On the wall

March 30, 2016

Studio work has seemed very stop-start recently. I’m finding it difficult to settle down to work consistently. When I am working I seem to jump from one activity to another and keep thinking of other things I need to do. It’s making me feel restless and a little dissatisfied.

However … I am fairly happy with the results of my latest round of dyeing. I pinned everything up to have a good look. Lots of small scraps because I don’t like to waste offcuts of antique linen. I over dyed some rejected screen prints too.

Technically, all shades of brown. But one of the browns had quite a strong green tone and there was blue and black dye on some of the offcuts. As I pinned things up I enjoyed playing with some of the colour and texture combinations. I particularly like some of the pales ... though they are tough to photograph.

Then I added some scraps from a different dye session - shades of dark blue. By now it was getting harder to find space to pin anything new, but the blues combine well with the browns and creams.

I’m leaving everything up for a while so that I can keep looking and consider the possibilities.

Six islands

February 29, 2016

Wallasea Island, Foulness Island, Potton Island, Havengore Island, Rushley Island, New England Island - six islands. Clustered between the River Crouch, the River Roach and the North Sea - or rather Maplin Sands. Separated from each other by creeks. Restricted access over land. Only fully navigable at high tide.

A boat trip. The wind was in the east and it was bleak and cold. Even colder once we were out on the water. An icy, biting wind and no shelter. Poor light. All the colours greyed out. I've walked along the banks of the Crouch on a brilliantly sunny winter day and the colours were so rich - russets, golds, deep blues and greens. But this time everything was silver, grey, brown and black.

I like the marshes best when the tide is out. The exposed mud and the way it reflects the light is far more attractive to me than when the channels are full of water. But I was interested to see the shore from a different perspective - from the water rather than the land. And in this bleak, cold light the edge of the marsh was reduced to dark lines dividing water from sky. Horizontals. Only the occasional vertical line - channel markers, breakwaters, fence posts.

The islands have always been remote. Isolated farms. Nature reserves. MOD ranges. Smugglers ... Places for people who people who choose to be at the edge of things.

Between the lines, Transience and Blackthorn

February 10, 2016

That period immediately after finishing a group of work is tricky. Having worked so hard, I knew that I would need a break. So I haven’t worried too much about what I’ve been doing in the past couple of weeks. Which is not very much! But I’m starting to prepare to get back to work.

Part of that is reviewing what I have just done. Looking at the group as a whole, I’m noticing different aspects that I want to develop – composition, marks, layering. And within the group, the work falls into one of three variations. I decided not to give pieces individual titles this time so they are named for each of these sub groups.

The main group, Between the Lines, was the most “planned”. This includes the larger pieces, including two of the largest pieces I have yet made. These use some of the ideas I explored in my drawings and are inspired by horizons and places where water meets land. A second group, Transience, is closely related but evolved more freely once I started working with the actual marks on the cloth I had made. To me these are more specifically about things that are in the process of moving, flowing and changing.

Both are about liminal, ambiguous places – tidelines, creeks, estuaries – where things are in constant flux and neither completely solid nor completely liquid. But they are also reflections on another sense of “liminality” – the psychological space between not knowing and knowing. Such as when someone is in the midst of learning something but has not yet properly understood it. It’s the parallels between the two that fascinate me and I shall continue to reflect upon and explore this.

One of the things I enjoyed about this series was the way that the monoprinting process resembled these processes. Each print was the same but some details were lost and new ones emerged from one to the next. Between the Lines 2 in particular exploits this transition, being built around three consecutive prints. You can look at it as a continuous “horizon” or as three separate snapshots of the same space.

The third group, Blackthorn, is more distinct and grew out of my print experiments last summer. It uses completely different imagery developed from photographs I took on an icy, foggy February morning several winters ago. At first I felt these were unrelated, but when I consider them, their attraction to me is also related to their diffuse edges – neither solid nor empty space.

