Textile Creativity Through Nature E-Book

Jeanette Appleton

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

Seitenzahl: 102

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

New ideas for working with nature to nurture creativity in felted and embroidered textile art. Immerse yourself in nature and rewild your creative practice with inspiration from textile artist Jeanette Appleton. With a focus on the versatile medium of felt, she takes readers through a series of ideas for working with nature to boost creativity, inspire, and make us more sustainable as artists. The book covers: • How to capture the nuances of nature through creating exciting felt surfaces – lines of sea, frosted puddles, hedge and grass – and how to translate them into subtleties of texture and stitch. • Transforming recycled cloth by bonding memories, mixed-media and found objects into your work. • Cutting and repairing techniques: making cuts and slits in the layers of fabric to reveal the secret strata of nature beneath, echoing the planet's fragility. • How to make the best use of sketchbooks, maps and mapping to record inspiration from time spent in nature. • A variety of strategies for overcoming artist's block, from revisiting past diaries and sketchbooks to interacting differently with your local environment.  Throughout, the author constantly challenges the felt process, discovering a new creative working practice through connecting with the outside world. Richly illustrated with exciting examples of the author's beautiful and reflective work, this inspirational and practical guide will appeal to textile and felt artists of all levels.

Leseprobe

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1: Which Way? Maps and Sketchbooks

Chapter 2: Stitching Over the Past

Chapter 3: Bonding Memories

Chapter 4: Cutting and Repairing

Chapter 5: Words as Inspiration

Chapter 6: Gathering the Research

Chapter 7: Essence

Conclusion

Sources and bibliography

Suppliers

Index

Acknowledgements

Grass felted by wind.

Foreword

‘The further one travels, the less one knows.’

From ‘The Inner Light’, George Harrison, English musician

Which way? Signpost on headland.

As the world stopped in spring 2020, the pandemic caused us all to reconfigure our lives in unexpected ways, changing from safe, known routines to coping with restrictions and uncertainty. The Guardian newspaper carried the headline ‘Britain Shuts Down’ as I crossed out my usual routine for over 20 years: travel for international projects, teaching, meeting friends and exploring new cities and galleries. I was suddenly marooned in a quiet North Devon coastal town wondering how I would cope with the lack of choice and a journey that now entailed only one daily walk.

Which way? To discover the footpaths surrounding my flat, to find a way to occupy my mind and a way out of a creative lockdown, I began with sorting the past 30 years of photographs, sketchbooks and folders of research of my textile practice into chronological order. This substantial timeline of the past consoled and grounded my unsettled emotions; I thought, whatever happens from now on may not validate my existence, but at least the past has.

The archive revealed forgotten projects, one of which was a sketchbook from 1995 for my first residency in Wales with ‘which way?’ written on the first page and an appropriate quote by the French artist and poet Jean Tardieu:

‘In order to advance, I walk the treadmill of myself but with no more boundaries.’

This directed me to repeat the process in the current day, to treat this vacant time as a residency. I considered my daily walk as work, used to explore and document the surrounding environment, giving me a positive purpose and focus during the start of lockdown.

No more boundaries – path through meadow.

I was accustomed to collecting cultural contrasts as I travelled through countries and cities to share my textile skills, backpacking and staying with kind hosts, meeting extraordinary people. But I was never as alone as I was now, and I had to tune into a new way of looking at and engaging with the local environment. I was living in a very safe part of the country and found myself walking through an amazing biosphere of nature.

A surprising social life began involving brief exchanges with dog walkers, but I seemed to be the only walker without a dog!

Every day revealed uplifting surprises, whether from human activities in the town or nature’s seasonal changes. On my first walk, I stepped over a rainbow chalked on the road telling me ‘Stay safe – smile.’ I found other messages on pebbles lining a path to the beach: ‘You are not alone’, ‘You are loved’ and ‘Stay strong’. These words of kindness and support from invisible strangers gave me reassurance during the initial uncertainty of Covid.

Rainbow drawn on the road.

Pebbles on the path to the beach and various messages.

Introduction

‘Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.’

From ‘Sometimes’, Mary Oliver, American poet

Stems stitched to cloth by tide (see also here).

My aim in this book is to share the methods I discovered during the pandemic to recover from a complete creative block in my textile practice. My work had always reflected a life of travel through contrasting environments, using the felting technique because of its direct links with nomads and land. But this no longer applied to the restricted movements in one place with just my own observations to inspire me. I had never had the opportunity to record a repeated journey with no planned schedule, as previous distance and time was measured by planned flights and accommodation. Now the journey was determined by the exposed physical limits of my body and the weather.

The restricted lifestyle was so different that I found new areas of my imagination emerging. Words would drop into my mind, filling a space of no distractions. The trill of birdsong and plant scents so strong in the open air were things I had not experienced while enclosed in vehicles transporting me to planned destinations.

Pay attention. Be astonished.

Capturing the moments of nature: evanescent dew on grass.

I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the coastal path. During online research I discovered it was a designated tranquillity area, free of light and sound pollution. This environment gave me a calm state of mind while coping with the unsettled feelings from lockdown.

The new experience of early morning walks in low light or mist highlighted the transitory beauty of the dew or frost. This provided an opportunity to discover the details of nature, where the unexpected became big moments of the day and created a unique way of looking. As Irish poet and novelist Patrick Kavanagh states:

‘To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as a man can fully experience.’

