This week I mostly did independant work and as a peer group we have set out a date for a making day on the 11th of March.
I’ve been trying to keep a daily sketchbook habit which has proven to be a challenge but also a huge leap in terms of detangling my mind and my thoughts around the notion of home.
Making day 11 March 2023:
We had a wonderful making day on Saturday via Teams that Lisa set up for us. What I enjoyed most was the contact with peers and that we were able to talk about where everyone was at with regards to preparing for assessment. I took away some of my tension to hear that we were all in the same boat. Some had more practical work to catch up with and others had to do journal entries or had to add more theory.
It was fun to see what everyone was busy with. – Lisa with some interesting value test paintings, Blair with a digital portrait and David with some photo collages on photoshop. We could all enjoyed hearing him speak to himself as he worked, adding to the sense of companionship.
I set our to do a few things but only managed to work on a collage of fabric onto a canvas. The idea came to me as I was working on my contextual study recently. In my introduction paragraph, I wrote about my own nostalgic memories of home and it took me to my grandmother’s house where a quilt was one of the items I associate with her home and how I was tucked into bed by this hand made quilt. My grandmother was always sewing. The idea of a quilt wouldn’t leave and I started to do a little bit of research on the history of quilts. More than how interesting the history was with all it’s links to motherhood milestones on a woman’s life, I thought that the quilt was a wonderful metaphor for the notion of home. It came with ideas of warmth, safety, care, acceptance and shelter – everything that we tend to associate with home.
I have been doing a lot of reading and researching the last few weeks. Ideas of how I might pull the theory into my practice was brewing and I as I looked around in my studio, a few ideas fell into place. I had some mdf boxes for ages – all different shapes and sizes. As places some of them together, to my surprise some of them actually created a type of a unit. I did the same with some canvasses that I had. I places small ones and bigger ones together and it hinted at the idea of a patchwork quilt. Another reason why this seemed like a good idea was because I knew that my home-theme had many dimensions and layers to it. I liked the idea that I could group a few drawings or paintings or a combination of that together. These blocks would allow me to do that. Here are some photo’s of the groups of boxes and canvases together in Fig 1.
Fig 1
Copper plate with some rust/patina in a painted mdf box
I felt inspired to take the idea in another direction using fabric glued onto a canvas and painted over with acrylic and coffee. I took fabric that had interesting and varied textures and played around with them during our making-day. The piece of fabric in the top left corner is one of my own drawings that was screen printed onto linen. The drawing was inspired by the dandelion plants that we payed with as children. I will use this as a background to paint or draw onto. This was the result and although I am still unsure of the colour, I am still interested in the concept and would like to make some more of them but perhaps using more monochrome combinations:
