In my last post I talked about how creativity tends to creep up on me when I am immersed in process. I follow a set process when developing a new series ... I work on the colours first - pinning them on my design wall for assessment. Then I do the printing and pin pieces up until my design wall is covered. I discard fabric that doesn't 'fit' without thinking too hard about why. I then sample different types of construction. In my Hidden Message series this resulted in several pieces going in the bin before I was happy. With my Ruins series (and the series I am developing now) building a background made of bricks felt 'right'. Having stitched some small sample backgrounds I turn to my design wall again. I don't do sketchbooks - I do pinning things to a design wall until something 'clicks'.

Today I pinned up my two sample backgrounds. I rummaged through my boxes of dyed fabric and pinned up a selection of colours. I am not going to decide yet if the foreground will consist of dyed fabric or printed fabric or stitch yet. They are just up there. I added a couple of photos I took last summer of an old gasworks.

Then I used one of my favourite 'tools' - I cropped and enlarged small sections from the photo and pinned the results up. And I got that wonderful tingly feeling! I don't know what size the finished pieces will be or how I will apply the foreground but I do know what I'm going to be spending the next few months doing.

My new partner in art Helen Conway wrote a great post last week called '3 reasons you should know your place'. She talks about how knowing the place, physical or otherwise, that recharges your creative batteries, knowing the place your art practice has in the art world and knowing the place you want to reach is empowering. It should be no surprise to anybody that knows us that I agree with Helen. We are both 110% committed to our art and, just like in our respective day jobs, we both strive to be the best that we can be. And we both know that reflection and self-awareness is an important part of the jigsaw.

But when it comes to the detail we are very different. In her post Helen writes how the repeated ritual of sitting down in her favourite cafe triggers the flow of creative. I can guarantee that, for me, sitting down anywhere with pen and journal posed is enough to empty my head completely. For me creativity (whatever that really is) happens mostly by stealth. It happens when I am immersed in process. I think that is one of the reasons I use intense stitching in my work. I have to concentrate when I'm doing this as I am pretty obsessed about getting straight, parallel lines but quite often, out of nowhere, I have a light bulb moment. Only then do I pick up my journal and pen!

I am a textile artist. I know that that may mean my work is viewed in a certain way in the art world but that is OK. My work is who I am. And how I work is who I am. I don't sketchbook. I don't draw. I don't work in chaotic, organic disorder. I do let my scientific training loose when I experiment with new colours, new marks or new methods. I don't make one off pieces to fit other peoples 'theme' - I let my work go where it wants to go. My methods of working are slow so I have to pick and choose which opportunities to pursue. I am a realist - it is likely to be 10 years before I can create art full time so I pace myself. I know how my art practice fits into my life. And I know my place.

As the saying goes 'another year over, a new one just begun'! And I have started the New Year by getting into the studio and doing some printing. For me there is no start or end; making art is a continual process even if there are days or even weeks when everything I create goes in the bin. Nor do I wait for January 1st to decide what opportunities to pursue in 2017. Galleries tend to plan 2 years in advance and most 'calls for entry' are publicised many, many months ahead. And so I do my 'big picture' planning looking forward over an 18 month period.

Today however is a good day to tell the world about what I will be working towards in 2017 and into 2018. I am very pleased to announce that myself and artist / friend Helen Conway are working towards a joint exhibition at Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery in the autumn of 2018. The exhibition will be called Fragments and will use the upper gallery which is a big, wonderful space in which to exhibit large scale works. We are also hoping to add a second venue for spring 2018. My work will be focussed on industrial landscapes both present and past. Although it will feature new works from my Ruins series I am committed to creating two new, parallel series; one on current, working buildings / landscapes and one on industrial buildings / landscapes from the past.

Because of the way I create new series I know that it is likely to be many months before I produce finished works. If I happen to have suitable work ready there are a few exhibitions that I would like to submit too (including Fine Art Quilt Masters) but I am not going to 'force' the evolution of new works to hit deadlines. Of course that means that I will inevitably have fewer things to do a happy dance to in 2017 but look forward to dancing myself silly in 2018!

It is that time of year when we look back at what we have done and, possibly foolishly, make promises about what we will do in 2017. So today I am looking back at 2016 and tomorrow I will look forward.

2016 has been an amazing year for me as an artist. The big stuff: I had pieces selected for Breakout: Quilt Visions 2016, SAQA Wide Horizons V, Fine Art Quilt Masters, Quilt National 2017 and SAQA Layered Voices. My piece Ruins 5 won the Art category at Festival of Quilts and I made my first 'proper' sale just before Christmas when Ruins 4 sold whilst on show at Quilt Visions in San Diego. I had two exhibitions as part of the Etcetera group, have had older work touring with CQ 'Elements' and had a couple of pieces shown in Visions Art Museums on-line exhibitions. WOW, not sure if my head will squeeze through the studio door!

I have made a determined effort in 2016 to increase my presence on social media. Having resisted for many years I have embraced Facebook, and to a lesser extent Instagram, and made many new friends along the way. I think this has really helped drive traffic to this blog and my website. This piece will be my 63rd post in 2016, a nice increase compared to 52 posts in 2015. But the real growth has been in visitors and views. In 2015 I had 3069 views by 652 visitors. As of this morning I have had an amazing 9635 views and 2262 visits in 2016. 66% of views are from the UK and 21% from North America. Another WOW!

So have I been successful because the planets have been aligned or the gods have smiled down on me? No, it is a combination of hard work and luck. As of this morning I have spent 964 hours in my studio this year - that is an average of 18.5 hours per week. I put in extra hours during the 3 months that I was 'between jobs' and this compensated for the hours lost whilst I went through the shock of redundancy and whilst I focussed on my new day job. I didn't keep accurate records in 2015 but will continue to do so in 2017. I completed 18.87 square metres of work in 2016 compared to 9.57 square metres in 2015 but this is somewhat misleading as I started 2016 with 2 large Ruins pieces part made and a large stack of printed fabric ready for other pieces. Working in series definitely increases output.

