Record, Map and Capture in Textile Art E-Book

Jordan Cunliffe

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

Seitenzahl: 112

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

A guide to the increasingly popular trend of transforming data into beautiful textile art. This stylish and fascinating book from up-and-coming textile art star Jordan Cunliffe shows how raw data, maps and personal experience can be distilled into textile art, producing mesmerising works with deep meaning, whether obvious or hidden, and concentrating on the smaller, quieter moments that make up our lives. Jordan explores the use of stitched data to tell stories, pinpoint special places on maps, convey secret messages, and record personal detail, for example daily walks or nightly sleep patterns. Her finished work is beautifully precise, including a long strip of fabric containing a stitch for every day of her life, a reimagination of a favourite childhood book in unreadable code, and pleasing beaded representations of secretly important documents. Almost any aspect of your life can be represented in graph or map form, and here are many practical ways to achieve this, whether it's recording the colours of flowers on a favourite path to create your own unique palette, or encoding your most private thoughts in beaded morse code. This visually stunning book explores a new way of working and will help you explore a fresh new angle in your embroidery and textile work. Illustrated with a wealth of examples of the author's own work as well as pieces from other data-focused artists from around the world, Record, Map and Capture in Textile Art proves beyond all doubt that data can be beautiful, and can inspire stunning works of stitched art.

Leseprobe

This fascinating and inspiring book shows how raw data and personal experience can be distilled into textile art, producing mesmerizing works with deep meaning, whether obvious or hidden, and concentrating on the smaller, quieter moments that make up our lives.

Renowned textile artist and embroidery designer Jordan Cunliffe explores the use of stitched data to tell stories, convey secret messages, and record personal detail, for example daily walks or nightly sleep patterns. Her finished work is beautifully precise, including a long strip of fabric containing a stitch for every day of her life, a reimagination of a favourite childhood book in unreadable code, and pleasing beaded representations of secretly important documents.

Almost any aspect of your life can be represented in graph or map form, and this inspiring book gives you many practical ways to achieve this, whether it’s recording the colours of flowers on a favourite path to create your own unique palette, or encoding your most private thoughts in beaded Morse code. It will help you explore new ways of working and develop a fresh new angle in your embroidery and textile work.

Illustrated with a wealth of examples of the author’s own work as well as pieces from other data-focused artists from around the world, Record, Map and Capture in Textile Art proves beyond all doubt that data can be beautiful, and can inspire stunning works of stitched art.

Contents

Introduction

Materials

DIY Project

Data Visualization

The Bayeux Tapestry

Linear time

Sleep

Sleeping and Waking

I Could Sleep for a Week

Overlapping Lives

Artist’s Work: Laurie Frick

Artist’s Work: The Tempestry Project

Artist’s Work: Olivia Johnson

Artist’s Work: Ahree Lee

DIY Projects

Steganography

Steganography in Wartime

21.3.2001: A Binary Beaded Diary

Coded Alphabet

Artist’s Work: Sam Meech

Artist’s Work: Raw Color

Artist’s Work: Holly Berry

DIY Project

Algorithms

Ada Lovelace

Overlapping Number Series

Mapping the Sky

Artist’s Work: Richard McVetis

Artist’s Work: Evelin Kasikov

Artist’s Work: Channing Hansen

Artist’s Work: Michelle Stephens

DIY Projects

Conclusion

Graph Paper

Binary Code Translator

Morse Code Translator

Contributing Artists

Index

Acknowledgements

Introduction

‘Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.’

VINCENT VAN GOGH

I have lived most of my life in a small Lancashire town, a place where textile history is woven into the surrounding landscape. Everywhere you turn, there are reminders of the textile industry, from the still-standing chimneys of the long-gone cotton mills, to the soot-blackened bricks of the houses, so indicative of a mill town. My childhood home was built by the local mill owner as a wedding gift for his son, and my own first house, located on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, was constructed in 1838, most likely for a mill worker. It was built in the view of a looming building, then Brierfield Mill, a steam-powered cotton mill that provided employment for much of the local population.

