OPEN DOOR – Textile Tales - Week 7

Yet another day where it’s snowing outside. I can only think of 2 sessions where there hasn’t been snow on the ground. But we have a loyal crew of women who have braced the weather to get to our session at Artlink today.

We rolled 3D balls and snakes from the wool, which prompted an amazing jaw-dropping story from Wendy. She recalled her time when she lived in central Africa as a Quaker missionary and how there were always snakes, which lived in her garden which the young children played with. One day an adder came so close to her baby daughter in her cradle it began hissing and Wendy practically frog leaped over to the cradle and rescued her daughter from the adder’s jaws.

Yvonne recounted a tale about her friend who had a pet snake and would sometimes let it sleep on the pillow next to her bed. One day she became concerned that the snake had stopped eating and it no longer would curl up in it’s usual way. So she decided to take it to the vet. Only to be told, the snake was infact ‘sizing her up’ and starving itself and making its body as big as the woman with the intention of gobbling her up! Perhaps the moral there is to never share a bed with a reptile!

There was some fantastic needlework from the group.  Dalip stitched sequins and beads into her felt balls, we think they look like exotic fruits to eat! Mrs Sharman embroidered her felt with riffraff making a wonderful rainbow piece.

Yvonne finished decorating her box with mirrors. These boxes are soon going to contain recorded stories from the participants. Musarat and I are on the hunt for the right microphones, which can fit inside.  

Happy Egg Fest everybody!
Bryony

OPEN DOOR – Textile Tales - Week 6

It was a really lively session today. We were exploring the accidental texture and surprises that occur with a different felting technique – nuno.

The word ‘nuno’ means cloth in Japanese. In this process you combine sheep wool with a natural cloth such as muslin. During felting, the wool fibers migrate through the weave of the cloth.  When the wool fibers shrink, the other fabrics shrink with them. The result is a wonderfully textured fabric that is lightweight.

In this process though – you are encouraged to throw your cloth on the table for at least 5 minutes, which help shock and shrink the fibres. This generated lots of discussion about different kinds of Indian bread, which you throw the dough during preparation. Chapati, puri, roti, paratha, naan, dosa and many more.

A couple of the ladies from Sikh Elders group filled the room with their singing for a good hour, as they embroidered into their felt. Their old Punjabi songs took us on a journey through traditional wedding songs, moral tales about annoying mother in laws, holidays without husbands and traditional female daily life – often with a deeper meaning but mostly rather comical.

There was a particular song ‘Sui ve Sui’ comparing a mother in law to a needle - if a needle pricks you, it hurts. The needle symbolises a woman’s pain because she is hurt by the way her mother in law treats her.

I really enjoyed listening to the chuckles and giggles from the women and have since listened to some of the songs online – which has been fascinating to learn more about the meaning behind the songs. Turns out there are quite a lot of Punjabi songs about mother in laws!

Bryony

Blog 2: Mobile Reflections

Studio 3, Leeds Art Gallery (Nike Savvas) & David Shearing 

This was our first session in a short series of workshops exploring colour, light and painting into space. I presented to the group some initial starting points and images from Nike Savvas’ work.  We discussed briefly ideas around movement; objects that move in the wind, spin or as the ‘viewers’ body moves through the space.

As part of the opening I showed a video by animator Esteban Diácono, set to the music of Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds. 

The video is emotionally gripping where we witness a short narrative unfold; a bird breaks free from its mobile and sweeps over the sea and through paper clouds. The group felt there was much in common with some of the animation pieces they had been working on and it helped set an imaginative tone for their own explorations. The video highlighted how simple moving objectives can create emotive stories.

We returned to Nike Savvas to get us started and begun by creating our own mobiles. Savvas often uses very simple materials, plastics, yarns, light, and Savvas has said of herself, that she can often be found rummaging through cheap pound shops for bright coloured materials!  We started simple, using cutters to create circles, stars and stripes; our aim was to see how the colours and shapes operated when we hung them up.  

Some of the group had already begun to imagine their own ideas and how this particular experiment could relate some of their practice. Karen quickly begun to explore different representations of angels and other mystical imagery – on seeing Karen’s previous work I felt the work had qualities similar to the complex lyrical illustrations by William Blake. Our task now was to consider the impact of making these ideas in three dimensions, in space.

Some of the group managed to hang a number of strings onto the frames before the end of the session to create some rather striking forms.  Philip’s colour choice was rather delicate; the green, blue and gold bounced the light around creating hazy turquois impressions as they moved.

 

Similarly, Elaine chose to keep it simple with two key colours, this time red and silver.

