Last year I created a series of woven pieces worked in raffia and paper weft on a paper warp.  I loved the texture of these pieces and now framed (and two sold) they still delight me. The little essay that follows extends my response to the recent work of artist Alice Fox whose graduating collection at Bradford College and New Designers I wrote about last month. Alice has subsequently been selected to exhibit in the graduate showcase at next month’s Festival of Quilts 2011 at the NEC, Birmingham between 11-14 August.

Untitled piece from Impressions of Stitch: paper and stitch 25 cm by 25 cm from a series of 9 by Alice Fox

For the artist the medium of paper remains the most immediate of surfaces. It is usually a ready-made in a range of standard dimensions, textural qualities and weights, though can be ‘made’ from vegetable sources and customized in size. As a surface upon which to construct an image flowing from the hand, its possibilities are bewilderingly various. Paper always responds; it meets the artist’s gesture, touch, pressure, imprint; it is not inert but active; it has a living quality about it.

Impressions of Stitch: paper and stitch 25 cm by 25 cm from a series of 9 by Alice Fox

Beyond its function as a surface for receiving made marks, paper can be a sculptural material. It can be folded, bent, pierced, embossed, interlaced – for an idea of what a specialist paper artist can do with paper alone look no further than Richard Sweeney  or Andy Singleton. In the miraculous engineering of origami, paper becomes the medium for visual representations of advanced spatial mathematics. There are powerful associations with marriage and funeral traditions in Oriental cultures. In Europe from Renaissance times folded paper forms have been associated with the presentation of gifts and personal tokens of affection.

 Viewing two of nine pieces, grouped together as Impressions of Stitch, constructed with paper and the action of stitch, these considerations described above play in the imagination. A 25cm square custom-cut surface of thick watercolour paper provides the responsive tactile area for a fashioning of forms.

 These paper-constructed images gather to themselves interventions of stitch. Thick paper yarn has been threaded to produce lines of hooped forms standing at their highest point about a centimetre away from the paper surface, as though reinforcing or emphasizing the embossed pattern they follow. In one, embossed marks possibly made from stitched patterns pressed into the paper provide a play of frond-like forms on the paper surface. Two of these fronds are raised with applied stitch to make, seemingly, a pair of snakes whose shadows provide a play of additional marks that shift and reform as the viewer moves and passes the eye across the stitched area. In the other, the same hooped stitch is contained in straight horizontal lines like a hieroglyphic text from an unknown culture. Hole marks complete the form where stitched characters might have been or may yet be sewn – a template or guide for the writing of stitch.

These pieces are quiet forms: to use Barbara Hepworth’s designation of a series of her stone shapes in white marble. Framed and hung (and from a distance), the viewer barely perceives these images beyond an empty creamy white square. One has to move close enough to enable a condition of reading: lines on a page; a message, perhaps, a declaration to be read. The eyes move left to right, following the lines as in a text. It is difficult to consider either images as complete forms. In such an aspect their qualities are sublimated into a general whiteness and shadowing. Very close, at a distance at which one might read a book-size text in 14 point, the texture of the paper medium and its stitched intervention are revealed. In some respects, as images framed and beyond the intimacy of a domestic setting, close-up photography may be the best medium to reveal this artist’s message – as interpretative images on her website suggest.

Close up of Untitled piece in paper and stitch from a series of 9 by Alice Fox

Stitch is so often infused culturally with the intimacy of the female hand, the quiet and reflective space in the bedroom, the chair beside the fire, the cleared corner of a cluttered table in the kitchen. These quiet forms in paper are redolent with such intimacy. They sing gently the music of silent reflection on the tenderness of loving, holding, being held, the press and mark of fingers on the body, paper so like skin, strokable, responsive, a living surface to fashion abstractions of memories and dreams.

]]> http://nigelweaving.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/paper-and-stitch/feed/ 0 nigelweaving paper & stitch 1 Paper & Stitch 2 IMG_3646 IMG_3644 IMG_3647 paper5 http://nigelweaving.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/fabric-of-the-building-the-material-led-art-of-alice-fox/ http://nigelweaving.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/fabric-of-the-building-the-material-led-art-of-alice-fox/#comments Thu, 23 Jun 2011 15:10:02 +0000 nigelweaving http://nigelweaving.wordpress.com/?p=2539 ]]> The composer Morton Feldman is supposed to have said to his students ‘If you haven’t got an artist for a friend you’re in trouble’. Feldman could call on a number of the great names of American abstract expressionist art as his friends, and it’s possible he was counted too as a friend by some of these illustrious painters. Friendship between creative people can be supportive and enriching, not least as a mutual sounding board, a way of obtaining critical reaction with the safety net of trust and respect usually founded upon shared knowledge of context and method.

