Textile Travels E-Book

Anne Kelly

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 97

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

An evocative exploration of how travel - local and far away - can inform, inspire and enhance textile art. Travel has always featured heavily in textile art, from artists' 'travelling sketchbooks' to large-scale installations mapping coastal erosion or the effects of climate change. In this book, renowned textile artist Anne Kelly shows how to capture your travels, past and present, in stitch, with practical techniques sitting alongside inspiring images. She begins the book by discussing maps in textile art, including their iconography as well as incorporating actual maps into textile work. She then goes on to explore the influence of different cultures from across the globe on textile art. From India and Peru to Scotland and Scandinavia, the book shows how to harness traditional techniques, fabrics, motifs and colours for use in your own work. The chapter 'Stopping Places' captures the moments in time on a journey that can be distilled, remembered and documented to create stitched postcards, sketchbooks and other pieces. The final chapter, 'Space and the Imagination', explores the possibilities of space travel as a source of inspiration, and covers inner space too, with artists mapping their own emotional journeys. Including a wealth of practical tricks and techniques as well as exquisite photography of both Anne's own work and that of other leading textile artists, this fascinating book will inspire all textile artists, embroiderers and makers to use past travels to influence their work.

Leseprobe

Textile Travels

Anne Kelly, Environmental (detail), mixed-media textile.

Anne Kelly, Japanese Kettles (detail), mixed-media textile.

TextileTravels

Anne Kelly

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Mapping the Journey

Chapter 2

Heading South

Chapter 3

Due North

Chapter 4

Stopping Places

Chapter 5

Space and Exploration

Resources for Journeys

Conclusion

Featured Artists and Contributors

For Investigation

Further Reading

Suppliers

Acknowledgements

Index

Anne Kelly, Sweet Box, crayon drawing.

Travel collage with the author as a young artist.

Introduction

‘Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.’

Mark Twain, American writer and humorist

Travel has been a central feature of my work and this book is by extension a continuation of the themes explored in my previous books Textile Nature and Textile Folk Art. I have always admired my adopted country’s predilection for travel and exploration. In my solo and collaborative project work, travel has shaped and directed the themes, materials and outcomes of my textiles. At the same time, it has helped me to question and research the landscape, culture and traditions of the places I have visited and my surroundings closer to home.

Travel features heavily in textile art, whether it is a guild member making a ‘travelling book’, or a large installation mapping coastal erosion and the effects of climate change. As artists, travelling helps us to locate our place in the world and share our practice with new audiences. There is much to learn from different cultures and textiles are the residue of that education, also contributing to our identity as textile artists.

Festival of Britain map, hand embroidery from kit, UK 1950s, collection of Judith Mansfield, Todmorden Books. The symbols for the different areas of the UK are simplistic and nostalgic, yet the piece works as a whole without any signage, apart from the title and to indicate where London is.

As part of my practice, museums and collections are always a great resource for making work. Celebrating and being inspired by what has been made in the past and understanding how it influences current makers can also be a part of the learning process. I have featured some wonderful exhibitions and collections in this book and my interpretations of work from them.

Chapter 1: Mapping the Journey looks at maps and ways of using them in textile artwork.

Chapter 2: Heading South looks at the influence of southern cultures on textile art, from Peru to India, via Australia, New Zealand, China and Italy. Traditional motifs and techniques engage new audiences while celebrating their rich cultural heritage.

Native Canadian and American cultures offer a huge variety of imagery and source material for textile artists. Work made referencing them can provide new insights into their purpose and this will be explored in Chapter 3: Due North.

Chapter 4: Stopping Places captures the moments in time on a journey that are distilled and remembered. A seaside hotel, a railway journey or a walk on the downs can all be the basis for a single piece or a series of work.

In Chapter 5: Space and Exploration, we will look at how imagination plays a big part in creativity, and connecting with the themes of space and boat travel will both be explored in this chapter. Visually, the moon and sky can be arresting, and it is fascinating to see how different makers interpret this. Sails and boats use textile in their construction and they are a popular theme for textile artists to portray in their work.

The final short section of the book, entitled Resources for Journeys, focuses on organizing materials and ideas before, during and after a journey, whether you are close to home or enjoying an adventure far away. By collating paper, fabric and stitch, we are able to condense and preserve memories, making observations and new, meaningful work. By understanding elements of our world near and far we can better portray, preserve and protect it.

Anne Kelly, Map Inspiration Box, mixed media.

Chapter 1

Mappingthe Journey

‘I’ve always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going – in a sense it’s three tenses in one.’

Peter Greenaway, British film director

Mapping

I am sitting on a train, looking out of the window, thinking about the landscapes, towns and hamlets we are passing by. How do I begin to convey or portray this in cloth, and how do I tell the stories of the lives of the people and the histories of the places seen? A good start is to begin with a map, which can be many things. It is always an interpretation, no matter how true to life. Cartographers make a series of decisions about representation to create a map that we can read easily. In this sense, map-making is allied to drawing – another translation from three dimensions to a flat image.

In this chapter, we will look at how to use and make maps in your work in a creative and meaningful way. Old maps can be a source of information about the history of an area but they are also beautiful objects in themselves. I favour the old Ordnance Survey maps that can be found in charity shops and second-hand bookshops, as they have a scrim backing which makes them easier to cut and manoeuvre. In my Map Tin Boxes project, I used an old map of Paris, found in a French brocante shop, to line the tins with before adding the stitched elements.

