11/1/2021

Day 10, and a milestone about these parts, apparently!

Mondays are a work day for me with not much opportunity for taking photos but what I do have to hand is sketchbooks. So Mondays might become post a picture of something in a sketchbook day.  Not a very catchy name for it but nevermind.

I am a bit fussy about sketchbook organisation and keep separate ones for knitting samples, sewing samples, and drawing, not least because the knitting and sewing books end up several inches thick and stuffed full of things that have a habit of falling out, so are not ideal for carrying around for the purposes of observational drawing, not that I do anywhere near as much of that as I should as I mostly work from photographs, however it does happen occasionally. 

These machine sewn samples are from a few years ago when I was transitioning from working on soft sculptural pieces based on coral, and 2d design work inspired by bacteria and cells, to making work that was more directly related to my own experience and things I was seeing around me. I have chosen to journal these particular pages today as the piece I showed yesterday also had bracken in it, and sewing that reminded me of this. What I was wrestling with was how to convey complexity without the whole thing just ending up as a big mess. In the end these samples became the basis for a piece in a series I did that had collaged photographs of bits of rubbish in amongst sewn plant textures (note to self - must revive that idea with the ubiquitous blue facemasks).