Holiday stitching

We went to Brittany at the end of August  -  self with husband, Arthur, daughter Juliette (Juls) and son Edward (Ed)  -  and had a wonderful time. My health was, I am so glad say, decent for most of the time and we actually experienced summer, seeing the light and feeling the warmth of a benevolent September sun.

I always take needle and thread wherever I go, sometimes working on images inspired by wherever I am but this time I was so concerned at just how long my major piece is taking  -  still am!!  -  that I stitched mostly on this large piece. However, stitching outdoors in M and Mme Le Moelle's beautiful garden was such a change on my usual work zones!

In the studio

I was in my studio at the university just recently and pinned my major piece on the wall to see how it was coming on. This is so useful, partly because it helps me decide where I want to go next. I also find it so helpful to look at a piece in a mirror. If there are times when I'm not sure whether I need a dark or light thread for the next section, seeing the image in a mirror somehow tells me just what I should do.

It was a lovely sunny afternoon!

Another little piece made within the current project.

From the work

Just a couple of images from the latest work on my pieces. As well as the main piece, I have now started another smaller piece based on a particular survivor's story.

This is a detail from the main piece which I feel is beginning to say what I want it to say.

A survivor's story of one of the bombings, children trapped in a burning building who managed to escape and live.

 For some years after my time in Belfast, I would sometimes wake at night and have to go through my experiences, one after the other, until I could find rest to sleep again. Now, to do the work I am producing, I listen to others' stories again and again while I work on the sound track and do my stitch, words that make up a litany of survival and pain.

Explosion

This post concerns my process of preparing silk fabric for stitching, colouring it with silk paints and  the words, in the form of a poem, that came to me as a direct result of this working process.

To explain, I paint my fabrics with silk paints in my studio at home using a wet-on-wet technique and I almost always start off the drying process with a bit of blow drying. This method gives a little boost to the drying and it also affects how the colours and marks come out on the fabric. Marks occur differently according to how the fabric is handled, whether it is transferred without prior drying to the drying table (set on fine plastic sheeting, sometimes raised on sheets of crumpled kitchen roll) and whether it has been pinned and stretched before painting or simply laid down on the glass surface of my work table. Different marks also occur if salt has been scattered over the fabric while the paint is wet. If I want the particular marks salt gives, I use my own mix of fine and coarse grained salts but sometimes I feel these results give a more design-like surface rather than a painterly one, so I use this technique sparingly. I work quickly, setting out my colours for the session before I begin and changing rapidly throughout so that I get a lovely fusion of shades over the fabric, at the moment usually organza, chiffon or fine silk.

One of my recent painting sessions had as its purpose to create burnt or smouldering colours on the fabric and I was delighted to find a beautiful effect using a couple of colours I had used before along with a few new ones selected online. The following image shows me in my studio at home at my table on the day I discovered the lovely colours.

I have painted the ponge silk and am blow-drying it. The fabric had been laid directly onto the glass surface of my work table, rather than being stretched, and I do not wet the fabric before painting but it becomes wet during the painting process.

(A little note of interest  -  I am wearing my favourite art-shirt, one that Arthur wore when he was on VSO in the Solomon Islands in 1970/71  -  some things have a great longevity as well as sentimental attachment!)

It was during this drying process that I felt very excited by how the silk, in these burnt colours, looked as I passed the dryer across it  -  it seemed to have the effect of smouldering flame and, partly through the colour and material and partly because of the sound made by the flapping, shimmering fabric, I also thought of prayer flags blowing in the wind.

Below is a short video of blow-drying the rippling silk.

Another material that I frequently paint is mulberry bark. This can be bought in stretched fragments when it has the appearance of fine lace or in bundles that need to be soaked before being gently pulled to tease out the fibres. I find it very difficult to achieve the really fine lacy effect by pulling the fibres myself but both kinds of bark have their uses. The fibres also take up the silk paint very well.

The bark painted in a wash of colours.

The bark as it comes in its raw state.

The above two images show just how fine the fibres can be.

The bark fibres teased out to varying degrees and painted.

Now follows a poem I wrote inspired by this process.

Explosion

Can words flow like smoke? Brown

to red to orange, hues in differing

shades glow, smouldering, on the

rip  -pl-  ing silk, speak aftermath of

fire, flame and explosion’s staining,

sharp shards of mangled metal wrought

in taut black threads. Stitch connects

colour to colour and form to

form but joined only by the new

chaos     of     bro  -    ken    constructs.

