ages ago. First, something from the Experimental Textiles course where Traverse first met and it definitely needs a lot of work, specifically on the very flat background, which  needs texture. The embellished felted pieces have copper either inlaid or on top so I've been experimenting.

Where shall I put the small copper circles and should they have a dark red (or maybe turquoise) border?

Maybe I'll move some copper from the bottom to the top.

I think I've found some interesting texture for the background anyway!

The second piece is much older - I began it on a workshop with Alysn Midgelow Marsden in 2014! I know I put it away because it was quite fiddly, working with Romeo soluble and tiny pieces of metal cloth but I didn't intend to leave it for quite so long! I love the texture created and also the heat patination on the three different metals - steel, bronze and copper. I'm trying to decide which orientation I prefer and was surprised at the difference it made when I rotated the following photograph taken in Deb's studio.

 

The sunlight coming in through Deb's window was creating some very interesting shadows that day and the way I look at it now makes quite a difference. A bit of a theme for me lately and I'm still not quite sure how it will end up but remembering my opening sentence - 'sometimes you just have to go for it, even if you're not sure what you're going to do'.

Cath

Times of endings

It's been an incredibly long time since the last blog post and I suddenly remembered that I usually write one at the turning of the year so here it is! I've been thinking about time this morning and how these strange times have unfolded and look likely to continue well into the New Year.

At first, way back in March, time became elastic and seemed to stretch out ahead of me and I imagined how I would use this time of enforced separation from my normal life to do all manner of creative projects - what a wonderful gift it might be! I could investigate new techniques, read all the many inspiring textile art books on my shelf and spend many happy hours upstairs in my room. But this was not to be.

I began well enough by finishing work I'd already started or planned for our 'Senses' exhibition, which we still hoped to show in the Autumn. My 'Ocean Drum' and the metal weavings, 'Moon' and 'Sun', have already been mentioned here in blogland, (Ocean drum in Winds of Change  and Sun and Moon in Lockdown Life) as has my doing the 'Swirls of Colour' workshop with Isobel Moore (also in Lockdown Life), but after that I began to lose creative focus. It slowly became clear that we wouldn't be exhibiting anywhere in 2020 and exploring any new themes just didn't excite me.

Ocean Drum - La Mer

Round and Round the Garden
(Ocean Drum reverse)

     

Moon

Sun

Finished Swirls of Colour piece - untitled as yet

         

I know from artists that I follow that I'm not alone in feeling like that - some have made great use of that elastic time to change direction or explore their work in greater depth, while others have felt like me. I questioned my belief in myself as an artist sometimes but thankfully those times were short and I reached a quiet acceptance that I needed to focus on other things in my life which fed my spirit - mainly singing, virtually on Zoom, with many people all over the world, which has given me great joy.

But this is a textile art blog so gladly I do have some other artworks to write about and they also followed what was emerging as my lockdown theme - finishing things. I found a small piece of embellished felt I'd started many moons ago, which needed some stitching and beads and so that soon came together, although it's unframed and untitled as yet (and the colour looks very odd in the second photo).

I also finished another piece, which I started earlier using one of Maggie Grey's paint-resist techniques; this will be part of another exhibition, curated by Chris Gray, hopefully sometime next year. I was inspired by aboriginal dreamtime symbols and imagery for the central panel layered on felt and I was very pleased to find a piece of handmade paper, which I'd previously dyed on a workshop with Alysn Midgelow-Marsden, which worked well for the background. That has made its way into a frame and is ready to go ... but who knows when?

Turquoise Dreamtime

I'm now working on finishing another piece for Chris, which had to be wearable, so I'm upcycling an old boiled wool jacket, which had a few moth-eaten holes in it - also on the dreamtime journeys theme.

I'm enjoying marrying the needle felting with the use of Kantha stitching and also working with no clear idea of where I'll end up, which I suppose could also be a useful metaphor for where I am right now on the last day of 2020 - with no clear idea of when the strange times will end or what lies ahead. Maybe I needed to concentrate on the endings to make room for new beginnings and I'm hoping for changing times soon. The elastic 2020 time, stretching out far ahead, eventually seemed lost altogether, leading to a timeless quality of life for me and I'm hanging on to truly timeless themes of joy in nature, music, friendship and love.

"What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from."

TS Eliot

I'll be back with more news from Traverse in 2021 but till then we all wish you a very Happy New Year and hope to see you soon!

Cath

 

Funky Felted Abstract

The West Country Quilt and Textile Show opens on Thursday and runs through till Saturday. This year, we will be teaching a workshop for the first time and we're looking forward to sharing our ideas and expertise. We have sometimes been asked by visitors and show organisers and so decided to take that next step. Last month at Deb's studio, we enjoyed planning and sorting out packs of resources, which means that we will also have some kits with instructions for sale on our stand (G48).

Look at these lovely fibres waiting to be packed!

Thanks to Vicki for making this mountain of rice bags to use as felting mats!

When we shared our ideas with the show organisers, they came up with the title 'Funky Felted Abstract' and we quite liked it so it stuck! We will be needle-felting a square of individual abstract design to decorate the cover of a 6 inch square sketchbook, using a variety of fibres, threads and textured yarns with added simple embroidery. Here are some of the samples we made with different colourways.

... and here are some finished and stuck onto the sketchbooks.

