Unpicking Time

This modest bag was made by grandmother for me about 40 years ago. My sisters and I were each given one. Based on the wrangles with odd sock piles and unfolded T-shirts that inhabit my adult life, I can imagine the conversations between my mother and hers about the frustrations of keeping clothes, drawers and wardrobes in order. No doubt these sock bags were a solution offered by my clever-handed granny.

How evocative of bygone times is this fabric? Sturdy, modestly patterned and brown.

Every January I have a real urge to reduce, consolidate and tidy. So after Marie Kondo-ing my own wardrobe and folding all my socks and tights into those very satisfying, permanently visible rectangles I had no need for my old friend the sock bag. However as it would still have to be in my life in some form, I decided to unpick the stitching so I would at least be able to keep and reuse the fabric.

Forty years worth of corner fluff.

I am a deeply nostalgic person and wondered how deconstructing my Granny’s work would affect me. Would I feel guilty, sad, overcome….? I began to unpick the side seams waiting for the tears. However the sensation that settled around me was a warm presence. As my fingers teased out the old thread and smoothed the fabric I felt a connection, a communing. She was with me, understanding me.

 

A tiny hand stitch to keep the coat hanger in place

The seam allowance snipped off to reduce bulk

A mitre trim for neatness on folding

Each rediscovered detail spoke to me of patience, skill and functionality and brought the two of us together into the same space for this morning meditation.

Tears finally came when I unfolded the fabric to reveal the wooden coat-hanger. Before mine, my Granny’s would have been the last eyes to see this simple wooden curve, neatly painted pale blue.

The fabric, the coat-hanger and an enveloping sense of connnection

 

 

The Quilt Thing: How It All Started

After over twenty years as a primary teacher I became a full time artist, returning to painting was challenging and satisfying in equal measure. Painting full time allowed me to spend my days working with colour, my absolute passion. After a while two things started to happen: more and more of my paintings took on the form of a grid, and I also found myself wanting to stitch into the dried paint.

The influence of quilts on this portait of a garden (detail)

At the same time a quilt made by my grandmother came back into my life after a long absence. Inspired by this beautiful item I started to paint patchwork quilts and also to stitch into the quilt with some visible mending…. then without warning my painting became blocked.

My Grandmother’s Quilt

It felt that the sewing wanted to take precedence. I started embroidering, how did I know how to do these stitches? Chain, back, stem, running, fly ​stitches. These stitches and this knowledge were coming from somewhere deep, somewhere important.

 

Tickets Please

Amongst the ephemera from my latest purse clearout I found a tram ticket and a coffee shop loyalty card. The smooth perfection of their surfaces, the neatly arranged colours and thoughtfully rounded corners made me pause before throwing them out. There’s a certain melancholy about mass produced items, so carefully designed to pass fleetingly through our lives without much consideraton from their audience.

Something about these two tickets lying side by side worked: their equal size and their opposite colours. Notionally they fitted too as the coffee shop sits by the tram stop I use when I go into town. They told a small familiar story.

I had been exploring textiles in preparation for a school based project and weaving was at the front of my mind. I snipped the ticket lengthways and the card widthways to create a warp and weft. Paper is much less forgiving than yarn which means that significant tension built up as I layered the tiny strips of paper over and under eachother. (An echo of the tension I feel when I throw stuff away?) In order to stop the whole thing pinging apart I stitched the layers together at the ends of each row.

In attaching the little paper weaving to the canvas I continued the lines from the printed design in backstitch which suggests the tram tracks, the often thoughtless journeys. I added a curve which nods to passenger handgrips and handles on coffee cups as well as the recycled nature of this piece.

 

Inspiration Part 4 – Twisting

I always guessed when a new baby was about to join the family as my mum would get out her knitting needles and white 4 ply yarn. Each new addition would be welcomed with a full layette (I’m showing my age!) if a close relation. For a friend it would be a set comprising mittens (or pawkies as we called them in Scotland), bootees and a wee hat. Whatever the gift was to be, I remember being called to action to help make lengths of twisted cord for the mitts and bootees. This was a two person job involving a double length of yarn stretched out between us. Each end was looped over a knitting needle which was spun round by a single finger to create a twist in the yarn. The longer you spun, the tighter the twist became. Then the magic happened: after enough knitting-needle twizzing, the yarn started to twist round itself creating a cord four times as thick as the original yarn. I found and still find the physics of this intriguing and satisfying in equal measure, seeing the twist evenly and regularly spacing itself out along the length of newly created cord.

