Birmingham: Lost in Lace

I had a day out in Birmingham to see the well-reviewed Lost in Lace exhibition at the City Museum and Art gallery, which finished this weekend. The Lost in Lace website, here, has images of all the works and information about the artists participating.  It was well worth the trip.  The exhibition is in the Gas Hall, separate from the main city museum, and although it is not huge in terms of the number of pieces, it was massive in terms of offering new thoughts about what lace is, and how the idea of lace, i.e the effect of knotting and tying threads, and creating patterns and images in the spaces between the threads,  can be translated into intriguing and beautiful objects and designs.

The first piece you see, on entering the Gas Hall, is the tremendous series of hanging panels by Naomi Kobayashi, the Cosmos series, made of paper and string, assembled and glued together to make complex shapes and shadows which are semi-trasparent.

I loved the construction, and also the huge scale - there are 8 columns, about 15 or more feet high.

I also really liked the long this piece by Diana Harrison, called simply Line, made of carefully stitched black thread on simple trips of cotton cloth and paperer which had been painted and then torn or dissolved away.  Again 6 or 8 panels, but making a very long thin line. 

 The stitching was perfectly even, not easy to do on such a scale, and the random patterns of black and white gave it a huge amount of texture and depth.

Then there was Tanabata Lace, by Suzumi Noda, made from black punch cards and black cotton thread, with complex knotting to bing them together into a huge set of panels.  

I liked too the series of hanging panels called the Latticed Eye of Memory, by Liz Nilsson, which was made of printed and stitched and laser cut panels, each about a metre square.  

I liked the overall effect, but was intrigued to see that several of the panels have been printed with script, or something like script, and this was related to my own work on 'not-writing' and the thoughts I've had so far about my final project, on deconstructing words and writing.  

Tarmar Frank's installation, A Thin Line between Space and Matter, was really lovely.  It developed form the string patterns we probably all made in maths lessons at school, but turned into a 3D version, on a grans scale, and then added intriguing lighting effects, so you saw the shapes made by the string has white lines in a totally dark room.  Very effective, and so good to take something we have all seen in a 2D way, and made it into something far more complex and interesting .

Chiaru Shiota's installation was also on a grand scale, consisting of 5 unrealistically long plain white cotton dresses, hung high in a room,  which was then almost completely filled with a caplet web of balck woollen thread, so that the dresses could hardly be seen.  I t reminded me of the Sleeping Beauty and the thick hedge protecting her from rescue.  there was a helpful film showing in time lapse photos how the piece had been made, using ladders, and scaffolding, and several people tying lots and lots of knots.

I liked, too, the simple but effective piece by Katharina Hinsberg, Perceids, which was a simple lacy pattern made by the incredibly simple method of drilling lots of holes in a piece of white-painted board.  

And Michael Brennan-Wood's Lace the Final Frontier, which was made of red-painted wood, cut into intricate patterns which at first sight looked a little like the paper snowflakes people make at Christmas, but on closer inspection you realise that the shapes in the patterns are military objects, like guns and tanks and aeroplanes and soldiers.  

Interestingly,  this was the only piece in the shoe show which was not monochrome black and white.   The red perhaps signifying the red of Mars, god of war, or the blood of the battlefield.  Whatever, it stood out among the mostly white and black of all the other pieces.  The works were all commissioned especiaially for the exhibition, so this black and white colour theme may have been one of the conditions set by the gallery.

The overall effect of the show was impressive, a fresh look at the idea of lace, of the holes and negative shapes within a space, at the scope for sculptural forms made largely of wool or cotton threads, and of the inventiveness of modern textile artists.  This was especially pertinent for me while I'm thinking about my next project and the idea of hanging or suspending or weaving together somehow my deconstructed writing.  Also, I had been looking at images of modern japanese and scandinavian textile artists last week, some of whom featured in the show.  

