by katie | Nov 27, 2015 | Blog
I recently went to the SIT Select Showcase and talks, it was great day filled with creative people.
The Showcase was basically a craft fair but the standard of work was amazing. My two personal favourites were Mayumi Keneko and Helen London. Mayumi Keneko hand weaves fabric using paper yarn and folds the fabric in an origami-type way. My favourite pieces she had out on display at the Showcase are unfortunately not on her website. These pieces were small creations folded in to detailed shapes in the traditional origami way, beautiful and intricate. Helen London is a silversmith who produces wonderfully delicate silver jewellery.
There were a lot of interesting speakers there too, I went to talks by Mary-Rose Watson, Penny Wheeler, Ismini Samandou, Jilly Edwards and Theo Wright.
Mary-Rose Wheeler‘s work is very interesting, as a weaver she uses a warp and a weft but not on a loom and not always interlinking. She creates her work on a frame by wrapping the warp and weft around it simultaneously. At first the three dimensional nature was coincidental but she has now developed and enhanced this aspect. She dyes all of her own yarns and only uses rayon, she likes the way the light reflects and changes the colour. My favourite collections are the Feather series and Pennine series. I am not so keen on the pieces where she has added extra yarn, I feel it distracts from the beautiful simplicity of her work.
Penny Wheeler is a weaver and artist. She has worked on many interesting projects including growing herbs in a shift dress. She was part of the Z Twist project celebrating the high quality textiles produced in Somerset. The Quantock Weavers were also an inspiration for one of her projects where she wove fabric based on stones.
Ismini Samandou‘s work is all about reproducing natural surfaces through woven textures, mostly using a Jacquard loom. Before she started weaving her main interest was in photography. She is always trying to create something new that no one has done before. Currently, she is very interested in clouds and time, and where you are in relation to these. Textiles with a narrative and meaning, and the God of Arachne are also very influential. She has completed many residencies including with the Crafts Council in Bangladesh and an Anni Albers residency in Connecticut. Her work is beautiful and well worth a look.
Jilly Edwards is a tapestry weaver who weaves on a range of scales. The very large scale pieces are produced on scaffolding that she has bought for her studio space. Her inspiration comes from her constant collecting of ‘stuff’ she finds anywhere and everywhere as well as her drawing. When she weaves her pieces (all sizes) she creates a drawing to scale to place behind the tapestry as she is making it.
Theo Wright, for most of his life, has been a computer scientist and greatly interested in mathematics. 30 years after he started his Computer Science degree he started his Textiles degree. He realised his interest in textiles when he looked back at all of the things he had collected from travels and realised that they were all textiles based, he was also knitting as a hobby. He taught himself to weave as a hobby at home before pursuing a degree. His woven work is all based on his mathematics interests, using permutation theories to work out and arrange his threading and weaving structures. Instead of using weave programs to design structures he uses Excel, creating equations that will produce many different designs for him. Colour isn’t a major part of his work, the thing he focuses on is contrast, his use of light or dark yarns. For me his work is not so pleasing visually but the way he uses mathematics in weaving is fascinating.
My day at the SIT Select showcase was very inspirational. Going to events like this keeps me excited about textiles and craft, and my motivation high.
by katie | Nov 13, 2015 | Blog
I attended a very interesting talk by the illustrator Bevery Philp. Illustrators create images for a wide variety of industries including computer games, advertising, packaging, textile design, books, graphic design, web design, the list goes on and on.
Beverly Philp started out doing a graphics degree, her tutor at the time was Rayman Briggs who is the illustrator for The Snowman books. Drawing was a huge part of the course along with printmaking, bookbinding and photography which are fundamental skills she continues to build upon.
Her success started when she finished uni and visited lots of companies to show them her work. It was her doll photography that caught their eye. She would make clothes, accessories and sets for dolls, making them up to look like celebrities. After some time she found that this was not very cost effective due to the huge amount of hours that needed to go into each doll so she decided to go back to uni to do her MA at the Royal College of Art.
During her MA she focused more on drawing and photography, producing two documentary books, Alfie and haircut. These again were a success when she finished her MA and can be seen on her website below.
She is constantly drawing, sketchbooks are a vital part of her work and she finds that she learns a lot about herself from looking at these. Her sketchbook is full of drawings of people and all using quick lines in black pen. Sometimes she will talk to the people she draws to enable her to understand them better and incorporate their personality in to her sketches.
As well as the black line drawing she experiments in her studio with different ways of drawing such as drawing something upside down or using lemon juice and baking it. This allows her to broaden the types of illustrations she produces.
Her final illustrations are very loose and and use a lot of texture. The textures she uses are all ones she collects, makes or prints herself. The illustrations start out with the hand drawn images and the textures separate, she uses a computer to put them together and play with the imagery.
Beverly does a lot of work for magazines and newspapers where she has to work to very tight timescales. For these she has to get rough sketches for her initial thoughts done within days to send through for approval. She then works on the ones they like. Working with publishers gives her projects with longer timescales.
From listening to the talk it was clear she is a lovely down to earth person who has to work hard to continue the work she loves.
Her illustrations really are beautiful and worth a look:
www.iambev.com
by katie | Aug 14, 2015 | Blog
I am really excited to be doing some dip dyeing again. Now that I have access to a great dye lab I am able to be more experimental with my dyeing. I am also trying out some beautiful new yarn Geelongora. This is a mix of Geelong lambswool and Angora. My graduated colour teddy bears were popular a couple of years ago so I will be creating a few more once I have sampled my ideas.
by katie | Aug 5, 2015 | Blog
I have just arrived back from an amazing break in Warsaw, Poland. Warsaw is a very modern city that seems to be continually changing with lots of new buildings. The building that stood out to me were in the old town in Warsaw and although brand new they are restorations of the beautiful buildings that use to be there.
The colours, patterns and lines of the buildings are very inspirational to me.
by katie | Jul 10, 2015 | Blog
My finished my knife! I am so pleased with the way it has turned out. I had never made anything like this before with metal or wood before and so I have a new skill set to add to my portfolio.
I must admit I did start with a pack which consisted of two rectangles of beech wood, two piece of brass, an unfinished blade/spring and a piece of nickel for the rivets. From this I cut, drilled, shaped and finished the individual pieces before putting them all together with rivets and finally shaping he handle.
When making the knife, a lot of time was spent taking it apart. Once all of the pieces were roughly shaped the internal working of the knife had to be perfected, in particular the kick and the part where the blade meets the hinge when open. In order to get these exact the knife had to be put together to see where the changes were required and taken apart to make the changes gradually in small steps. Therefore, this was repeated many times until right.
I had great fun making this and will never look at a knife in the same way again.
by katie | Jun 26, 2015 | Blog
Today I was lucky to be able to attend a knife making workshop with Grace Horne. She currently works in Sheffield making handmade knives and scissors, she has been making beautiful knives since her degree in 1992. Please have a look at some of her work at http://www.gracehorne.co.uk/.
There are quite a few elements to knife making and I was introduced to just the most simple parts today. There wasn’t enough time to be able to completely finish the knife but I just have some finishing touches before I can begin the final assembly of the knife. I am finding that knife making is about getting everything absolutely perfect, all of the pieces need to be made very precisely to enable it to work properly and visually it needs to be flawless. I like this because in this sense it is very much like weave, there is no leeway for imperfections.
I am looking forward to finishing my knife and very much hope to continue learning more craft skills.
