Lines of Thought

Drawn lines, stitched lines, patterns and motifs are the lines of thought drawn out by eight cutting edge textile artists.

The artists are Polly Binns, Michael Brennand- Wood, Shelly Goldsmith, Alice Kettle, Eleri Mills, Lesley Mitchison, Lynn Setterington and Michele Walker. The commissioned works for TACTILE explore these ideas and techniques and the crossovers between textiles, drawing and pattern.

Where do you draw the line ?

The poetry of surface

Surfacing (v) to come up from a state of immersion

Surface (n) the outer boundary of a material body – earth, sea, artwork.

Polly Binns, throughout her career, has been through several states of immersion – in her artistic family’s influence, in investigating form and materials, in academic reflection, in intense looking in the landscape – always surfacing in a different place. The grid in her art suggests a co-ordinate of these shifts; though it remains present, there are changes in form and emphasis. In mapping Binns’ creative journey it is interesting to trace the relationship of grid to surface in her work.

As a sculpture student in the 1970s, Binns became preoccupied by relationships between materiality, structure and surface. In the early 1990s her material knowledge allowed her to articulate complex

ideas of surface and change in the landscape. Since then studio practice is always preceded by a repeated walk, at low tide, in the Blakeney Channel, on the north Norfolk coast. As artist Hamish Fulton says of his practice, ‘no walk, no work.’ 1

Polly Binns

In the inter-tidal marshland zone at Blakeney, distinctions between earth and water are unstable. Binns observes the ceaseless negotiation between natural processes and man’s attempts to mitigate them.

The zone’s surface- not quite land, not always sea, ever changing- is irrevocably altered twice daily by tides and Binns studies these shifts with forensic attention. At the same time, she keeps a daydreaming quality in her gaze, being open to the unexpected, accumulating knowledge of materiality and immateriality.

In the studio, she articulates her memory of the zone’s surface and the sense of the sublime that it induces.

1. see Walking Journey, Hamish Fulton, Tate Publishing, London, 20022.Dermot Moran, ‘Phenomenology as a way of seeing and as movement,’ in The Phenomenology Readers, Eds. Moran and Mooney, London, 2002,p2

Taylor, Barbara (2003), Polly Binns: Surfacing, Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery

Binns’ is a phenomenological approach. Walking, she immerses herself in direct experience of surface phenomena- mud, sand, water, detritus, bird marks, rope marks, vegetation, light. In the studio she aims to ‘describe in all its complexity the manifold of layers of the experience of objectivity, as it emerges at the heart of subjectivity.’2

In the early 1970s Binns looked afresh at contemporary art, away from family influence. In Warhol’s Brillo Pad boxes, Carl Andre’s bricks and Robert Morris’s felt works, she saw a potential for geometry, modularity and materiality beyond the Modernist design she understood so well from her father.

Early student experiments with clay- five porcelain cubes, Untitled 1976 and a wall-to-floor piece, Untitled 1976- reveal that process and material were now her subject matter. She was interested in structure and surface, working intuitively with clay in different states from wetness to dryness, not knowing how each would behave when layered against each other.

Surface and Structure

As a child Binns watched her father, designer John Dawson Binns, draw a pencil grid as part of the sizing process for his designs, which were imbued with Modernist geometry. A finely drawn pencil grid remains a point of departure in Binns’ cloth works but it is not about design precision: resisting the prediction implied by the grid has been a constant challenge.

As a post-graduate student and on into her early career, Binns continued to explore form and material with rigour. She was interested in the layering of surface, the relationship between hard and soft materials and edges started to become important. In Untitled 1977 she builds a surface by negotiating clay and cloth.

Multiple frayed cloth squares are overlaid with pierced ceramic discs, held in place with a spoke of stitch. It is a small, quiet piece but reveals key occupations: the grid, modularity, flexibility, rigidity and edges.