The process of photographing all these, particularly the close-ups, also helped me to see them differently and suggested new ideas. I particularly liked the more extreme abstraction of some of the cropped images. I’m starting to make plans for the next phase of this series. … which means it’s time to get back into the studio.

In the meantime though I have a short break in Norfolk to look forward to. A large proportion of this work will be in the exhibition at Bircham Gallery which opens this Saturday and runs until 6 March. All the work can be viewed on their web site.

Working

January 17, 2016

In early December I planned out all the work I needed to do. An exhibition in February means work has to be ready for framing … around now actually. It was all perfectly possible on paper. But it’s one thing to block out time on a plan and write “stitch work”, for example, and quite another to actually do it. In the studio I surveyed the pile of work I needed to finish and felt slightly terrified.

A deadline is a wonderful thing for getting focused. I dropped or deferred everything that did not contribute to getting the work done (including this blog) and settled down to work. Apart from a couple of days with my family, I stitched all the way through Christmas.

It goes something like this. I pull out each piece of work and lay it on my studio table. In this case I had already stitched them all to a backing fabric. Canvas this time (I had my reasons but never again – my poor fingers). I lay out different threads on top of the work until I have a palette I want to work with. Silk, rayon, cotton – some matte, some shiny. Mostly very fine in weight. I look at the piece of work for a clue as to what to do and where to start.

Mostly I work with the marks on the cloth, sometimes I work against them or look to add marks where there are none. I will have an idea what I want but not usually a plan for the whole piece when I start. I will know where I want the emphasis to be but otherwise I will ask myself as I am working what the piece needs.

Occasionally there is a piece where I don’t know what to do. When there is a type of mark I haven’t worked with before. Or the marks in the cloth are so subtle that I am really not sure what to add – or whether to add anything at all. In this case I just try something. If it doesn’t work, I pull out the stitches and try something else. Change thread. Larger stitches. Smaller ones. A different kind of mark. Dense layers of marks – or sparse and widely spaced. I take photographs – sometimes it’s clearer what you need to do when you look at an image of it.

For two weeks I worked like this for six to ten hours a day. I listened to music or radio documentaries. Sometimes I worked in silence. If this sounds relaxing, I can’t say that it was. There was a tension between the slow, patient hand work and the underlying sense of pressure to get everything done. This was a consequence of working to a tight schedule, not the experience of slow stitch. And there wasn’t time to play around or experiment too much.

As I worked, ideas came to me – things I want to try. Not just stitch ideas. I jotted them down in my sketchbook so as not to lose them and kept working. I was mildly frustrated that I couldn’t afford the time to stop and do other things. Which made me ponder the value of both work and play. I remembered how earlier in the year I was frustrated that I didn't know what to do and was not “working” and used play and experimentation to keep myself going. The work I am doing now derived from that period.

Anyway I am now preparing a pile of finished work for the framer. I have some admin things to do but otherwise I will soon be through this phase of work. Then I am going to do something else for a while.

Exhibition details:

I will be showing some of this new work in an exhibition alongside paintings by Stephanie Stow and Elaine Cox at Bircham Gallery in Holt, Norfolk from Saturday 13 February until 9 March.

I also currently have some work in a mixed show at The Bank in Eye, Suffolk. The exhibition, Abstraction of Form, runs from Tuesday 19 January until 28 February.

Winter lines

December 13, 2015

New inspirations and ideas brewing.

I've said before that I like winter. The linear quality of bare branches. The subtle range of winter greys. The way everything is exposed and reduced to essentials.

One walk this weekend was initially really unpromising. Poor light, a cold wind and rain showers made photography difficult. But then I started focusing on the graphic qualities of the bare trees against the flat grey sky and I was away. I became interested in the different branch patterns, the edge of the tree line and the negative spaces.

On a different walk (with slightly better weather) the best part came towards dusk when we passed a lake. I loved the way the tree reflections were exaggerated and broken by the water.

