New Highland Contemporaries 2

My loom and film installation is on view in the New Highland Contemporaries 2 exhibition in Nairn this week!

 For details of times and dates please see here

Good bye third year

Time to pack up and go home

I took down, packed up and emptied out everything from my college studio today and took it all home into my wee house. I will miss the lovely space I've had this year.

A Red Thread of Words

 Here's a wee glimpse of how my studio looked all set up for marking. Sadly I haven't got a picture with the projector on the go as I was sharing it with another student. It should be standing on the white platform hanging from red cords and projecting film onto the white silk warp.

Installation view

The marks of wear

Just noticed these tender tracings left behind; darker blue lines left behind where the sheltering red thread has worn out.

One Week Left

Just one week left before all my work has to be spick and span ready for marking for the end of year three. I've spent most of this week sorting out and tidying up, cleaning the space and making final decisions about positions of everything in relation to everything else and sorting out technical problems with light and projector and film sound.

My studio is looking a bit empty in these photos. I've got so used to all the clutter of excess branches, baskets of wool, work table, wood shavings and scraps of fleece. Today I had to get everything possible off the floor so it could be washed. I want my white silk warp to drape and drizzle on the floor and I want it to STAY white!

I still have to get something up to block the sunlight out so that my film projection is visible.... Just as well there's still one week before hand in.

Spun Silk Warp

Stitching the silk warp

Silk warp waterfall

Today I finished warping up my hand-spun silk projector screen and stabilising the top with a red thread stitched through.

The flow of the silk laid over the table caught my eye. It reminds me of currents in a river.

Silk flow 1

Silk flow 2

Boro Evolution

Left leg, 9th October 2013

I was looking through my photos today, and I was struck by how much my jeans have changed. In the first picture here the front of the left leg is almost intact although you can see where I have reinforced the fragile original material with the first layers of patch and boro style stitching.

Left leg, 4th May 2015

The second photo is of the same section of the jeans, but it's almost unrecognisable. Most of the fabric of the original jeans has eroded away and the patch that was hidden in all but the tiny cross-stitched area in the first photo has come to the surface. Many of the first lines of stitching have also got somewhat eroded. I have just added a third internal layer where all the dense red stitching is and once again my cat can't stick his claws through it and into my knee!

Exploring Twist in Wild Fibre

Fine Roots

 Wandering by the Findhorn River on a rare and precious half hour off of essay writing. I can never leave my creative practice behind though. Every where I look I see things I could spin, things that will give my fibre colour, things that make links in my thoughts with my studio practice.

The driftwood piles left by winter floods are full of roots, from the finest grass roots hanging like tufts of sheep's' fleece to huge root balls of mature trees. So many different textures and forms.

This fine wisp had a red roots in it, making me think of my Red Thread/Common Thread. The red was coarser but stronger than the black, brown and sun-bleached blond roots.

Not all make me think of spinning and weaving though. Sometimes there are strange forms that call to me in other ways, like the spoon root I found today. Formed by a tree root forcing itself between two stones then being unable to force them apart in order to grow. When compressed or restricted, life-force distorts, warps and takes on unexpected forms.

A spoon root?

Some of the exposed roots suggest other uses than spinning, perhaps this one may become a dye vat stirrer...

Boro Jeans

It's just over two years since I began mending my one pair of jeans. The first two patches were over the kneecaps: on the left knee is a piece of my godson's traditional Norwegian naming day shirt and on the right a bit of tweed from his sisters' coat. I am very hard on the knees of all my clothes; I always have been as I love getting close to the tiniest details of nature and, for me, that has always meant getting down on my knees.

Third layer going in on the left knee, but the of-cut from my godson's shirt is still strong.

Inside my jeans is a crazy jigsaw of overlapping patches, made from another pair of old worn out jeans that didn't fit me any more. In a few places the old seams still show up with their yellow stitches.

 

Not much of the original fabric is visible from the inside any more.

 I love the visual texture of the boro stitching, particularly on the inside. As an experiment I decided to put one patch on the outside and do the darning from the inside so that the wonderful texture shows. Not a great choice of placement though - right in the middle of my backside!

Back pockets - nearly gone.

 I have a habit of ramming my hands into my back pockets when I'm thinking. If I want to continue having that comforting thinking aid I will need to do some creative mending here... But visually I'm enjoying the disintegration of the fabric unimpeded by mending.

Interesting contrast between new patch and disintegrating original fabric.

The rhythm of stitch blends well with the rhythm of thought: I sit in my studio and muse on next steps for the evolution of my practice and catch both thought and patch into place with neat tight stitches.

Ouch!

Just have to remember not to stitch while thinking or talking about things that make me angry: Blood is always the result! My own I hasten to add...

Studio wanderings

 Just looking at the interactions between space, shape and colour...

Fresh-cut Alder wood/Crottle dyed yarn

Big loom/tiny looms

soft lines/hard lines

Yarn stretched tight/yarn hanging soft

Red Thread

At the beginning of the school year I traced the word 'Desire' on my studio wall in red thread and pins. It felt important at the time. But now it's time to take it off.

As I pulled out the pins the thread made these wonderful crazy lines unravelling across the surface.

I couldn't resist keeping the mass of sharp angled thread, so unlike the usual soft round curves of thread off a spool. I hung it on a pin that was holding something else on the wall and later on the sun came in and showed me it anew. I like the shadows as much or even more than the thread.

Red

The red shed strand has worked wonderfully in the visual sense. The contrast between wood, wool and cotton is visually poetic and satisfying.

But - from a technical point of view it's not doing its job. The shed doesn't shift smoothly and it's not possible to operate the loom as one person alone.

Yet.

I will persevere and work out how to make it behave as I chose!

Red Thread

'All we love deeply becomes part of us.'

This is one of my Red Threads: the interlacing and entwining of the fabric of my jeans with the fabric of my self. Every stitch taken in the darning of my jeans involves the fabric more deeply and irreversibly with the beingness of my self. I am stitching myself a thick skin from the fragile and worn layers of the past darned into a strong fabric with the thread of present strength and determination.

Another of my Red Threads is gradually dancing into place on my loom. It's a painstakingly slow dance of hands, thread and warp. There is a sense of the Weaver becoming the Woven....

Weighting a Warp

For several years I have habitually chucked my coppers into an old vase as I like to be able to close my purse easily and never can be doing with footering about with coppers in a queue at a till. I remembered that if one takes coins to the bank to exchange for notes then both 1p and 2p coins go in one bag and they can tell how much money is in the bag by the weight of it. This means that 12p must weigh the same whatever the mix of 1s and 2s. How useful!

So as it turns out, that stash of coins is perfect for weighting the warp of my loom - 12p per 5 warp threads tied up in a scrap of recycled fabric.

Wonderful how the softly falling yarn becomes a taught and springy surface as the weights go on.



The next step is putting the 'shed' in to allow the weaving to progress a little faster than it might otherwise. I have chosen this red thread to weave the shed from for two reasons.

Firstly Red Thread has come to have a deep significance in my work;  it stands as a metaphor for finding one's way through the creative maze, for the concept of 'a common thread' and for all the connections of text and textile through language and myth and story. I reached for the spool of red almost instinctively. The other thread I had to hand in my studio was an indigo blue and there was just no contest.

Of secondary importance to the symbolism of the Red Thread is the aesthetics of the colours; red felt like it belonged with the white-blond wood and the dark brown yarn. Second reason, yes, but also very important to me as I am very visually sensitive.