Normal Service...

is resuming, slowly. I've got an inner ear infection, which upsets my balance a bit, so I've been in bed the last couple of days. Completely idle, which, for me, is unusual; if I'm in bed, I'm usually doing something. Art related of course...drawing, or sometimes hand stitching.

But now to get back on something that loosely resembles a track. When is a quilt not a quilt? Why, when it's a sculpture. And, in this case, a book. I've been working with lutradur again. I thought it would create an interesting book, and indeed, so it does. I enjoy making sculptural books, things that you can play with, look at from different angles and perspectives. These are very simple to make, yet incredibly effective.

I do bind books, now and again, and enjoy it when I do, but I'd rather be sewing. Or painting. So in future, I'm intending to pass cloth to Helen, who makes books faster than I do, and save my time for other things. Just because I know how to, doesn't mean I have to do it!

Inner Landscapes III

I thought you might like to see the other Inner Landscape piece I made on Monday. Besides, I'm tired, too tired to write much. Who said a picture was worth a thousand words? I'd like to shake his hand!

Inner Landscapes II

Having painted a lot of paper to do transfers onto lutradur, I thought that today, being wet and windy, was probably a good day to be beside an ironing board. Hence, two new 'Inner Landscape' pieces. Here is one of them, or rather, almost all of one of them, they are both slightly bigger than the scanner! The one shown here is made for an old friend whom I haven't seen in a long time, the other for a new friend, whom I seem to see quite regularly.

I was concerned about how to go on with this series, after the happy accident that was the first of the quiltlets. I shouldn't have worried. I did some painting, using the colours I thought were right together, and when I ironed them out, I recognised the people they related to. Strange, isn't it? Or there again, trusting the process and one's unconscious mind is always a good plan.

Not quite a host, more a cluster of golden daffodils.

Grubbing in the Garden

They say exercise is good for depression. Sadly, they're right. So when I felt a bit blue today, out I went into a warm wind, and tidied up one of the borders. This reminded me of two things. One, you really ought to tidy up in the autumn... Two, you really ought to be fitter than you are. Sigh. But there is something very pleasant about a little light weeding on a beautiful spring day. So I visited the plants in the other borders, and snapped these lovely miniature daffodils on the way back in.

And having blown the blues away, I finally got to grips with the quilt for the Spring show that takes place next month. And I made a book...that isn't a book... more tomorrow!

Dancing With The Demons : Burnout

In a previous post, I talked about a quilt I had made to tell the story of my last breakdown. Shirley asked to see a picture or two, so here we go. This is a highly personal quilt, and yet the experience it portrays is very common, so I make no apologies for going into details to explain the quilt. Funnily enough, the artist's statement that accompanies it is very short and to the point. Fire, it says, is a good servant and a bad master.

The quilt describes a time period of about two or three years. I had been working in a very difficult environment, for an unreasonable man, at full pitch, for about three years. One day, a friend mentioned a fire walking workshop, and asked if I'd like to take part. I was horrified at the thought; I shook with fear. I said, no, I don't want to do anything like that. Later, though, I changed my mind. I didn't want anything to have such power over me, and so, I signed up for the workshop. I walked on fire. I burned my feet, slightly. You would think that I would have got the message at that point, but no. So, the first section of the quilt shows me tentatively stepping forward onto the fire.

About nine months after that, I burned out completely. I could no longer function in any meaningful way, and left my bed only to go to psychotherapy, and to have long hot baths with lavendar oil in them. The central panel of the quilt shows me, immobilised, being immersed in the fire, unable to escape.

And then, things gradually improved. I was no longer the person I had been; I was retired from my day job on medical grounds, and, eight years later, have no plans to return to my profession. But despite that, there was hope. The third panel shows a falling, burnt shell of a person, falling, falling...but below it, a silver hand. For me, that represents my own creativity, the saving grace, literally and metaphorically, in this situation.

I have since made a number of quilts that are indirectly 'about' depression. One series is entitled 'The Texture of Memory', and it looks at the way in which we remember things, sometimes obscuring our own view, and distorting our memory, through wearing the infamous 'pink coloured spectacles' of hindsight. One of those quilts is part of the Changing Perspective show, if you're interested.

Meanwhile, I focus on the beacon of hope that is the silver hand of creativity. I can't make this illness go away, sadly; a short business type meeting will exhaust me for days, I miss the energy levels I used to have. But I can recognise that I have gained from it, too. I now have the time and space to explore art as I wish to, without any pressure from anyone except myself. I find myself wishing to put the art 'out there', but I'm not entirely sure that I have the confidence or the stamina to do so in a sustained manner. It's scary.