Even as I was taking all these photographs, I was thinking about drawings - abstract, monochrome ones. I said this was prompting new ideas but in practice I was making connections to some old ones too. But then isn't that always how it is?

I shall be spending most of Christmas stitching new work. But I think some drawing might provide a useful contrast to this.

Exhibition and a marsh walk

November 29, 2015

A day off from studio work yesterday to deliver work to Bircham Gallery for their Christmas Exhibition. If you are in Norfolk, the exhibition runs from 5 December until 13 January and you can see my work alongside that of several other gallery artists. The above image is of a piece called Transient, which is a favourite of mine.

Of course we could not go all that way without heading out for a walk across the marshes. After some brief sunshine first thing in the morning it was grey and cold with a wind from the north-west, that grew stronger and wetter as the afternoon wore on. We started from Morston and headed west across the marsh along the southern edge of the Blakeney Channel. It was low tide and I love seeing the channel exposed with most of the water drained out of it. There was fresh seaweed and other debris strewn along the edge to remind us that the ground we walked on could be underwater again in a few hours.

But in the meantime there is this bleakly beautiful landscape spread out between the edge of the marsh and Blakeney Point in the distance. Brent geese, curlews, redshanks, gulls pick their way over the surface looking for food. The surface changes between mud, shingle, sand creating changes in colour and texture across the surface. And the creeks reflect the light, silver grey, twisting their way towards the channel.

Morston Blakeney Channel 02 2015 Helen Terry.jpg

Morston Blakeney Channel 03 2015 Helen Terry.jpg

Morston Blakeney Channel 04 2015 Helen Terry.jpg

Morston Blakeney Channel 2015 Helen Terry.jpg

Setback

November 8, 2015

Setback. Noun. A reversal or check in progress, relapse, placing (of project) farther back in space or time than it might have been. Synonyms: problem, difficulty, hitch, issue, disappointment, complication ...

I had 15 silk screens prepared and have been printing and processing them a few at a time. I processed the first set and the results were ... disappointing, lacklustre, uninspiring. The colours were boring and the print quality was poor.

In retrospect I had taken rather a lot of chances with these prints, without testing things out first. Since I was repeating techniques I had tried earlier this year I thought I knew what would happen. Never think you already know what will happen with dye if you change the cloth, colour, value, and especially all three at once!

Frustrated. Cross. And interesting how it brought out all my self doubt too. None of which is terribly helpful of course. So I walked away and did something else for a while. Then armed myself with a cup of tea, pinned everything up and had a closer look. I wrote a little rant in my sketchbook about everything I did not like ... but then started to work out what had actually gone wrong and what I could do about it. My main concern was the screens I still had left to print rather than salvaging these prints (I can always over-print or over-dye those).

There were some things I couldn't change, at least not without totally undoing hours of preparation. But there were a couple of things I could do something about that might be enough to improve the next set of screen prints. Fingers crossed, so far these look much more promising.

Ambiguous edges

October 25, 2015

I had spent ages mixing a palette of dye colours only to feel that the results were not what I wanted. I seriously considered discarding them and starting again. Fortunately I couldn't bring myself to throw away all that work - or waste the dye. So, I spent another couple of hours painting the dyes onto cloth. In an "I don't really care what happens here" frame of mind. Then leaving the dyed cloth to cure overnight. And finally several more hours of rinsing out and processing. All with fairly modest expectations of what I might get ... although increasingly more encouraged. Then I laid out the results on my studio table.

A dance-around-the-studio moment.

The photos could be sharper and the colours are not quite accurate (the camera struggled with these colours under artificial light), but never mind. It's the edges I am most pleased about. Looking at the photographs, I particularly like the way you can't readily distinguish the real edges of the cloth from the painted ones. I spent some time, moving pieces around, overlapping them in different ways, considering the possibilities.

