Ongoing work

Make It through the Night

Make It Through The Night is the working title of a series of embroidered household textiles, sheets, pillowcases, curtains etc. that I am currently making. It is very personal work and it marks  a return to my original practice of embroidery into cloth, which I had not done for several years as I have been developing stitched work on enamel – firing vitreous enamel on copper using textile patterns and techniques. Lately I had been trying to make enamel look and behave like fabric, by patterning it and even drilling and stitching it so that it will move and may even be folded.

The return to stitching onto cloth was prompted by the commission for a monkey pelt. I just realised how much I enjoyed the sensation of stitching a needle and silk thread  through fabric – how accepting the cloth was to this process, which sounds obvious, but I’ve spent several years having to drill every single hole in the metal prior to being stitched.

I have undergone such a change in my working practice that I seemed to have lost touch with something else, my confidence in my own work had disappeared – returning to stitching fabric was like stepping into a deep warm pool of knowing and being totally absorbed in the whole process of making. I instinctively understood the medium, I knew which yarn to use, what colours would work and how to get it to absorb or reflect the light. Stitching the commission gave me time to think deeply about what I was making, and why.

Now I needed to somehow get the two elements of my work to come together so that one did not compromise the other, and would also allow me to consider and choose the most telling material or technique in which work. Below I will hopefully explain and illustrate this process.

To begin I looked back through my research /work books and picked up on two relevant and connecting ideas around making safety curtains/security blankets and illustrating my dreams…..

1:SAFETY CURTAIN – BURKA EYES

I use symbolism in my stitched work, the more traditional and well understood the better. Not for me the hidden personal allusions accessed by close attention to the current philosophical texts.I like hands and heart and eyes and flowers – lilies, pansies and red roses; easy reading for everyone interested to find the underlying ideas and inspirations within sumptuous surface decoration. I have a collection of talismans and milagros, amulets and charms and I make my own versions in a more enduring material than cloth, vitreous enamel, for people to wear for their own needs and protection.

collection of milagros bought in New Mexico after a visit to the Girard collection at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe.

My favourite symbols are hearts, specially the broken and mended heart – no doubt a testament to a bumpy but enduring marriage; hands, often found in friendship jewellry -  if they are holding a heart even better; and eyes – now these are something different, staring eyes are very unsettling. Traditionally the “Evil Eye” is used to deflect envy and malice, it is symbolised in many desert areas in the form of mirrors which also deflect the gaze. These eyes always appear to be the colour of the stranger; where brown eyes predominate they are blue, where blue predominates they are green, we still say “the green eyed god” to denote jealousy. But I use it as the inward eye – the imagination and if it deflects envy at the same time – that’s fine.

my heart brooches, which I made with vitreous enamel over copper and mended with wire.

my small collection of blue glass evil eye amulets, they are placed in various  windows around the house

some of my own heart jewellry mostly given to me by friends and some I have bought for myself, but I made the stone heart badge.

But these symbols signify something extra to me – they are all that I need to make my work. The eyes represents imagination, the hands symbolise my skills, and every idea developed by the intellect needs to resonate in the heart to connect with the viewer. To quote from “The Craftsman” by Richard Sennett, “built into the contractions of the human heart, the skilled craftsman has extended rhythm to the hand and the eye”.

I started to think about this set of work about 12 years ago. I have vivid colour-filled dreams and try to record the most visual ones with notes and sketches. I wanted to make a series of embroidered works about bedding, think security and/or comfort blankets, safety curtains and counterpanes, comforters and pillows for people to sleep soundly and safely. Just recently I have returned to this idea and these pages are will illustrate the stages of the developing project that I want to share with you.

Leafing through a book on Paisley shawls I noticed that the end papers showed a map of the traditional “shawl routes of the Orient” I suddenly realised that I was looking at a current war zone – Afganistan,  Turkesten, Iran and Pakistan are all at the heart of this ancient trading route for textiles. the orif=gins or=f the paisley pattern now appears to be in the middle of a cultural desert in photographs published in the recent press reports…but this is a land of desert tribes who dressed their children in multi – coloured mirrored clothes to ward off the evil eye, and this is the land of the burka and niqab – the total body, head and eye covering chosen and worn by some Muslim women.

I looked at my own collection of enamelled eyes, previously I had made an enamelled badge collection for a research group to which I belong, and then one Sunday morning I found an image of a pair of eyes staring out of a photograph in the Observer newspaper, a niqab wearer, a woman who did not want to be recognised, she featured in a disturbing article about honour killing in Britain, more disturbing was the fact that all the girls who had been murdered were happy and relaxed, looking straight into the camera and wearing high street fashions.

sketch book with photograph of the Burka eyes with my own enamel eyes surrounding it.

