Monday 13 November 2017

Interview.
This is where I am in stitch terms at the present. The historical costume side has been absorbed more or less in to the landscape work!  I tried to explain this in a podcast interview published this week-

I have grabbed some text from the textile art blog I write, so apologies if you read both!

England is a very lived in landscape. It wears the past up front, it has been altered, adapted,  scarred, as needs and fashion dictated.  This isn’t the romantic wilderness but a  work place.WHERN K WELL

I have spoken before of  tenuous thoughts of how to combine the different strands of my work, the flat work and the historical costume, of how they should entwine,  and this may be the most successful  attempt so far.
I want this to be made of parts, remnants and fragments of things,  a landscape of layers and ghosts, of things half seen, half understood.
P1170577
It is worked over a found piece of crewel work, a chair back. The style has roots in the Jacobean designs, even the idea of a chair back or antimacassar is an old one ( They were to protect the furniture from the late Georgian’s hair oil!) Some will be unpicked leaving  holes to mark the pattern. Some will be exposed, some painted into the background.
On top of this are the usual lines and divisions of a landscape, but these are muted in colour and are worked across with text from an 1840 publication. And in this piece a dismembered garment is going to be embedded into the background and then the fabric plucked away in places to reveal the crewel work and the base fabric beneath.  Over the surface will be a landscape from Givendale in the Yorkshire Wolds.  My main job is going to be balancing these elements, not letting one dominate and trying to end up with a coherent whole...  I can try!  At present the work is about half way, garment is attached, most of the text done, plucking and fraying partly completed and a start made on the landscape. Does look most unpromising, but then a frockcoat half way through is like wrestling with a fabric octopus.

 

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