Found marks and ambiguity

October 12, 2015

A visit to the RHS garden at Hyde Hall this weekend. While everyone else was admiring views through the gardens, autumn flowers or leaves, I was peering at tree trunks. I was drawn to the variety of marks and patterns on the bark of the birches in particular. The lines suggest stitches. Or signal traces - morse code, electronic pulses. There's just enough suggestion of some kind of order without repetition. The way the lines were interrupted or changed by other marks - lichen, cracks or scars - also interested me.

Something I have been reading:

“There is a human need to make sense from the random confusion of the world, to process our perceptions as we experience them, and to structure them as best we can. ... vision is an active process in which the brain attempts to make sense of the information it receives from the eyes. ”

— Derek Horton, Introduction "Drawing Ambiguity" (2015)

Exploring this process of perception and interpretation is at the heart of what I like to do. But at the same time I think marks and imagery are more interesting if they never quite resolve themselves but remain somewhat unexplained. Ambiguity leaves room for a wider range of interpretation. As soon as they resolve themselves into something definite it closes off some of the possible layers of meaning - which is far less engaging in my view.

“Ambiguity is a property of the interpretative relationship between people and things or ideas (or representations of them). ... In other words, things and ideas are not inherently ambiguous; rather, ambiguity arises in their interpretation.”

— Derek Horton, as before

The interpretation placed upon marks or images relates as much to the observer's own experience and concerns as anything in the imagery itself. I may have certain intentions for my work but am sometimes surprised by the things other people see. This is both rewarding and challenging. In some ways it is more challenging when I am working with marks that are less abstract. I like to retain that tension where the observer is not quite certain how to interpret the imagery. But the opposite problem is avoiding the kind of wilful obscurity or mystification that is merely annoying:

“... ambiguity’s value is determined by the quality of interpretation and the meaning that is derived from it. Ambiguity is not a virtue in itself and it can end up being merely confusing, frustrating or meaningless”

— Derek Horton, as before

Plenty to think about while I develop and refine the pieces I'm working on in the studio.

Two Tree Island 25 September Helen Terry

Watching the tide turn

September 25, 2015

My previous visit to Two Tree Island a few weeks ago was at low tide, when all the mud was exposed. It was a damp, cool day and everything was grey and green. Revisiting the island today just after high tide, in glorious sunshine, it was all pale blue, grey and silver.

When I arrived the channel was full of water and I walked down the slipway to the water's edge and spent some time looking up and down the river. It is a long slipway and standing at the end, with the water lapping my boots, I could almost trick myself into a sense that I was standing in - or even on - the middle of the river. The water was mirroring the sky but was clear enough that at the same time I could see the bottom and the fish moving within it.

After a few minutes I turned around and was amazed at how much had changed behind me while my back was turned to the island. The edge of the island was emerging from the water, but not all at once. The mud is shaped by the waves into ripples, a simulacrum of the surface of the water itself. What I could see were the crests of these mud-waves which, as they emerged (to my eye), took the form of sinuous hieroglyphs while the water twisted and snaked between them.

As I watched, the relationship between solid and fluid was changing so fast that I almost couldn't see it happening. Positive and negative shapes enlarging and shrinking and shifting before my eyes. I mean, if I focused on a particular point of course I could see the mud emerge as the water receded. But everything was so mobile, the water, the reflections, the light; and as I gazed at the surface, there was simply a general impression of everything changing and moving moment by moment.

I like these ambiguities.

On the wall

September 20, 2015

Having spent weeks finishing pieces for the exhibition in Knebworth, it has been quite difficult to get back to developing new work. I moved furniture around; made cushions (at least that involved cloth); hung pictures; rearranged books ... productive, but displacement activity nonetheless.

At the end of last week, I took advantage of a day at the Committed to Cloth studio to spread things out. Sometimes it is really helpful to just pin everything on the wall, step back and look at what I have. The bigger the wall, and the further back I can get, the better.

