SvenJen2020

With our annual textile adventure (this year an Evocative Arts Workshop in South Australia with German tutor Dagmar Binder) binned along with everyone else's plans for 2020, we decided to do a little home state travel, and head to our beloved Caloundra, with coffee machine, suitcase full of wool, and gym gear in tow. This is the stunning view from our beachside apartment.

To be honest, there hasn't been a great deal of workshop activity, but here is evidence of the small amount that has occurred, accompanied by bubbles, of course.

The rest of these images are from our walks on the beach and rocks, sunrises, and sunsets. Ahhhh, this is the life!

 

Unexpected validation and a nudibranch.

On the eve of my annual creative retreat, I received a truly wonderful email. It ended with ‘Your work touches my heart’. For a girl sometimes still searching for a true sense of purpose – well, mission accomplished. Years ago I wrote that all I wanted to do was make amazing work that would touch people in some way – that was all that I really desired. To know I have done that gives me a certain sense of accomplishment and fulfillment. Reading those words have made me very happy, and have given me a lovely boost. This is the work which gained the praise. Now nicknamed 'Weedy', he is shortly to be kicking off Spring in Gallery 86, Penguin, Tasmania. I'm super pleased to see his life extended beyond the paperonskin exhibition he was created for.

I had another exciting moment this week, when unwrapping a piece of glass jewellery I had bought from glassmad, I found the artists had included a bonus gift – a beautiful tiny glass pink nudibranch! Just wow. It was so exciting to find, and really, could a glass nudibranch come to a better home than here?! Such lovely generosity – warms the cockles of your heart. I have photographed it here looking most at home near a rockpool in Caloundra, my home for the next week for the revised annual SvenJen adventure!! Stay tuned for hilarity!!

Lost Days

Hah! On reading the beginning of my last blog, I find it humorous to note that “I am really enjoying working on my first body of work”. My, how times change. I guess everything stopped ‘flowing in the right direction’, because the last few weeks have been quite the struggle. I lost all drive – everything became too hard. Even if I had a good idea I couldn’t be bothered to do it. Basically, I’ve been in a funk. However, I seem to find myself now on the other side of that emotional storm, which was possibly influenced by the bizarre state of the world at the moment. I’ve been kind to myself, and have kept chipping away, and lo! joy in creating is once again found! So here’s what I’ve been up to:

 Free motion embroidery on organza, which I then burn out over a candle, and dye to become a lovely green lichen. Until I break my good embroidery hoop, as well as my rubbish one, the lightbulb blows in my machine, and the knee-press finally drops out.....

When you need to do some work but don't have the enthusiasm, do a piece where you don't have to do something new and you know you'll like the result. Stitching this leather ready to be laboriously painted was quite therapeutic, and I am pleased with the result. Also, now I have something to paint, and I have discovered that I very much like painting. Indeed, I keep asking myself why all these things I'm making aren't paintings.....

 Maybe because I can't get these beautiful random dye patterns with painting! This is unique to the fabric/dye process. This dyed and embroidered silk is to be a simple rock background for a textured leather piece.

 I'm trying to emulate this beautiful crayfish shell, inside and out, so tried painting and texturing Tyvek. This piece is currently in stasis - a phase they all seem to go through. I think it's so I can be exposed to them day after day and just have the image simmering away in the back of my mind until I know what to do with it.

On the days when I just couldn't make it into the studio, I spent time writing - articles, applications for residencies (responses pending) and applying for the York Botanic Art Prize - a similar process to applying for a residency! As things started to turn around, I was boosted by my proposal for the York prize being accepted. It's a new venture, and it is great to see a whole range of media being encouraged, as well as an innovative approach being taken to botanical art. The subject must be a native flora of Western Australia, so I searched long and hard to find a correlation between a seaweed I had photographed on King Island, and one in WA. Finally, I found Ecklonia, which I am moulding in leather, currently soaking in dye.

Interestingly, one thing that helped me during my lost days was looking at what I had written about this project with enthusiasm. It reminded my that my love for nature was my driving force, and was all that I needed to be reinvigorated.

Creating a body of work

I’m really enjoying working on my first real ‘body of work’. Having found the overarching theme that ties it all together, I exult in watching it come together little by little, watching connections form, living the experience. There are many different pieces in creation at one time, in many techniques, and they all reflect on, and inform, each other. Amazingly, despite not having work commitments, days can easily disappear quickly, so often just one little task or some preparatory work gets completed, but it’s the constant daily flow in the right direction that really creates the feeling of immersion. 

I say my first, although I had two exhibitions - Morphology I (2009) and II (2011)  - ‘exploring the fascinating surfaces and forms of fungus and lichen through contemporary textile practices’, featuring felting, dyeing, shibori and free-motion embroidery. Yet this feels quite different. Partly no doubt, because it’s a decade of experience on, it’s solo, and it’s based specifically on my five-week artist residency experience on King Island. It’s my main focus, my number one priority, it’s what I think about night and day.