Taylor, Barbara (2003), Polly Binns: Surfacing, Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery

Victor PasmoreArchitectural Relief Construction1965Wood, paint, Perspex

Sally FreshwaterBlue Pewter2004

Lycra stretched over studded board, laminated with pewter foil and stitched with wire

Polly Binns

Polly BinnsTidemarks1995Hand embroidery, machine embroidery

WhITworth LINKS shows how the works in TACTILE link to the Whitworth’s collections that are either on current display or on the Whitworth’s online collections database. Search the online collections database and find other related works by using the following words: sea, walk, ceramics, clay

Access the online collections by going to:http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/collection

The defining characteristic of my work has been a sustained commitment to the conceptual synthesis of contemporary and historical sources. In this respect I have persistently worked within contested areas of textile practice- embroidery, pattern, lace and recently floral imagery. Sites, which offer unbroken traditions, cross cultural connections and a freedom to work outside the mainstream. Textile patterns, in particular, are conveyers of human experience, cultural interaction and identity. Patterning is an encoded visual language constantly morphing via trade and migration. Indigenous patterns hybridize into new configurations. The study of patterns reveals much in anthropological terms about our spiritual cultural and sociological history.

Patterning, specifically floral imagery, increasingly came to fascinate me in 2001.Textiles historically have referenced floral imagery i.e. William Morris, Art Nouveau, Caucasian Rugs, Batiks, Suzani Fabrics etc. My response to floral imagery at college was one of disdain; we were expected as textile students to draw flowers. I was interested at that time in Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Minimal Music, I had no empathy whatsoever with a plant. My research, however, into historical textiles kept returning me to the inevitable conclusion that I

would have at some stage to interpret this endemic connection. My solution was to subvert this tradition via a process of using real flowers not as a source image but as media, I would literally draw with flowers.

Michael Brennand–Wood

In order for my work to have relevance within the here and now it must also synthesize thought and expression that reflects my time. If you get that right I believe you are creating something that has the possibility to transcend the obvious and reach into the unknown, a marker for future generations to puzzle over.

http://www.clothandculturenow.com/Michael_Brennand-Wood.html

‘Stars Underfoot’, a series of large photographic prints began this process in 2001, a residual memory of a textile was improvised using real flower heads, The work was by definition temporary and the photograph became the only record of that process. Having got to this stage and excited by the results it seemed inevitable that I should now move back into constructing a textile. The evolutionary nature of this process had great symbolic appeal, as it seemed to enforce my awareness of the cyclic nature of textiles’ influence.

‘A Field of Centres’, which opened in 2004, illustrated this transposition from the real flowers to the photographic images into almost holographic computerised machine embroidery, mixed media, and reliefs. As is always the case in my work, which is serial in development, additional references crept in, once again reinforcing the organic cause and effect of responding to that which impacts upon practice at a given period of time. I feel fortunate to have been given the opportunity to work within an area that allows insight to be tacitly experienced, qualities that are not discernible from the printed page. Textiles are, if nothing else, about the accessing of information via sensory engagement, touch, feel, scent, sight, sound. We understand deeper levels of meaning in greater depth through the employment of both our sensory and intellectual selves.

Textile traditions for me are not enough; I’m not interested in heritage culture re-workings of existing ideas, however beautiful or exciting. I seek an infusion of both history and experience born out of my life on this planet. The past is instructive, it provides insight and an opportunity to share communal concerns; it roots my practice within a global framework facilitating comparison, it gives me support in the sharing and discussion of ideas.

Michael Brennand–WoodDice ManMixed media stitched piece

Michael Brennand–WoodHide and Seek1992Constructed of fabric inlaid into painted wooden base.

Michael Brennand–Wood

WhITworth LINKS shows how the works in TACTILE link to the Whitworth’s collections that are either on current display or on the Whitworth’s online collections database. Search the online collections database and find other related works by using the following words: English lace, Italian lace, floral pattern

Access the online collections by going to:http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/collection

Shelly Goldsmith

I use textile materials and processes as a metaphor for imagining how psychological states, emotions and memories associated with human fragility and loss can be made visible in cloth. I trained as a fertility nurse and my past work has explored the fluid systems of the body in relation to the beginning and end of the human lifecycle and parallels between these bodily fluid systems and meteorology.