I pinned up drawings, photographs and samples, some of which I hadn't looked at for weeks. Then I started to pull out pieces of dyed and painted cloth, looking for echoes - colours and marks that seemed to relate to what I wanted. Trying things out. Eliminating some options - developing others. Some of the accidental combinations that occur as I spread things out on the table generate ideas in themselves.

What works in my head doesn't always look so good in reality. Some of my initial ideas collapsed all too swiftly when put to the test. Frustrating ... but that's the value of doing this. After a few hours of moving things around, I had a stronger sense of what would work. And a list of things to do next.

Green and Grey

September 6, 2015

I have been doing lots of walking. In North Norfolk and closer to home in Essex. August was unusually dull and wet but there were still a few bright sunny days. But now, as summer shifts into autumn, the first mists have appeared ... and lots of rain.

Wet weather strengthens the greens in the landscape. Brilliant greens against all shades of grey. Walking through the pine woods at Holkham, the pouring rain turned the moss an almost lurid emerald. On another day at Cley, mists veiled the ridge behind the marsh, muting all the colours in the background - blue-greys, green-greys.

Back at home, two days ago, we went for a walk around Two Tree Island. A nature reserve, the island is tiny and sits in the Thames Estuary between Leigh on Sea and Canvey Island. Saltmarsh and mud flats edge its northern shore where it runs into the estuary. The skies were pale, animated by banks of heavy cloud - greys tinged with blue and even violet.

Observing the transition between silver water, grey shining mud and the grey-greens of the salt marsh. All kinds of edges.

Exhibition and other news

September 2, 2015

I raced back from North Norfolk yesterday to set up the exhibition with Clive Barnett at Art Van Go in Knebworth, Hertfordshire. I am delighted to be showing some new work alongside Clive, who shares my interest in mark-making.

Lines and Edges Clive Barnett Helen Terry

The exhibition runs from 2 to 19 September.

Secondly, I was honoured when Maggie Grey asked me to write an article for Workshop on the Web about my daily mark-making practice. This has now been published in September's edition (subscription needed).

A daily practice - part four

August 14, 2015

In the studio, I am still stitching. I took some finished pieces to the framers this morning and am now finishing off some smaller ones that I think I will show unframed. This is all for the exhibition with Clive Barnett at Art Van Go that starts 2 September. I've pinned everything up on the studio wall to decide what goes in ... and what doesn't - and to choose titles for the ones still unnamed. It is all hard work - and there's lots of associated admin, none of which makes for a particularly interesting blog post.

However, I have not shared the details of the last round of mark-making / drawing, so ...

This was the fourth round of forty days of daily mark-making. In fact it was forty-two days and finished at the end of July. I've only just got round to sorting through the photos. This time I had decided it would be interesting to work on loose sheets of paper, which is what I would normally prefer to do anyway. But, having worked in a sketchbook for the previous 120 days plus, I found it surprisingly difficult to get going. Despite the increased freedom, for the first week or so I could only manage my minimum one page a day.

There's something about working in these blocs of forty days - each develops its own rhythm or character. And each time, there's been a period of adjustment at the beginning - uncertainty about what to do, having to find new strategies for working. And at the end, I have sometimes felt that it was becoming predictable, routine, that I was just repeating myself. It's curious and I wonder whether it would be the same if I had committed to a continuous practice rather than a time-limited one.

I value activities that put me in a position where I don't quite know what I'm doing. So this period of adjustment each time is not a bad thing in my view. The difficulty is a sign that I'm having to find my way and learn something afresh. I actually prefer this to feeling that it is too easy, automatic and I am not having to think.

The value of this practice (for me, I don't know about others) is the engagement with the process and the materials. This is more important than the quality of whatever results. I think what I'm looking for is the development: changes in the kind of marks, the ways of organising them, finding different methods for making them, effects I haven't seen before.