It’s also very different for me to no longer be working on body-based sculptural pieces. I tried very hard to do this with Morphology, but just couldn’t manage it. It simply would not work back then; now it’s coming together almost effortlessly. It’s really different to living with just the one idea for many months, as I have for my previous wearable art works. I’m living with hundreds of ideas and techniques at the same time, and surprisingly, working within the bounds of natural colour. So many firsts. Below is a rack of backgrounds I am working on - all on solid felt backing.

Another is the use of synthetic material. Normally an anathema to me, for this series I was looking to use materials I already had, as well as those I could find second hand.  Bags of bridal fabric scraps bought years ago had been pillaged for the beautiful lace, silk, and tulle, with polyester satin begrudgingly stored in hope of future use somehow. These came into their own, teamed with Polysol dyes, for creating large background covers. Being polyester, I felt no compunction in painting over them, piecing them together – making the most of them in general.  The dyes have also been a challenge to work with, as they don’t appear true in the pot. To summate – they are murky buggers that remain a bit of a mystery until they come out!

The beauty of this though, is that I finally get to work through this stash of both artificial fabric and the dyes for them. Another way I have found of dealing with synthetics materials in a non-wearable environment is being able to paint in watercolour, as laundering is no longer a consideration.

It’s also really nice to be revisiting the free-motion embroidery techniques which initially brought me into the textile art world, learned in workshops from Ken Smith and Carol Wilkes. I really value the notes and samples I have from these times – from inspiration, to technique notes and machine settings.

 I always remember thinking in high school “if only I could concentrate on one thing, just one discipline”. University disappointed me in this way, but finally, given full free reign, and the years on me to care little about other possible restraints, it’s a joy to be immersed in this work.

Leather Kelp detail panel construction

I took these photos of this work in progress today, imagining I'd be able to do a fun, quick, wee slideshow video of the transformation, but noooo, it's not that easy! So here y'are!! Red leather, sewn onto the backing, ready to be stiffened with glue and then painted.
Inspiration:

*** Lovely lady from the Northside of Brisbane who gifted me all these offcuts of grey and red leather, I have searched high and low for your email address to thank you once again. It was quite a few years ago, and for a while I thought I would use these in a WOW entry, but now they are really coming into their own in my exhibition work. THANK YOU.

Artistic progression

Since my last post, I've continued to play in the studio - including weighing down pva-coated leather as it dried so it retained a stretched format, painting and stitching on 'glass' organza, needle-felting over wire armature, botanical dyeing, and creating fragments with silk paper, cricula cocoons and thread.

Most importantly, design-wise I believe I have found a way to both explore the imagery I have of King Island and represent it in both a meaningful and an artistic way. It was hard to tear myself away from the desire to simply try and reproduce the magic of my photographs, although ultimately I knew this wouldn't work. Like most things, with time, it found it's own way. An overarching theme, within which I could include elements of my photographs, emerged. Suddenly, 20 or so images which were important to me found a way of coalescing into a series of work which made sense, and allowed for focus to be dedicated to the parts I was most interested in. I feel like I have made that leap from simply replicating an image, to using it to create a work which is uniquely my own.

Other images have found their way towards fully sculptural interpretation, which I look forward to experimenting with further. These are the ideas that float around at 3-5am! Suddenly, I seem to have created a vast number of sketches which need to be fulfilled! The book of selected photos I had printed when I returned has been a very useful tool, although it is amazing how often I look for an image that isn't there. Images I initially didn't rate as vital have now become so! The constant scanning through it, and the computer files, sorted into weeks and days can be very time consuming, so on my latest plan of work I made sure to note the file number on each sketch! And they say artists are disorganised......

It seems fortunate in many ways that I had pre-determined my wish to try and create this project with as much of my own materials and that which I could scavenge second hand. TST (These Strange Times) has now made that somewhat of a necessity, but I couldn't be better placed to not only survive, but thrive. I've uncovered amazing fabrics which I have dyed over the years, hand-dyed yarns I've bought, fabrics gifted from friends, dyes unused for many years now coming to the fore as I work through synthetic fabric off-cuts. I am almost entirely unaffected by TST, and once again recognise the fortunate umbrella I live under. Days spent sewing and painting in my studio are special, and I hope one day that the result of this this work will be seen as special by others!

Watercolour on Silk

I had a bit of a Eureka moment during the week when I tried out watercolour paints on satin and silk as a background to embroider over. I’ve always loved watercolour as a medium, but it is by no means as easy as it looks. I feel like I might have discovered another transitory point for myself now though, with painting on fabric. This whole crossover of mediums is turning out to be fun! It’s certainly working better than my last attempt to create art panels many years ago.

Another change is the way I look at and review my progress. Now, with Facebook, Instagram, a blog and a website, I feel obliged (the apps even remind me) to post images frequently. Apart from the time taken to photograph, caption, and post them, I am finding the process to actually be helpful. I create a solid record of my progress to reflect on and use as a resource. It has often been said that a good way of reviewing your work is to look at it in a mirror, or in this case, in a photo. ‘Framing’ my work in this way for reflection is both useful and gratifying.

Much has happened in the studio this week, so a good tidy-up is in order. I avoided that this afternoon by sitting on my table and painting my leather ‘kelp’ for hours. The single sculptural piece didn’t take too long, but the densely layered piece was endless! Still a long way to go on both, but I am happy with progress overall.