Hands, calico and stitch in linen thread - photo by Caroline Evens

Once physical communities of artists came together informally on a day-to-day basis; in the studio, in the street, in the café, in the home. This still happens of course, but we now have an additional and potentially valuable meeting place: the virtual community of the Internet and the artist’s blog. Artists are becoming practiced in sharing the detail of their creative journeys, the nitty-gritty of discovery, experience, failure, influence. We know what books lie beside their beds, where they travelled last weekend, even what they cooked for tea. With the aid of a digital camera and the application of an hour or so at the computer an artist can use the blogging medium as a way of posting a regular report on artistic progress and process. This is often undertaken as a means of making a self-explanation of where work is going to; it can be a valuable form of both self-criticism and self-knowledge. The premise of such revelation, judiciously managed by making reference to techniques or the work of other colleagues, can quickly build an international community of interest. For some artists their blog is solely focused at their work, even to the extent of safeguarding their anonymity, though this is increasingly rare. Others, and these seem to be in the ascendant, demonstrate how their practice (what a loaded word that is) integrates with the minutiae of their daily life. There’s also lot of showing off; who we met, where we’ve been, when the next significant exposure of work will be. That said, there are out there in the bloggesphere occasional examples of sustained engagement with the medium that have the potential of adding a layer of informal interpretation that can enhance and enrich a viewer’s experience of an artist’s work.

In the past artists wrote letters to each other – constantly. These letters, like most blogs, reveal the commonplace that surrounds an artist’s daily life, but also contain flashes of profundity and revelation; they engage the imagination in a way few blogs will ever do. What an artist says to a single reader is unlikely to be thought appropriate to anonymous blog readers. Here is Cézanne writing to a young artist:

. . . I have perhaps come too early. I was the painter of your generation more than of my own . . . You are young, you have vitality; and you will impart to your art a vitality which only those who have emotion can give. I. I feel I am getting old. I shall not have the time to express myself . . . Let’s work! . . .

            Perception of the model and its realization are sometimes very long in the coming . . .

Paris 13 January, 1897

————————–

 This piece, written here for the bloggesphere, attempts a critique. It looks at a body of work devised for public exhibition within the constraints of an academic course of study. It is a final show of work, the result of some five years of mostly part-time study. It is a mark in the sand, a point of temporary arrival in the journey of artistic making and creating. It embodies taught and guided practice embracing the many, many aspects considered by the UK’s lively and imaginative academic community necessary for a newly emerging artist to sustain a presence in the prevailing culture of the visual arts.

Fabric of the Building by Alice Fox is a collection of work devised under the quite strict conditions of academic study. It doesn’t pay lip service to such conditions, rather the contrary: it embraces them in the spirit of professional constraint that a working artist often finds themselves placed under. As a result it has purpose, strength and the promise of a continuum of practice that engages the viewer to ask both why? and how? Its very presentation and intrinsic nature places the viewer in a questioning frame of mind. It doesn’t reference itself easily; it isn’t comfortably populated by recognizable motifs and content. There’s the absolute minimum of interpretation or critique. It doesn’t come with a story, a life experience, the influence of a place, time or object. It is an environment for the viewer’s imagination to populate from the personal hard disk of memory and association. This runs against what we have taken as a way of interpreting visual art. We’ve come to expect both commentary and critique to flavour and guide the imagination.

Leonardo's Mona Lisa

Oscar Wilde in his book on The Critic as Artist describes how his appreciation and pleasure of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa was enhanced by this description by Walter Pater.

Pater wrote: Set in its marble chair in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as if in some faint light under the sea.

Wilde’s extended commentary reads: She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave: and she has been a diver in the deep seas and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants.

In some sense what Alice Fox begins to achieve here is an engagement with the very essence of what makes an image we can take into ourselves. Perhaps you can’t write about this work as some kind of imaginary construct (as Wilde and Pater did about the Mona Lisa)? What makes that essence is the material itself, the means of its making, the interaction and intervention of object and manual action and process. What is intriguing is that the material and its marks made seem to offer the viewer both imaginative space and opportunity – along with a simple delight in engaging with what Roger Fry described as something ‘independent of the subject of the work or its emotional impact . . . how things are made.’

Still Life with Compotier - Cezanne

When Fry wrote about the painting of Cézanne he began his discussion of Still Life with Compotier by describing the application of paint.

He wrote: “Instead of those brave swashing strokes of the brush or palette knife [that Cézanne had used earlier], we find him here proceeding by the accumulation of small touches of a full brush.”  So here we learn how he painted and with what tools; we can suddenly find ourselves imagining the work being painted.