I made this work to show what this garment means to me – it isn’t just about the hidden women but the hidden history of the whole culture. The sensuous and symbolic textiles that have been developed over centuries and now are a part of the whole world’s heritage are also being denied by this garment. The tiny pieces of patterned cloth you can glimpse behind the eyes range from original woven shawl textiles to embroidered versions from the more westerly edges of the route, to modern western fabrics woven for ties and the most accessible form of this pattern the “Liberty print ” which has become a classic English textile design.

the “envelope” of  black surrounding material  protects the brittle enamel eyes, they are stitched onto padded paisley patterned grounds

construction of the safety curtain in my studio, January 2010

Making this piece of work caused me a great deal of soul searching, it was so difficult to hide half of the beautiful Paisley patterned fabrics with these solid black materials; only simple woven fabric is allowed for the manufacture or the burka. I was relieved to finished the work, which took several months, but it did give me a way forward for  developing a new set of work. I realised I had made a “safety curtain”, the embroidered netting holding the envelopes together is reminiscent of the open weave fabrics inserted to hide even the eyes of the strictest Muslims women. Conversely it also refers to the net curtains we use for the windows in the West, to avert the gaze of the curious and the stranger.

finished hanging on my studio wall, it is made to fit my studio window, size approx. 100X130 cms

The next piece of work needed to be more personal to lead to the dream ideas, I felt that using the bedding as the link to embroidering the dreams would work and this is where I decided to use the title of “Make it Through the Night” for the whole collection. And I  like the idea of using the enamels as the amulets or protective symbols that the fabrics are holding. But first I just need to get back to freshness, lightness colour and embroidery -  but this is taking rather longer than I had envisaged………

2:BOLSTER

After making “Burka Eyes Safety Curtain” I decided to make a series of work incorporating more symbols from my Milagros collection, and realising it would have to get deep down and personal, I returned to my ideas of protective textiles. Usually I steer clear of anything personal in my work, I prefer to look outward for my inspiration, but having a working title for this series with the theme of “Make It Through The Night” which – let’s face it – is just too good a title to resist,  and knowing it had to lead somehow to the dreams I had drawn (see Burka eyes) I had to commit to some introspection.

I made a list of all the fabrics used in the home which carried double meanings and Bolsters seemed perfect – they are not large, the size of 2 pillows side by side and I had inherited some from my mother and best of all they were made in traditional black and white striped ticking; what a gift for someone looking for inspiration…..but what did I need to bolster myself against?

first drawing for bolster, traces are from my own hands, the layered messages are very different from my usual clear compositions,

samples for bolster writing.

For over a year, I have been taking Yoga classes and trying to build a daily practice which incorporates a meditation session – very short but very powerful. This practice lead me to work on a programme of meditation and self hypnosis, within this I was given a some basic “tools” to counter my tendency towards procrastination, negativity and consequently sleeplessness. Some of the tools I was given take the form of “mantras” or short  sentences to be repeated to help concentrate and re-boot the mind. I was being given these words to bolster my confidence and free my energy, but when I first heard them I could not bring myself to say them, the initial sentence got stuck in my throat. Eventually I did manage to say something but the words came out differently – a Freudian slip – but making perfect if unnerving sense to me. It was my intuition speaking, I could hear myself loud and clear.

the mantra I could not say and how it eventually was spoken

The resulting textile piece is hard to “read” as the words are difficult to distinguish from the interference of the striped ground, but it is stitched onto fabric used to  feather- proof the inside bag and therefore would never be seen on a made – up bed. I am being true to the use of this fabric and my own references; I also thought how powerful it would be to sleep on a hidden pillow of affirmative words.

hidden pillow of affirmative words

The powerful stripe obscures the messages to such an extent that the viewer needs to read and re-read the words – repetition is part of the discipline of yoga practice. The scattered images and overlaid messages are unlike anything I have ever made before, and in complete contrast to the regimented order of the Burka Eyes Safety Curtain that I had made prior to this. Again I feel uneasy about the new work, even though it makes a strong statement of both my own experience and my skill – I did feel very comfortable making this work holding it easily in my hands – I always feel that fabric just wants to be handled. But I am still un-nerved by the presence of this work, several months after finishing it.

detail of different types of stitched writing to try to give different “atmospheres” or meaning to the messages

3: COUNTERPANE

14th century woodcut -”Frau Minna’s Power Over Mens’ Hearts”