So when I was commissioned to work with the pupils at Cheetham Academy what better way to introduce the Year 4s to the delights of textiles than this little bit of woolly excitement? They worked in twos choosing coloured yarns based on simple colour theory and set off twisting – with pencils though as I couldnt bear the thought of herding 60 knitting needles! It was quite moving to see their excitement as they saw the energy they were twisting into it change how the yarn behaved. It wasn’t on a screen, it was real, it was a first hand experience. They were affecting a physical change using their own hands, feeling the tension in the yarn with their fingers, they were in charge.

Each finished cord was arranged onto a square of coloured card and glued into place. We had trees, spirals, hearts (lots of hearts), zigzags and knotted heaps. Each unique, all fantastic. 120 little works of art ready to be added to the final piece

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Inspiration Part 3 – Pyramids

As part of the Legacy Project at Cheetham C of E Academy I wanted to share with the Key Stage Two pupils some basic skills associated with textiles . Not only because having more physical skills can only be good, right? But also because learning how  to manipulate materials and to create one thing from another brings a deeper understanding of the world around us. Spectators become particpants.

Along with the skills of folding, tying, twisting, knotting and weaving I also introduced the pupils to some simple colour theory which they applied when making the colour choices for their small art pieces .

Year 3s used scoring and folding to create triagular pyramids from coloured card. Each pupil hid a letter they’d written to their Year 6 selves inside and tied the pyramid closed with coloured ribbon.

They worked in groups of six to create a tesselated arrangement which was mounted on a small square ready to be incorprated into the large piece. These miniature time capsules will be opened in 3 years’ time just before the pupils leave for Secondary School.

Inspiration Part 2

The joy of this Tibor Reich piece was the inspiration for work I undertook with the pupils of Cheetham C of E Academy as part of their Aspirations Week activities. The school had recently had a new building with beautiful white walls just crying out for a big colourful piece.

An understanding of the materials around us and simple skills associated with textiles, such as knotting, weaving and twisting, were the starting points. And of course no art project is complete without a quick tour round the colour wheel.

Early Years and Key Stage One pupils had their sessions outside in the sunshine. The school fence provided the perfect loom for creating woven panels. I used the colour wheel to teach them about colours and their relationships to eachother. Each group was to work with homogenous colours or ‘next-door colours’ in KS1 speak. As well as learning a bit of simple colour theory, the pupils explored the repetitive over-and-underness of weaving, experienced the autonomy of making creative choices, worked together, took risks and shared skills -with those who could tie showing those who were yet to learn. At the end of the session they had the opportunity to stand back and reflect on what they had created. “That’s a volcano one”, “That could be grass and flowers” and my favourite “We made that! Are we artists now?”

Inspired by Tibor Reich

Last summer I visited the wonderfrul Tibor Reich retrospective at Manchester’s beautiful Whitworh Art Gallery. The gallery’s curators created this textile mural to celebtrate his passion for design and colour. The satisfying repetition of a simple shape, each one carrying a different design and the whole piece subtly moving through the colour spectrum chimed with my own aesthetic.

 

Recurring themes in my own practice are patchwork and repetiton and my deep love of colour meant that this piece really stayed with me. When I was recently commissioned by Cheetham C of E Academy in Mancheseter to work with pupils to create a legacy piece for their new building, memories of the Tibor Reich collage came bubbling to the surface again.

So how to go about recreating the joy brought by this piece and making it relevant to 570 five to eleven year olds?

All will be revealed in  the next installment…..

 

 

Plastic Angst

As I put my grocery shopping into cupboards, bowls and baskets the kitchen bin fills up with packaging. I recycle and reuse what I can. The cubby hole under the stairs is now almost unusable as a cupboard due to it being full 0f plastic bags disgorging more of the same, tubs and pots are treated to a round in the dishwasher before being saved into my special sister-bin and feet are stamped when I read NOT CURRENTLY RECYCLED on plastic fruit bags.