Explosions crackle in my brain,  

acrid, choking invasion of 

gelignite into lungs,

nausea and exhaustion,

rising smoke,

    birds 

     fa – 

                  ll – 

        ing,

 smashed bricks and glass,

torn   branches of trees, people

bleeding,   crying    out,

    sta -  gg -  er -  ing,

          wan -  der  - 

                                         ing  

con -  fu - sion   of rescue   -

scenes  seared   forever

into the DNA of memory.  

Haunting sounds

I have been working for some time now on sounds of the Troubles in Belfast and it seems almost eerie to hear how someone else's description of the aftermath of an explosion echoes with my own.  In one instance, a recording features the noise of a bomb with the blast and the breaking glass and a man who had witnessed the blast, which happened at a bus station, describes the moments after the explosion, 'It was so quiet, not a sound of a bird or anything'  -  my poem After starts with the line 'and no birds sing'  -  my own experience echoed in another's.

Another person who experienced the same bombing goes on to say how there was 'lots of smoke and fire from the building  . . .  people seemed to be going in and out, as if they were going in and out of clouds'. Again, I experienced several times over how people would disappear into the smoke of a blast and you didn't know until afterwards if they were alive or dead.

A woman describes an explosion that she experienced when she was only a child, going to the sweet shop to buy sweeties. Of the moments after the blast, she says, 'I just remember this deadly silence, you know, like deafened, I felt really deafened and I couldn't hear, I really couldn't hear but I know that we were screaming and panicking . . . and I think we held onto each other, we just screamed at each other  . . .  as nine year olds, we thought we were going to die in the shop'.

I felt this sense of silence, especially after one explosion when I fully believed myself to be dead, when I didn't hear the blast, just felt the push before I blacked out. When I finally came round and did hear again, which didn't happen for a while, it was like bursting into a world of sound and technicolour all at once.

Now I have been working for some time on my large piece which is as yet untitled.

This is a detail from the piece which will take some time to finish, so this is just the beginning. Images from a black and white photograph have been blown up in size and inkjet printed onto A3 sheets of cotton fabric prepared for printing. All these cotton sheets have then been stitched onto a calico background and stitching has begun, as with my recent work, all by hand. With a colour scheme of burnt browns to indicate the area singed by the fire of an explosion, some silk-painted organza fabrics have been laid down. 

This image is not of a particular car explosion that I had experienced but I am stitching my memories onto a detail which I extracted from a photograph of an incident of the time, in this case, what became known as the Miami Showband Massacre. A land rover which was involved in an incident which I was very close to, had held four occupants, police officers, two men and two women and it was reduced to a heap of mangled metal; they were taken to hospital and I do not know if they lived or died.

Prism at the RBSA Gallery, Birmingham

Just recently, I have been privileged to exhibit my work on Conflict in Mid Wales Arts Centre, Caersws, Powys but last spring, two of the pieces from Conflict were shown with exhibiting group Prism in the exhibition Another View in the RBSA Gallery, Birmingham. This exhibition with Prism was also shown in Hoxton Arches Gallery, London, this autumn.

Prism hadn't shown in the RBSA Gallery before and it's a really lovely space in which to show artwork.

I'm pictured here by one of my pieces, A Belfast Peace: In the Name of Peace.

The companion work to this is A Belfast Peace: Beneath the Surface and they were hung beside one another along with a sound track that I included with the wall pieces.

Image from A Belfast Peace: Beneath the Surface

Full picture of myself with the pieces and headphones for listening to the sound track in the RBSA Gallery, May 2017

Juliette and Arthur by my work at the Preview, May 2017

The three of us by the work

Wider view of the gallery

Two visitors having a closer look

The sound track is made up of what resulted when I pulled a strand of linen thread slowly through calico stretched through an embroidery hoop, then worked on this sound on the Audition programme on the computer. The unaltered sound of the thread passing through the fabric had a depth and power to it that I found quite surprising but when I then stretched and deepened this sound on the computer, I was startled to discover that what I was listening to sounded just like the aftermath of one of the many explosions I had experienced in Belfast. This then became one of the factors that led me to concentrate on the theme of the Troubles interpreted through stitch and sound for my part-time PhD in Fine Art.