Above is a print that has had a great influence on my work – it was placed as inspiration inside a work book when I first started to learn to enamel. I admire and am amused by the inventiveness which Frau Minna employs for breaking  hearts, but what interested me in this woodcut was the opportunity to find ways of mending them. I embarked on a series of small drawings which gave information for making the wound and the mend, I imagined that fairly specialised techniques may need to be employed.

drawing for mending wounded hearts

Over the last 8 years I have made many wounded and mended hearts in enamel and embroidered the mends often complete with glass beaded blood drops,and I also embroidered a mending sampler with stitched enamel hearts when I first attempted to make work which incorporated enamel and fabric.

embroidered linen and vellum mending sampler with stitched enamel hearts

Recently when researching for a new piece of work for “Make it Through the Night” I looked again at this work, and started drawing out some ideas which would take the idea in a more personal direction. I  felt I would like to make some enamel hearts again and sew them onto a large sheet as a wounds and mending “counterpane as counterpain” but when researching the ideas just wanted to stitch it . I made some drawings after looking at’ The Book of the Heart’ by Louisa Young, one of my favourite research resources, full of all sorts of information both factual and fanciful, a really great tool for generating and developing ideas for me. I had looked an image of the ‘seven wounds of the virgin’ and made seven personal wounds with their individual mending methods.

I started to make drawings of hands holding and sewing the hearts, l needed a hand to copy and had a small Buddha Hand cast in metal and fetched it to draw, it lives in our bedroom and I see it everyday but as picked it up I realised this was a stitching hand. – you know when something just shifts into place? it is like a message from the gods or the universe is telling you are on the right track. I felt this, very strongly. I made whole series of studies of Buddha hands in all their manifestations, (this is where Google Images is so fantastic as a research tool). I had also just started to develop a meditation session at the end of my yoga practice, so maybe this is why I suddenly saw the connection, but this gave the imagery extra depth of meaning and validity for me.

drawing of Buddha Hands in many different attitudes, all of which have meanings attached to them.

stitching sample for hands

I needed to make some samples of how I would stitch these life size drawings onto a vintage counterpane, a top sheet on a bed. The 7 recent personal wounds I chose ranged from the frivolous everyday niggles which grieve me, like having my hair cut – it always ends up too short, or tha fact that  I cannot now wear my glamorous strappy stiletto heel shoes – to the difficult and hurtful wounds; I embroidered a  copy of one of the many rejection letters I received last year, fashioning it into a dart and even to  the saddest, deepest wound of all……

losing our old wire fox terrier dog Burtie, who went down a badger set and never came out even after 2 weeks of us using every method to search the site – visits from the local Badger societies, the fire brigade with heat detectors and even taking a recording of our front door bell and playing it at every entrance to the set – it was the only sound that made him bark spontaneously and the rescue societies said that  if we could definitely hear him barking they would dig him out of the large cliff top set – but we failed to find the proof and gut feelings don’t count at DEFRA. Moving on…. but more importantly I show the mending strategies I have contrived to deal with all these wounds.

 

As to the problem of the glamorous shoes, well I just have to wear flatties now or very low heels so my beautiful strappy gold leather heels wound is  mended with a large suede heel patch.

stilletto shoes detail

The seven wounds are all seen below on the finished counterpane:- first at the top is the broken heart from lost dog – mended by the inevitable replacement. After 3 years we bought a retired 7 year old stud dog called Bertie, spooky, and we renamed him Boysie; his tartan collar is being fastened round my heart. Clockwise, 2.  The hairdressing scissor cut is being mended with a darn made of real hair (Janet Stoyel donated her own hair, thanks Janet) 3. A direct quote from an apoplectic dog owner who questioned my right to own a dog when I was totally unable to control me and it – Boysie had the temerity to sniff his dog’s bum ( the dog didn’t mind) but the owner was obviously angry with the whole world and I was the only available and safe person to howl at – this is mended with a surgeons knot, a small, secure and safe mend for a tiny but vicious, violent wound.

More seriously, 4. the piercing by breast cancer ribbon -I have had many too friends die of this disease, but the hearts is mended by a darned heart. 5. the stiletto shoes and sensible suede patch, 6 the rejection letter dart and a really intricate darning mend to show I am still worthy of working even if they don’t want me and lastly the tools of my trade which have elicited much grief one way and another,  mended with the mirrored eye of  imagination.

This is the third embroidery in the series and I feel it is much too personal -  but it does  lead straight to my dream drawings where the imagery is personal but also recognisably universal in their symbolism.