So, I finally find myself at a point where I have decisions to make. Wish me luck.

Hidden Meanings?

You may recall that I posted recently about a postcard. I'd worked on it, and lost it, and finally found it again, photographed it and talked about it here. What I didn't share with you, was the reaction of a particular friend, who shall remain nameless. That's rude, she said. I looked at it again. Phallic, right enough, regardless of any which way you turned it. How did you fail to see that, she asked, wondering if indeed it was just her mind... Well, to tell you the truth, I didn't make the connection. I work a lot with marks that are intended to make you think that they have meaning of some kind, that they might have been deliberate, intended... only in this instance, the meaning my friend found wasn't anything I'd intended... ah well.

As it happens, I managed to, well, mislay the postcard once again. I found it abandoned in the printer/scanner yesterday. While fishing it out, I realised that actually, I like the back a lot more than I like the front...so I'm going to finish it as a two sided postcard, and be done with it. Besides which, on this side, you get to see the encaustic painting clearly, which was intended as a feature, but the lutradur obscured it a tad too much, and whilst said encaustic looked better on the other side, I'm not about to unpick and start again. I rarely ever unpick a work...I'm more likely to throw it out, and I don't think this wee thing deserves that, entirely.

Getting Nothing Done

Or at least, it feels that way. But when I look at the day, actually, it has been a day of incremental improvement. I had to go out to collect a variety of prescription drugs...as well as the Prozac (for which I'm daily grateful), there's the iron tablets for the anaemia that always seems to be either present or threatening, and the inhaler for my asthma. Sigh. So, since I was out anyway, I continuted on to buy some batting and threads. And, once home, while waiting for the kettle to boil, I painted up some paper with transfer dyes. I don't have a lot of room for drying stuff, so little and often is my motto for this kind of work.

And then, I made An Experiment. I'm still struggling with the quilt for the exhibition next month, with Spring as its theme. I started a small brown quilt, but somehow, it isn't conveying what I want it to. So I took a piece of fine cotton, which is a deep brown, and felted some green wool tops onto it, randomly. I thought that I'd use it reversed, since Nuno felt of this nature usually has the odd glimpse of the wool on both sides, but whilst the two surfaces are bonded, there doesn't seem to be any fibre on the back. Which is fine, as I'm quite pleased with the top, and will use it fused (probably) onto some dark velvet. I want to suggest the random nature of growth, whether in a newly dug garden or a newly ploughed field. Pictures tomorrow, I promise. Meanwhile, the last of the dye pictures, a screenprinted piece that I'm quite taken with. Just as well, really, as I've got a few of them!

Deep And Meaningful : The Mummy.

the totem tribe. Michael suggested making lots of them, and he was right! But they tend to migrate to other homes.

My personal totem doll

A Short Story

I promised Jen that I'd tell this particular story. Amongst the other things I do, I make dolls. I resisted doll making for years, it seemed like a terribly 'girly' thing to do (no offense meant to dollmakers everywhere), and that just seemed so 'not me'. But it niggled and niggled, as these things do.

And then I went on a workshop that was run by Michael Brennand-Wood, a well known UK embroiderer, whose specialism is 3D. It was fun, from start to finish. I, of course, being of a dark disposition, or at least a tendency thereto, found myself making something Deep and Meaningful, something that looked like a mummy, and which represented the cycle of birth and death. And on day three of the workshop, nearly finished with Deep and Meaningful, I looked round and realised that everyone else (and there must have been about a dozen of us), without exception, was working on something brightly coloured, that looked joyful, and I thought...what AM I doing? So...I started making a totem doll. There she is, up at the top of the blog. She turned out to be a self portrait, bless her...a glimpse of the goddess within, I suspect.

And I've been making dolls ever since, some of them totem dolls, made from sticks and cloth, others entirely cloth. And I love it. It's my treat, for when I'm between projects and I'm stuck, and don't know how to move forward. Making a doll or three does it every time. So does making altered books, but that's another story altogether...

Closet Quilts

One of my goals for this year is to (finally...at last...) catalogue them, the finished quilts that live in the wardrobe above my head. I'm very, very bad at paperwork; my preference is to make, not to record. But every time someone asks me what size a piece is, I have to go measure it...again...and that makes no sense at all to me. So, I have a little book, and in it, I'm writing down everything I've made. Well, that's not strictly true. Everything I still have in my collection, or that I know is definitely somewhere else, like the healing quilts hanging in an acupuncturist's surgery, or the specific quilt I gifted to someone in the US, made for her birthday. Which is why I've got piles of quilts in the living room, and a tape measure on my knee.