Research into my family tree reveals textile links everywhere. My great-grandad was the mill manager for a woollen mill in Dewsbury, where a blanket that I still own was produced. My great-uncle emigrated to America after the war and his factory produced the wool for ladies’ coats, which he would ship back over the Atlantic Ocean to his sister (my nana). My paternal grandad was a sheep farmer, and I spent many childhood hours in that Yorkshire farmhouse, a place where my granny taught me how to knit, a wonky but cherished scarf emerging stitch by painstaking stitch. Textiles, and their history, are imbued into the fibres that make me, and I have carried a passion for them for as long as I can remember.

During my BA degree course at Manchester School of Art, I found my niche in embroidery. Something about the meticulous nature of hand stitch, and the conventions surrounding this technique, appealed to me, inspiring me to take this age-old tradition and make it my own. Further still, after completing my MA, I discovered a fascination for data visualization, that is the graphic representation of information. This contemporary subject is fast-paced and ever-changing, yet when paired with such a traditional skill as hand embroidery, it becomes laborious and slow and meditative. There is an irony that the data might have changed by the time the stitching is complete.

As my own practice has developed, I have found that the most important elements of my work are storytelling and counting. It must have a meaning; this is the storytelling aspect. I find it easiest to shape my work around a narrative, so I look for stories or ‘data’ that I want to share, searching for the most efficient way to relay that information through embroidery. More often than not, this narrative relates to everyday life – the smaller, quieter moments that in retrospect can become magnified. I want to give a voice to these junctures and to acknowledge their understated power by taking the time to record them. It is important to me that these moments are recorded meticulously and accurately, which is where ‘counting’ comes into play: I represent the data in a literal sense, so if I am documenting something that lasted 10,000 days, I will create 10,000 stitches – spending time on something is how I honour it. For this part of the work, the planning is as important as the embroidery, and I consider it to be integral to the artwork.

Visualizing Time project (detail): see here.

Linear Time (detail): see here.

There are certainly quicker ways to produce the pieces that I make, but I enjoy the work being slow. When every stitch carries meaning, it is important for me to take it stitch by stitch and to consider each one, rather than looking for shortcuts. It also allows me to carve out much-needed thinking time as my hands work to create the repetitive stitches, and I often find that a part of my brain turns to problem-solving when I am in this state, unpicking and untangling the swirling mess of my thoughts until they become as neat and orderly as the stitches on my cloth.

If I am struggling for inspiration, I’ll often pick up a needle and thread and start some repetitive stitching. With no destination in mind, I find the activity soothes me and a new idea usually emerges. In the same way that returning to the scene of an event can jog a memory, going back to the familiar action of stitching helps stimulate my thought processes. If you find yourself in a creative slump, or you are struggling to unwind, why not try it too? Set aside a short period of time each day or each week, and keep returning to the same piece of cloth. Let your mind wander, and as you lose yourself in the familiar act of hand stitch, you may well find your creativity.

I focus on the ‘everyday’ in my embroidery because I want the work to be relatable to everyone. I sometimes keep the descriptions of my pieces deliberately vague, as that way I find that others can find their own story within the stitches. Most of our experiences tend to be universal, after all.

‘We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.’

MAYA ANGELOU

Materials

‘It has been said that next to hunger and thirst, our most basic human need is for storytelling.’

KAHLIL GIBRAN

Although much of my work is data-driven, it is important to me that each piece retains a human aspect. All data is really just storytelling, and because textiles can hold an amazing personal connection, the choice of fabric used can enhance that storytelling capability.

Choice of Fabric

When I create a new piece of work, the first thing I take into consideration is what kind of fabric I will work onto. This always falls into one of two camps: either I choose a sentimental piece of fabric, or I use a grid-based fabric. Here I will discuss the benefits of each through a particular piece of my work, and hopefully these examples will help you as you make decisions of your own.

Sentimental fabric

Whenever I picture my grandad, he is always wearing one of his M&S knitted pullovers, garments he would wear until they fell apart. After he died and we were sorting through his things, I brought one home with me and kept it safe. When I felt ready to honour my grandad’s life in stitch, this sweater became the perfect canvas.

