Narrative Textiles E-Book

Ailish Henderson

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 124

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Bring your personal story to life in colourful, vibrant textile art. Ailish Henderson is an exciting young textile artist whose work is fun, quirky, tells interesting stories and uses a diverse range of media, though always grounded in cloth. In this gorgeous book, she explains her working methods and how you can harness them in your own work to create unique, deeply personal textile art pieces. She encourages you to draw on your own personal memorabilia to create work that is meaningful to you – the intention is to capture a moment in time, a memory to treasure, a look on a face, a glance of love from a pet. Along with work from the author, the book also showcases work from textile artists such as Aran Illingworth, Jenni Dutton, Woo Jin Joo and Jordan Cunliffe. It includes: • Materials: where to source cloth, using found and recycled materials, curating vintage fabric, incorporating precious family pieces in your work. • Processes: finding inspiration, creating mood boards, keeping sketchbooks, developing work from drawings, capturing character. • Techniques: Screenprinting, hand and machine stitching, appliqué, mixed-media collage. • Subject matter: the narrative line, self-portraits, family snapshots, history, identity, travel, favourite animals, even famous faces. Throughout the book the author encourages you to work with freedom, instinct and honesty, bringing in a wealth of different techniques to create authentic stories in cloth, and most importantly, enjoy yourself along the way.  

Leseprobe

Ailish Henderson’s quirky, deeply personal textile work takes inspiration from her family life and history, creating evocative and meaningful pieces with a combination of vintage fabric, found textiles, sketches and photography. In this fascinating book, Ailish explains her working methods and inspirations, as a guide to help you create your own unique and personal textile art.

Chapter One explains how to start your project, looking at sketchbooks, mood boards and sources of inspiration. Chapter Two shows various ways of collecting and sourcing materials for your pieces, with a focus on memorabilia and found textiles. Chapter Three explores different ways of making, from printing to stitching, sketching or sculpting, always with a focus on cloth and textile. The rest of the book takes you through a series of narratives from Ailish’s own life that have shaped and inspired her work, giving helpful tips and prompts along the way. There are also contributions from other leading textile artists who create narrative textiles.

Beautifully illustrated with the author’s own work and that of other contributing artists, such as Lise Howie, Caren Garfen and Daisy May Collingridge, this book revels in the stories that can be told through textiles. It is the ideal book for any artist who wants to explore new sources of inspiration and create work that is meaningful to them.

Castles in the Sky Dress (Ailish Henderson, 2013). Childhood linen, thread, antique familial lace.

Dedication

To my grandmother, Narg: you wove the narrative within my soul.

To my grandmother, Lillian: I never met you, yet your fine soul led my pen to paper.

To my mother, who sewed the seed and taught me to read.

To my father, who taught me how to feel life.

Finally, to Barnabus, who led me into love again.

Thank you.

Red and I (Ailish Henderson, 2011). Oils, brown packaging.

Clasping after the loss of nargdad. My treasure Narg and I (2012).

Contents

Dedication

Once upon a time…

The narrative custodian

How to read this book

Processes in motion

Boards of visual accumulations

Drawing it out (from head and heart)

The ‘S’ word (sketchbooks)

Materials: the rags we see as riches

Happenstance

Ancestral

Archival

Making actions

In print (Narrative One)

Mash-up moments (Narrative Two)

Stitching it out

Unusual sculptural (Narrative Three)

Walking the narrative line

Yourself (Narrative Four)

Family ties (Narratives Five, Six, Seven)

Nosey notions (Narratives Eight, Nine)

Fabricated (Narrative Ten)

Gone by (Narrative Eleven)

Flying the nest (Narratives Twelve, Thirteen)

The healing powers…(Narratives Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen)

The Re-

The End (tying up the narrative)

Featured artists

Featured quotes

Sourcing materials

Inspirational places

Index

Appreciations and loves

Once upon a time…

Step into my curious world, the tall and true tales of Ailish.

As a child, I was nurtured, cosseted and nourished in warmth. I led a Little House on the Prairie-style life, home-schooled by my dear mother, and I owe her for everything that flows from my head, mouth and hands. We did it all, including nature days and school trips to many a historical location – don’t get me started on the graveyard lichen trip or the chemical compounds of the White Cliffs of Dover!

As a young woman, my mother had made all her own clothes, and she endeavoured to pass this trait down to me. Let’s just say we differed on this. My weapon of choice would always be my pen and paintbrush – or so I thought. Yet here I am, writing a book about textiles!