So, what happened in the end, once I got through this awkward adjustment phase, was that I found myself alternating between two contrasting strategies. The first was that I took full advantage of the loose sheet to manipulate the page: folding, crumpling, rubbing, scratching and piercing the surface. It was more of a collage approach - and sometimes I layered two pages together, making holes in one so you could see through to the next. It was quite intensive and I usually worked on no more than two pages at a time or even worked into a page over two days.

The second strategy was to do a series of ten (or more) pages, working quite quickly with the same media (mostly ink) and a similar theme. This led to series of very similar looking pages but I found it very informative. It was an excellent way of trying different combinations or layers of marks - variations on a theme.

Since the end of this fourth round, I have accidentally taken a break. Accidentally, because I didn't actually decide to do so in advance. The immediate cause was first, that I went away for a few days; second, that I hadn't prepared either paper or sketchbook for the next round, which just proves how important it is to do this if I want to keep going, in my case at least. The secondary cause is that I'm in two minds what to do next with this. I do feel that my mark-making is becoming a little too repetitive for my taste. I could just carry on and work with that, keep pushing things on until there's a breakthrough. But I'm also thinking it might be valuable to spend some time on more observational drawing to train myself to make new marks / combinations of marks. But then that would be a decisive shift towards drawing rather than mark-making ...

So, while I'm working on finishing the final pieces for exhibition, I'm allowing myself a break to figure out which approach would serve me best. ... And if I fail to make up my mind, I shall just start anyway and see what happens ... once this exhibition is up and running that is.

Boro: the fabric of life

August 3, 2015

I travelled to Cologne for the day on Friday to see an exhibition of Boro textiles. This was the same exhibition that was first shown at the Domaine de Boisbuchet in 2013.

First, a word about the photos. The museum allowed photographs provided I did not use flash. Since the textiles were displayed in low light this compromised quality. These images are the clearest I could manage ... with some significant editing to improve sharpness and clarity. Sometimes this is at the expense of colour accuracy.

Some things I learned:

The museum made a link to kesa, robes pieced together by Buddhist monks from cloth they received as alms, originally rags. Ironically, since rich Buddhist followers would often donate precious textiles to show their devotion, kesa were sometimes made from rather splendid, embroidered silks. The exhibition included some gorgeous examples from the museum's own collection.
Japanese peasants originally wore cloth made from local bast fibres - hemp, ramie, mulberry, wisteria, nettle. The softer and warmer cotton became popular in the eighteenth century ... but was only available to the rich. Rural people bought used, damaged cotton clothing from itinerant rag merchants or traders and mended or re-used the cloth.
Sashiko is the term for the running stitch used either to mend cloth or to piece small pieces together into a larger cloth. Originally bast fibre was used. It was only once people gained access to softer, more pliable cotton threads (from the mid 19th century), that the decorative designs and patterns developed that we associate with the term sashiko.

Since I knew I was not going to get good photographs, I made lots of notes and rough drawings of the aspects that interested me. I was particularly interested in the variety of approaches to the stitching. There was no single approach, different examples showing the individual style and skill of the maker(s). Some pieces were so densely stitched that they looked woven, especially where the stitching was close and even. But then later repairs disrupted the original stitch pattern, creating interesting discrepancies. Another example was the complete opposite: the stitching was sparse - tiny stitches, widely spaced, creating a totally different rhythm.

The stitch lines commonly followed the outside edge of the patch and then traced a "square spiral" path into the middle. The most natural way to secure a square patch to a backing using a continuous thread with no stopping or backtracking. Some pieces were stitched with regular, closely spaced lines, others with more irregular, widely spaced lines. Idiosyncratic changes in direction as the stitcher had chosen their route around the cloth made interesting rhythmic patterns. I was struck by one piece where long, loose stitches followed convoluted paths across the patches for which there was no observable logic. Some looked like strange drawings ...

