Alpaca Adventures

This time last year (I know I'm very behind with my blogging!) I spent a happy week creating vessels out of Alpaca fleece for my friends Ros and David who were getting married in April 2015. They own and care for the beautiful boys above. Ros had been off on her own Alpaca adventures to make her wedding dress and David's waistcoat from nuno felted Alpaca fleece. She also thought it would be lovely to have felted vessels as table decorations at the wedding and this became my wedding gift Part 1. Ros had dyed the fleece in a lovely range of colours. It was very different to work with than merino tops and quite a challenge. The first attempts were a bit of a disaster but after some practice I got the measure of this new material. We laughed a lot as I danced between the kitchen sink and the dining room table twirling and smoothing wet, wobbly vessels! It was also lovely spending time with my friends and feeling very much part of the preparations for their celebration.

I had hoped to sneak the vessels off for a bit of an installation 

but there wasn't time

I rather liked them before embellishments were added

There was much debate as to what we should add to the vessels ( hearts, sweets, fairy lights) and how we could ensure they remained stable (jars and gravel). Ros and david also gave every vessel a place setting number and the people with the place numbers got to carry off they vessel at the end of the evening. You can see more of the table settings here

Their cake was a work of art full of personal symbolism and I was there as the artist (in the background) had the nerve wracking task of assembling and suspending it in the marquee!

In April, prior to the wedding I was also sent on another Top Secret wedding mission as their dear friend Barb Jungr had written an extra special wedding song for the happy couple. Barb thought it would be lovely if I could illustrate the song and as I didn't like to say that I'd already made my wedding gift, I said yes! The illustrations include spring wild flowers, the bride a groom, honey, bees, Mr Bumble, David's motorbike, tea and cake and of course the Alpacas Ronnie, Reggie, Victor, Valiant, Truffle and ?

I was a bit worried about how to have it reproduced with the words in place and in the burnt orange that was part of the wedding theme. I rang the ever wonderful Kate Dyer at Corby Community Arts and said "Help! Short notice, rush job, bit of a panic..." and she came magnificently to my aid. The printed songs were sealed in Top Secret envelops as an extra surprise for Ros and David on the day.

The song was called Dancing With Alpacas 

sung with love and great gusto to 

the tune of Going to the Chapel

Apart from being long time friends, Ros is the reason I discovered I could still sing after many years of silence and the reason I joined the most marvellous Deep Roots Tall Trees Choir, got to know Barb and have been whisked off on new and exciting creative adventures! 

As the Choir has such a special place in Ros's life she invited us to sing three songs at the wedding celebration - I Believe in Miracles, Love Train and Higher and Higher which got the evening off to a joyful swing! we had a wonderful time, it was a beautiful day from start to finish and we got to dance our shoes off into the bargain!

Pudding (no wonder my dress no longer fits!)

Gravity - Love - Apples - Collaboration - Beginnings

I had hoped to write this for St Valentines Day but got tangled up in lost photographs and a missing poem. Whilst implementing mouse defences in the studio I came across part of the poem applied to various pieces of old work, so here it is, some thoughts on time, gravity, aprons, apples, temptation, experimentation and love.

Towards the end of the last century I found I was becoming troubled by my own working processes,  to some extent I am still torn and inhibited by the same conflicts - the desire to make something with materials that touch an actual support and the desire to use photographs, text, found images and digital manipulation to create images.

I had been involved in a school project which led to an afternoon spent at Newton's house, Woolsthorpe Manor. Newton's apple led me to an Apple Day event at Kirby Hall. There were many old and strange looking apples with wonderful names and terrible complexions. I have a very strong suspicion that the social historian Ruth Goodman was demonstrating how apples were used in bygone kitchens. 

There is something so evocative about an apple, I remember being a child in the school playground with a wonderful crisp red apple, children were rushing this way and that but I was lost in my own version of Snow White. I had just taken a bite from this most delicious apple, when I tripped over my own feet and the apple fell to the ground, ruined. 