I have used maps in a variety of ways in my work and will be exploring some of these in this chapter, as well as returning to them later on in the book. I also wanted to see how maps can be interpreted and act as an inspiration for contemporary work for a range of other textile artists.

Anne Kelly, Map Tin Boxes (open), mixed media in tin boxes.

Anne Kelly, small unframed works on paper, mixed media.

Maps as images and as guides

» Lines

» Railways

» Airports

» Contours

» Seas

» Lakes

» Rivers

» Mountains

» Parks

» Forests

» Plains

» Paper maps

» Postcards

Anne Kelly, Map Tin Boxes (closed), mixed media.

Making Map Tin Boxes

Source some old tin boxes from charity shops or online. I used old stock cube, medicine and sweet tins, which I had long been collecting but was unsure of what to use them for.

1 Clean and dry the tins thoroughly. Some of the rusty or worn elements can be part of their charm, but you don’t want them to have jagged edges or to be disintegrating.

2 Line the tins with paper or thin cloth. I used an old map sourced on a trip to Paris, gluing it into position with a glue stick and then varnishing it with acrylic varnish, although a diluted PVA mixture could be used.

3 Choose some stitched elements to go on the outside of the tins. I cut out some small pieces from scraps of vintage embroidery. These were then glued into place and varnished as in step 2.

4 Finally, choose a suitable sized piece of embroidery to place inside the tin, so it is visible when opened. I used some existing work that I wanted to showcase, and I made a paper template to fit the space before pinning it to the embroidery and cutting it out.

5 Glue your work into place and varnish the whole piece, inside and out. You may wish to leave the interior embroidery unvarnished, depending on the look you want.

Anne Kelly, Map Tin Boxes (open), mixed media in tin boxes.

Hannah Streefkerk: Manual Repair

Hannah Streefkerk is a Sweden-based artist working with nature and place to create a remarkably textural map of the world. Hannah describes her ongoing project as follows:

‘I embroider a map filled with lichen. In daily life people are often in a hurry and feel stressed. There is no time to pay attention to the smaller details around us. Details such as lichen are often taken for granted and hardly watched. Lichen are very interesting organisms, [the product of] a symbiotic relation between different kinds of algae and fungi. Lichen are good indicators of how the environment is doing. Clean air is needed for lichen to grow, so in places where you see a lot of lichen, the air is not polluted.’

‘My works consist of installations in situ, outside or inside, and embroidered pieces. In a lot of my works, textiles and textile techniques, like crocheting and embroidery, play a significant role. I use a lot of time-consuming handcrafts and I always embroider by hand. This is important to me because it illustrates the nature of time in my work. Nature has a certain rhythm, whether it is changing with the seasons or in the course of a single day. This rhythm is visible; seasonal changes can be seen and my latest work relates to the passing of time in nature and to the cyclical nature of time.’

Hannah ‘manually repairs’ her natural surroundings, and emphasizes details in nature with needle and thread. She creates a visual metaphor for our responsibility for taking better care of our environment.

Hannah Streefkerk, Africa (work in progress), mixed-media textile.

Hannah Streefkerk, Africa (detail), mixed-media textile.

Vanessa Barragão: Botanical Tapestry

Vanessa Barragão is a Portuguese tapestry artist based near Porto. She develops wool and dyed yarn collections for use in her work through an eco-friendly artisanal process. Her connection with the landscape, and the sea in particular, can be seen in her work. She creates environments by combining craft and recycled materials into sculptural carpets and tapestries.

Vanessa Barragão, Botanical Tapestry, mixed-media tapestry, in situ at Terminal 2, Heathrow Airport, London.

Vanessa Barragão, Botanical Tapestry (work in progress), mixed-media tapestry.

‘The Botanical Tapestry,’ she explains, ‘is an artwork developed to celebrate the partnership between London’s Heathrow Airport and Kew Gardens,’ so linking the themes of travel and map making. ‘Installed in the departure forecourt of Terminal 2, Heathrow Airport, this tapestry is 100 per cent handmade, using ancestral techniques like latch hook, crochet and felt needle. It took more than 520 hours to weave, using 8kg (18lb) of jute and cotton and 42kg (93lb) of recycled wool. This art piece represents the world map. There are visible all the colours present in our continents and oceans and some threatened species, like the coral reefs, and some plants around the world.’

Kate Tarling: A Sense of Place

Kate Tarling is an embroidery artist from Bristol in the south-west of England whose work illustrates how looking at places closer to home can also be inspirational. In her artwork Bath, Kate has managed to create a pictorial representation of the landscape in her neighbouring city through her instinctive use of colour and by creating texture with stitch. She describes her process for creating her maps:

‘The inspiration for them comes from a desire to recreate a place, stitch it down permanently and capture a moment. Our surroundings are always changing but these textile maps are a fixed reminder of our place in time. I make them by painting onto a cotton or linen fabric and then stitching on top using freehand machine embroidery.

‘I read human geography at university many years ago and my current textile work is heavily influenced by those studies, as my maps are all about a sense of place and stitching memories into a landscape.’

Kate Tarling, Bath, mixed-media textile.

Kate Tarling, detail of embroidered landscape lampshade, mixed-media textile.

London Collar Case

I found this case in a vintage shop in London, and wanted to make a repository for my work about London. I have a strong connection to the city and have happy memories of visits there when I was a child. My grandmother lived in north London and I always associate her house with lace, so it was a natural fit to make London Collar Case