It struck me that while Grandad knew me my whole life, I only knew him for a small fraction of his. Sometimes it is easy to forget that people lived entire lives before we knew them, and I wish I had asked my grandad more about his while I had the chance. I decided to commemorate the intertwining of our lives, and in this piece I made a red stitch for every day of his life and a pink stitch for every day of mine. It shows all the life he lived before me, where our lives overlapped, and where mine now carries on without him.

Grandad’s Sweater (2020). Sentimental knitted sweater, embroidery thread. 610 × 630mm (24 × 24¾in)

As I stitched the red section, I really took the time to consider what my grandad had been doing on each day he had lived. I thought about what his childhood must have been like. I wondered which stitch marked the day that he met my nana, or when his children were born, and which showed the day he moved abroad for work, and did he know at the time how much that would impact the rest of his life?

This is a living monument to my grandad that I can add to, as the time since his passing increases and the pink section grows on its own, weaving my own story into the fabric he wore. Sometimes, when I want to tell a specific story, there is only one piece of textile that will suffice. Perhaps you have similarly sentimental textiles at home that could help you to tell a story?

Grandad’s Sweater (detail).

The Tiger Who Came to Tea (2020). Red thread, muslin cloth. 185 × 160 × 30mm (7¼ × 6¼ × 1¼in)

Grid fabric

As a child The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr was my favourite book, and when I was around three years old, my parents would find me ‘reading’ it to myself. Of course, I couldn’t read at this point, but I could recite it word for word, and I even knew exactly when to turn the pages.

I wanted to recapture this childhood memory somehow, so I decided to rebuild the book stitch by stitch, sewing a cross for every letter of the story. I wanted this piece to be a direct copy of the book, so each fabric page is the same size as its printed counterpart and the layout, spacing and format of the words are exactly the same as the original text. This was the closest I could get to creating a new ‘language’ and it was my way of reproducing the experience of ‘reading’ what was essentially a set of unknown symbols as a three-year-old. I could simultaneously understand each word, while not actually recognizing it, as the pattern of shapes on the page revealed the story to me. Even now, 30 years later, I can still remember the order and cadence of the words.

Because it was so important to match the original layout of letters, I needed a grid (evenweave) fabric, as this would make it so much easier to measure, count and plot each stitch to ensure the scale and composition correlated precisely to the original book pages. From the evenweave fabrics available, I chose a muslin cloth, because the loose weave of the fabric gave the pages a translucent quality, which meant I could see what was coming on the next page, in the same way that as a child I had known exactly how the story would follow on subsequent pages.

Aida and linen fabrics.

Types of Evenweave Fabric

If there isn’t a particular sentimental textile item that I want to stitch onto, then I will always choose an evenweave fabric. To weave a piece of material, warp (vertical) threads and weft (horizontal) threads are crossed over and under each other, and when the thread is evenly spaced on the warp and weft you get an ‘evenweave’ fabric. I find these grid-like textiles to be really useful for my storytelling pieces, as I can keep an accurate count of the stitches – this precision is integral to the kind of work I do. There are a lot of options, so I like to go to the fabric shop and choose something that has the right scale of grid for my project.

Evenweave fabrics vary in weight, stiffness, texture and colour, so it is good to look around and experiment with a few different types. There are no hard and fast rules about which ones you have to use, but I have listed some of my favourites here. Something to consider is thread count, that is the number of threads within a one-inch area of woven fabric. More fine threads can fit into an inch space than coarse threads, which is why, generally, fabric with a high thread count is softer and more supple.

Aida    This material is specifically designed for cross-stitch embroidery. It is stiffer than linen fabric, but the holes are easy to stitch through and to keep count of. Aida comes in lots of different colours and a variety of thread counts. The higher the thread count, the smaller the space between the holes. This is an excellent material for a beginner, but as you progress you may want to experiment with other types of evenweave fabric.

Linen    This is a natural fabric and therefore has more inconsistencies in the weave (known as slubs) than a manufactured product like aida. Some of the warps and wefts will differ in thickness, meaning your line of stitches may move up and down a bit, but I think this adds a lovely quality to the piece.

Muslin