Explorations

August 14, 2016

I seem to be both revisiting ideas from earlier this year and investigating new ones.

I’m working on two separate strands at the moment and they each present a different challenge. In the first, I’ve gone back to the themes and techniques I worked on for my exhibition in February. There were lots of loose ends – things I wanted to take further – so I’m starting to develop a new series of prints in the Between the Lines and Transience series.

I had to overcome a surprising reluctance to this. Having done so much work before I think there was a sense of going back over the same ground. I didn’t want to repeat myself. But of course it doesn’t work that way and as soon as I actually started working on this again, new things emerged. New marks, new thoughts. It’s like my daily walk – when everything is so familiar I can take it for granted. But when I pay attention, there is often something I hadn’t noticed before or something I hadn’t expected to see.

The other strand is the work I’m doing on the Wicken Fen project. This is very different. At the moment everything is exploratory. Sally and I have now made two visits to the Fen and I am playing with my photographs, drawings and making collages. I have no idea where I’m going yet. Well, perhaps I do, but it’s too soon to tell whether it will lead somewhere.

I'm reluctant to share too much yet. These images give a flavour of how I'm working but none of them represent a fixed idea at this point. I think what I'm really trying to do is generate lots of interesting beginnings.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sketchbook

April 28, 2015

I still have work to finish but in between I've been working in this sketchbook. I normally prefer to work on loose sheets of paper but I thought it would be interesting to work into a book for a change. So far I am finding it more restrictive but on the other hand I like seeing the lines of thought emerging.

The pages below are from last week. I'm just trying things out. Testing ideas, ways of looking at things. I've been working from photographs of estuaries and marshes, making quick drawings and collages. Then cropping some of these, or turning them round, to look at them in different ways.

I've also been playing with words. This helps me to find connections and associations that I don't necessarily get from the drawings.

I always have several sketchbooks or notebooks on the go. The two main ones are my journal, in which I reflect on things I've done, seen, read, heard. The other is my studio sketchbook, which contains technical notes, sketches and photos of work in progress, random ideas to try, dye calculations, lists and plans. These two are my working books. They are not pretty but they're the most important to me. Then there is my dye book, which contains swatches and records of all my colour experiments, and there is a shibori book, which records outcomes of various physical resist techniques. At the moment there is also my daily mark-making book - I'm now on the third of these.

Sometimes all these things can seem disconnected from each other but it's all research.

Helen Terry

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