Inserting a smaller disc inside offered a subtle dynamic by creating a clear contrast - the silver disc seemed to take on the colours of the room.

Ian chose to explore a range of different styles and techniques in one mobile; this will provide some interesting material for when we explore the mobiles with light.

In our next session we hope to experiment with hanging these in a space and make the experience more ‘immersive’. We will also add an additional element of paper to offer us richer material for our lighting workshop in two weeks time.  

OPEN DOOR with SHANTONA

Session 1

And so we begin. Musarat and I (Rozi) are working with a group of girls aged 13-19.

Musarat introduced the project. This will be a combined textile and animation project contributing work to a final exhibition. We are taking the work of Michael Brennand Wood as a starting point. You can see examples of his work here http://brennand-wood.com.

I added that I can see a lot of beautiful and careful detail in this work, and it also has a strong sense of pattern. I can see how these patterns can animate, moving, almost dancing in intricate and intriguing sequences.

I described to the group how animation is the ‘illusion’ of movement, caused by the way your brain receives the information through your eyes.

Using the zoetrope optical toy, we looked at some zoetrope strips that have been created using abstract patterns, and everyone had a go at creating some of their own. 

There is no story, or theme attached to the work at this stage of the project, which allows everyone a freedom to experiment, with shape and colour and pattern.

There were two further activities to explore. The group divided into two and Musarat and I led an activity each. Musarat worked with the participants to create patterns by arranging gems, butterfly-shaped buttons and bottle tops.

The other group used the iPad and stylus, and a painting app to create painted patterns. Each participant took a turn at adding to the pattern and saved the image at the new stage. This sequence should also playback as a movie clip, and animate.

We also used the photo booth app to capture a sequence of photos of the zoetrope strips, using the kaleidoscope effect. This creates amazing abstracted patterns, especially of hennered hands, and blue nailpolish! These photos were uploaded into iStopMotion on the MacBook. The participants only needed showing once, and were uploading more photos to create movie clips without need for guidance.

The groups swapped over so everyone had a chance to try each activity.

Experimenting was rife especially with the various effects on the iPad!

We have yet to decide on a title for the project.

Some suggestions are, Moving Crafts, Crafty Moves, Fabricamation???

We shall see!

 

Rozi & Musarat

A THOUSAND PAPER CRANES

Session 8

It is amazing how small you can fold a silk scarf!  I have brought 20 of them and they all fit in an A4 envelope. They are nearly one and a half metres long each and we’ve decided to paint them in 3 sessions, so that the gutta can dry thoroughly before we paint them and we haven’t got any smudges.

After applying the gutta we dried it with a hairdryer.

One of the scarves has a musical score on it. I wish I could read music, but even as a pattern it looks fab.

Another participant has decided not to use gutta and let the paint spread freely on the surface. “I’m going free form!” The effect is like painting on wet paper, rather beautiful, and blue and green look so well together.

Bernadette missed the last session so shes decided to have a go with a sampler. The result below looks like folk art from Croatia. I must show her some illustrations next time.

We are all admiring steady hands that can produce such wonderful pieces.

And the time just flies away.



OPEN DOOR - Textile Tales – Session 5

There was a real buzz in the air at todays’ session - lots of energy for feltmaking. For most of the group, this was their first time in turning sheep’s fleece tops into gorgeous felt pieces. Step by step we learnt about the history of felt and how it was discovered, how to prepare the wool, layering the fleece in warp and weft directions, pulling the fibres together and then getting very soapy when rolling our wool inside our bamboo mats. Dalip chuckles “This is like rolling pastry!”

There was lots of chatter and laughter between Touchstone and Sikh Elders participants this week, as we get to know each other a little better. Between us we took pleasure in sharing stories from our cultures – especially stories we were told as children. Such as Sumerian legends of warriors, tales of Anansi the spider – a character from West African folklore, as well as dark cautionary European tales from the Grimm Brothers.

As we got more confident with felt making, we introduced other materials – pre-felt. This acts as a blank canvas, which you can work directly onto. A collection of beautifully illustrated storybooks were offered to inspire design ideas for felt. The group were very artistic and found ways to express their ideas creatively. We created forested landscapes, characters such as air goddesses and children. There were many ideas for future felt making.

All the time our stories were shared, wool was turning into felt beneath our fingers. There’s always that fantastic ‘reveal moment’ when we unroll the wool and see our felted pieces for the first time. Here are some lovely quotes from the day:

“Thank you for giving me something to occupy my mind and fingers!”

“It’s great to learn so many new skills at my age.”

“This is so relaxing. Wish I could do this all day.”

“This keeps me out of mischief.”

“This is good for my arthritis.”

Bryony and Musarat