Fry assembled in his critical writing a toolkit to analyse the painterly work, a toolkit one can apply to many different art forms. These he identified as colour, line, light and dark, volume, mass and composition. He asks his readers to join him on a journey of discovery into the very heart of what, in rather a scientific way, makes a painting what it is. He doesn’t negate the imaginative response, rather he fuels our imaginations further, makes them keener. We come closer to the artist. Through analysis we enter the world of his/ her own very thoughts. Fry helps us bypass contextual commentary and draws us into a play of tangible details rather than what his imagination might supply as interpretation. We become active rather than passive viewers.

In viewing Fabric of the Building there appear to be no guiding titles (although a price list – not displayed – contains basic identifiers). There is nothing except the work itself to provide external triggers for the imagination. The images, some 48 of them in different media, are presented to the viewer without verbal intervention. There seems a complete absence of Ekphrasis (that time-honoured device used to illustrate a possible real or imagined meaning of an art object – ex. the description of the shield of Achilles in the Illiad). What you see is what is there: material and the action of print and stitch, folding, binding, embossing and experimental dyeing, and the outcomes of algorithmic programming of virtual stitch.

In the space containing Fox’s work the pieces are gathered together in areas that draw the viewer to see  a set of collected outcomes based on material and action.  There are five areas in all: Wall 1 – twenty-five squares of thick felt 30cm by 30cm, Wall 2 – 9 squares of thinner felt 30cm by 30cm, Impressions of Stitch – a collection of nine paper squares 30cm by 30cms. 3 pieces titled Folded Wall 1 (felt), 2 and 3 (in silk), animated digitally processed images in a back-lit digital picture frame 22cm by 18cm titled Fabric of the Building.

Wall 1 from Fabric of the Building by Alice Fox (sketch by Nigel Morgan)

The 25 thick felt squares are assembled across the join of two adjacent walls. Titled in the artist’s price list as Wall 1 each square can be clearly perceived as relating to specific types of making processes with print and stitch. Print is mainly a collection of hand-manipulated screen images that embody the action of drawing, many of the line-based forms having a gesture and flow of a drawn sketch. Some squares contain overlays of these printed drawn gestures made apparent by different tones and a minimal use of colour. Colour composition is frugal: not so much muted as played down, not restrained so much as not attention-seeking. This is Colour to differentiate rather than to excite. Referencing the Farrow & Ball colour card (as we are clearly in architectural territory here) Pointing (2003), Lime White (1) Bible Black (225), and Slipper Satin (2004) would be close to Fox’s vocabulary of colours.

Line is always evident as solely ‘line’ across or within a surface. In these squares we often perceive line as we do contours on a map, a running stitch across a fabric surface. Lines are sometimes contained in the square, its ends present. In others, lines enter and exit the felted space. The felted square can become as a view from window, a map or aerial photo, a marked tile, the accidental accretions of note-book doodling, or tracks of man or beast across snow or tundra. The very difference in stitch type provides a lively vocabulary of forms and, if one speaks the language of stitch, knowing its references and associations may act as a prompt for the imagination. Evidence of design development in the artist’s sketchbooks  suggest the following stitches were explored and some are presented variously in the final outcomes: back-stitch, stem stitch, blanket stitches, chain stitches, feather stitch,  bullion and fly stitch, running stitches, straight satin stitch. In the final pieces the predominant stitches were straight stitch and bullion stitch.

The play and composition of Light and Dark is formed by densities and intersections of print with stitch. Sometimes the stitch follows and emboldens the print, pulling it out of the texture to both lighten and darken: both to accent, and to mute.

Volume is described in the containment and organisation of printed forms. It is either rich and full of the accidental or gathered into perceivable and distinct shapes: clearly defined journeys with stitch.

Mass and Space are never in confusion but speak clearly in each square to the viewer. This is achieved in a variety of ways. They are engagingly and playfully balanced as one follows trajectory paths of viewing from square to another – up and down, side to side and in diagonals.

As for Composition, it is difficult for the viewer to feel that the coming together of these felt squares is anything but temporary and (again) playful; that the whole sequence, if that’s what it is, could easily be something else, a wholly different pattern and arrangement. This is like looking at a forest floor from day to day. The elements of a viewed patch may retain prevailing features, but a chance rain shower, a passing animal, a gust of wind rearranges but does not fundamentally alter our perception of the elements in a viewed space. Grass, earth, leaves, vegetable matter, animate intervention, the passing of day to night are all in constant play. This is how a naturalist views the organic world, basically acknowledging the same scene, but always aware of the slightest different. And it is these differences that matter in our knowledge of this dynamic world.