My mother is the reason I look around the corner and go the extra step. We walked the curriculum line: every exam taken, no chickening out allowed and 9-to-4 days were mandatory. I thank her now for my ability to stay focused and driven. I thank her for our bedtime story nights, The Teddy Robber and glances of voyages across the seas. She may not have taught me the theory of everything, yet row by row my spelling is only in order because of her arduous ‘line-giving’.

As an artist, I actively use my own narrative line to build visual textile-based artworks. Almost every area of our lives can be used to create artistic matter. Be it good or bad, life’s path will be full of inspiring fuel to create artworks; we just need to comprehend how it can be used. This is where I hope to journey with you. I will walk you through using your own stories as a source of material. From traditional embroidered examples, through mixed-media stitched collage, to using the most subtle colour palette within a sculptural setting, there will be an aspect that captures your own interest.

My own personal pieces are used as illustrations, with suggestions as to how you can repurpose these ideas for your own personal stories.

This book is full of images, using examples from my own practice, from other narrative-focused artists, and from my own past and present students.

As the story-keeper, I will lead you through a variety of possibilities so that ultimately you can create a personal version using your own tales. I will leave you with a ‘comma’; you can then finish the sentence – your sentence, your narrative – leading to whatever your ‘full stop’ might be.

A selection of my handmade sketchbooks.

Life can be beautiful, no matter the obstacles along the road. It is up to us to look for the beauty, to capture it and tame it to become a visual storyline: our story.

‘I will tell you the story, of Jack and the Glory…if you don’t speak in the middle of it.’

I held my breath and waited for my grandad’s (henceforth Nargdad’s) conspiring twinkle: Silence. Curiosity killed the onward vocals…. I caved, too impatient to wait. Of course, he was never going to tell me the story. He was teaching me a vital life lesson: patience.

My dear Narg, his other half, with knitting always in hand, her stories were always my demand. She never had a book in her hand. Life can be cruel, and only as I grew did I appreciate why she always made her stories up. I thought she did it especially for me, not realising her eyes had ceased to see.

Jack and the Bean Stalk, Red Riding Hood…this duo of grandparents, without knowing it, sowed the narrative deep within my soul. Ask any of my friends: even now I will go around the world and back just to tell the story of my day before I get to the point.

Yet isn’t that what makes life beautiful? The ability to see life with more volume than the skeleton narrow view?

This early foray into the world of non-book-led stories created a requirement for me to develop my own stories. This, of course, could have been translated in many ways. For me personally, it has found expression in art.

Artist at work.

We all have our own life stories, or those we make up for ourselves. How can we use these as the ignition to produce textile art or mixed-media outcomes?

Within this book, I will not prescribe to you any definite course, one that you cannot make your own. I will lead you through a multitude of possibilities and starting points; things to make you think ‘what if I…’

Cherish your curiosity; embrace your own history, travels and the things that make you uniquely you, and use them to fuel your textile art projects. It is my hope that my book will give you the strength to follow your own narrative line and develop all those characters that lie in your heart.

‘Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start’

– Julie Andrews, The Sound of Music (1965)

Grandmother, what big eyes you have! (Ailish Henderson, 2023). Self-cut pattern, wool, intuitive cloth, treasured findings.

The narrative custodian

Moments matter. Do not let them scatter.

As an artist, and indeed simply as a human being, that statement shapes my path, dominating my thinking and practice. I like to question the impact that life’s events can have on our ongoing narrative; the things that are set to make us or break us. Strongly entrenched events, experienced in early years may only come to the surface decades later, where they often take on new meanings and can finally be understood and processed.

This focus has led me to specialise in research to connect the repair and restoration of you, the author of works, to the act of making – ‘Maker: Mended.’ This evidences itself in my work in both the written and practical form.

I wasn’t always inclined towards textiles. I began life very much led by pen and paint, pursuing an early education in the so-called Fine Arts. I was a raised in a family with a mother and grandmother who enjoyed cloth-driven practices, while my father’s side was very much paint-driven, so maybe I was always destined to bounce between the two. Experience has taught me that I don’t have to, I can combine and define a narrative path for myself. It took a happenstance with a certain textile arts tutor to formally introduce me to the material bound. I had met my match! This was love at first sight, and the novelty has never worn off.

As I have developed my practice, I haven’t bound myself to any one technique. I enjoy questioning how to marry textiles, sculpture and, yes, paper and pen.