In many places stitches had worn away, leaving gaps in the stitch line or loose threads. Heavily patched areas created overlapping stitch lines that didn't always relate to the visible patch, revealing something about what was happening in the layers beneath it instead. This aspect really appeals to me.

More information:

My previous blog post about the Somerset House exhibition in 2014
Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Cologne
Domaine de Boisbuchet
Sri Threads - examples, with information, of boro textiles. Stephen Szczepanek co-curated this exhibition and provided many of the textiles from his private collection.

Close focus

July 19, 2015

Limited space and limited time mean I tend to focus on either one thing or another in my studio. It's hard to switch back and forth too quickly between screen-printing, dyeing or stitching. So although I have developed more monoprints since my last post, I was conscious how much I still needed to do to get work ready for exhibition in September. So I am back in stitch mode.

I joked to friends that I am "panic stitching"! An exaggeration, because in practice I have plenty of time, but there is that (rather helpful) sense of a looming deadline that is driving me to get the work done. I know I won't feel completely settled again until it is.

The stitching phase is so different from any other part of the process. It means spending hours at a time with a single piece of work, studying minute marks on the cloth and deciding stitch by stitch how to respond to those. I can be quite fidgety and so it can be hard to settle down at first. Listening to good music helps. Another tactic I've found is to set a timer for one hour and work until it goes off. All the usual distractions have to wait until then, by which time it's reasonable to have a short break anyway. In practice I've usually settled by then and am happy to keep going.

I'm stitching the largest pieces first so the task will get easier and progress faster as I go on. The first two are always the hardest as I work out my approach. False starts, trying things out, changing my mind, starting again until I'm happy it works.

In the meantime the experimentation hasn't completely stopped. I've reviewed and organised all my samples, pinned everything up on a wall to have a look and done some drawing. Plenty of time to think about all this while I stitch.

Resistance

June 21, 2015

Quite a lot of "resistance" - in Steven Pressfield terms - this past week. I have struggled to get into the studio and get going ... even though I had eleven screens ready to print. And then when I did start, I managed to make preparing cloth and mixing dye last a whole day!

I think in part this is a perverse response to the fact that things have been going well. I like the samples I've already printed so much as they are ... and yet I know they need something more. So there's been a subconscious reluctance to "meddle" with the process and just keep doing more of the same - play "safe" ... maybe just change scale.

The other factor I think is that this is quite a change in my process. Preparing and printing the screens involves making different kinds of decisions. And at an earlier stage in the process of producing cloth. I'm having to adjust to this.

And yet another factor is that I am unsure how I am going to work with these pieces. I love what's happening and know that this is a direction I want to pursue ... but I have no idea at this point how I will turn these into finished work. (And, yes, I do know I don't need to have the answers to that yet!)

I always draw comfort from Pressfield's assertion that if you're feeling resistance to doing something, you're getting somewhere. And the only useful response is to get back to work. I got my act together and printed over half the screens. I experimented with different kinds of cloth and started to bring in more colour and layer marks. The one above was printed on muslin with a plain cotton underneath. Well, it had to be tried but this was not one of the more successful, or most interesting, trials. I want to evaluate the results before I print the remaining screens, but it's looking promising. One thing that has helped has been to bring in elements from previous work. It's helping me to find my way in.

Not many images with this post. I'm wary of sharing too much when my ideas are at such a fragile stage. This is actually a good sign - it means I think I'm making progress.

Experimentation

June 6, 2015

Over the past few months I've been experimenting with different ways of making marks on cloth. While I love the linear marks I have been producing with shibori and other techniques, I don't want to just keep repeating myself. So I've been shaking things up.

I started by looking through my library of photographs and identifying certain qualities that interested me. I also collected images with similar qualities from the internet and elsewhere to expand my ideas about what I might do. Then I thought about ways I might achieve similar effects on cloth.