It seems so apt to be approaching the subject of social violence through fabric and stitch, as the social history of Northern Ireland is closely bound up with the linen industry in so many ways, growing the crop, processing the flax into linen and the making of linen goods to sell. My own family has been and still is, involved in the linen industry. My paternal grandfather was a designer for Belfast Linens, producing delicate designs for handkerchiefs among other goods, and my grandmother worked in the stitching room when they met. She worked as a dressmaker during their marriage and, at one time, they had a shop selling linen goods on Queen's Parade, Bangor. My uncle, the eldest of their five sons, inherited a linen factory in Dublin when the previous owner died. Uncle Ernie and two of his brothers, one of them my father, worked together in the linen factory for a time. My father and his brother, Gilmore, left for other things but Uncle Ernie stayed on and now that he, too, has died, the factory is now owned and run by his two sons, my cousins Kenneth and Melvin.

Linen, then, holds a special place in my affections and not only that, but Granda was an artist and designer, as was my Uncle Gilmore, so to work now with stitch in Fine Art on the theme of the Troubles draws together several strands of family history for me. Besides my own family, we all have a close connection to cloth and this gives textile artwork connotations with domesticity and familial associations not present with other media such as oil painting.

For some, the social connotations of cloth are problematic when it comes to viewing art and they find it difficult to accept textile as a valid medium in which to produce Fine Art despite the wide variety of media which come under this title. A negative attitude towards textile as art form prevailed during the 1970s when it tended to be classed as 'craft'  or was deprecatingly termed 'women's stuff'! I was doing my undergraduate studies in Fine Art at the time and, faced with this negative view of stitch within Fine Art, I did not turn to stitch for my creative expression until, in 1993, ill health forced me to reconsider what my body was and was not capable of doing. Now I continue to stitch not just because the medium suits the state of my muscles but because I love the rhythms of hand stitch. To stitch by hand, allied to paint and word, continually gives me a rich seam of creativity to explore.

A Belfast Peace: In the Name of Peace

In this image, you can see how the stitched etching and aquatint not only has words stitched within it but is also surrounded by words. The image is produced on Somerset paper which is ideal for the words in the margins which I wrote in black ink. All these words are taken from my own poetry.

It is more usual for me to stitch into cloth, most often linen, cotton and organza, so these pieces on etching paper are unusual within my work. A little sadly, they will remain so, as the physical effort to produce etchings, including inking the plates which I did enjoy, has proved too much for my muscles to cope with. This is despite the help which printer Andrew Baldwin so kindly gave to me. This included dampening and preparing the paper for printing and taking the work through the press to produce the print. I have enjoyed working in etching again very much and appreciate this opportunity afforded me by the university but I need to be realistic about what I can physically achieve.

This still leaves me with silk-painting my materials on the days when my muscles can do this and also painting grounds in oils or acrylics. I will continue to produce digital prints for my stitching and of the works afterwards, so I still have a wealth of creative possibilities to dip into and there is so much still to be done with word and sound.

In the RBSA, the sound track consisted just of the sound of altered thread through fabric but in London, I added myself narrating one of the incidents that I experienced while working in Belfast during the Troubles. This narration was recorded as I stitched another of my wall pieces, Litany and I will consider this sound work in my next blog.

Ireland again!

I now have another piece in Ireland, the time in the Linen Hall Library, Belfast. I've not visited the library before, so I'll look forward to seeing the exhibition when I go over in April. The exhibition is entitled War-Torn Children and my piece is Her Pillow, the Earth. 

Her Pillow, the Earth         (full image)

This is the work, inspired by a tragic story of a family in Aleppo that I read about in the Independent newspaper online. The whole exhibition is under the aegis of Conflict Textiles and the full details of the article that moved me to make this piece can be found at:-

http://cain.ulster.ac.uk/conflicttextiles/search-quilts/fulltextiles/?id=390

Detail with the child.

The figure of the little child is actually from a drawing I had made of Juliette years ago, altered to stand for a Syrian child, or indeed for a child anywhere. The ruined buildings are an interpretation of all those seen in Aleppo on the news night after night. As I stitched, I felt as if the buildings were falling over onto the child and I couldn't stop it happening  -  the powerlessness of watching the terrible violence that the people, including even the youngest children, are having to live through in Syria and elsewhere day after day. 

The fabric sweeping over and round seemed to me like a shroud, the little square pieces, the small desk-tops the children would have sat at in their school classroom.

and then the blood flowed . . .

I have given a paper about my work at the TFTV Conference in Aberystwyth University last week and have been invited to speak at a Symposium on Absence, Presence and Embodiment in the Old College, Aberystwyth. This is in connection with a touring exhibition on the Missing in Mexico and elsewhere  -  very moving and so tragic what some people go through in our world.