When I was making or remaking embellished work of this type a year or more ago I categorised them all as part of sets called either Meltdown or City, (1,2,3 etc) but later some of them seemed to find other names. This one is now In the Sun. Most of the pics I put on this blog or elsewhere are quite low resolution by current online standards but this one has a few more pixels.
It can be satisfying to take colour to an extreme.
Perhaps it’s time to take up painting with paint, I feel the need to get the paint on thick and then flourish the pallet knife! But in the meantime scraps of shiny fabric, threads, the embellishing machine and my recently serviced sewing machine will have to do.
The piece had quite a lot of metallic thread and shining cloth but this doesn’t show in the photo, also I have further embellished it which makes the surface matt, even fluffy. Quite a lot of the work here is cutting away, to create depth and reveals but this is contradicted by the action of machine stitching which pulls the layers of fabric tightly together. Some hand stitching now.
After a busy few days in London, several art galleries as well as street actions culminating in the gigantic – 800,000 peaceful folk – Palestine demo I’m doing some sewing, revising some old ideas. Meltdown, a series of fabric pieces, embellished, embroidered and heavily stitched, begun in 2015 as a response to the disaster at Fukushima (2011 on-going).
The subtlety of colour and stitch is rather lost in these photos.
I enjoy creating something – maybe not beautiful but hopefully of interest – using the tiniest of scraps picked up from the studio floor or stuffed away in waste bags.
Most of the thread I use for larger pieces or clothes (rare now) is organic cotton which is a little heavier than ordinary cotton, but for this work rayon, made from wood pulp is perfectly good. Not a plug just that these are widely available, Marathon rayon threads are very low cost and although they can be a little weak for some work they have a pleasant lustre and strength isn’t an issue here.
Fukushima is in the news again, as it will be periodically for the rest of your life and beyond. This time it’s for starting to dump toxic water into the Pacific, with partial blessing of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who are trying to hedge their bets, or just lying through their teeth. And a Netflix drama series about the 2011 events.
Anyway I thought I might re-post the piece I made for my Masters degree.
I have managed to lose most of the files, sketches, notes, images &c. I collected for the project and for the rest of the MA, probably when I moved home, twice.
My overall feeling about this piece is that I would like it to be darker and with bigger and bolder images, but at the time of making I was thinking of the confusion surrounding the 2011 events, and a recent visit to the COBRA museum, Amsterdam https://cobra-museum.nl/ where the anti-art movement of Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam (post World War Two) is displayed.
FlagFly 