Meteorology and its global cycles have played a significant part in my practice, both as a means of expressing human fragility and the impact imposed upon us. For twenty years or more I have intimately followed the impact extremes of weather have had on my parents, who live in the American mid-western state of Ohio.Their experience of extreme weather systems (their home is located in ‘Tornado Alley’) and extreme shifts in seasonal temperatures have forced them to adopt a radically different approach to the weather than my own.

These things have impacted heavily on my own personal sense of security about my place on the planet and seeing, hearing and reading about these predictions, facts and devastations at some distance has magnified my anxiety. Weather has become a metaphor for expressing fear, anxiety and human fragility in my work. Running through my work are connections about what is happening on our planet and in our bodies. These resonant observations and comparative studies underpin an ongoing preoccupation with the

essential fluids of our joint states of being; water, blood, rain etc. My research into the body has expanded to encompass an understanding of Eastern medicine as my engagement with Japan has strengthened.

I have been impressed and humbled by an approach to grieving the loss of a child in Japan and wonder why we in the West are culturally unable to allow for such an outlet.

My work is fed by research and observation of clinical procedures such as sonography sessions at the Harris Birthright Centre for Neonatal Medicine at Kings College Hospital, London. I engage with nature and geology, recently descending into the bowels of the Onllwyn Open Face Coal Mine in South Wales to collect samples. International Museum collections, such as the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cluny, in Paris, and human simulacra in wax at La Specola in Florence have been inspirational places.

The notion that clothing, cloth, can carry memory, a sense of experience has driven much investigation. I have constructed work that imagines the external life of the wearer, cloth that bears the imprint or residue of life. Originally, I utilised dresses and bonnets intended for girls, but these very gender-specific garments were not pertinent to all. However, it was the Christening robe, a non-gendered garment that became a natural choice with which to develop these ideas and in some way encompass us all. Ultimately, these garments are very strongly rooted in a domestic, familial, English and Christian context, which is my experience, yet, the cultural, ceremonial and historic references are wider. My intention is that this would become apparent to others who have grown up within wider cultural parameters.

The dressing and layering of cloth and textiles over many years, as observed in Japanese Mizuko Jizo shrines1, is unique and emotionally charged evidence of how another culture expresses the power of clothing, in this case, as a memorial to a life that never was. This emotive and powerful use of clothing, on an inanimate object has hugely impacted on my own understanding of textiles, clothing and life cycles.

My engagement with dressmaking, construction and deconstruction, is long standing. My childhood activity of making clothing for my dolls naturally extended into garments for myself and has assisted and underpinned my understanding of working with textiles as an effective and accessible vehicle for the expression of ideas.

1 ‘Mizuko Jizo shrines are places of remembrance, for the souls of miscarried, stillborn and

aborted children – literally children who have died in the amniotic fluid.’ Goldsmith, S,

Children of the waters, Selvedge Magazine, issue 04 Jan/Feb 2005, pg 52-53

http://www.clothandculturenow.com/Shelly_Goldsmith.html

Processes/techniques currently used are:

Sublimation printing Heat transfer printingEmbroidery Hand woven tapestry Laser etching Scolding onto cloth.

How does the domestic influence your work?

The use of reclaimed garments has been a major element of my work over the past few years. These clothes are often picked up in charity shops, bid for on e-bay, or gifted to me by friends and family. Most have experienced a sort of collective time-lapse, having often been packed up, or discarded until the time when they have been rediscovered, reborn, re-invented.

I have been struck by the way second-hand clothing carries memory, and absorbs and reflects physical experience, for example how a favourite jacket takes on the shape of its wearer. In the intimate space between body and garment unspoken domestic anxiety and everyday trauma is played out and captured in cloth - the stains of life are left as a residue on the inside of garments, representing a kind of psychological seepage.

In this new body of work I have listened carefully to the stories that these anonymous garments seem to mutter. Glimpses of domestic interiors, provided by the chaotic rooms of a derelict doll’s house; the ravages of an internal tornado or the final parting thought of the wearer are the various narratives I imagine to be laying just beneath the surface of the cloth or embedded in the fibre. These implied narratives are ‘imagined truths’ I have sought to expose through a series of pertinent technical procedures.

