Friday 19 May 2017

DISrupt-ed

Last week I went to Stroud to visit the DIS/rupt textile exhibition and to do two workshops that were each run by a textile artist who had work in the exhibition.

The exhibition was spread over two sites - the Museum in the Park and the Lansdown Hall.  This meant that there was ample space around each exhibit and made for great viewing.  The exhibits were made from various media and were very thought provoking.   The work for the exhibition was provided by members of the Textile Study Group and details of the exhibition can be found here: DIS/rupt.

I drove down on Wednesday and spent the afternoon looking at the exhibitions and walking around Stroud.  There were other exhibitions to see around the town as part of the Select Festival.  There were some pictures of birds by Jilly Cobbe in a rather lovely cafe called Meme in George Street, where I had a chocolate explosion of Hot Chocolate and a chocolate brownie.  Yum!

The first workshop on Thursday was run by Ruth Issett called Disrupting Repetitive Pattern.  This was really well prepared and we achieved an amazing amount in the 2.5 hours we had available.

We did quite simple monoprinting with a limited palette of colours.  I chose turquoise and lemon and later turquoise and yellow.  At various points Ruth asked us to use black or white as a third colour.  We started on calico.  I ended up with this but I think I was a bit heavyhanded with the black.

We moved on to Cotton Organdie which I loved using.  You can disrupt everything you are doing because it folds so easily and holds the shape.




This is the start of the second piece of organdie.

I disrupted this by screwing up the organdie as tightly as I could, flattening it out and then printing on top of it.

Ruth gave us some black organdie

And then she gave us two pieces of her own dyed fabrics with a square of freezer paper on it.  I printed over the top and then removed the square.

I may have been a bit heavyhanded again with the white.

There was a short break between workshops where I went out for another look at the Lansdown exhibition and had a hot chocolate with a friend.  You can read about her view of the workshops on her blog.

The afternoon workshop, Text in Textiles was run by Julia Triston. This was another excellent workshop.  I didn't take photos whilst I was working!  We had to choose a word or phrase  and find ways to disrupt the word.  I chose 'exiles'.  My initial thought was to put the letters in pairs and have 'ex' larger than 'il' which in turn was larger than 'es'.  Julia suggested I might put blocks of colour and put the letters on top and disrupt the line of rectangles with some of the letters.  I built up a background of calico pieces and sewed them together with running stitch to infer pathways.  I used bondaweb to attach the blocks of colour and the letters.  I still have to finish stitching the 'e' at the top right (which currently looks like a 'c'.)

On Friday I did a little tour of Gloucestershire to view other of the Select exhibitions on the way home.  I went to Painswick to visit a felt exhibition at ACP.  The clothes were beautiful.

Then I called at the Malthouse Kitchen & Bar where there were enormous drawings of children dressed as superheroes called 'Future Giants'.

And then on to The Nursery at Miserden to view the sculptures.


If you're ever down that way Miserden is well worth a visit.  It's tucked away in the Cotswolds.  It's one of those villages where the 'big house' owns the village.

My final visit on the way home was to New Brewery Arts which had a few items for the Select Festival but mostly I went to see Emily who has a studio there where she make beautiful books.

I had a lovely time and my head is full of ideas from both the DISrupt exhibition and the two workshops.

And since the workshop I have continued to stitch and the piece now looks like this.


Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice



1 comment:

  1. Wrote that sounds a couple of exciting days with so much to do and see. As I was reading I realised that I would like to be part of a creative group locally, I'll have to look into this. The exhibition and contributors sound wonderful. I loved the pieces you did in the workshops and how your exiles looks when completed. Lucky you, no wonder you had so much to think about when you got home.

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