personal project part 2

I am finally ready to write the second part of my Personal Project story, well its more of a visual story so lots of photos.


I talked about how I was interested in creating a "decayed" surface to work on and how my experiments with image transfer I had discovered a quite exciting way to produce the look of old billboards and peeling advertisements. I wanted to use this as a metaphor for the tricks that memory can play on us. What we think we remember has changed and the details have been lost over time, also how we can misinterpret an event and weave this faulty myth into our psyche or personal story. Something overheard in childhood for instance that has a very profound on our idea of who we are or where we come from can be so easily misunderstood. If we never get round to discussing these events for whatever reason we may never truly understand who we are or where we come from.
I have just talked myself round in a circle and I am not sure I have made any sense, sorry if you are confused.







Here are the layers of image I was talking about that I peeled away before they were properly dry so that the edges decayed.

Whilst looking at the work of other textile artist I re-discovered Polly Binns and loved the way she used knots, I did some experimenting and really liked the way the long ends of the knots look like birds wings.

Here finally is what I did with my paper birds. Stuck them like specimens on to my quilt. On a purely visual level it adds another dimention to the piece. Metaphorically it represents all those conversations I would like to have and it also conveys how prickly and uncomfortable I find the sort of discussions I am talking about.

This is one of the most succesfull parts of the quilt, I really like the white paint around the edges of the transfers and the way the text and the face are layered.

Here is the quilt before I transported it to college to hang in the exhibition. After seeing it up I decided to cut away some of the acres of white fabric that I had left around the outside of the image area.

Below is the quilt and me at the exhibition.

By the way I decided to name the work,

"Words-half spoken and half remembered".

Thanks for looking.

Lots of Love

Christina

P.S.

Here is one more image, I was experimenting with lighting the piece to create shadows, in the end I decided that it was strong enough with out going that far but I really liked the way it took it to an even darker place.

xxxx

A whole day to myself

Yesterday I packed up my sketchbook and a small snack and took off by myself for the day. No plan. It was lovely.

I started with a quick stop to sketch of one of the old mine workings that dot the Cornish landscape and then took myself over Roughtor to the top of Brown Willy and back, it was so windy at the top I could have been blown off. I stopped there for a quick sketch and to eat my snack, then back to the car and off to one of my favorite beaches, Crackington Haven where I had a proper lunch and long walk on the beach.

I have never been a great photo taker and that day was no exception but here are the few I took and a few of the sketches I did as well.

I enjoyed the day so much I am going to try to incorporate a regular day to myself in my life.

Love Christina xx

Personal Project year one. 2010

This is a little glimpse into the sketchbook I worked in during my personal project.

The front cover

I started thinking about how we communicate and in particular how we can be missunderstood. I began to examine some of the "myths" of and from my childhood. The things that I have always believed to be fact though they have never been spoken about. How the things we thought of as actual events can have been missinterpreted and missunderstood and missremembered as a small child. All the things that have shaped the person I am now and how many of them are based on erroneous memory. Both of the above images are self portraits and they represent anger or frustration and self loathing. I felt that I needed to comfort, wrap up, the me that falls into these mostly momentary fits of self loathing so I quilted me. That is I think when I started looking at the other possibly less obvious associations with quilts, almost a protective layer between you and the world or sometimes yourself. I associate it here very much with a mothers love. The comfort that a mother provides, the protector, the one who picks you up and kisses all your pains away.

This winter I became fascinated with the starlings that cluster in huge clouds over the Moor where I live. I looked at birds in symbology and mythology and found that they were so often used to express "communication". I could also see how a silent communication orchestrated their inticate and collossull formations when they flock. I started including starlings in my sketches and textile samples

I have always been drawn to text in textile work and it is of course one of our most obvious forms of communicating. I also started to think at this point about how my personal project would look and began to sketch and sample out ideas. Above are image transfers that I did using white arylic paint and photocopies. I am really pleased with the transfer on knitting. Particularly the way it decays and cracks when adhered to a surface with stretch like this piece of chunky knitting.

I became fascinated by the decayed surfaces that Norma Starzakowna (above)creates using various print mediums, some look like rust and others decayed concrete. I wanted to create a decayed surface to work on to express the notion of faulty memory and the damage it can cause.

I was also inspired by the way Joan Shulze uses image transfer in her quilts (below). I had already fallen in love with the process of image transfer and discovered through experiment that it is possible to layer up images and if the source is removed before the paint is dry it pulls away and gives a decayed effect, like neglected billboard hoardings.

Below is the start of my personal project. All the images have been transfered on using either image maker or white paint. I started using photocopies of bits of work I have done before or photographs but I quickly ran out of source material and started ripping relevant or interesting images from newspapers (mass communication).


I am almost done now and I am not going to show you my finished piece in this post because I think I have run on for too long, just one more image (below). These are the most literal interpretation of the work in my sketchbook. Little birds cut from the pages of a book. I'm afraid you will have to wait until next time to see what I did with them.

Lots of Love

Christina

xxx