4: DREAM PILLOW

a dream drawing December 1998

Time to start incorporating the dream drawings; if I can remember a dream when I wake up, I make very quick drawings and notes but even if I don’t the most vivid will come back to haunt me throughout the day. This dream was both vivid and disturbing but also somehow amusing or at least ironic…all my favourite shoes scattered about my bedroom and when I looked down my feet had been cut off, and I could see the bloody stumps just looking like cut beetroot rings of various reds. The shoes were multi-coloured, but even worse than the loss of the feet was a man’s hairy hand cutting the flowers off my embroidery, this was either in the same room or I had a dream within a dream and this was when I woke up.

Tulipomania embroiery detail

Flora, embroidery and applique 1996

The dream hand was cutting off the flowers from the arrangement in Flora,  but the image of the cut heads was more in keeping with another piece from the series, Tulipomania, where in the centrepiece I had depicted a sleeve appliqued with the cut heads of tulips. Apparently this was a fashion in Holland in the 17th century when striped tulips were so expensive that the wives of growers were said to wear them as jewels.

I am more than aware of the significance of shoes in dreams, and as to the the hairy hand…………..

Moving on – I now wanted to return to the dream and incorporate it into the present work, Make It Through the Night. I did not want to remake these embroideries but to reinvent the dream in the sympathy with my new work. I have been collecting printed mid 20th century embroidery pattern papers and printed linens; I just love those simple outline all ready for filling in with satin stitch on table cloths, tray cloths and antimacassars. I have found many patterns in charity and vintage shops and am using them in other work.

I really like the bland blue or the printed line on linen, it is much more elegant than the finished embroidery illustrated. I also liked the wonderful flowing writing on the magazine page, I am still considering whether to extend and embellish the writing on my embroidery with these leaves.

sketch book research for embroidered flowers

So I was looking though my stash of printed linens for information for the Stitched Ceramics, which feature in the blog, and found this printed bowl of anemonies with one cut off – what  a gift -  I simply traced most of the design onto a large square linen pillow, deciding to embroider the drawing in a simple blue running stitch. I changed the leaves into anemone leaves as they filled the space better and then got down to the business of embroidering the flower heads in encroaching satin stitch.

The more observant of you will have recognised that this is the embroidery that I used for the first header on this blog, I had just completed it when I started the blog in May 2010.

wind flowers a rare – for me -machine embroidered silk applique

enamelled windflower copied from drawing for machine embroidery

But this also relates to other pieces of my work; a machine embroidered panel of wind flowers which I made some years ago, when I was developing the book “The Embroiderer’s Floral” (Collins and Browne 2002 ISBN 1 85585 975 0) and that I translated in enamel onto  a large copper dish. If you spend a lot of time and effort researching and drawing for work it pays to use the references as much as possible. I find that I constantly refer to my old drawings and technical research, which is kept in a series of work books dating from my late 1960′s art college sketch books.  I am often either embarrassed or bored by my old work but I always find the work books stimulating and refer to them constantly. I suppose because they are full of  ideas in the making – finished pieces have arrived and never have that sense of potential that the first studies always contain.

the finished dream pillow

The embroidered pillow is really just the adjunct to the main shoe dream, which is my next embroidery. I aim to stitch it on a sheet to make a set of bedding, but it is a daunting prospect  -not just the physicality of stitching such a large hand embroidery but the dragging up of all those old ideas that gave rise to that particular dream.

5: THE SHOES DREAM

the finished dream pillow

This embroidery has been a real struggle to  make, which is so strange as I have had the drawing of this particular dream for over 10 years; have often looked at it and thought “one day”……I have written about the struggle to make it in the post Slow Progress. But I have now finished it so this is by way of a celebration – but I will give an overview of the whole process and then must consider where I go next with this long drawn out project.

What is interesting though is how close the finished piece is to the original quickly scribbled drawing done the morning after the dream. I know that first drawings are full of energy and although often ill proportioned or scrappy they hold a truthfulness that will always tell itself later. I have come to respect my first idea drawings as the most immediate access to my own vision. and this drawing has stood the test of time, and is why I am happy to keep showing it in all its rushed scribbled state. The hairy hand section gave ride to the last pillow embroidery – “and then I woke up”

Originally I decided to embroider all my dreams onto bed sheets and bought several single vintage linen sheets to work on so that everything was life size. I liked the idea of “A sheet of dreams” – still do actually – of making large simple dream drawings in the traditional fabrics and techniques used for bed linen. When you consider it there is a lot to be worked with here, white work in the form of  padded lettering from the grand sheets of stately homes…through to patchwork, quilting (above) and candlewicking (right) – a rich set techniques which really deserve an entire project to themselves; but this is personal work and has to tell my story as well as delight me – and hopefully my audience – in developing my practice as a textile artist – sometimes technique  just gets in the way…………..

