sketchbook — Helen Terry

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.

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.