We will be running the workshop daily at 12.30 and demonstrating needle-felting techniques on our stand at the show. In the mornings, we'll be using some of the beautiful fibres and yarns to show how we made the workshop samples and in the afternoons, we'll be using the Janome embellisher in various ways, as usual. If you are planning on coming to the show, we'd love to see you for a chat about our work.

We're heading off to Bristol tomorrow to set everything up ready for Thursday. Looking forward to it ...

Cath

Ally Pally Inspirations

A bit late but this has been rewritten due to my having accidentally somehow deleted the first effort!

Last week, I made my first visit to the Alexandra Palace Knitting and Stitching Show. After a longer than expected journey with a rather stressed out coach driver who had never been to Ally Pally before and ended up relying on my phone to navigate the narrow side streets of London, we finally arrived and I headed straight for the Galleries, intending to investigate the 'shopping' side of the experience later, as it was very crowded. However, it wasn’t that fact, but rather the quality of the work and the artists I met, that meant I returned home with a nearly empty shopping bag but a head full of ideas and inspiration.

First was Alysn Midgelow-Marsden’s collaborative Fabricated Narratives project, which was top of my list. This huge hanging of stainless steel fabric looked wonderful, suspended in the corner; as well as the simple but very effective stitching, I love the patination that occurs when metal fabric is heated and Alysn is the ‘metal maestro’ for me. I had a little chat with her about a collaborative project of our own that Traverse are hoping to embark on next year – this piece was a great inspiration for that. Watch this space for more …

The Ripple Effect - stainless steel fabric and stitch

Heat patination

I spent quite some time looking in detail at this piece.

 

I must apologise to Alysn's collaborators because I have no good photos of everyone's work but I will post what I have here.

Artists Brushes - Marianda Twydell

Circles of Life - Marianda Twydell

Sadly, I don't even have a title for the following - an amazing indigo-dyed kimono.

Marianda Twydell

Next I moved on to Cas Holmes with her Tea Flora Tales and Textile Landscape – an inspiration to Bernice, who was honoured to have a piece of work included in her latest book, Textile Landscapes. Although the naturalistic forms in the foreground of this piece don’t usually feature in my own work, I loved the way the background is composed of such a beautiful variety of Indian fabrics …

Madder

… along with the intricate embroidery and the use of cut-out elements.

 

Of course, I loved the red madder colour, which was so me, but was also interested to see the complementary pop of yellow, which was so not me! Food for thought …

I really enjoyed chatting to Clare Bullock on the Artists in Action stand and watching her nuno felting technique, which has such beautiful results, enhanced by her wonderful stitching. I’ve had mixed results when I’ve tried nuno felting in the past but her explanation was so clear that I’ve come away inspired to give it another go. (Thanks to Art Van Go’s Kevin for this and some other photos of the artists in action.)

Clare in action

I also liked Clare’s method of working on small pieces, which she carries around, working on them as and when she can, before finally extending and assembling them into a whole; it reminded me of the Indian fabric background on Madder.

Adding and extending into a whole piece

Close-up of layers of silk and stitch - possibly my favourite section

It was very crowded but I managed to find a small space on a bench to eat my lunch while listening to a very interesting talk in the Creative Living Theatre by Jan Beaney and Jean Littlejohn entitled Capturing the Spirit. I have long admired their work but am always particularly drawn to Jean’s use of the embellisher, as I use it a lot in my own work (as well as demonstrating it at shows). Her part of the talk focused on her series based on the moon and the various design processes she goes through, emphasising the long process of building up layers of print and stitch. 

Cusp 1

Cusp 2

Strawberry Solstice

As luck would have it, Jan and Jean were also on the Artist in Action stand in the afternoon so I had the opportunity to look at several examples of Jean's work in progress up close. She was also very generous in answering my many questions about the effects she achieves with an embellisher and I definitely came away from there feeling very inspired.

Jean in action

Jean's work in progress

There were many other examples of beautiful textile work in the other galleries, although based on people’s comments and having read a few other reviews, it seems there were not as many as in previous years. As this was my first visit, I had nothing to compare it to so I did really enjoy it.

I dashed back to Alysn’s gallery as I wanted to take some photos of a few more pieces, which I hadn’t been able to get close to earlier because of the crowds. I’m on a workshop with Alysn next week and I’m really looking forward to working with a bit of metal and wire again – something even half as good as this would be fantastic! (I’ll try to post a few photos of work in progress.)

 

Finally, this beautiful wire mobile and its many reflections had an interesting title - Accreted Towards a Whole.

 

 

I have a bit of a reputation for being good with words but this was a new one on me and I had to look up the word accretion on my phone; I was very interested in the meaning – the process of growth and enlargement by the gradual accumulation of additional layers and here are just a few of the synonyms that I found - accumulation, gathering, growth, increase, extension.

As I sat on the coach on the way home, reflecting on the day and hoping for a better journey than the morning, I thought how well that word summed up my day – not only in the physical processes I had seen, Clare’s nuno felt, Cas’s Indian fabrics, Jean’s embellished, printed and stitched layers, but also the gathering together in the collaborative element of several of the galleried exhibitions and the growth and extension of my repertoire of techniques and the many inspirational ideas which came my way.

'Never mind about the journey', I thought and I was reminded of one of those inspirational quotes you sometimes get on greetings cards:

It’s not about the journey, it’s about the people you meet along the way

Cath