Since February, I've been engaged in an extended, on and off, process of experimenting - in between making new work for exhibition. There have been some outright failures. Dip-dye techniques are now crossed firmly off my list of possibilities. But there have also been some interesting beginnings.

I've deliberately investigated methods I tend not to use much. I generally avoid screen-printing because I'm not interested in repeating designs. But mixing screen-printing with drawing and mono-print techniques has led to some exciting results.

I also don't normally use screen inks. But I wondered what would happen if I used them to resist the dye ... and there were some surprises with interesting texture effects.

There is still loads to do. I need to solve some technical issues; refine techniques; think about colour; develop the marks and imagery ... and all just to develop an initial collection of different fabrics. Only then can I start to play around with ideas for new work.

In the meantime I carry on making work with my existing fabrics. Although In practice, some of my new ideas are starting to creep in anyway ...

Exhibitions and other news

May 21, 2015

I am delighted to be showing some new work in Bircham Gallery's Early Summer Exhibition. This is a mixed show which also features paintings by Anne Davies, Keith Roper, Tony Foster, Mhairi McGregor, Martin Laurance, Stephanie Stow and Sally Tyrie; and ceramics by Virginia Graham and Lowri Davies.

The exhibition runs from 23 May to 17 June. There is an online catalogue with details of all the artists and their work. You can see my page here.

I am also preparing for an exhibition from 2-19 September at Art Van Go in Knebworth, Hertfordshire. This will be a joint exhibition with Clive Barnett. Further details to follow.

Finally, I am very honoured that John Hopper of The Textile Blog chose to write about my work in Issue 4 of Inspirational magazine.

A daily practice - part three

May 10, 2015

Forty days of mark-making, round three. Although in fact I am on day 43, because I have several pages left in the sketchbook and want to fill it. This time I have focused on ways of changing the surface. Rounds one and two were dominated by drawn marks - additive marks. I wanted to make myself think about the surface itself more and experiment with subtractive marks and texture. Scratching, creasing, rubbing, crumpling, piercing, sanding, combinations of different media ... any way of creating visual or actual texture.

There have been some really bad pages - experiments that didn't work ... and couldn't be rescued. When I was tired sometimes all I could manage was a wash of ink over some wax crayon. But there have also been plenty of good or interesting pages. Some are impossible to photograph - all the camera can see is a plain, dark page, not the subtle texture or fragile marks. So the pages pictured here are just the ones that do photograph well.

I got excited about the possibilities of gluing different kinds of paper to the surface and painting over it. Different papers take the ink in different ways, just as different fibres react differently to dye. There were lots of ways to make interesting edges. I gathered up tissue papers, rice paper, pattern paper, packing paper, tracing paper, handmade papers, book pages and played around. I also played with masking tape and double-sided tape, applying tissue paper or rubbing graphite or crayon over the top.

The sketchbook is another handmade one with different kinds of paper in it. So every now and then I would turn the page to be faced with something challenging. Tracing paper. Or thin photocopy paper. I eventually learned to exploit their tendency to cockle and shrink when wet rather than fight it. But there were other types of paper I started to look forward to, such as a fine lokta paper that could be rubbed into holes when it was wet.

Dealing with the restrictions of working in a book has been part of the practice. Although I think it will be interesting to repeat this with loose sheets of paper. That would increase the range of things I could try too. I also still like the restriction of forty days. It is useful to have a focus. Whenever I find myself reverting to my default marks, I bring myself back to the idea of changing the surface in some way.

Although I consider this a mark-making practice, many pages are effectively drawings. I've wondered whether I should stop myself, concentrate more upon just making the marks. It is plain, looking back, that I have little interest in pattern making or repeating marks. In fact I am more often looking for ways to disrupt patterns or create interesting negative space. I also notice that I'm as interested in the surface and the impact this has on the look and feel of the marks. I think the important thing is to keep this exercise open and exploratory. Which means allowing myself to experiment with other design elements, if that is what draws my attention.