Printing on textiles - summer course at NCAD part 2

I previously blogged about the Introduction to Printing on Textiles course that I did a few weeks ago here. This is the second part of that account of my adventures at NCAD. I was thinking about French painter, Henri Rousseau, when I was figuring out imagery for my linen napkins. Here is one of his most famous paintings, The Dream.

After seeing the heat press demonstrations with foliage, I had an idea that I wanted the linen napkins to have a lush foliage design and I kept thinking of Rousseau's work. Here is another of his paintings showing what was in my mind.

I started out thinking that I wanted an overall background colour of green, so painted a sheet of newsprint (with the special ink for the heat press) that was roughly the same size as the napkins.

 

I used the negatives from the Yupo paper to block out the wild rose, and various bits of foliage to block out areas that I did not want the overall colour to go on. The Yupo paper, which is synthetic, melted in the heat press! But I decided it was an unnecessary precaution anyway as the fuschi screenprint of the wild rose was a stronger colour than anything to overlay it. I also decided that I didn't really like the white foliage areas, even if I did like the foliage shapes.

So I painted some other greens on newsprint and ripped pieces to make a sort of collage of colour, including cut-out leaf shapes and real foliage.

This random collage and colour was more satisfactory to my sensibility and my plans were then to just keep layering as I went along.

The class was a small group, so by time my collage layer was ready, the heat-press was free and it was my turn to do another sixty second countdown.

Up until it was time to clean up on the last day, I was working on my layers. I photographed the finished napkins on a bench outside the work room and the sun was absolutely streaming through the huge windows.

These pictures give some sense of the finished napkins. The colour seems fairly correct on the wild rose, but the individuality of all the foliage is easier to discern in real life.

As well as Rousseau for the foliage, I think I was also channeling Botticelli's Birth of Venus by having the silkscreened goddesses emerge from the wild rose. It was an intense, productive and fun week learning this process!

Printing on textiles - summer course at NCAD part 1

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Introduction to Printing on Textiles week-long summer course at the National College of Art & Design (NCAD) in Dublin. The experienced, patient, wonderful and lovely tutor was artist Mel Bradley. On the first day she introduced the small class to heat press printing on synthetic fabrics so that we could gain some understanding of the possibilities of this process. The day was one of experimentation and fun!

On the second day Mel gave some demonstrations of silk-screening on fabric and how to create our own stencil designs using newsprint and/or Yupo paper (a more robust synthetic paper).

Mel's demonstrations, of course, made everything look so easy, but she was also using very simple techniques and basic shapes to prove that designs did not need to be complicated to be beautiful.

When I got to the class on Tuesday morning, Mel and her assistant, Tríona, were preparing workboards for everyone, which was soft on one side and covered with wipeable oilcloth, and hard wood on the other side for cutting. This is my workboard in my workspace before I started working!

I cut out a basic wild rose stencil from Yupo paper to be my basic screen image. I had brought in six linen napkins that I wanted to refresh with textile design and I also brought in four tiny silkscreens of archaeological goddess images from different cultures (for instance, an image of the Venus of Willendorf and  an image of an ancient Egyptian Venus) that I had prepared many years ago.

This is the wild rose silkscreened onto the first linen napkin. As you can see, the cloth must be taped down to the soft part of the workboard before screening.

Here are two napkins with both the image of wild rose and goddesses screened on them, hanging on the wall to dry completely before I do anything else to them.

Midweek I brought a few acetate rose leaf stencils into the class thinking I might use them. My husband had made these stencils when he was painting his suit jacket for our wedding in 1995. Here I used a hard round brush to stipple ink onto the linen through the stencil, but decided this process took too long and it wasn't actually what I had in mind for the napkins. Though I knew already that the heat press process and inks would not be as intense on natural fibres (such as linen) I decided that it was this process that I was most interested in and planned to spend the last two days with working on foliage to get all six napkins completed by the end of the course. I'll continue with the results on the next blog!

The Map - exhibition at Rua Red Gallery, Tallaght

A couple of weeks ago I went to see The Map at Rua Red Gallery before it closed at the end of that week. The work was an enormous collaborative commission by Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon, in response to the "history and legacy of Mary Magdalen".

In Ireland any response can only be nuanced -- not only as the name of the female disciple of Jesus, but as a concept attached to the systemic abuse and incarceration of women, with the collusion of the church, since the founding of the State some hundred years ago. 

Thus Maher's and Fallon's response is politically, historically, as well as artistically charged. Using traditional concepts of "women's work" - needlework of all kinds (appliqué, embroidery, crochet, sewing skills) -- as well as paint and print, they created a huge work of art, a textile sculpture, using the language of cartography. 

There are islands, winds, constellations, flora and fauna in abundance throughout The Map and the details are exquisite.

There was a documentary video outside the gallery in which Fallon and Maher spoke of their collaboration as having its starting point in the banners they created a few years ago for the "Repeal the 8th" marches prior to the referendum regarding the 8th amendment (whereby a fetus had the same rights as a living being, making abortion criminal under any circumstances).

As with maps of old, various sea monsters roamed and Maher and Fallon used these as both witty and pointed decorative devices.

Each detail in The Map is important, so I found myself examining portions and trying to get a handle on it, while stepping back periodically to take in the whole view of this work full of wonder and awe!

As I am not tall, I couldn't quite see all the details at the top of the work. The only other way I could imagine it being displayed is on a huge table that I could walk around.

I agree with Maher's description of the work as one of "material culture" and I hope there is the opportunity to view it again.  I do think it belongs in one of the State collections - at the National Museum, National Gallery or the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). I hope someone has the foresight to see the importance of this work, both artistically and historically.

In gallery two was the accompanying aural work We Are The Map, an ekphrastic poem by Sinéad Gleeson with music composition by Stephen Shannon. It was both pleasant and enlightening to hear the writing wander through The Map after having seen it. In a darkened room, the aural hopping from island to island became a meditative experience as I was able to gain a fuller understanding of the imagery within the artwork. Of course, I appreciated the beautiful writing of Gleeson with whose work I am already familiar.