So why the delay - well I have just got a little stuck with where to go next with textiles and my art piece is consuming every spare minute because it is a huge piece of work and by it's nature - it is an uncertainty - it may work really well or may just fall apart at the final stage or worse still, may just not get finished in time.
Here it is in progress
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| The Bristol car engine, free machine embroidery on dissolvable fabric |
But for textiles I just have lots of ideas that still need to worked at along with a little more research, and hopefully a solution. An email from my mother-in-law suggested that this is about me, my damage and repair, caused by carl but not now about him. This makes a lot of sense and therefor I think I will look at the idea of making a feminine garment - it may be monochrome. dissolving / disintegrating and loosing it's form, but equally it could be formed with an exquisite panel suggesting that damage can be repaired and may take of a different guise - one that may be fragile but strong, damaged but still beautiful.
I will look at the exhibition Future Beauty, 2010, 30 years of Japanese fashion. An exhibition that showed how fashion has been turned into art - away with the magnificent ornament and extravagant techniques of the post war era and instead the stark and monochrome with a new direction where holes, rips, frays and tears would emerge from the fabric.
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| Paper dresses - modern take on the traditional |
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| Shadows, monochrome |
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| Flatness |
I also want to look at look at Kirstie McLeods work about Dreaming Dresses. For her degree show in 2004 she designed dresses that misbehave - they dissolve, melt, inflate, cleave together and are bound. McLeod dissolved a crinoline dress in water down to the skeleton but said it was neither a sense of boredom or relief.
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| Kirstie McLeod |
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| Kirstie McLeod |
McLeod mentions John Berger as an influence for her work - this sounds really interesting and I will try and to get his book Ways of Seeing from the library at uni. He suggests that women look at themselves - her actions indicate how she would like to be treated but men are just actions. Is this how I look at myself - the damage is part of me and maybe my strength rather than just something that needs to be fixed - it is making me who I am now and helping my work to develop.
