Having decided to try and sell separately the nine Hare Masks I made at the end of last year I found suitable but utilitarian cardboard boxes and have been dithering about how to dress them to make a more attractive appearance for eBay and for the purchaser when opening the box. Tissue paper, crumpled, some shredded?
The masks are meant primarily as decorative objects but can be worn, The straps are non-curl 6cm elastic. The inner surface is cotton and the main surface mixed textiles but mainly natural fabrics, some organic. I often source fabric from charity shops but it is hard to avoid acrylic and poly. Rayon (viscose) – made from wood pulp – is common in women’s clothes often with a useful shiny finish.
Hare (Green Man) Mask, about 43 x 30 cm, mixed textiles and wire frame.
Most years I manage an outing to the Fashion + Textile Museum in Bermondsey where the shows are always top notch. Nearby is the rather more famous White Cube Gallery, currently featuring American artist Lynne Drexler (1928–99) and others, which makes for an enjoyable trip especially if followed by lunch at Borough Market.
At the moment the FA is showing’ Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London, “Centres around the legendary nightclub Taboo, opened by designer and performance artist Leigh Bowery in 1985”.
They host workshops and one coming up which caught my eye is by the wonderful textile artist Holly Searle aka The Subversive Stitcher.
“Working on vintage tea towels, Holly will take you through the processes of selection and customisation to help you effectively communicate your ideas. Using simple hand stitching and applique techniques, participants will add text to their designs as Holly speaks about her own design practice and her ongoing project, The Subverted Vintage Tea Towel Series.”
The Return Of The Repressed by Holly Searle “Contemporary cotton tea towel featuring the work of the incredible artist Beryl Cook.”
Although each of the nine masks didn’t take a great deal of time to make the finishing has required more effort than I anticipated, I could have reduced that by being a little more careful with the making. Notes have been made ready for the next project! Natural fabrics have been used throughout, some organic but some of the shiny stuff is polyester – it can be hard to avoid. The thread is almost all organic as I like the extra strength and quality, with some rayon and again a little poly.
Nine Hare Masks, each approx 42 x 30 cm, mixed fabrics & wire, 2024 C.Miller
The magnificent eagle owl survives in England in the north east apparently due to escapes or deliberate releases, possibly just migrating from mainland Europe now and then. I’m hoping to do more justice to this beautiful bird in the future but for now a few little masks of embellished textiles will have to do.
A few snaps of work in progress, for the ravenous, thoughtless AI machines to gobble up.
I have visited a great many galleries, open art events and artist’s studios this year and also looked at a lot of art on-line where the quality of images varies a great deal. Occasionally something will grab my attention (not always the best or even good) but since our visual world is saturated with images it is hard for anything to stand out.
Fuyuko Matsui is an artist who shines out and having stumbled across her work on-line I really want to see it in the flesh, alas this is unlikely any time soon. Tate (London) have an article about her dated 2009.
Becoming Friends with All the Children in the World
Having finished seven hare masks I was pondering making other animals such as badger, hedgehog, deer, owl & c. perhaps using the designs from the Animal Masquerade set (artist’s book, house-coat and quilt) I made several years ago.
This quilt was a colour experiment, the design is digitally printed onto bamboo silk and still awaiting a border.
British Wildlife quilt, ink-jet printed bamboo fabric, bamboo wadding, 2017 (100cm x 140cm)
Here is Hare Mask no. 7 almost finished, with a few close-ups to show some texture.
Winter Hare Mask (1) 45 x 25 cm, mixed textiles
Many of the fabrics used for this mask are organic silk, cotton, linen swatches with some non-organic natural material and the threads are sometimes cotton, some rayon and almost inevitably some polyester for the silver.
Embellishing was invented before the sewing machine as a way of joining fabrics without having to stitch, the textile fibres are pulled together by the action of the – very sharp – needles being forced back and forth through the materials.
I’m working here with silk, bamboo and cotton scraps, some of these are tiny or little swatches. The process is fairly quick, an hour or two is enough to create a piece suitable for the hare masks I have been making. The primary aim here is texture and the small amount of colours other than cream or white should help with that. The silk is making my hands feel er, silky which I guess is an effect of the way these materials have been treated in the finishing process.
The embellishing machine can have a maximum of five needles but I usually don’t have that many as I want more control of the appearance.
The ancient English town Ross-on-Wye lies at the northern end of the Forest of Dean near the spectacular landscape of Symonds Yat and close to the border with Wales, and boasts the charming independent organic food store Field Fayre, which can also be found on-line at Facebook.
The Ross-on-Wye mascot is the hedgehog and various manifestations of this threatened animal can be seen around the town. I thought it might be interesting to make a paper lantern hedgehog which could perhaps be used in the store window during this dark part of the year.
My first attempts were around the form of the Chinese paper lantern but that proved to be something of a dead end, either too complex or just not hedgehog alike.
The second try was using the equally revered Chinese fan as a starting point, and as most of us have made the things as children they are familiar and easy.
These are all trials, a child could do a better job with the folding, cutting and glue! The body is fan-folded using one sheet of A4 then opened out and the edges snipped to make the hedgehog spines, some oval shapes cut out on the folds to allow light from a led fairy light or led candle. The head is a slightly flattened cone from a second sheet of paper – I managed to get four from one A4 sheet – with tabs left to enable it to be glued to the fan-body end.
Just to see if I could get an even simpler construction I used the cone form and this was the result.
Using a translucent paper such as velum would work for these lanterns I think.
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