Collections

I'm sure all creatives are secret collectors - hoarders of curios, interesting textures, found objects which inspire, ignite the imagination and ensure every drawer of the house is stuffed to its brim!  I'm no different.  It is a family joke that when we go out for a walk, Mom returns with pockets bulging full of driftwood, sea glass, rusty metal, smelly crab claws, good sticks.  My favourite place to forage at the moment is Richmond Beach .....

It's always windy here & I think this is why so many treasures wash ashore. We've found entire trees here along with  huge pieces of metal, delicate glass softened by the sea and buckets of crabs' legs, shells and glistening stones. 

It's a really inspiring place for me, I love the wildness of the sea and the randomness of its offerings - such a contrast to urban America where everything is controlled, pruned and pampered.

I always catalogue my 'finds' in a field notebook, adding sketches & photos and I now have over a year's worth of records of my walks with details of found objects.  For some time now I've held an idea in my mind about making some kind of   'foraging' or 'collecting' bags or vessels.  I've struggled to work the idea through, sometimes my skills just don't match the beauty in my head!  But I have in my imagination a whole wall filled with these small bags/vessels, a visual map of my walks, each one plotting a certain point in time, each as beautiful and unique as the objects found.

I started by doing some research into antique 'pockets' at the V&A and the Bath Costume museum where I found hundreds of ideas, these are some of my favourites...

 

I love the simplicity of the pocket design but I tried different variations of the shape, I'm influenced by this research but I don't want to just copy the bags.  My first attempts were too 'busy' so I'm trying to simplify the embellishment and make it more abstract, here's a glimpse ...

The bags are made from recycled fabrics as is all my work, hand dyed using natural materials found mostly on my walks so that's quite fitting I think.  They have actually turned out quite different to how I expected, sometimes as an artist you are just a channel for an idea and it manifests itself in its own way!  I'm making 10 to start with, for a show in March and then maybe more depending on the reaction to them!  They are not at all practical but I think they could each be framed as a work of art & I'm thinking of simplifying the idea to produce a range of functional bags.  Check in soon to see my progress!

  

Luminous

Way back when I was a student one of my lecturers told me that if I wanted to make beautiful things then I had to ensure I made the effort to go out and see beautiful things.  I thought about this piece of advice when I recently visited the Luminous exhibition at Seattle Art Museum, a beautiful show of Asian artefacts from the art collection some of which had been brought out of storage for this occasion.  It was a visual feast, I fell in love with the painted silk screens - this one below was a focal point of the exhibition ....

It looks so contemporary with the black crows flying out of the luminous gold background.  The absolute highlight however was this silk gate installation created especially for this exhibition, featuring animations of various motifs taken from some of the exhibited artefacts.

Stunning!  Of course I now want to do some film making of my own!  The exhibition sparked off so many ideas that I fully understand why it's so important as an artist to continually seek out new inspiration & to see things 'in the flesh', not just in a book or on a screen.  There's a Gauguin exhibition starting in February & I'm really looking forward to visiting and hoping I'll be inspired by his use of colour.

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.'