  

Newton's Apple - monoprint and drawing

An Older Adam, Eve & Serpent - monoprint and drawing

An Apple Falling - Collagraph

In 2000 there were a series of workshops to encourage artists to apply to the Arts Council for one of the 1000 small grants to celebrate The Year of the Artist which took place between June 2000 and May 2001. Through a strange set of circumstances I found myself creating new work, in new ways at the Castle Theatre, Wellingborough in collaboration with artist Ruth Rignall and dancer Sam Ingram. For the Year of the Artist we called ourselves Pulling Together. Taking gravity as a theme, Pulling Together set out to explore the complex relationship between science and the human heart.

“Newton's apple, hurtling through space reminds us of the apple from the tree of knowledge, reminds us of how fast we are traveling in terms of science and technology. Our thirst for knowledge is often more pressing than our fear of the consequences, we tend to be equally fearless/reckless in terms of our emotions and our relationships. As artists we are driven by the passionate pursuit of ideas, as individuals we strive to find people who will offer us love, help, support or just a momentarily still point in a turning world.”

"We spent 10 days between April and May 2001 working together at the Castle on a performance piece incorporating these themes...........

"Density

The Inverse Square Law 

And just the fact that in physics 

there often seem to be things 

where there are lines or strata

Large Mass Small Volume

= High Density More Gravity

The nearer you are to something the more you feel it's gravitational pull - this effect fades at a rate expressed by the Inverse Square Law." Ruth Rignall - Gravity Booklet

This led to the creation of a textile piece / costume known as "Sleeve", a tubular garment made of materials that move through the spectrum of heavy (dense) to gossamer (fine). This could be worn in various ways and contained our thoughts on the Inverse Square Law. "

The interesting thing about this piece is we created without knowing we were describing density the diagram above, which made sense of our artifact, was drawn by Dr Matt Burleigh - it was one of those 'aha!" moments. We weighed every piece of fabric.

Sam rehearsing with Sleeve

The music for this piece of the performance was As Time Goes By - Julie London

Photograph by Kate Dyer

Photograph by Kate Dyer

We decided to take something domestic, the apron, as a device to pin our ideas about time, space, gravity and motion on; seeing parallels between kitchens and laboratories. We had three layers of apron for Sam to dance in, plus a host of bags, balls both string and felted and at one point she begged us not to make any more props for her to work with! The first was a pin striped suit apron lined with red, covered in pockets and stamped with useful scientific facts. 

"Apron

Attraction Accretion 

The gathering of mass, 

and its potential energy.

Mass is not the same as weight, 

weight is a measurement of the 

downward force of mass i.e.:

it relies on gravity - in space 

you are weightless

but not without mass

Einstein realised that mass 

has potential energy.

E = mc2

It is possible to defy gravity i.e.: 

make things go up not down, 

by expending energy." 

Ruth Rignall - Gravity Booklet

With the suit apron we wanted Sam to embody attraction, accretion, the gathering of mass and it's potential energy. For this section of the dance we had The Apron Sound Score specially composed by Phillipe Vandenhove.

Photograph by Kate Dyer

Back to the Apple - Count Basie from Atomic Swing

The second layer was a calico apron, lighter, less about the heavy world of work and much more about entropy, the front of the apron stated that the study of gravity was the study of motion. 

Dr Matt models the calico apron. 

The final layer was an organza apron. 

"Underneath the Apron....

Redshift / Blueshift

Movement as an antigravity device!

Doppler redshift: objects moving 

or spinning away from us appear 

redder than normal;objects moving 

or spinning towards us bluer

Gravitational redshift: thanks to 

Einstein's General Relativity, 

an object with an extremely 

high gravity will look slightly 

redder than expected." 

Ruth Rignall - Gravity Booklet

Photograph by Kate Dyer

Breathing Sound Score

Metrononome

To the Edge of the Earth - Michael Nyman

During this project I started making digital images and my early attempts, as you can see, are quite basic. These were applied to the calico apron, framed as prints and projected during the performance. Both the images and the collaboration were the start of a radical shift in my practice and were a taste of a much longed for freedom. I also started working with fabric and learnt to make felt balls under the expert tuition of Heidi Street Ward - both felt and fabric have played quite a part in my working life since then.

Never could resist lichen on a headstone!

The image above and below were later reworked, with more layers added. The one above also became part of other images - I love this process of taking something from one image and building it inside another.

Gravity Poem

Gravity, love

An invisible 

Force urging or

Pulling together.

An apple falling.

The call of skin,

Of heart and mind.

Free falling,

Longing to catch

Each other.