Symmetrical layers of flooding, influenced by Rorschach inkblot tests1 and reminiscent of the medical procedure of staining cells to identify disease seep across the inside of a cocktail dress. Another dress, in an attempt to reveal its latent history, is charred, altered on a molecular level by the extreme heat of a laser.

Utilising both archival plant matter2 and sublimation printing on garments, solid dye vaporises in a process that both physically embosses and leaves a dyed residue on the cloth it touches. The dead plant material, in contact with the cloth for a matter of seconds, transfers its skeletal structure, imprinted like a blush of hypostasis.

1 Hoggard, Liz, Pear-shaped stories, Crafts, No.202 September/October 2006, pg 56-61Rorschach inkblot tests associated with Freudian analysis and a commonly used test in forensic assessment.

2 Pressed plant matter originated in 1946 from the Natural History Museum, Herbarium and the conservation department at the Whitworth Art Gallery.

Shelly Goldsmith 2008 Written for the exhibition Indelible: Every Contact Leaves a Trace at Fabrica, Brighton 2008

Shelly GoldsmithMonsoon Capital1999A pair of funnels, one partly tapestry woven and the other of silk with a heat-transferred image. Linked by clear monofilament tapestry ’warp’.

Sally FreshwaterBlue Pewter2004Lycra stretched over studded board, laminated with pewter foil and stiched with wire.

Shelly Goldsmith

WhITworth LINKS shows how the works in TACTILE link to the Whitworth’s collections that are either on current display or on the Whitworth’s online collections database. Search the online collections database and find other related works by using the following words: baby’s bonnet, baby’s gown, domestic cloth

Access the online collections by going to:http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/collection

Alice Kettle

Alice Kettle is a contemporary textile/fibre artist based in the UK. She has established a unique area of practice by her use of a craft. She has extended the possibilities of machine embroidery: producing works the size of tapestries, exploiting the textures and effects made possible through the harnessing of a mechanical process to intuitive and creative ends.

My work evokes moments in our lives. It is of people and glimpses of stories which mark themes in our very existence. Some are reminiscent works which reference mythology and story telling, using the line of thread to connect relationships and define emotions such as suffering, hope and renewal.

The figures which inhabit the work explore relationships, as do the threads, one placed next to or on top of another. The fabric and the image held together by stitch, express the emotional connection, the sense of touch, texture, and feelings, those emotive sensations which textiles provoke and express within their fabric. Changes in direction in the hatching and stitching add to the relationship with light touching and settling on the surface.

In covering areas of fabric right to the edge there is a slow building up of back and forward free embroidery, the visual evidence of the repetitive movement of the machine stitch. The stitched background is drawn on the fabric; the tension in the thread pulls and distorts. My head is full of pictures, sensations and stories forming and worked into its material. The threads are various in gauge and type, sometimes thick and reflective otherwise matt and fine. Those that are thicker are rolled around the bobbin and the fabric worked upside down, often with the threads loosened to tuft and loop. The stitching is often drawn blind from the back and the vastness of fabric bunched in the arm of the machine. For me this is a liberating act of drawing an unseen image in reverse and subsequently responding. It is a process that can change and be reconstructed and grow, so that the piece is often stitched over, cut up, patched and stitched again. Various machines give variety of line and form.

It is also a process which reveals the sense of self and identity. This work portrays emotional fragmentation, the revealing of the inner self and the subsequent reconstruction of persona. The face becomes a mask, contorting and covering and joining the disparate parts to ‘face’ the outside world. The thread makes physical and metaphorical connections between the touching, sensory quality of textile and the expression of feelings.

Alice Kettle,Three Caryatids 1988-89Machine Embroidery

Edgar DegasStudy of four dancers Charcoal with coloured pastel on paper

Alice Kettle

Henry MooreReclining figureScreen-printed linen

WhITworth LINKS shows how the works in TACTILE link to the Whitworth’s collections that are either on current display or on the Whitworth’s online collections database. Search the online collections database and find other related works by using the following words: portrait, tapestry, mythology

Access the online collections by going to:http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/collection

My instinct has always been to embrace both painting and textile traditions without having to conform to either. I feel a huge sense of liberation in this chosen area. While the act of drawing is central to all my work, I delight in the raw beauty of all my materials- whether they are fabric, thread or paper. I see no distinction between the paper-work and the fabric-work as each is vital to the other. In any case I regard the process or medium as incidental. The content of the work is my main concern.