My focus as an arts practitioner is to build evidence and research to provide depth and substance to my belief that, through artistic practices, one can ignite a form of repair for oneself, a ‘Maker: Mended,’ narrative in real time. The comma (,) at the end denotes the cold fact that there is no one-time fix. However, one can access a form of soothing and constant care through the application of one’s hands.

The author (2019).

Considering odes to one’s grandmother in direct connection to textile narratives.

How to read this book

Within these pages, I will give you the inspiration, the desire and the inner strength to fly. However, I won’t tell you the correct flight path, because there isn’t one. It depends on the turbulence, the conditions and the destination: your destination. Having said that, I will not leave you high and dry, at a loss as to how to proceed, so that you just don’t bother.

As much as possible, I have endeavoured to illustrate visually how you could approach things. I always find that a ‘could do’ list is much more tempting than a ‘have to’ list, don’t you think?

The narratives you will encounter are a juxtaposition of the fabricated and the true. You may identify with some of these narratives, but my goal is for you to locate your own story, thereby building your own personal textile narrative.

Example of a scrapbook exploring ancestral linkage with grandmother.

Processes in motion

Red Ties sketchbook work (Ailish Henderson, 2020). Bamboo base, handmade paper, red ink, thread with selected thematic imagery.

Initial sketching out of Gigi’s Garden (Ailish Henderson, 2019).

This section is divided into three subsections. I hope they become jumpstarts for your own artwork. They are not a prescription, but they are important. In my early learning days, I remember going to an interview with a portfolio of my artwork; all carefully executed watercolour illustrations. The judging committee challenged my inspirational sources.

‘Where from?’ came the opening gambit.

‘My imagination, of course!’ I responded.

‘Yes, but artwork must have a background,’ was their ‘checkmate’ answer.

Granted, at times it is lovely to just make impromptu artwork, without any prior plan. However, I have learned over the years that the best ideas have a ‘walk-before-you-run’ aspect. In other words, you must know the basics before tackling the complex.

This is where this section comes into its own. If you are like me, on any gallery visit, you tend to be curious about why the artist in question created that scene. What went through their mind? Usually (although this is not a given), there will be a reason or a thought, which turned into a plan, which turned into a visual.

The key is not to get bogged down with doubts about what will appear in your creative hands. That is why I have titled this section ‘Processes in motion’; it is about keeping moving and taking the pen for a walk, rather than sitting down and reflecting too much.

Let’s look at three key ways of doing this:

1.   Mood boards/vision boards

2.   Drawing

3.   Keeping sketchbooks

Boards of visual accumulations

I enjoy creating these boards. I also enjoy having a nose at other people’s – either my own students or when visiting events where designers bring along not only their finished work, but also the creative history behind it.

Stitched collage portraits mood board. (mannequin based).

Red Ties mood board (2018). Selected paper-based media to plait together own narrative line with grandmother’s.

Studio handmade visualisation board, capturing current musings.

Create your own boards

Where to begin?

Have a theme in mind: faces, for example.

What do I need?

Gather a selection of photos, magazine cuttings and any other visual fuel you wish to put on one page.

What might it look like when I am finished?

Here are a few examples. You may wish to structure yours in a certain order, creating it on a flat table until satisfied, then stick it in place on a large piece of card to give it some structure.

Sample themes?

Nature, family, travel…decide on what suits you personally.

FEATURED ARTIST:

Lise Howie

I had the privilege of spending time with Lise when she came along to one of my masterclasses at The Biscuit Factory, Newcastle. We had previously been in touch over social media – she currently lives in France. I loved her open-hearted nature which I observed through her creations. The works are not frothy, nor flimsy, they have an edge without becoming uncomfortable.

Lise Howie reveals:

‘I was auditioning textiles – stitched, botanically dyed and vintage – for a piece called Me, Myself and Eye. The embroidered flowers, top right, are from a tablecloth stitched by my grandmother, a flower crown metamorphosing into a crown of thorns. The finished piece considered mental health, particularly schizophrenia, from the perspective of its effects on the five senses – auditory, visual, olfactory, gustation and tactile – and how this might manifest in the form of hallucinations, persecution, and delusions.’

Visual auditioning for Me, Myself and Eye (Lise Howie, 2021). Mixed textiles.

Drawing it out (from head and heart)

Okay, let’s cut the ‘I don’t know where to start, so I won’t bother…’