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Helen Terry

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A daily practice - part four

August 14, 2015

In the studio, I am still stitching.  I took some finished pieces to the framers this morning and am now finishing off some smaller ones that I think I will show unframed.  This is all for the exhibition with Clive Barnett at Art Van Go that starts 2 September.  I've pinned everything up on the studio wall to decide what goes in ... and what doesn't - and to choose titles for the ones still unnamed.  It is all hard work - and there's lots of associated admin, none of which makes for a particularly interesting blog post.

However, I have not shared the details of the last round of mark-making / drawing, so ... 

This was the fourth round of forty days of daily mark-making.  In fact it was forty-two days and finished at the end of July.  I've only just got round to sorting through the photos.  This time I had decided it would be interesting to work on loose sheets of paper, which is what I would normally prefer to do anyway.  But, having worked in a sketchbook for the previous 120 days plus, I found it surprisingly difficult to get going.  Despite the increased freedom, for the first week or so I could only manage my minimum one page a day.  

View fullsize Daily practice IV 10 Helen Terry.jpg
View fullsize Daily practice IV 11 Helen Terry.jpg

There's something about working in these blocs of forty days - each develops its own rhythm or character.  And each time, there's been a period of adjustment at the beginning - uncertainty about what to do, having to find new strategies for working.  And at the end, I have sometimes felt that it was becoming predictable, routine, that I was just repeating myself.  It's curious and I wonder whether it would be the same if I had committed to a continuous practice rather than a time-limited one.   

I value activities that put me in a position where I don't quite know what I'm doing.  So this period of adjustment each time is not a bad thing in my view.  The difficulty is a sign that I'm having to find my way and learn something afresh.  I actually prefer this to feeling that it is too easy, automatic and I am not having to think.  

The value of this practice (for me, I don't know about others) is the engagement with the process and the materials.  This is more important than the quality of whatever results.  I think what I'm looking for is the development: changes in the kind of marks, the ways of organising them, finding different methods for making them, effects I haven't seen before.  

So, what happened in the end, once I got through this awkward adjustment phase, was that I found myself alternating between two contrasting strategies.  The first was that I took full advantage of the loose sheet to manipulate the page: folding, crumpling, rubbing, scratching and piercing the surface.  It was more of a collage approach - and sometimes I layered two pages together, making holes in one so you could see through to the next.  It was quite intensive and I usually worked on no more than two pages at a time or even worked into a page over two days.  

View fullsize Daily practice IV 02 Helen Terry.jpg
View fullsize Daily practice IV 03 Helen Terry.jpg
View fullsize Daily practice IV 04 Helen Terry.jpg
View fullsize Daily practice IV 05 Helen Terry.jpg

The second strategy was to do a series of ten (or more) pages, working quite quickly with the same media (mostly ink) and a similar theme.  This led to series of very similar looking pages but I found it very informative.  It was an excellent way of trying different combinations or layers of marks - variations on a theme.  

View fullsize Daily practice IV 06 Helen Terry.jpg
View fullsize Daily practice IV 07 Helen Terry.jpg
View fullsize Daily practice IV 08 Helen Terry.jpg
View fullsize Daily practice IV 09 Helen Terry.jpg

Since the end of this fourth round, I have accidentally taken a break.  Accidentally, because I didn't actually decide to do so in advance.  The immediate cause was first, that I went away for a few days; second, that I hadn't prepared either paper or sketchbook for the next round, which just proves how important it is to do this if I want to keep going, in my case at least.  The secondary cause is that I'm in two minds what to do next with this.  I do feel that my mark-making is becoming a little too repetitive for my taste.  I could just carry on and work with that, keep pushing things on until there's a breakthrough.  But I'm also thinking it might be valuable to spend some time on more observational drawing to train myself to make new marks / combinations of marks.  But then that would be a decisive shift towards drawing rather than mark-making ... 