Eleri Mills’ work is deeply rooted in a sense of place and based on her experiences of life’s rites of passage. Her pieces pursue personal themes through stylised figuration, a process firmly underpinned by a high degree of technical competence.

The production of embroidered objects has signified many things throughout embroidery’s long history- a conspicuous demonstration of wealth; an expression of religious devotion; a means of social control; a celebration of skill- sometimes several or all of these simultaneously. Historical perceptions of embroidery as ‘skilled decoration’ closely linked to female social status have been, and continue to be, of great research interest, expanding the terms of reference of the medium.

Eleri Mills

Mills has plundered archaic, classical and contemporary visual sources in a legitimate research for metaphors for her new work, and has incorporated the processes of drawing, hand painting, dyeing and appliqué in addition to stitching, to present a highly personalised, yet universal thesis. This encompasses the description of rites of passage from a female perspective, the burgeoning expression of a Welsh sensibility, and an affirmation of the energy and power of icons of cultural identity.

Mills’ chosen themes-family; roots and homeland; duality; innocence and the acquisition of life experience; rites of passage- originate in an arena traditionally perceived as female. Furthermore, these themes are explored and expressed through embroidery, a medium historically perceived as a domesticated, controlled and entirely female form of creative expression. Mills pares down both stitching and layering to minimal levels, this approach being almost contradicted by the adoption of a more painterly approach towards her canvases.

Hughes, Philip (1995), Eleri Mills, Ruthin Craft Centre

Joseph Mallord William Turner‘Tivoli’ A colour beginning1828Watercolour on paper

Eleri Mills John Robert CozensSometimes at twilight Tree studies, Thorn1995 1789Applied work, Soft ground etching embroidery, painting and aquatint.

Eleri Mills

Conrad AtkinsonConstructed landscapePostcard (colour) acrylic

WhITworth LINKS shows how the works in TACTILE link to the Whitworth’s collections that are either on current display or on the Whitworth’s online collections database. Search the online collections database and find other related works by using the following words: landscape, applique, dyeing

Access the online collections by going to:http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/collection

Materials, processes & techniques used:

Cotton, polyester, silk, monofilament & paper yarns have been utilised often in combination. The majority of this work is hand-woven and sometimes incorporates embroidery and screen-printing techniques. These range from hand painting onto the warp as well as discharge and devore print processes onto the finished woven cloth. Embroidery has been used to form the shape of the weave in structure or as a hand embellishment to the woven cloth.

The weave process itself explores multilayered cloths, distorted warp techniques such as seersucker and most recently a pick up technique has been utilised in the creation of more illustrative qualities in the weave itself.

How do you use drawing as a process to develop ideas?

As well as the practical outcomes in the form of textile art pieces and samples provided there is also information on the backup and research undertaken in the development of ideas mainly through the use of drawing, painting and sketchbooks. Lateral thinking is often an integral part of the drawing process undertaken when exploring ideas and concepts, and examples of this have been included in the form of copies taken from sketchbook pages and extracts of qualities from paintings.

Lesley Mitchison

It is not about drawing what is intended to be made, but drawing to explore the possibilities of what can be made, and through this these discoveries can be influential in terms of the decisions taken in making particular choices; for example: colour, composition and mark-making. Often I find myself drawing to reflect or capture an essence or mood of a particular place or object that laterally links to initial ideas.

In the work undertaken during the 1990’s much of my initial research related to landscape, and because of the subject matter being explored (corsetry) this was drawn very much in the vein of an unravelled corset often worn and faded and many layered.

The most recent work undertaken (2004 - 07) is about reflecting on the loss of craft skills in modern society. Information and research has been drawn from journals and written documents about the emergence of the craft world in the early 1900’s particularly through the work of Ethel Mairet and her strong beliefs in the philosophies of the William Morris era.