original sheet – abandoned after printing on linear design

I started to make the samples for the large scale sheet, it was all very interesting and I was veering off into other ideas, like using the blue line from the printed linen embroidery patterns as for the previous pillow, I wanted to keep these as a pair – a matching set – suddenly all my homemaking “mix and match” attitudes came to the fore…… But I really got bogged down in this process, it was difficult to control the iron on transfers, and ultimately I didn’t think the overall effect was strong enough when after a month of drawing and transferring I looked long and hard at the results. I am ashamed to say that this is the result below – I have just hauled this out of the fabric stash for the project where I first abandoned it months ago in order to make my point – sad isn’t it? Still I may be able to cannibalise it (re-cycle) for something else one day.

abandoned sheet of transfer designs

I eventually reasoned that the decorative delights of the trompe loeil ‘ patchwork’ section which I was happily playing with was really supposed to reveal the contours of my body in the bed using the stitched lines of the ‘ quilting’ as seen clearly in the original working drawing below. But they just were not strong enough and i was really trying to be too clever by half.

original working drawing squared up sizing up onto cloth

Meanwhile I made other works – and so generally let the problem lie at a low level, to be absorbed knowing that eventually it would re-emerge…this is how work often resolves itself; you just have to be patient and let it suggest its own way forward…..then I made somehandkerchieves for the Stitching and Thinking project leading on from the imagery in the Stitching Ceramics and realising how good it was to work small and quickly again – I thought I could maybe make the work smaller and embroider a” pillow of dreams” – after all, I reasoned, this is where you lay your head and where all the action stems from.

working the pillowcase

So I set to work again restitching the whole image onto a vintage linen Oxford pillowcase. The drawings remained exactly the same, but now I used running stitches to describe the quilt then padded it in a trapunto technique to emphasise the body shape that emerges from the distorted “patchwork”. This was all really interesting to work, I was now on the right track and gone were the misgivings of “copping out” for a smaller scale.

I am particularly pleased with the effect of the body in the bed – trapunto quilting also works for the white work stitched body, seen above the sheet  – I look a bit wrinkled, but not as much as in real life!

me dreaming of me

Now the observant will have noticed that a checked pattern has been applied to the dreamer’s pillow, this is when decoration is really functional, the white worked face just disappeared into the ground and the whole piece looked unbalanced, rather vague in fact.  It was difficult to make much out at all so I embroidered the patterned pillow to make the body and hair clearly apparent suddenly the piece has a whole focus but in fact the face – the usual focus of any attention still recedes into the background. I had always looked forward to stitching the shoes though, the drawings were taken from many old sketches and my own collection -some shoes I cannot bear to throw away…….

my old shoes ready to be transformed into the stiuff of dreams.

And I do love drawing shoes, they appeal to me for many reasons and I have kept a small battered collection. Shoes are such a give away to a person’s idea of themselves – even if you can’t wear them. In fact I have just  heard a sad story of an old friend of mine who has teeny tiny feet (you know who you are Irene Bohan) and she always wears the most vertiginous and exquisite shoes she can afford. Now she has been told she can’t wear her teetering heels anymore – due to some rare medical development (probably due to the shoes in the first place but I feel she would think it a fair swap all those eyars and years of shoe pleasure) – but I dare not yet contact her – it is too sad – but I wonder if she has any shoe dreams?

so here are a few hand embroidered shoes to look at

the glitzy gold

an odd assortment

ther’s always an odd shoe in a bedroom

I have written at length in Slow Progress about the stitching of the shoes and the effect it had on me regarding hand v computer driven machine stitching but now that I have finished this work I just want to have the shoes seen as precious objects in themslevs, and this is something that traditional hand embroidery does confer on its subjects – preciousness – well that is carefully crafted hand embroidery. I am interested that this piece now reflects the atmosphere of the dream, not in its detail but in the curious jewel like qualiy of the shoes and my disbelief – well horror really – at looking down and seeing those bloodybut not bleeding stumps.

I laso like very much the fact that the fabric of the old pillow has been pulled out of shape by the stitching process and undulates now instead of lying nice a flat and starched as it did when I bought it. This is a departure for my work – I always used to stretch my ils embroideries and fasten them on frames to keep them tight. Now I like this fluidity of the fabric, the fact that it has responded to being handled in many ways but also I feel that this preference has to do with the flatness and firmness of the metal grounds which I used for many years when I was enamellling my imagery.

My next major piece of work in this series must somehow begin to use the enamelled copper with the fabrics to make a fusion of the 2 materials……a security blanket maybe?