Lace Narratives

With my own interest in lacy textiles I have been looking closely at work by textile artists with a similar interest.

Cecilia Heffer, based here in Sydney, is one such artist who has been working in contemporary lace patterns in various textile forms, examining the structural forms created.

After studying fine art for three years she went to Spain before moving to the UK and completing a masters degree in textiles at Central Saint Martins college in London

She is currently the coordinator of textiles at the University of Technology, Sydney.
She has received many awards and her work has been published in many national and international design journals.

She was first inspired to work with lace after viewing the lace archives at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney and began to create contemporary lace designs for interior displays.

She creates lace designs using digital technology and industrial processes rather than hand knotting.

This installation above was from her solo exhibition in 2006 entitled Laced. The circles are cut from silk organza and then hand printed with traditional Venetian lace braids.

During the restoration work on Government House, Canberra, Cecilia was asked to redesign the lace curtains in the main drawing room and she was able to create a design incorporating Australian flora eg wattle flowers. It was based on Nottingham lace but had a contemporary feel.

In 2009 I attended an evening talk by Cecilia locally when she related how this design was developed and was eventually made up by a Scottish firm located about 10miles from my native home town as no one was equipped locally!

Cecilia's current exhibition, Lace Narratives" in Redfern Sydney closes tomorrow but I am hoping to visit it and hear her closing "conversation" about this work. More later....

Module 1 3D Assessment piece paperwork

For completeness of Module 1 I have posted below my details of costings, timings, H & S, and evaluation for my functional 3-dimensional piece.

Back down under

Finally had some time to blog since I got back and also download my hundreds of photos from the trip - no, don't worry I won't go through them all here. But we did have a wonderfully inspiring trip and saw quite a few exhibitions in UK and Paris to keep me going for a while.

I did enjoy the summer school, seeing everyone again, and learning from Ruth. I'm sure students have said great things about the whole workshop time but I did appreciate especially the discussion on the last day being in amongst like-minded people with some great ideas.

I returned to find that both my textile pieces in the NSCG Fire and Water exhibition had sold, so I was fairly chuffed by that. It's inspired me to do more hand stitching so maybe that will get me back into the C&G hand samples I'm mentally stuck with.

I tutored a workshop on Saturday for ATASDA in Sydney on "Contemporary Lace" which was great fun. All the the students were so enthusiastic and keen to try out different ideas with soldering irons, mixed media, and free machining, not to mention some weaving on created grids.
Some great work was produced all round.

Have also been putting the final touches to my piece for "Voyages of the Imagination", the national ATASDA exhibition held in the Palm House within the Botanic Gardens in Sydney.

A section of it is shown below

It's another hand and machine sewn hanging entitled "Old Man Willow" inspired by the forest in "Fellowship of the Ring" by Tolkien. The exhibition opens on Thursday 12 so if you're in the area do call in.

"Fire and Water"

This year's exhibition and sale by the North Shore Craft Group, Sydney, of which I am a member, is taking place next week. As well as having a selection of handbags and wearable accessories in the display as usual, I have 2 pieces in the exhibition entitled this year "Fire and Water".

I decided to interpret the title separately and to have one piece inspired by fire and one by water, but both using the same textile techniques and the same size (framed about 30" by 12")

The first is "Bushfire" inspired by the terrible bushfires in Victoria at the beginning of last year.

It's also my little tribute to Jan Beaney's technique as the piece is made from extensive hand stitching over scraps of dyed scrim, silk and wool tops then integrated using machine stitching and the embellisher. A small area is detailed below:

The second is "Ocean Pools", using a similar technique but more translucent, with digitally printed silk organza in the background, less wool tops, and separately prepared lace pieces added on top of the work at the end. I've also used painted fusible web and distressed sheers in there too.

The photo below shows the lace ripples in more detail:

Dress embellishment

I did a little more work on the embellishment of my 3D item for the diploma, by manipulating and stitching the motifs into flower-like arrangements on the bodice. I made motifs out of the various sheers, pink, red and green and also simply out of thread (although the lace ones are not really apparent from the photos - believe me they are there!). The sheers had varying translucency that helped give depth to the layers.
In the process of making the motifs, after dissolving away the Solvy layer I dried some over bottle caps so that they remained curled and gave more dimension to the flimsy material.

The tendrils are made from overlocked thread lengths and dyed gauze strips cut and edged on the bias to give the curl. Within the motif arrangments, the tendrils could be threaded through the holes in some of the shapes which was an interesting plantlike effect.

The motifs continue on the back at the end of the strap. I didn't feel the need to add more to the strap itself as with more coverage the strap began to take over!