So, while I'm working on finishing the final pieces for exhibition, I'm allowing myself a break to figure out which approach would serve me best.  ... And if I fail to make up my mind, I shall just start anyway and see what happens ... once this exhibition is up and running that is.  

 

In Creativity, Mark making, Process Tags daily practice, drawing

Boro: the fabric of life

August 3, 2015

I travelled to Cologne for the day on Friday to see an exhibition of Boro textiles.  This was the same exhibition that was first shown at the Domaine de Boisbuchet in 2013.  

First, a word about the photos.  The museum allowed photographs provided I did not use flash.  Since the textiles were displayed in low light this compromised quality.  These images are the clearest I could manage ... with some significant editing to improve sharpness and clarity.  Sometimes this is at the expense of colour accuracy.  

View fullsize Boro 06 Cologne July 2015.jpg
View fullsize Boro 08 Cologne July 2015.jpg

Some things I learned: 

  • The museum made a link to kesa, robes pieced together by Buddhist monks from cloth they received as alms, originally rags.  Ironically, since rich Buddhist followers would often donate precious textiles to show their devotion, kesa were sometimes made from rather splendid, embroidered silks.  The exhibition included some gorgeous examples from the museum's own collection.  
  • Japanese peasants originally wore cloth made from local bast fibres - hemp, ramie, mulberry, wisteria, nettle.  The softer and warmer cotton became popular in the eighteenth century ... but was only available to the rich.  Rural people bought used, damaged cotton clothing from itinerant rag merchants or traders and mended or re-used the cloth.  
  • Sashiko is the term for the running stitch used either to mend cloth or to piece small pieces together into a larger cloth.  Originally bast fibre was used.  It was only once people gained access to softer, more pliable cotton threads (from the mid 19th century), that the decorative designs and patterns developed that we associate with the term sashiko.  
View fullsize Boro Notes 01 Cologne July 2015.jpg
View fullsize Boro Notes 02 Cologne July 2015.jpg

Since I knew I was not going to get good photographs, I made lots of notes and rough drawings of the aspects that interested me.  I was particularly interested in the variety of approaches to the stitching.  There was no single approach, different examples showing the individual style and skill of the maker(s).  Some pieces were so densely stitched that they looked woven, especially where the stitching was close and even.  But then later repairs disrupted the original stitch pattern, creating interesting discrepancies.  Another example was the complete opposite: the stitching was sparse - tiny stitches, widely spaced, creating a totally different rhythm.  

View fullsize Boro 01 Cologne July 2015.jpg
View fullsize Boro 02 Cologne July 2015.jpg
View fullsize Boro 04 Cologne July 2015.jpg
View fullsize Boro 05 Cologne July 2015.jpg

The stitch lines commonly followed the outside edge of the patch and then traced a "square spiral" path into the middle.  The most natural way to secure a square patch to a backing using a continuous thread with no stopping or backtracking.  Some pieces were stitched with regular, closely spaced lines, others with more irregular, widely spaced lines.  Idiosyncratic changes in direction as the stitcher had chosen their route around the cloth made interesting rhythmic patterns.  I was struck by one piece where long, loose stitches followed convoluted paths across the patches for which there was no observable logic.  Some looked like strange drawings ... 

In many places stitches had worn away, leaving gaps in the stitch line or loose threads.  Heavily patched areas created overlapping stitch lines that didn't always relate to the visible patch, revealing something about what was happening in the layers beneath it instead.  This aspect really appeals to me.  

More information: 

  • My previous blog post about the Somerset House exhibition in 2014
  • Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Cologne
  • Domaine de Boisbuchet
  • Sri Threads  - examples, with information, of boro textiles.  Stephen Szczepanek co-curated this exhibition and provided many of the textiles from his private collection.  
In Exhibition Tags Boro, stitch marks, Japan, sashiko

Helen Terry

fabric, colour, texture, art, craft, creativity.

 

This is a place to keep track of what's inspiring or interesting me,  and how this shapes the thinking that goes into my work.  


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