2016 has been a pretty awful year for many, many people with loved ones lost and a frightening surge in voilence and hate around the world. There is much to be miserable about much to take comfort from. A hug, a memory of a beautiful sunset, a fragile pattern and wonderful colour on cloth ... Happy New Year everyone!

Definitely! And here to prove it is 'Happy todays?' baby sister.

Baby 'brother' just did not feel right. Maybe because it is part of series that is about me, my emotional state and the calming influence of place? Maybe because I am tainted by the stereo type of textile art as a form of female expression? I would hope not but there is no denying that the wonderful textile / quilt community I am part of is predominantly female.  I wonder how male textile artists would label their work?

In between wrapping presents last week I did manage to prepare and pull some breakdown screens. I got some really promising marks by using a screen made with torn strips of freezer paper gently ironed onto the screen before rollering on a very thin layer of black thickened dye. I also made a screen using strips of torn masking tape. I wanted the marks to be delicate so pulled through with lots of print paste. And replaced the paste if it got tinted with colour.

However those lovely marks only appeared from the first and sometimes second pull. After that everything went 'blobby' and not at all what I wanted.

I have found before that I get the best marks and the most 'pulls' when I dry breakdown screens outside on warm sunny days. Drying out screens quickly and thoroughly is not easy in the winter. I have tried drying this batch of screens next to and above radiators and I still only get one good pull. Trying to develop a new palette of textiles based on this low success rate could be really frustrating! Luckily I am not working to a deadline so, although Plan B looks to be a good one I am putting it on hold until spring. I wonder if Santa can bring me an early spring?

Just where did the week go? And why am I stressing about the state of our carpets? Or debating the need to clean the oven?

Now I am an intelligent and well organised person. I buy cards and wrapping paper in the January sales. I have trained my children to submit Christmas present wish lists with web links and costings in plenty of time. I order the turkey from M&S in early November. And I stopped aspiring to be a domestic godess years ago and 'learnt' to live with a (slightly) messier home.

But the same thing happens every year. Preparation for Christmas seriously derails my goal of 20 hours a week in the studio. Actually I have time in the studio over the last 10 days - shopping on the internet, wrapping presents, writing cards. Figuring out the optimum date to clean the stairs carpet so that it won't get mucky again before 'the big day'.

And yes, all the while knowing that I am truly lucky to have such woes. But I can't help wondering if there are many middle aged male artists out there longing to get back to making art?

It is a good job that I have a Plan B as my experiments over the last week or so have failed to give me a 'WOW' moment. The results didn't even fall into the 'Ugly Duckling' category of pieces that might fit in with what I'm trying to achieve with some additional process. The experiment has been educational but not in any way that is connected with what I think I'm trying to achieve.

I started with 8 pieces of cotton each 'marked' with a different medium. It turns out that my water resistant acrylic ink didn't put up much of a fight and washed out when put in the soda bath to soak. The soda solution was a beautiful turquoise colour as I poured it down the drain. Luckily (sic) the colour washed out so sucessfully that I can reuse the piece of cloth. The remaining seven, soda soaked and dried pieces were pinned to the bench and a layer of colour added using an open silkscreen.

After batching them I washed and dried the pieces. The original marks were all clearly visible below the layer of colour. The lines I had made with dilute acrylic and with acrylic mixed with Golden Matt Medium looked a little faded and fuzzy but the rest appeared unchanged. I then stripped out the colour using two methods. One half of each piece of cloth was discharged using Formosol mixed with print paste and applied through a screen. The other half was discharged using the cheapest bleach I could find (40p for 2 litres - bargain!) and a fan brush.

The Formosol discharged to a fairly consistent colour irrespective of the original colour. The bleach gave a bit more variation and also some different colours. Neither method affected the original marks. Hmm ... I had been hoping for some really interesting chemistry to happen that maybe striped back or somehow changed the first layer of marks. Instead discharging added colours to the fabric pieces that created a palette that reminded me of street lights glowing in the dark. Which has got me thinking about something else ... maybe the beginning of something else? So the pieces will be hung on a small design wall to contemplate whilst I move on to Plan B!

 

Having worked on the colour family for what I hope will be my new series I need to start creating a palette of fabrics. Where to start? I started by clearing a design wall and moving everything off my 3.5m long print table. I don't do sketchbooks so this is my equivalent of that blank first page. Scary.

Time for a cup of coffee and a think. I want to experiment with building layers. Marks or text being the first layer. Colour (from the new colourway) being the second layer. Then marks or text being etched back into the colour using a discharge process. Thus revealing some of the original marks or text. Sounds simple but there are so many ways of achieving this. Being a list person I went through all my cupboards and pulled out all the different materials that could be used to mark cloth and wrote a long list of all the different ways they could be used - for example using acrylic, acrylic mixed with water, acrylic mixed with fabric medium, acrylic mixed with matt medium ... you get the picture. I cut decent sized pieces of cotton, pinned them to the bench and started.

Having not touched some of the materials in years I guess that I shouldn't have been surprised by how much stuff had dried out and how many containers I could only get into by cutting off the lid! My big long list got a lot shorter!

I am not bothered about the types of marks or even the colour of the marks as I'm pretty sure that most of what I produce over the next few weeks will end up in the bin. I am really looking at how different materials interact. After a pleasant couple of hours I have my first set of 8 different starting layers. Some will need fixing which I will do tomorrow then they will need soda soaking and drying ready for the second layer. It wasn't so scary after all.