Fortunately, though I've been working in cloth for over twenty years, the serious art stuff only goes back about five or six years, so it's not as if I have to dredge my rather uncertain memory for what I made Back Then. What is interesting, is clearly seeing the patterns in my work. I thought there were more quilts in the Texture of Memory series than there actually are, for instance. It is probably the earliest of the series quilts, and many of the themes in it, are still popping up in my work today. Many of those early quilts are either directly or indirectly about depression. One of them, Burnout, charts the progression of my last breakdown; my son can't bear to be in the same room as it. I know how he feels, though I see the hope in it, rather than the pain.

Art as therapy? Perhaps. But then, nobody criticises a writer for writing what s/he knows. I don't make quilts about depression specifically to help myself get over it; I make them because making art is what I do. And as I understand my situation better, it changes, hopefully for the better, and so do I. If that's therapy, so be it. For me, it's a by product. The real aim is the visual moment.

There seems to be rather a lot of work just lying about the house, waving...really must Put It Away. But not before it is measured and catalogued. What's scary, is that once this is done, I have to catalogue the paintings, too. There are quite a few of those, which accounts for the seeming gap of nearly a year, where I painted full time, pretty much, and didn't touch textiles. At present, there are paintings piled up in odd places. They aren't as easy to store as textiles. What I really need, is a Fan, who could take some away!

When In Doubt...

cut it out? Well, not quite. I had a piece which I really liked, a handdyed square (napkin), which I'd dyepainted blue. Then on top of that, some lutradur, half dyed red, half dyed blue, with a white gap between them. And then, I stitched. And Stitched. And it didn't work. So then, I stitched some more. And yes, it still didn't work. I even overdyed it a bit more, which is easy to do with lutradur, just a question of ironing the colour on to where you want it. And that wasn't right, either. So, finally, I cut it up; I now have a diptych. And I'm happy. Or I will be, when it is mounted and framed. The photograph shows it lying on the tiled floor in my conservatory.

Reading this over, I realise that, despite my intention to talk about something other than dyeing, given that I seem to have been obsessed with it over the last couple of days (and more images to come...), dyeing does seem to have sneaked in. Ah well, I suppose it is a reflection of the way I work. Dye first, dye last, it doesn't matter to me. I don't have a specific order in which I apply the processes I use. I just make it up as I go along, and do what seems to need to be done at the time. Like I keep saying, it's a question of trusting the process...

printed pieces

printed pieces

printed pieces.

squiggle, squiggle...wonder how I'll eventually use this piece...

Turned Out Well

I've had squeeze bottles in my box of 'things to make marks with' for years, but somehow, never used them...I have now! They make a lovely, clear mark...must do some more writing on cloth... Must also go through the box of things, and play with the rest of them! And buy a funnel, for pouring dye into them, less messy all round, methinks.


The printing I did has turned out well, though you wouldn't know it from these pictures... But then, I think 'well' is perhaps a misnomer. Well for the purpose I have it in mind for, would be more correct, perhaps. As pieces of whole cloth, I'm not overly taken with these examples. But then, they aren't intended to stay as whole cloth. They will be cut up, used together, with other cloth, stitched into, all sorts of things. And for that, they are ideal.

We fall in love with cloth, sometimes, and talk about being unable to cut it up. For me, that's the clear sign of either a whole cloth piece, with unobtrusive stitching, or quite simply a perfect piece of cloth, that should be allowed to remain exactly as it is. It might never be used in a textile piece, but I suspect it will fuel lots of ideas, if you sit with it long enough. And that is surely a bonus!

Paint'n'Print

I've spent the last couple of days working with dyes. I had forgotten how much I enjoy that...particularly the painting and printing aspects. I used to sell my cloth, and teach dye workshops, still do, now and again, but never the painted stuff. Nobody seemed interested in it. Now, with books like 'Breakdown Printing', and doubtless the popularity of City & Guilds courses, there seems to be more of an interest in 'interesting' cloth. Or perhaps it's just that I've moved from Scotland, which is resoundingly traditional in orientation towards fabric selection. (Go on then, the Scots among us, prove me wrong...I'd love it!).

I had done some low water immersion dyeing which I wasn't particularly happy with. Scotland has wonderful soft water, and I'm finding that I don't get quite the colours I used to, here in hard water hell. Mind you, that's the only complaint I have about Norfolk, and I can deal with it via Calgon, so I have little to complain about! So, some of the cloth was reimmersed, in a magenta dyebath, and the rest of it was printed over. I also did some screenprinting on plain fabric, but that's another story for another day, I think.

The results were varied, and, I hope, interesting. Well, put it this way, I expect to use it all! See what you think. The pictures below are dye painted cloth; the one above, LWI.