Off the Shelf Textile Exhibition

This week, I enjoyed a visit to the WAC Gallery to see the exhibition staged by City Lit students on the Textile 2 course. Although, I took some photographs you can see much better ones on their Facebook page here. It's only on until 30th November so you will have to be quick to see it. It was nice to see so many red dots too. Well done!

Pencil illusions

A friend of mine recently showed me the Pencil Illusions App on her phone and I couldn't wait to get my hands on it to have a play. Besides being fun, I thought that it might help me simplify some of my landscape images.  It's really easy to use and works like the camera except that you can't zoom in or out. Here is a picture of my friend Andrea, which I think turned out well but I did take photos of other people which were less than flattering to them!

 

I couldn't wait to try it out on a landscape and without much thought to composition took this photo of a local field.

 

And here is the equivalent image using the Pencil Illusion app. I quite like it and could definitely inspire a piece of textile art.

I took this photograph in the other direction across one of the fields, firstly with the camera on my phone and then....

 

 

 

....the similar picture using the Pencil Illusion app. I don't think this worked quite as well as the first landscape but it has possibilities.

 

 

I think my new toy offers potential and as it was free, I don't think I'm in a good position to moan about the lack of zoom! Have you used anything else like this? 

Taking Textiles Further Exhibition Photographs

Since losing my Dad I have been very busy helping with arrangements and doing all the things that need doing at these times and so I've not been able to post photographs from our exhibition....not until now that is. 

 

I have shown the progression of my pieces in previous posts here, here and here so I thought that in this post I'd concentrate on the work of other artists in the group. As ever, (my) photographs of textile art don't do justice to the work, so do visit the exhibition if you can.  

 

Buffy Fieldhouse

June Withers

Marjorie Haylock

Buffy Fieldhouse

Marian Hall (me!)- Gridlock I

Sharon Lidbury

Mary Gamester



Valerie Knowles



June Withers

 

Judith McBride

Top: Jeanette Guppy
Bottom 2 rows: Melanie Forrester

 

There are 48 pieces in the exhibition and so this is just a selection of the work and unfortunately doesn't include anything that was framed behind glass because the reflections from the studio lights made photography difficult. 

I had 4 business cards made for the exhibition, with each card representing a different piece of my work. Last week when I went to the exhibition there were none left, either there has been a lot of interest in my work (well I can dream!) or maybe people like to have the set rather than just one?

 

I would encourage anyone who has the opportunity to exhibit to do so. It certainly makes you get work finished and there's more to staging an exhibition than meets the eye. It was good to work together as a group towards a common goal.  

 

Gorgeous Grey

A couple of weeks ago I attended the 'Gorgeous Grey' course run by Claire Benn at Committed to Cloth. A couple of foggy mornings on my recent cruise down the Rhine provided inspiration for the course and my favourite 'grey' photo was taken when a passing barge became visible through the fog. I wasn't happy with my representations of the barge, and so I decided to concentrate on printing simple shapes but then they started to look like buildings.....

 



So more experimenting with barges is required and when I (hopefully) achieve the look I am seeking, I may even cut off the right hand side of this piece and print my barge on the left hand side. 

But before any printing started we experimented with making different shades of grey (and before you say it, it was more than 50!). I experimented by adding small amounts of colours to black and then reducing the value to see the different greys that could be created. 

And I had some happy accidents. An over generous addition of scarlet, created just the dusky pink I was looking for in another piece, which you can see on the right hand side of the cloth below.

And I was rather pleased with the beigey colours I created  here. Could be very useful in landscapes.

 

Another trial looked at what would happen when different values of rust orange were overlaid on different values of grey. I know all of these are going to provide useful references for future work.

Here's an 'action shot' of me printing and my grey trial pieces at hand for easy reference. 

I printed quite a lot of fabric during the course and although I didn't print anything that I absolutely loved, I learnt a lot and came away with loads of ideas to follow-up on and I'm sure you'll see more of these in time but here's one other experiment. After I created the fabric background I wet the cloth, added liquid orange dye and tilted the fabric so it ran.  

This reminded me of the reflections on the Rhine. The orange on the horizon line needs beefing up to give the colour some more depth or maybe I could enhance it with stitch? Whatever I do to it, I doubt that I am ever going to really love it. But I do want to experiment with creating pieces where I embellish just the horizon line.  How would this impact the feeling of distance? This could be the piece to experiment on.

Me & my Dad

On Thursday, my Dad passed away. He had bravely fought illness without complaint and was cheerful until the end. He always encouraged me to be creative and if ever I had any tools, equipment or materials on my Christmas/birthday list you could bet he would buy it for me. I am very proud of him and will miss him very much.


Me & Dad on Father's Day earlier this year 

I know he would have enjoyed being at the opening of our TTF exhibition today and had seen all bar one of my pieces in the exhibition.

The exhibition runs until the end of November at Art Van Go and includes around 50 pieces of textile art. Why not visit if you are in the area?