A diary line of moments emerged, collected at random, one thought and image leading to another, clumsily flitting between various ideas and working methods to engage again. This resulted in a muddled collection of parts: manipulated old work, new textile samples, sketches, hundreds of photographs, lists of words and phrases, a diary and a step count, newspaper articles and quotes from books. I began to sort them, and my mind, into groups and headings; gradually, a specific context emerged.

I had become immersed in nature, and it was fascinating how it directed me through the development and structure of my work. Compiling and selecting words and images, and discovering their surprising links and associations, can reflect one’s unique creative self for hope in an uncertain world.

Capturing moments of nature: tranquillity, a quiet expanse of dandelions.

Capturing moments of nature: the fragility of dandelion heads.

Which Way? Maps and Sketchbooks

‘Each of us, then, should speak of his roads, his cross roads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreau said that he had the map of his fields engraved in his soul …’

From ‘The Poetics of Space’, Garston Bachelard, French philosopher

Collection of sketchbooks. Maps and sketchbooks helped me to find a direction in the changing routes of personal and creative space.

Using sketchbooks

When I wrote ‘Which way’ in the sketchbook of my first residency, it referred to travelling there, discovering the surrounding environment, and what inspired me on the way. My intention was to develop a design for a textile wall hanging at Nant Mill Visitor Centre, once a fulling mill near Wrexham, Wales. But finding a direction during the pandemic was not easy; with the world in lockdown, my mind seemed to do the same.

I had never been short of energy and motivation, but the inability to fill a forward planner with exciting projects and travel plans disturbed me. I knew I needed a plan, a manageable project to document my changed circumstances both spatially and emotionally, and do something familiar and comfortable. A sketchbook seemed to be the answer.

The sketchbook became a map line for both a mental distraction and a focus, to find a route to reveal the root of an idea, as the Scottish painter Victoria Crowe suggests:

Discovering new paths.

‘A personal symbolic language; a place to play; a place to question; an interpretation of the world; a book of meanings; a memory of trace; a gathering of information; an aid of understanding; a source of laughter and experimentation; a place of poetry and association; a creative journey. Dictionary definitions seem bizarrely inadequate!’

The type of sketchbook I use is influenced by the circumstances; I receive them as gifts and enjoy purchasing them in different locations. Exhibiting with designer bookbinders near Cambridge in 1990 provided me with a beautiful range of shapes and construction. I love the element of surprise while exploring diverse places such as a Japanese temple tourist shop or a village store in a remote part of Australia. I enjoy finding books with a sense of place and purpose, such as my child’s writing exercise book from Tbilisi, Georgia.

Collection of sketchbooks.

Sketchbook details.

The shape and style of a sketchbook can affect how you make the marks within its form. I had found a beautiful folding book in Japan just before arriving in Alice Springs for a backpacker’s journey down to Adelaide in Australia. The concertina shape revealed one folded page at a time, which was ideal when I was squashed on a bus full of young travellers. Keeping the same horizon line throughout the folded pages enabled the whole journey to be seen when the book was pulled open. The continuous line held a week’s journey where I worked along the page without thought of time or restrictions. Sadly, the sketchbook went missing during an exhibition, leaving me with an internal story rather than holding the reality in my hand.

Now a different effect of time and constraint had to be drawn, a repeated daily walking route as far as my body was able. A Christmas gift from my daughter was a Seawhite Octopus Concertina Sketchbook with eight folding pages extending from a spiral-bound spine. Immediately I saw the potential of each folded paper length representing eight months, with the four pages either side providing space for two pages per week. Knowing when this project would end gave me a feeling of hope, a small certainty for my unsettled mind.

Although I had a structure for completing two pages per week, I struggled, as my enthusiasm lessened with the unfolding news of the National Health Service being placed under great strain and a rising death toll. Another distraction was needed, so I looked for a context around the pandemic that linked with the issues of my work.

Lockdown sketchbook.

Travel adverts and articles in The Guardian newspaper began to shift from global to local with a new lexicon of ‘staycations’ and ‘wellbeing’. Even the Government produced adverts stating: ‘Unexplored England: Find the paths and places less travelled. Enjoy summer safely.’

I pasted this new journalism of travel and the environment below drawings of seasonal changes on the coastal paths. The sense of a journey was now split into months, a designated space for blocks of time rather than a continual line.

The shape and marks within the book can trigger visual recognition of other forms or actions. The folding book I created during my Australian backpacking trip gave me an immediate reference to the folding cloth emerging from the needlefelt machine during my residency at the University of Huddersfield in 2003. The continual line of merging colour was like watching a moving landscape from a train or car window.

This evolved into my largest installation, featured in the ‘Through the Surface’ touring exhibition during 2004, curated by Professor Lesley Millar. The suspended folding form was extended to fit the space it occupied, whether at the Sainsbury Centre in Norfolk or the Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto. The double-sided continual length of cloth suggested the shifting moods within a journey and was titled Land Line: Double Edged Encounters. The lost sketchbook had inspired a monumental form, a space filled with a line of journeys, and is now part of the permanent textile collection at Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery.

Land x Line: Double-Edged Encounters (2003), 28.4 x 0.6 x 3m (93 x 2 x 10ft), Sainsbury Centre, Norwich. Artist-produced needlefelt, machine-embroidered labels, heat-transfer images. Produced for ‘Through the Surface’, featuring collaborating textile artists from the UK and Japan. Photographed by Pete Huggins.