‘What’s a sister-bin?’, you may ask. Most weekends my sister visits. She travels about half an hour from another authority, an authority which has a very generous list of plastic items it’s happy to recycle. So ever on the look out for ways of reducing waste headed for landfills I keep a special bin of clean plastic just for her to take away with her on a Saturday night! It’s not a perfect system, carbon wise I’m probably cancelling my good intentions out with the hot water and petrol but at least my yoghurt pots, margarine tubs and meat trays are not heading for …… but wait a minute. Where are they going? How can neighbouring authorities have such differing policies?

I do love a system. To me the little-number-in-the-circular-arrow symbol suggests great sorting possibilities: we could all be sorting our plastics into bins according to this number and off it could all go to the particular process suitable for that type of plastic. No? Here my scientifically savvy friends check out the ceiling and sigh.

So as you can see I have plastic angst. I read about The Great Pacific Garbage Patch which contains 100 million tons of plastic. Our oceans full of tiny pieces of plastic – microplastics. The fact that they are tiny pieces does not mean that they are decomposing in the accepted sense. They are still plastic, an unnatural material whose chemical bonds are forced to fuse under tremendous heat. They are still plastic, a material mistaken by the digestive systems of marine life as hormones. They are still plastic, an everlasting material created by the ingenuity of man but often utilised in single-use, cheap or disposable items.

(Not) Currently Recycled                 20cm x 20cm             Acrylic paint on canvas

So this piece is my response to that angst. Tiny dots of colour suspended in bright blue. The scale here is ambiguous. It could be a satellite shot of landmasses and oceans. Equally we could have zoomed right in and be looking at microscopic flecks.

Either way the plastic is here to stay.

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A True Portrait

Another little piece in the series of shed paintings. This particular wee beauty had a real glow to it due to the back wall being made almost entirely from glass panels. I like this idea: that there is a transparency of character which becomes apparent in how we create things, be they conversations, families, quilts or sheds. So in painting these little shed portraits I feel I am almost painting a portrait of the person behind (or in!) the shed.

When You Leave Somewhere …  20cm x 20cm       Acrylic paint and found materials

In this piece I have incorporated a tinned food key as part of the fence, a little black safety pin with an interesting round end and a rusty washer: an opener, a connector and a facilitator. The text is snipped from a newspaper interview given by Lemn Sissay MBE when he became Chancellor of The University of Manchester, he said ‘When you leave somewhere you take it with you.’

I also like to think that as we move through life we leave a little of ourselves with whatever we have created.

 

 

 

 

Sheds from Leftovers

These little shed portraits are a continuation of the work I did on Patchwork Plots. They celebrate the creativity and ingenuity of plot holders and gardeners in reusing objects and materials which are regarded as having come to the end of their useful lives: old window frames spanning a range of styles and ages becoming a greenhouse extension or cold frame; decapitated plastic containers lining the boundary of and allotment sprouting with an abundance of strawberries; lengths of piping providing protective collars around brassicas to keep away munching pests or providing obstacle free growing space for the straightest of carrots.

When I come to paint these characterful little buildings I too make use of things that might otherwise be thrown out. In truth I can’t throw them out because of their histories, known or unknown, so honouring them in this way seems apt.

The Key’s on the Hook          20cm x 20cm          Acrylic paint and found materials

In this piece I have framed the work in a series of rectangles and squares to suggest it’s a small part of a larger whole, making reference to the original inspiration for this series – the patchwork quilt. The palette is muted echoing the pale colours of the oft washed quilt as well as the faded paintwork of well weathered sheds. My favourite circles appear in metal as well as paint. (My son is now well trained in picking up rusty washers and lost buttons.)

The text is torn from old sheets of cello music from my childhood, once practised weekly now yellowing in dusty piles under the bed. The little vest button was an extra raided from my mother’s button box for another project and the little rusty key has long lost its keyhole, isn’t it hard to throw away a key?