I'm thoroughly enjoying using Bertha... for those of you wondering who or what Bertha is, she is a wide scale printer, which allows me to print cloth up to 24" wide, and as long as I like... I'm still at the experimental stage, but I hope to offer other textile artists the opportunity to send images to us at the Gallery, so that we can print cloth for them, too. Meanwhile, this is one of the images I'm working on currently. This was printed on Evolon and stitched into. It's part of the 'Cracking Up' series I've been thinking about and working on for a while. Not sure if it's finished yet, I may add something else to it, possibly using the embellisher. I've included a small close up, to let you see the detail in both the stitch and the print itself; remember you can click on the images to enlarge them.
The original image was a photograph of cracks in the floor of an outbuilding at the Gressenhall Museum. It's amazing how quickly and easily a photograph can be manipulated on computer. The challenge, I'm finding, is working out how to combine photographs as abstracts with stitch. I've always said that it's important to leave space for stitch in any design we make; I'm finding that if I work the image too hard, it's difficult to work out quite how and where to stitch...and to justify the stitch at all. That hadn't really occurred to me. I don't see myself as a photographer, but in some ways, that's what I am, or what I have become. It's not a turn in my creative journey that I was expecting, but that's okay. I love the unexpected.
4 comments:
You and Bertha are working really well together. Good to see you working again and back at The Gallery.
best wishes,
Jane C
Liking the collaboration for sure!
I'm trying to fathom out Bertha, having done mainly screen printing on fabrics in the past. Is it the drum kind, computerised, perhaps? Not that it matters what kind she is, when you work so well together! I've spent an enjoyable half an hour perusing your work, and very enjoyable it has been, too.
I think you could be onto a winner here Marion! I'm not sure if I've quite grasped the finer details, but I know there's loads of people out there who enjoy manipulating photos on photoshop, and changing them to abstracts etc.
There then seems to be a slight problem of what to do with them next. If they knew it was possible for the image to be printed large scale onto cloth, and then stitched into etc., I'm sure they'd be queuing at your door.
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