Nine 'Sails' of Wall 2 - stitch and print from Fabric of the Building by Alice Fox (sketch by Nigel Morgan)

Wall 2 is an arrangement of felt pieces that ‘sail’ on tensile grids of wire. ‘Sailing’ because the whole structure of 9 pieces has the aspect of square rigged canvas in a stout breeze. The felt, thinner than used in Wall 1, is stretched and billows outwards. We can also see behind the outward facing image as the hanging technique places the felt squares far enough away from the wall to allow viewing. This approach gives a sculptural and dynamic quality to the work and reveals a view of stitch the viewer rarely sees. Colour, through the intervention and evolution of natural dyeing processes, features more prominently here and the patterning appears to be the result of strange, unusual interventions that come from binding the felt with cords to produce lined patterns and forms where the dye has not been allowed to infiltrate.

Impressions of Stitch is the third collection in the viewer’s left to right route through the work as a whole. It is at once  most mysterious and cerebral. Paper squares hang from little brass bulldog clips. Paper yarn has been stitched in and around embossed patterns – made from the relief of stitch itself. This is a surface that responds to three-dimensional stitch in a play of shadows. The viewer doesn’t stand still with this work, but unconsciously moves to take in the shadow play of standing stitches in paper thread.

Impressions of Stitch and Folded Wall 1 by Alice Fox (sketch by Nigel Morgan)

There are three pieces sharing the title Folded Wall. There is an ambitious coming together of some thirty or more small (6-10cm) and irregularly shaped felt planes covered with printed ‘drawn’ gestures. These felt planes are prominently machine-stitched on their edges and joins in chocolate brown linen and cotton using a zig-zag stitch; they fall downwards and outwards from a height of six foot encompassing an area equivalent to the viewer’s upper body. You find yourself staring into the heart of it, deciphering what feels like stitched and printed messages appearing at all angles from the structure. It is has something of Cornelia Parker’s exploded forms about it, though caught in fabric rather than in a photograph. Aligned with this, Folded Wall pieces 2 and 3 come together as a compositional whole. It’s presented like an after-word to the viewer’s journey across the exhibition space. These are pieces in silk: folded, discretely dyed, again falling across and down, fragile and engagingly tactile.

The final component of Fabric of the Building carries its name as a title. It is a back-lit projection in a domestic digital photo-frame. The material is the stitch: scanned and organised to appear on an invisible grid driven by an algorithmic process. As the viewer looks at the screen black ‘virtual’ stitches appear involuntary one at a time, and at different speeds to populate a white background. There often seems no rhyme or reason to their progress and evolution. Stitched forms grow and then stitch by stitch disappear. If this had been played on an I-Pad hand-held tablet the viewer might have achieved, possibly,  a richer sensation and relationship. This framing on the wall of such an active representation of the stitch in action gives off a detachment and disembodiedness which seems at odds with the personal relationship an embroiderer has with stitched  material and stitch itself. A larger projection of this work surrounding a join between two wall surfaces was possibly more successful, but was not in physical proximity to the other exhibited work.

Alice Fox has commented that choice of material has been a key part of the evolution of this her final degree project. Felt was chosen partly for its sustainability, but also because of its non-woven structure being very close to that of paper. Colour was developed from the natural colours of wool. So it is these materials that have undoubtedly provoked the work and yet their qualities and identities seem undiminished by her artistic intervention.

Fabric of the Building enjoys, significantly, a simultaneous presentation as website images and interpretation, with a sustained blog diary kept throughout the artist’s final (full-time) academic year and introduction to other recently exhibited work. Together these elements (not I think to be thought of as additions, but integral) makes for a powerful statement of artistic intent. In web media the artist is revealed as observer, as recorder, as inventor, as originator, as commentator. And all this is part of a life-lived, an outcome of a personal history only partially revealed, a love (indeed a joy) of the chaotic patterning of natural forms embedded in both the conscious and unconscious. It speaks of what it is to engage with the hand, material and eye in a counterpoint of action and invention.

Alice Fox is showing Fabric of the Building at New Designers at The Business Design Centre, London N1  between Wednesday 29 June and 2 July and on the web.

I know you enjoyed last year’s letter from Stroud so here’s one for 2011. Last year was my first visit and I only managed a day – to attend the Slow Movement in Textiles conference. I managed a whole weekend this time and it was the richest of two days.

Saturday was Studio Trail day, and after encountering torrential rain on the journey down, the sun was out in Stroud. The regular Farmers Market was doing great business and this small Gloucestershire town with a rich textile heritage was en fête, enlivened by the bright pink and yellow signs for the Stroud International Textile Festival.

Alex Caminada

My first step on the Studio Trail was to the home of Tim Parry-Williams. I introduced you to this artist in previous blogs – he was represented in Warp + Weft. He lives just a 10-minute walk from the town-centre in what appears to be a detached 2 up 2 down with an all important attic space – of which more later. Let me paint the scene as from the moment I entered his house: the idea of taking a photograph seemed intrusive.

