"This Week" series, "A Fortnight"- Diaristic works.

"This Week III"

"This Week" Series. 

Aspects of the work:
1. Materials used are: 
a. warps -silk that has been dyed in the eco-dye baths used for the picket fence explorations.
b. wefts – cotton fibres ‘unwoven’ from the eco-dyed calico used for the picket fence explorations.
These materials were all in studio stock – ready – at – hand.

2.Weaving is a repetitive activity. The stitching used is based on variations of knot making, drawing through various loops at various frequencies.

3. The pieces are created with one warp sett per day; each sett containing 8 warp ends – referencing the eight hour mundane day (If you sleep eight hours, work eight hours there can be only eight hours left for the everyday). They are built up to a seven day composite or a weekly unit.

4. It is planned to make these on an ongoing series across a period of time.

5. The fineness of the materials used and the unevenness of the subtle colouring is chosen to make the thread work existent but illusive. Shadow created by the mounting of the work amplifies as it masks the actual work. This resonates with mundane work that often only has its visibility in the effect it has of maintaining a functioning existence.

6. The fineness of the materiality and the small scale of the thread work evidences maker commitment or an intensity of emotional investment, reflective of the large part of mundane work being emotional labour.

7. The scale of the created work and the form of presentation are designed to stage an intense viewing experience. The details are incrementally perceived on close inspection. This relates to the micro-detail level of care the mundane is mostly involved with.

8. By creating these works with the concepts behind them I feel I have given a materiality to time.

9. The pieces are inspired by the ephemeral nature of much mundane activity – the tales of the work are loose, often unsecured. The passages of the weaving or stitching are mobile on the warp threads – they are not totally fixed or permanently located on their warp setts.

10. The warps used in these pieces are high value Cambodian raw silk. This is life – valuable, hard to come by. The wefts are recycled threads taken from other projects and reworked in a new nature so instead of being hard packed into a tightly woven pragmatic calico fabric – good for lining curtains but very cheap to purchase – they are treated with delicacy and high regard to create networks of beauty and individuation of each strand.

11. The overall impression created in these pieces is of fragility but they also have a tension and resilience in them with the warps being maintained under tension. This reflects the nature of everyday life – fragile but surprisingly resilient.

12 It is widely believed that the everyday is a set of habituated practices. This description implies things are monotonously repeated identically over and over but in fact that is never the case in the human process – there are always nuances of variation. The weaving and stitching is using a very limited vocab of automatic or habituated activities but every expression is subtly different from all others

My appraisal of the process and its result: 

The woven daily strands – These pieces are very interesting for me as a maker, it is possible to use valueless material (left-overs) to create the strands and I’m sure the framing can be resolved. (At time of writing this post I am still completing the matte board framing trial which is being held up by the slowness of the glue drying. I hope to complete this in time for the contact session tomorrow but it is really a mute point). These constructions while technically interesting to me as the maker do not really speak about the on-going on-goingness of the mundane. No one could read this aspect in the pieces without an extensive backstory so they are not really effective in that respect. They are also not really referential to anyone’s mundane world except mine in terms of media used so I feel this will mean they will be hard for people to identify with and therefore to ascribe value to in the context of a conversation about the mundane. Even if a daily unit is made and there is a 365 day accretion it will just be a large number of items still not speaking about the mundane to people for whom a woven language or a textile language is unknown. They have value in the context of fibre art and weaving skill – in other words in a different conversation. So I am going to complete the gluing, document the result and set these aside.

My gallery statement on the series of "This Week" read as follows:

Seven interwoven and knotted bands, one for each day of the week comprise these works.

Although we think of our days as seperate identities, they are all holistically intertwined and engaged with each other. Like a series of ripples, the decisions and actions of each day impact on those of the subsequent days. The maintenance of the home in the domestic everyday is an incrementally accumulative process. Keeping the home intact is a sensitive task, the structure of its being is fragile and ethereal. Conscious choices are continuously made to maintain this "preciousness".

"A Fortnight"

This work developed from reflection on the "This Week" series. It is a fourteen-day, sequentially woven and knotted exploration of the intersections of days. Each day was allocated a different weft material for the creation of its "strand", evoking the variable nature of what is normally considered the repetitious nature of the mundane. Although tasks are re-performed on a daily or routine basis, their performances can never be exactly the same as time has moved on, other things have occurred in-between times, shifting the substrate of performance. This work references the patterns of time's passage with the clock-like format. 

"A Fortnight" in progress

Ode to Dissolution -Autumn II 25/07/2016

These are some images up close of new experimental works I am indulging in this week.  I am away from my studio for a full week with some unbooked time so it is a nice chance to explore with a small number of materials I had hastily packed, seeing what the materials tell me. My only parameter has been that the works must include some element of weaving or interlacing. The materials - merino pre-felt and silk voile have been eco-dyed in differing dye baths so there are several tonal sets.
My goal with these works is to create beautiful and organic forms that will stimulate visual engagement. Because the works include interlacing or weaving I am having to make an extra effort to break out of the horizontal and vertical rule set my woven work is usually proscribed by.