New work

Although I have not been writing about it here, between visits to Wicken Fen I have been working away on a new group of work.  It is a continuation of last year’s “Between the Lines” series in that it repeats the imagery and themes, but is sufficiently different that I have given it its own title, “A Marginal Space”. 

There were several aspects of “Between the Lines” that I wanted to develop further so, over several days in January and early February, I filled a sketchbook with collage experiments.  Working with paper and on a small scale meant that I could work fast and try out lots of different ideas without getting too precious or hung up on any one of them.  And to help me think differently, I set a series of “rules” in opposition to my previous approach.  I found it was relatively straightforward to translate what I learned from this exercise into cloth. 

View fullsize

I’ve made fourteen pieces of work in this group and spent several days recently photographing them.  I love these detail images.  They really focus attention on the marks. 

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Several pieces from this group will be exhibited at Gallery 57 in Arundel for the exhibition, Gaze, Glimpse: A look at landscape (24 June – 6 August).  This is a lovely gallery, run by Ann Symes, and I am thrilled to be exhibiting there alongside a wonderful group of other artists.  In fact you can see a preview of the new pieces here. 

In the meantime, I also have some work in Bircham Gallery’s current Early Summer Exhibition, which is on until 24 May. 

Explorations

I seem to be both revisiting ideas from earlier this year and investigating new ones.  

I’m working on two separate strands at the moment and they each present a different challenge.  In the first, I’ve gone back to the themes and techniques I worked on for my exhibition in February.  There were lots of loose ends – things I wanted to take further – so I’m starting to develop a new series of prints in the Between the Lines and Transience series. 

I had to overcome a surprising reluctance to this.  Having done so much work before I think there was a sense of going back over the same ground.  I didn’t want to repeat myself.  But of course it doesn’t work that way and as soon as I actually started working on this again, new things emerged.   New marks, new thoughts.   It’s like my daily walk – when everything is so familiar I can take it for granted.  But when I pay attention, there is often something I hadn’t noticed before or something I hadn’t expected to see. 

View fullsize

Drawing desk

The other strand is the work I’m doing on the Wicken Fen project.  This is very different.  At the moment everything is exploratory.  Sally and I have now made two visits to the Fen and I am playing with my photographs, drawings and making collages.   I have no idea where I’m going yet.  Well, perhaps I do, but it’s too soon to tell whether it will lead somewhere.

View fullsize

I'm reluctant to share too much yet.  These images give a flavour of how I'm working but none of them represent a fixed idea at this point.  I think what I'm really trying to do is generate lots of interesting beginnings.  

View fullsize

Sketchbook page

Sketchbook

I still have work to finish but in between I've been working in this sketchbook.   I normally prefer to work on loose sheets of paper but I thought it would be interesting to work into a book for a change.  So far I am finding it more restrictive but on the other hand I like seeing the lines of thought emerging.

The pages below are from last week.  I'm just trying things out.  Testing ideas, ways of looking at things.  I've been working from photographs of estuaries and marshes, making quick drawings and collages.  Then cropping some of these, or turning them round, to look at them in different ways.  

View fullsize

View fullsize

I've also been playing with words.  This helps me to find connections and associations that I don't necessarily get from the drawings.  

View fullsize

View fullsize

I always have several sketchbooks or notebooks on the go.  The two main ones are my journal, in which I reflect on things I've done, seen, read, heard.  The other is my studio sketchbook, which contains technical notes, sketches and photos of work in progress, random ideas to try, dye calculations, lists and plans.  These two are my working books.  They are not pretty but they're the most important to me.  Then there is my dye book, which contains swatches and records of all my colour experiments, and there is a shibori book, which records outcomes of various physical resist techniques.  At the moment there is also my daily mark-making book - I'm now on the third of these.  

Sometimes all these things can seem disconnected from each other but it's all research.  

Visual Thinking

Taking photographs is instinctive for me, drawing doesn't come so naturally.  But I find photographs can be too passive - it's easy to end up with masses of images and ideas about them that are too vague or simplistic.  I wanted to work with that last set of photographs and push my ideas further.  

In one of my books, the jeweller, Kayo Saito, describes her drawings as "image training".  I like that idea of drawing as a thinking process.  I'm not interested in copying my photos or producing an accurate landscape drawing.  What I want is to bring out the elements that interest me, play around with them and see what I can do with them.  

And so for the last week or so the studio has been turned over to drawing and collage.  I printed out my photos and cut them up.  Slicing them up, taking them out of context, the linear elements that had caught my eye when I took the photographs in the first place became even more shibori-like.  Arranging them into new compositions is similar to the way I would work with cloth, with lots of freedom to experiment with ways of juxtaposing the different lines and tones.  

For the drawing, I'm using mainly ink.   Ordinary fountain pen ink - although I'm using inks from Diamine who produce writing ink in 101 colours!  I love the way the ink flows and bleeds on the page in unpredictable ways.  Plus I can dilute it to make the palest washes or bleach it.  In other words it behaves a lot like dye.  

Hmmm.  There's something here about my taste for media that I can't fully control.  I think I rather like how they undermine my inner control freak and force me to let go of the outcome.  And I love the random, organic effects that ink or dye can produce.  

I'm not worrying about where all this is leading at the moment.  There's no plan.  But I'm enjoying this kind of thinking.  It's generating ideas about composition, marks, colour that are moving me beyond my initial response to the photographs - which is exactly what I want.  

clicking on the thumbnails will bring up a larger image