‘Please remove your shoes’ reminded me immediately of Tim’s 15-year association with Japan. He has studied with Junichi Arai, one of the leading weavers in that country, and visits every year to work with a collaborator Ikuku Ida with whom he prepares his yarns and dyes, stocking up for the coming creative year. This is where the all important attic space – reached by an extendible ladder comes in. Last year Tim and Ikuku devised a touring exhibition in the UK called Plain Stripe Check which focused on the outcome of their joint research into historic textile practice. To view some wonderful images by photographer Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert of the textile making in in Ikuku’s home town of Kiryu, Japan click here.

Tim’s weaving space is small and most beautifully arranged. There’s a four- shaft Douglas Andrew loom and a Swiss computerised 16-shaft affair. I’d loved to have been able to draw and label this working space but it seemed so intimate and private that a verbal description is more appropriate. It’s those little details that entranced me – the partitioned box of essential tools to hand, a jumble of small wooden frames called Waku for storing silk yarn so it stays taught, a CD of the Icelandic cellist and composer  Hildur Ingveldardóttir Guðnadóttir playing quietly, the rich collection of books, an open notebook with the kind of elegant script I so admire.

A Japanese Waku - for storing fine silk yarn

When I climb the steep stairs to his first floor studio Tim was sitting at his loom in the kind of Japanese working coat and trousers that look so comfortable and practical. He was busy weaving a linen tea towel for a show he is giving at Ruskin Mills in nearby Nailsworth starting on 20 May.

It was an exquisite piece in 2/2 twill using a palette of just 3 coloured threads prepared for him on one of his Japanese visits – and stored in that loft space. The first thing I noticed was his use of two pairs of lease sticks managing the cross on the warp. Tim clearly noticed my attention and gave me an explanation unbidden. When weaving twill he said this arrangement enables the tension at the four different lifts to be even. It was his own ‘idea’ he claimed and produced the results he was after. He was most generous with little explanations, which he gave with the kind of clarity and patience that is all too rare. His students at Bath Spa are fortunate indeed!

Hanging on one wall was a boro cloth. Boro means ‘aged’, a piece of cloth usually from a working garment that has been patched with replacement materials, often woven. I’d seen these at the Sashiko exhibition in 2009 and loved the idea of a patched texture that was often ragged in places to reveal the original underneath. This kind of traditional piece is now a valuable collectors’ item and has inspired textile artists like  Ismini Samanidou to produce similar effects in her Jacquard work. Her piece in the recent Pairings Show I wrote about last month had used this device to great effect. For those, like me, for whom the wealth of Japanese textiles practice is a yet to be explored area, I recently found a valuable introduction in the form of a report of a lecture on the subject by Jeff Krauss . There are some fine images of ‘boro’ cloth included in this presentation.

It was difficult to tear myself away from the disciplined yet restrained atmosphere of this working space and its activity. I felt for the rest of the weekend I’d been given a rather special gift, and even now as I wrote about it, consider myself most fortunate to have had experienced something of a true craftsman.

A quiet corner of Matthew and Cleo Harris garden - against Matthew

Just a few hundred yards away the textile artist Matthew Harris lives and works. He and his wife Cleo Mussi have created a lovely house and garden complete with two studios, a ‘his and hers’. Cleo is a ceramicist and gardener. Matthew works with textile forms, often in collage, and was for a significant period influenced by the graphic notations employed by composers of contemporary art music. When I first started exploring textile art Matthew’s name was often mentioned as an artist bringing together music and textiles, but he is quick to say he is not a musician and doesn’t read music. This withstanding, he has created a striking installation for the foyer areas of the renovated Colston Hall in Bristol and related how musicians had actually played it! We corresponded a little when I was working on Fifteen Images, but it wasn’t until the recent Taking Time exhibition that I actually saw his work properly. My visit to his studio enabled me to view a collection of pieces of recent work and meet him properly. As for Tim Parry-Williams there was a fascinating stack of CDs in his studio demonstrating how music  plays a part in his creative process. We talked a lot about his ‘connection’ with music, his friendship with renown conductor Martyn Brabbins, and particularly the issues surrounding graphic notation. This is something that appeared in the 1960s as composers sought to liberate their performers from the  tyranny / straight-jacket imposed by Classical notation. I found myself telling Matthew that I felt there was a renewed interest in these graphic forms, particularly as a result of the work of Austrian composer Helmut Lachenmann, whose music concrete instrumentale had broken new ground in what we put in front of musicians as notation.

An example of a graphic score by Helmut Lachenmann

Matthew had arranged a small show on his studio walls of past and recent work. There was one piece in particular that interested me, a cartoon for a textile work called Shard. In muted greys, creams, browns, mauves this piece was also illustrated by a plan on a board almost opposite the cartoon. This showed how the textile pieces would be organised and applied. It was a small but significant glimpse into this artist’s working process. Like Tim Parry-Williams the Japanese experience has been most important, indeed one of his most significant pieces, Lantern Cloth takes inspiration from Japanese forms.

