Are we the only ones or is this a very busy time of year? Our meetings have been rather scattered lately, but we have been getting together to share our work and inspire one another.
Helen is the most productive member of our group. Every meeting, she seems to bring along incredibly beautiful and intricate work. She brought along this collaborative work from her embroidery group at Mt Colah.
Each member had a section of an image of the Ian Potter Centre in Melbourne, to inspire their work. The individual members could use all of their section or just a part of it, but all works had to be black, white and grey. All the pieces were mounted along with the original photo for an exhibition. It's not easy to see in the photo but the individual works are hand stitched and have a lot of gorgeous texture. The enforced limitation of the colour palette made all the members focus on the shape and line in their image - a very interesting exercise.
Helen also brought along another work she made, on the theme of Faces.
She enjoys manipulating photographs, so each page of the accordion book has a different face image. Isn't it wonderful? Making self portrait or portrait works can be really daunting and this is such a fun take on the idea.
Helem also brought along a book cover she'd made. One of her groups had a mini workshop on this technique and this is how she used the resulting sample.
They began with washed calico fabric, and bonded tissue to it, using fusible web. The resulting surface was painted with acrylic paints and gesso, so it had a very stiff and textured hand. Helen has added some of her signature rug canvas, stitched with a metallic medium rubbed over the stitching. She added a bead and a thread tassel and stitched it into a book cover. She's not sure if she likes the result, saying, "it's very blue..." but we think it's altogether lovely.
Tricia and Nola had been doing some more breakdown screen printing. Tricia had a couple of screens that really did not want to discharge, but they continued to give such interesting prints that she was reluctant to clean them off. Here are some of her prints:
These two are very similar bit the colours are more muted in the second one. Tricia was printing with just the thickened medium, in the hope of loosening some of the dried dye on the screen.
In this one, she was spritzing the screen with water, or adding thickened dye directly to the screen, rather than in the well, to try to soften the dry medium. Hasn't it given interesting prints?
Eventually, she gave up on this screen. A few days later, Nola took some prints from the same screen.These three were taken in rapid succession, using different colours.
When you see them together, they look like different colourways of a fabric range.
In later prints, she was adding chemical water to the dyes to try to break down the resistant areas. The resulting prints were very runny, but there are still traces of the pattern.
Finally, Nola scrubbed the screen off, using a soft brush under the high pressure hose. She was worried it might not come off at all but it did come clean without damaging the screen. It was reassuring to know that resistant screens like this won't automatically need to be resilked.
Tricia made this print with another screen, which was also curiously resistant to breaking down.
We'll see a lot more prints from this screen, as she's printed from it several times and it still hasn't broken down fully.
As always on our second meeting day of the month, we swapped postcards. Here's Tricia's...
...and Helen's...
..isn't it strange, they are quite similar to look at, but they worked independently of each other. Helen's is made of paper; Tricia's is from fabric. Here's Nola's:
This one was from a paint rag, drawn on and then painted.
And Maz's:
This one used a paper serviette, bonded to fabric.
More from our June meetings soon!