Pathway Project 1/1

I've started work on my first of two Pathway Projects for Foundation this week.  From the list of 8 possible topics, I've focussed on Site/Place/Map and have been doing a lot of thinking and web-based research to get my ideas loosened up.

It's been an interesting journey already.  I'm not sure I made a conscious choice about this, but I began by focussing on the word Map.  I looked at all kinds of references to maps in art - from the old world onwards.  There is just so much out there!  Here's a random selection from among the many images I've found and liked, starting with three textiles images, firstly this by Shannon Rankin

or this by textile artist karen kamenetzky

or this by New York quilt maker Ian Hundley

Printmakers have done lots with maps, such as this by Bristol printmaker Anna Warsop (website link is here)  

Among many current artists using maps, I particularly liked the work of Susan Stockwell, whose work is very varied and original, including using printed maps to make dresses and other objects, and creating maps from unusual materials such as tea bags,  dressmakers patterns, and blank tissue paper.  More of her work here and some images here...

It's been very hard to focus.  And as I've explored the idea of 'map' i've been drawn into other aspects of the theme - Site and Place - and realised that this theme could take me almost anywhere - from site-specific installations, large and small,

through to graffiti and street art,

and onwards into landscape of all kinds,

and indeed into land art.



Too many images to choose form - more on my project folder in due course.

So how to narrow this down to something I want to do, in the space of a month-long project?

I also have to keep my chosen pathway in mind too.  Of course, I'm not entirely sure what that is - so here's a bit of a ramble about how to choose.

I have, so far, done most of my creative work in textiles - and I know I can continue to do this at home and in classes - I know how and where to get inspiration and challenge.  So it makes sense to develop pathways this year which are outside my 'usual' areas, and which take maximum advantage of the college facilities and staff.

Plus,  what are the things I might be able to continue to develop, within the limitations of working at home, after Foundation finishes?  There's no point getting all excited about enamelling, for instance, if I'm never going to have access to a kiln later on.

Adding these things together, I am drawn most to Printmaking, and  - oddly and surprisingly - to Painting.  And of course I can add stitch and textiles and ceramics and digital and photography and sculpture into this mix as the mood takes me.  But a focus on printmaking will be the starting point, and aiming to move towards printmaking in the confirmatory stage.

College week 3/2 Screen-printing 2

Second session on screen printing today.  A couple of people were absent which meant there was a little bit more room for us to work.  I had done a little bit of thinking about my image since last week, and had drawn something based on negative spaces around a group of trees, firstly drawn, and second done was matisse- style cutouts.  This morning, with Janie's help, I printed these out onto acetates and put all three images onto a photo screen for printing.  I printed up several prints from the drawn image from last week,  using the paper backgrounds I'd prepared then.  But the more interesting work was to print the new images onto some of my hand-dyed fabrics, and also some loose-weave calico and some transparent viscose which I brought from home.  The acrylic paint needed to be thinned with a medium to slow down the drying time so the paint doesn't harden onto the screens.  For working on fabric you use a special textile medium, which helps the paint to absorb into the fabric without leaving a slightly sticky and hardened 'hand' to the feel of the cloth.

The screens we used were mounted on simple but effective printing boards, allowing the screen to be held steady but 'flipped' up to allow for positioning the paper and replacing it for overprinting.  I will try to make a smaller similar gismo to use with my A4 screens at home.

I had just about enough time to over-print some of the fabric samples in a second colour, and this worked well with the negative/positive screens I had made up.  I felt that the work today was more promising, and that I had got the feel of how to assemble and use a screen, how to mix the paint and medium appropriately, and how to register prints and overprints, also how to clean up afterwards.

I don't think my images were particularly good, nor that they were very well suited to the photo-screen method - I could have worked just as well with cut-out stencils today.  But it was helpful to work with a simple design as practice, and I would feel confident to plan a more complex and subtle set of prints using a photo screen at a later date.  I enjoyed using the screens and I might well return to screen-prinitng in my personal project work later in the year.

I can add some images of my print work here later on.....