Detail from Matthew Harris work Crumb - after a score by the American composer George Crumb

A fragment of unusual music notation from Nostradamus by George Crumb

The garden surrounding Matt’s studio though was probably at its very best, and to begin to describe it would require a whole blog article  in itself! I know you visited it last summer and I think there are some images on your blog. I saw it after a much-needed early morning shower and it was lovely. Matt’s work is now attracting attention from national exhibitions and collections. His work has been included at the recent Collect 2011 in a body of work promoted by New Brewery Arts the Centre for Contemporary Craft in nearby Cirencester (of which more later).

Studio Seven

Next stop lunch in busy Stroud, a punnet of local strawberries and a cheese sandwich (I’m sounding a little like Nigel Slater). Then straight on to visit the home of Studio Seven Contemporary Textiles. This is a collective of seven textile artists who came together in the late eighties as The Textile Workshop, and then reformed in 2006 under their current name. One of their activities has been to explore textiles in performance. Working with actors, dancers, a sound designer and composer they have already created a number of site-specific pieces that look stunning. One of the seven Liz Lippiatt showed me an album documeting  their performance history. I had never seen anything quite like it: very impressive and beautiful, particularly dressing the famous garden at Hidcote. Their collective studio was one very long room with a print table running the whole length of the space (see above).  The group are based at Seven Valley Arts Space in the very centre of Stroud. Described as an artist-led resource, this seemed an impressive and valuable place for artists in this area of Gloucestershire.

Next stop, the studio of weaver Nick Ozanne. Mentioned in these pages previously, Nick is one of a triumvirate of male textile artists in and around Stroud. He is a designer weaver making bespoke scarves, ties, throws and woven cloth for (mainly) male fashion under the label Leto and Ariadne. He is also a charming and engaging person who generously welcomed visitors to his studio  in a former mill 3 miles outside Stroud. On a simple 4-shaft Ashford floor loom Nick was weaving a full-width piece to be laser cut as a tie. It was a complex sequence of twill patterns in green, dark, blue and white silk. He also showed a recent blanket / throw which was double the width of his loom but ‘not’ executed in double weave – simply two cut lengths sewn together. He demonstrated the very neat way he had achieved this so by sewing together  the ‘loops’ on each selvedge – beautifully effective. Go to his excellent website and see just how he makes a scarf.

A woven design

Finally to Cirencester, and a memorable visit to the New Brewery Arts Centre in Cirencester. This is an impressive complex of buildings in the town centre housing eleven studios of makers. I went to see two, weaver Sarah Beadsmore and clothes designer Dorothy Reglar. Before making these visits I had an excellent coffee and cake in the café and snapped this intriguing mechanical piece on the wall having placed 20p in a box to make it run.

A Mechanical Display in the cafe at New Brewery Arts Cirencester

Adjacent to the café was a lovely spacious gallery presenting Fest, a collection of work by artists featured at the Stroud 2011 Festival. This was a really good show and supplemented the main exhibition at Stroud’s Museum in The Park. The highlight for me was definitely weaver-in-willow Lizzie Farey’s Bowl II and the ambitious and very large What I Think of You. I enjoyed seeing Jan Garside’s work for real, but decided I liked the photos of her work better. Strange this, but there it is. Whoever curated this show deserves a medal. It demonstrated how beautifully a mixed show of work can be put together in a meaningful way.

Liz Farey

Sarah Beadsmore I mentioned a couple of months ago in connection with her research visit to Shetland to study computer-based weaving. Sarah weaves on an 8-shaft Glimakra loom and I caught her just before the end of the day when she was warping up a large blanket. We had an intriguing discussion about double weave as opposed to double cloth. I almost followed it, but there’s a note on my office  board to say – investigate this further! I admired Sarah’s no nonsense well-crafted work, very much in a traditional vein and no worse for that, indeed rather reassuring. She is someone from who I know I could learn a lot if only I lived a little nearer.

Woven material by Sarah Beadsmore

The Studio Trail ended with a real surprise and delight in a visit to designer Dorothy Reglar. Enter her studio and there is all these wonderful garments with a distinct East Asian flavour, silks everywhere. This is because for the last ten years or so Dorothy has worked for part of every year with a group of village weavers in Phonsavan in Laos.

Weavers in Phonosavan in Laos

She designs the garments with the silk fabrics these women weave and helps coordinate their sale across the world through organisations like Oxford. I was captivated not only be her story of how all this came about (there’s a film all about this), but by the garments and the designs themselves. Suffice to say Dorothy is a designer of some distinction with a portfolio of work for major fashion houses to be reckoned with. There was one vivid hanging she’d designed with a beautiful central section in ikat.

