Home on the Main Range

A weekend spent in the outdoor studio until the heat drove me indoors. Dyeing, printing, overdyeing, designing, experimenting and doing it all again. The fabrics are the end product after sometimes months of drawing, mapping ideas for a product, collecting visual references and looking at the origins or history of the materials I use. Research is integral to the creative process - whether it's the materials, other artists, cultural significance or historical uses. The testing is probably the most interesting part - finding the meaning, the symbols and intersections, looking for connections be it through colour, pattern, scale and shape. The process often sparks another series of thoughts. It never really ends and other times, well it's just a load of fun in the studio.  

Playing with monoprinted papers made a few years ago. Pears was once a theme - these were created by crumpling and uncrumpling brown paper many, many times until it felt like fabric.  Liquid acrylics were then scraped and pushed around the surface. The acrylics dried to a soft gloss.  Gold oil stick was then gently brushed across the surface, catching the tops of the folds and creases. Next step was to print pears. I use a large sheet of glass, bevelled and taped around the edges onto which I rolled a thin layer of oil based printing ink. The paper was placed face down over the glass and a knitting needle used to gently draw out random and overlapping pear shapes. The ink takes a few days to dry - depending on weather conditions - and the resulting paper can be used whole, or collaged into a journal.  

Carving a new print is relaxing but requires full mental presence and even more patience. A rushed cut or slip results in nothing printable at all.   The grevillea leaf is one of my favourites. Spiked points and gentle curves mean it can carry many meanings in an art work. It can speak to nature, trees, the outdoors, Australian native plants at a very obvious level. It can also carry deeper meanings about our lived experiences. This one is carved in soft plastic - which generally works better than lino on fabrics. It has a little more give and manages to get the full print onto the substrate whereas sometimes the linocut version leaves an imperfect mark.  Getting to the final carving is an evolving process. Then there are test prints on paper, choosing paint,  ink or decolourant (dye stripper) and how that works (or doesn't work) with a particular project. Sometimes I will use discharge paste and strip out the dye before offset and overprinting with ink. This gives t...

These are the tools of creativity. Hand cut and carved erasers, foam, lino and soft plastic. They give meaning to my work and bring colour, texture and interest to the overall design or pattern.  A peony  seed pod, the swirls of shells and ammonites, scribbly bark trails and smoothly stacked river stones. Inspiration for cutting and bringing paper and textiles to life.