To the best of my understanding, it's a clue, an opening, a nudge to push me in a new direction, or further from where I am or was at one point, to enable me to... (I hate myself for thinking in these words but this is as accurate as I can make,) increase my visual and design vocabulary. Or, to weave things that look dramatically different to my usual without discontinuing my usual, so I can go back and forth.
Naturally, I Googled handwoven cloth/s images and saw a lot of lovely stuff, but nothing of what I need now. I looked up textile/fiber art, but nothing made my wandering eyes gaze for long, silent minutes. Last night I got bored of flipping through other people's fab artwork, so I decided to resume cleaning my hard drive, something on my To Do list for years.
I know that technically my weaving is probably on decline; I liked looking at details from the middle of last decade, like these. I feel as though I haven't challenged myself for some time; this is from April 2009. I particularly enjoyed shifting through the P2P2 folder and though there are nearly 500 pics after culling twice, I didn't have the heart to cull further.
I enjoyed P2P2 tremendously in retrospect, because I couldn't weave due to a tennis elbow, so I used pens, papers, glue and scissors to experiment much longer than I normally would. (At the time, I was embarrassed about not being able to "complete" the project, and every day I had to tell myself it's OK to just go as far as I can.) I enjoyed the physical involvement of making up tiny mock ups; learned a lot not in my head but with my hands and eyes about my theme; learned I can learn so much from doing without analyzing; and loved living with these scattered around my living room.
You could say I looked within me to find something new, though it sounds so pompous I couldn't possibly voice it in person; nevertheless this would be part of following Randy's advice to be my own apprentice. It now appears I may only need one or two first clues, possibly somewhere around here, instead of in the ether.
But first, a fourth piece from the Not-Laharya warp.
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4 comments:
I love this piece. The design is so interesting, and the colors just sing! Beautiful.
Thanks. It's actually three pieces from the same warp just off the loom. I'm afraid the fourth is going to be a bit dull...
The colours look nice but if you could tell me why this is special? You could look into tribal north-eastern weaves of India.
Let me try this once more, Dodo. These are "special" in as much as they are so bright and unintentional compared to how I weave normally. It is never my intention to recreate/emulate any regional/ethnic textiles, some of whose complexities are well beyond me, and there is much political discussions here in New Zealand about "acquisition" of other cultures' styles, which makes me uncomfortable about straight-forward imitation. I also use only commercially-available yarns so I work within a limited color palette and within my budget.
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