A woven hanging by weavers from Phonosavan: in silk with ikat

Design by Dorothy Reglar

As you probably have gathered by now there was just so much to take in and describe from doing the Studio Trail that to include a report on Sunday’s Off the Loom symposium is impossible here. So just take this as part 1 and I’ll try to write to you again before the month is out!

In friendship

Nigel

End of a 1/3 size sample for a rug using a pattern by Anni Albers

In my April blog I showed my first attempt at Clasped Weft technique. I’ve progressed a little with this, particularly dealing with getting the tension at the selvedge correct as one is effectively creating a turn around the selvedge at both ends simultaneously. I’ve also been playing a little with a sample bag of Nepalese rug and tapestry yarns from my February visit to the Handweavers Studio in London.

A sample of a cleft weft pattern using Nepalese rug wool

One upshot of studying three pictorial weavings by Anni Albers (check out my last three blogs) has been to examine and then replicate one of her weave patterns. In the catalogue from the wonderful Ruthin show earlier this year there’s a double page close up of a curtain woven for a Harvard dormitory. The piece is in two colours only, woven in plain weave. Its simplicity belies an intriguing sequence of weft picks.

Curtain for a dormitory at Harvard Graduate Centre 1950. Cotton and undyed linen 218 x 121 cm

Having worked the pattern out I then chose two weft colours, one being the colour of the warp itself. Then the fun began . . . What looked so straightforward was nothing of the kind! Working with two colours in an irregular sequence of picks produces all sorts of difficulties at the selvedge – just how do you organise the relationship between the two weft ends. It took me nearly half a metre of weaving before I developed a way of working so that the selvedges didn’t look a complete mess. `All the time I was grappling with this I kept thinking ‘how can I describe succinctly the method of doing this weave?’ Well, for the time being at least, I admit defeat.

A close up of the selvedge

When I next get a chance to look at another weaver’s work it is this  factor that I’ll be examining . . .For now I have enough home-made strategies to get by. Whether they are ‘correct’ or not I have no idea. The only description I’ve come across of the process of handling two different weft yarns is in Debbie Chandler’s confident book. Anyway, I like this pattern and before I scale-up my sample to 3 times its present warp width I want to try scaling up the pattern itself to double its present size.

My own reworking of Albers' pattern for a dormitory curtain

During April there has been a burgeoning preoccupation with colour and texture in my weaving and thoughts about what next. I found myself yesterday thinking I must learn to describe colours accurately. I’m hopeless at it. When I try to talk about a colour I reach for a pile of paint cards. I have to say I love the given names – I have the Farrow and Ball colour card here – Lulworth Blue, Savage Ground, Arsenic, Bible Black – brilliant. Perhaps there’s a poet somewhere who the company employ on a retainer to come up with these powerful and evocative names when a new colour appears. Maybe it’s Simon Armitage whose poem about the National Trust Range of Paints Colour  Card I set to music in my Travelling Songs.

The cover of Stephen Beal's book The Very Stuff

So yesterday I wrote to a friend (who has promised to teach me to sew one day) to ask if I might borrow two books I know she has in her wonderful library of reference books on textiles. The first is Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green by Michael Wilcox. This was recommended to me by felt artist Jeanette Appleton who reckoned it had a huge impact on her work. It was one of those books I was not then ready to assimilate; but perhaps I’m ready now. The other is a book of poems called The Very Stuff: poems on color, thread and the habits of women by Stephen Beal. It’s a somewhat curious book in both style and content with each poem based or rather tagged to a DMC embroidery thread colour neatly shown on each page. But it was through this book I discovered its author’s engaging Periodic Table of Colour.

Stephen Beal's Periodic Table of Colour

Just before Easter the challenge of colour raised its head again during a visit to Texere, Bradford’s yarn emporium. I went to accompany the friend mentioned above who is currently engaged on developing an ambitious collection of work that I bravely tried to describe a few weeks ago, if only to help myself understand what she was doing. I imagined I was writing the preface to a serious exhibition catalogue – full of clever quotes, references and long words. Interesting experiment, and in the process of which I discovered a powerful poem by Jorie Graham called Over and Over Stitch. It had this unforgettable line.

 There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven—

I also found myself having to address in this imaginary preface the issue of colour in this artist’s developing body of work:

 Colour. What colour? The colour here is evolutionary, the colour comes out of the wall, the stitch, those natural and elemental sources that speak of a kind of weathering, colour made with the intervention of the chemistry of the mordant, the play of the substantive, adjective and fugitive.