So drawing for this has been very different and it is often the drawing of colour and mood to capture and reflect an era and thus a familiar period in history.

Paul FeilorOverlapping forms brown1964Oil on canvas

Lesley MitchisonDecadence1991Woven, embroidered and assembled from Egyptian cotton, tussah silk, polyester yarns, brass wire and polyester boning.

Lesley Mitchison

WhITworth LINKS shows how the works in TACTILE link to the Whitworth’s collections that are either on current display or on the Whitworth’s online collections database. Search the online collections database and find other related works by using the following words: bodice, pulled thread, drawn thread, corset

Access the online collections by going to:http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/collection

The mainstay of my work over the past fifteen years has been cloth-based artefacts generally in the form of quilts. They possess a strong autobiographical content, referring to the concerns and lives of women within contemporary society. These are juxtaposed with a constant celebration of the ordinary; of the skills and activities that cannot be replaced by technology and gadgetry. Both the image content within the quilts and the hand stitched manufacture of the cloths, reinforce the persistence and importance of individual concerns and vanities within a contemporary context.

Underpinning this discussion is also a concern with the reverie of objects. Imagery is therefore diverse and eclectic; from the depiction of a family heirloom, the TV remote control through to beauty and gardening. All question and offer commentary on contemporary

society, celebrating some of the rituals of domestic life in which old and new merge to form ever changing, yet constant reflections of human need and desires.

Lynn Setterington

New work over the last five years has shown a shift in terms of materials and output. The work still explores issues of consumerism and life in the early 21st century, however materials include plastic bags and waste products. The quilts create a dialogue with the viewer using words and text and question our attitudes and need to consume more and more.

Other developments over the last few years include a range of community-based projects working with a broad cross section of the public. This ranges from women’s groups to adults with learning disabilities. In this age of IT and digital technology I work largely by hand and in doing so embrace and celebrate the hand made and the rewards which arise through slow and shared endeavour.

Pauline BurbidgeJoining Forces1989Quilt

Lynn SetteringtonSowing Seed1992Hand embroidery

Kantha stoleIndia (Bengal)1990-7

Lynn Setterington

Keith Hallam PottsPlastic Construction 1965 Sculpture

WhITworth LINKS shows how the works in TACTILE link to the Whitworth’s collections that are either on current display or on the Whitworth’s online collections database. Search the online collections database and find other related works by using the following words: Kantha, quilt, text and stitch, stitch

Access the online collections by going to:http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/collection

This work has been made in response to my investigations into Japanese sashiko stitched work clothes funded by a practice-led Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship (2003-6). The purpose of this award was to facilitate a new direction in my studio practice.

The Fellowship enabled me to undertake extensive field work in Japan in order to discover some of the personal histories fundamental to the understanding of these garments. My research continues and is taking place at a critical time when the wearing of sashiko is barely remembered. I am acutely aware that the lives of these elderly makers with first hand experience is drawing to a close and the traditional Japanese landscape is changing irrevocably.

My research focus is threefold. Firstly, to uncover the lost identities of women associated with historical sashiko. Secondly, to investigate the stitched patterns used for these garments that were considered to offer both physical and spiritual protection to the wearer. Thirdly, research contemporary Japanese sashiko textiles.

Michele Walker

Sashiko (sashi to stitch and ko small) is characterised by patterns of white, hand stitching on indigo dyed cotton or linen cloth. The technique developed from the need to patch and repair garments and the re-use of textiles. Working women living in fishing and farming communities used this technique for work clothes and domestic textiles.

Hand sewing was an essential skill and part of a woman’s daily routine that centred on her family’s wellbeing and survival. These women were the cornerstones of communities but their lives were not considered important and passed unrecorded.

Sashiko

Sean ScullyDiagonals 31973Watercolour, pencil and masking tape on paper.

Michele WalkerRetread 11995Machine embroidered quilt.

Michele Walker

WhITworth LINKS shows how the works in TACTILE link to the Whitworth’s collections that are either on current display or on the Whitworth’s online collections database. Search the online collections database and find other related works by using the following words: quilt, Japanese textiles, machine embroidery

Access the online collections by going to:http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/collection