Stitch as Story

Forget Me Not from Mew Lab on Vimeo.

Isn't this beautiful?  Would love to try and produce some short films.

Stitches & Scars

"What wound did ever heal but by degrees?"  

William Shakespeare

Adding stitch to my dry point prints - repairing,  patching faults,noticing the scratches, scars and wounds.

Suture - a stitch or row of stitches holding together the edges of a wound

External internal landscapes - mapping emotional & physical journeys, intimate, emotive, private.

Taking my camera for a walk

Whenever I need to clear my mind I take a good walk with my camera.  Inspiration is all around us, we just need to view things with a fresh eye.  It's quite wet here now which is encouraging all kinds of moss & fungi - if I were a knitwear designer I would definitely be using these to inspire my next collection

The textures are wonderful & it's got me thinking about wrapping threads around sticks.

I found them in a secret place, a dense, damp grotto...

...which eventually led to this magical view

where dragonflies danced around lily pads

and grass snakes scurried along the path

Definitely a fairy story in there somewhere!

The unintentional mark

Creating a new shellac plate with tiny marks, rather like the traditional way of transferring an embroidery design with chalk.  It's a SLOW process but I enjoy the repetition & the rhythm of push, move a little, push, move a little....  On completion I found that I'd actually pushed a little too hard & managed to pierce the plate completely, leaving lovely unintentional marks on the paper below,

which got me thinking about accidental or unintentional marks, a theme for the future I think.

I'm not completely happy with the way the plate printed, I really need to run it through a press but I do like the way the ink has pooled in certain places & the piercings now resemble unpicked stitches which is what I'd hoped -

Giving Thanks in San Francisco

I've just been lucky enough to spend 4 days in San Francisco over the Thanksgiving holiday.  I managed to escape the madness of the city for a couple of hours & wander around MOMA which had an interesting exhibition of the drawings of sculptor Richard Serra...

There is a beauty in the simplicity of graphite on paper & strength in repetition...

The visual power of repeated forms is something I've been investigating in my own work as I struggle to create large art pieces.  I realise that often this means my work suffers in exhibitions when hung alongside larger works so I'm exploring the idea of repetition & have a few ideas I want to play with. 

I was also excited to see a piece by Agnes Martin, I've been looking at her work alot lately, seduced by the apparent simplicity of her line.  The work has wonderful texture & again the quality of mark making is beautiful.

Agnes Martin was quite a philospher too & I have this quote on my studio wall to keep me on my own path -

'Don't worry what others think, just make what you have to, what's calling to be made. You will find your voice this way.'

Little Things

Trials & tests ....


using ideas of 'reveal & conceal' with the small silk prints

From Sketch to Print

My printmaking course doesn't resume until after Christmas so I'm spending some time evaluating what I've learnt & assessing how I can use these new skills in my own practice.

I often work outdoors, I love to take my sketchbook & camera for a walk, stopping from time to time to draw, collect and simply observe.  Sometimes I leave all art materials behind and challenge myself to use only what I find around me - mud for paint, sticks & feathers for brush, discarded envelopes, plastics or even tree bark for paper.  It's one of the ways I connect with my local environment but this has been hard in America since everywhere is kept so clean, tidy & landscaped!  

This page from my sketchbook is a collection of tiny drawings made in the field with a fine liner, berry juice & mud. 

I prepared some small shellac plates, etching my usual wirey drawings onto the surface with various sharp tools ...

In the printmaking studio we use oil based inks but this doesn't sit well with my environmental concerns so I tried acrylic paint - it's all I have on hand anyway!  I tried to wipe away as much of the surface paint as possible so that the print was clean but that's much harder with acrylics, the paint dries too quickly. 

The results vary....I added a retarder to the paint which helped, water colour paper gave crisper results.  A bit of creative thinking turned my pasta maker into a make shift roller printer! 

Printing on parchment paper gives a suggestion of possible layering -

I then tried printing directly on to silk,  I like the delicacy of these...

What I really love is the used shellac plates & the way the black paint has filled the etched lines, funny how our tools become just as beautiful as the work created...

I can now see where some of my lines were not deep enough so I'll work further on these and have another print session when I've purchased some water based inks.

Not sure how I'm going to mix this work with my textiles yet but I like the quality of line that this technique provides so I shall continue with my samples & I'll probably use the best of the prints to make some cards.