Anyway, back to my Texere afternoon. I was still in Anni Albers mode, and spent time looking for yarns that had some resonance with those I had been studying in her work. Curiously enough it was the silk yarns that grabbed my attention. I came away with a mix of cones of Tussah and Bourette silk. It was fascinating looking through what was available. I had in my ignorance always thought of silk as something very delicate and thin. Not so, it can be very chunky and incredibly strong. As I write this I have reached out for my copy of The Yarn Book by Penny Walsh. This is a beautifully illustrated book that gives so much to the reader from well taken close up photographs. But nothing quite like a trip to Texere to handle the yarn itself.

My choice of (mainly) silk yarns from Texere. There's a cone of jute and green linen there too.

Colour has been such a preoccupation for me as a composer during the last twenty-five years. I’ve tackled it as a subject and a source of inspiration in several major pieces. In the 20 and 21C there has been an increasing fascination in what composers call timbre, the ‘colour’ and quality of sonic texture. We talk about orchestral colour, and some composers like Olivier Messiaen have identified particular scales and chords with a colour palette, most notable in his opera Saint Francois d’Assis. For me timbre has until very recently been less important than pitch and rhythm, and what I’ve come to call the sound event rather than the sound object. Despite this I have been, like the poet Goethe, fascinated by the affect of colour. It was through this fascination that I first investigated the journey of artist Bridget Riley from chiaroscuro into the colour stripe. Then I discovered Josef Albers and his book The Interaction of Colour. But it was handling colour myself as a fledgling weaver intent to be able to design what I might weave that I had to engage with colour in a very different way.

Basically, I’m afraid of colour, just as in music composition I rarely start from a timbre or a texture. I don’t hear my music at first played by a particular instrumental timbre: it is something so much more abstract. Right now I’m dealing with a series of pieces focused on the exploration of the deep oceans. Some of the writing about such exploration is rich in descriptions of colour. But for me I’ve become intent on taking descent and ascent as my preoccupations, and in doing so investigated interpolation. I’ve taken two chords and / or scales, one high in pitch, the other low in pitch and looked at interpolating them across the pitch continuum. It’s rather like mixing two distinct colours, and the results have been inspiring. Just yesterday in York I saw a post Easter altar cloth that showed a striking interpolation from yellow to mauve. I jotted the sequence down in my notebook and coloured in later.

Interpolation of colour - from an altar cloth in a York city church

I’m currently completing an orchestral study called Migrations based on orchestration by register rather than the usual ‘colourful’ family groupings of woodwind, brass and strings.

My other gathering preoccupation during April has been a little development in my creative writing. I am currently a commuter for the first time in many years. I have a 37 minute train journey to my studio early every morning. On the day I began this new routine I decided to write a short piece in that time available, basing the writing on an image from the small library of photographs I carry on my mobile phone. I usually manage about 300-400 words and the results of a fortnight or so of such early morning creativity are interesting, though rather varied in content and success. Yesterday I put most of my first attempts in the bin, but there were two little essays that I’ve kept to place on this blog. In thinking of doing so I’ve also opened a folder to keep what I realize is the beginnings of a collection of fictional writing about textiles, weaving and embroidery in particular. I already have a considerable collection focused on music.

So here to end are two examples of my 37 minutes on the train. The first is autobiographical – a recollection of my first exposure to the art of  weaving as a seven year old at a famous choir school. The second relates a passage from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, a telling of the story of Philomela. This reference came about from hearing a song thrush singing its heart out from the top of a poplar tree, and then writing about the bird and its song on my 37 minute train ride. The thrush is known as Turdus Philomelos, hence the link to this Athenian princess. Although the story of Philomela is a very savage indeed tragic tale, it has, in the form of an extraordinary play by Joanna Laurens called The Three Birds, intrigued me for many years, certainly before I thought about learning to weave. I’ve always considered it would make a perfect chamber opera, but the author’s agent put so many restrictions in front of me I had to abandon any plans. The play is now out of print, so I’m minded to try again.

You can download these stories with their images as Word files  (Paroles Tissées) and (Turdus Philomelos).

At the end of next week I’m off to Stroud International Textile Festival for the weekend: to do the Studio Trail (May 7) and to attend Laura Thomas’ Symposium Off The Loom (May 8). Do go to the Studio Trail link to see Alexander Caminada’s stunning photographs of the artists and makers taking part. SIT is a festival that consistently produces the most beautiful images and interpretation in its publications and programmes. The Studio Trail booklet is no exception. Look out for an extra ‘Stroud featured blog’ this month if time permits.

PS: I had an advance date for my diary e-mailed to me last week: the opening of tapestry artist Jilly Edwards retrospective show at Ruthin Craft Centre. If you’ve read this blog in the past you’ll know my association with Jilly in providing music for her Sense of Place show at Dartington’s High Cross House. The Ruthin show opens on June 17 and I’m sure will be a must see. I’m currently busy preparing a CD recording of the Sense of Place concert score for solo guitar, a project that has been seriously delayed because of a broken arm back in December, just days from the planned recording session!