Helen Terry

View Original

Ambiguous edges

I had spent ages mixing a palette of dye colours only to feel that the results were not what I wanted.  I seriously considered discarding them and starting again.  Fortunately I couldn't bring myself to throw away all that work - or waste the dye.  So, I spent another couple of hours painting the dyes onto cloth.  In an "I don't really care what happens here" frame of mind.  Then leaving the dyed cloth to cure overnight.  And finally several more hours of rinsing out and processing.  All with fairly modest expectations of what I might get ... although increasingly more encouraged.  Then I laid out the results on my studio table.  

A dance-around-the-studio moment.  

The photos could be sharper and the colours are not quite accurate (the camera struggled with these colours under artificial light), but never mind.  It's the edges I am most pleased about.  Looking at the photographs, I particularly like the way you can't readily distinguish the real edges of the cloth from the painted ones.  I spent some time, moving pieces around, overlapping them in different ways, considering the possibilities.