ARTISTIC RESEARCH- Process


DAY  2- THOUGHTS ON TEXTILE ART & MEETING THE GROUP  + STARTING

THOUGHTS ON  TEXTILE ART - lecture with Elin Igland
- crossing textiles with each other in many possible ways to make a sculpture
- push limits of materials and techniques of looms to find new possibilities.
- weaving as sculpture & installations.
- artist, material and techniques of systems to make sculptures with.
- Annie Albers - curious and experimental approach to weaving, abstract expressionism, experimenting and crossing threads, weaving for the eye, layering of weaving
- Lausanne Textile Biennale - to check !
-  standing on the shoulders of giants : Annie Albers, Sheila Hicks, Leonora Tani (make art weaving where you need to think of construction), Claire Zseiser, Else Jiak (discusses what is flat and three dimensional), Eva Hesse...
- Elin and hrer machines and yarn = stories that make  us go where we’re going
- Working with digital Jacquard loom, can control every thread- Holland : machine adapts itself to what the artist wants. it’s usually the other way around.
-TC2 looms : black and white squares
- chaos of the thread : what is natural for the fibre vs the tension of the thread when it is pulled and tightened.
- Textile in dialog with architecture and space
- possibility of weaving as free as possible : as fast as possible, as impulsive as possible and not caring about the result, weaving with whole body.  didn’t use a loom, hanging hooksin the ceiling and had the warp hanging and walked around the room with the weft. bundled loads of nylon fibre to make the weft.

- wool fibre together with nylon fibre: symbiotic relationship.
- work in a process: recycling the fibres, re-using the fibres from the previous exhibition/art pieces.
- contiuous thread throughout her work process: holland place came back years later in her work, the material she uses makes that happen.
- risks of textiles in space- dust, colours change, etc...
- the material has its own language
- process: starting with meeting with the material then getting ideas so then she has to stop and write and read and then go back to weave, etc...



MEETING WITH THE GROUP FOR THE GROUP PROJECT - LINN, ARYS, FREIA, AND ME

- had lunch together, got along well, took it in turns to say what we liked about the lectures so far, what we’re interested in, how we like to work, if we already had any ideas about the project.
- I said that whenever I think of textiles the first thing that comes in my mind is sheets hanging out to dry and playing inside them when I was little, the light that shines through, the shadows of my sisters behind the sheets, etc...
- someone mentioned the movement of fabric, especially when thinking of hanging sheets. someone else liked the playfulness of the idea, playing as children.
- went up to get the material. we had lots of white hospital sheets, rope hemp-like and nylon-like (with colours), some odd organic rope and fabrics hardened by glue and sand (recycling of an other project), and lots of different fabrics.
- we picked the sheets and some rope. picking the material was pretty spontaneous where we each asked the other what they thought and if the other said yes then we would take it.
- we went straight to catedralen to set up, picked the place furthest away from reception, close to the entrance to the auditorium.
- right from the start, the idea of a grid to help us hang things to became apparent, so we started tearing strips of fabric and weaving them together to make a grid. again the work flow was very spontaneous, we each took turns to cut and tear and weave, without so much as asking each other  or planning who was to do what. we each did what we wanted to do within the parametres that we had decided together. we knew a grid needed to be done so we worked together to do it, when there were less strips one of us would get up to make while the others carried on weaving. that sort of thing.
- it took maybe two hours to complete the grid, we hung it up by the entrance of the auditorium, just to see what it would look like, and started hanging things (knotting the fabric onto the grid). here the process became more individual where we each decided to do our own thing, occasionally asking if it was ok that we would do this or take that direction (’oh sorry I’m encroaching a bit on where you were working, no that’s ok  go right ahead and add to it’). Linn kept saying that whatever she was doing, we (the others) could always add to it if we wanted to.



- we ended up with a fairly sculptural hanging piece of white pieces of fabric organised on a grid, to mimic the hanging sheets and playing through them.
- taking it down for the night: because there was going to be a show in the evening in the auditorium we couldn’t leave it up overnight. Again we talked together on how best to take it down and agreed that we would mark each corner of the grid in another coloured fabric, take each corner down and fold the grid on itself, with the hanging fabric inside (so that when we opened it out in the morning, it should have stayed put).
- love the teamwork so far!