New patterns from old

These samples are from my last printing and dyeing session at my old home in Crystal Palace. I was experimenting with simple marks that could transform an existing pattern.

In:Site Graduate Festival of Creativity Commission

Inspired by the pattern of the cathedral glass and the young muslim women I found praying there - I designed a series of patterns that could be overlaid as a way of describing peoples' overlapping experiences and journeys.

I printed these as resists with people passing across the Cathedral Square during the course of the 2nd of September, before letting the print dry and dyeing the whole piece with indigo. We then removed the resist - revealing a new and complex pattern. 

Many people came back to see our final piece and find out how their print had been combined with many others - discovering, I hope a strange and new harmony.

Watch a short film of the work  being created at www.insitefestival.wordpress.com/2013blog

Many thanks to Craftspace for giving me this opportunity to continue my community pattern-making experiments, to Honami for making our matching aprons, to Karin for making the journey and to everyone who helped make the print

Chelsea Celebration

Here are some pics from my final show at Chelsea College of Art - thanks to everyone for coming along and to all my friends for all your love and support. These patterns are for you!

Pre show chaos...

Soulful Pattern

Here is final collection for my BA Textile Design Course at Chelsea College of Art based on five pattern-making experiments that tried to get under the skin of pattern and see if it could be anything more than skin deep. 

Together with gardening friends on my local allotments, at Spa Hill in Upper Norwood, I have created different pattern stories that reflect a time, a person and a place. You can read more about their stories at  www.spahill.blogspot.co.uk

Through collaboration, I wanted to create a recipe for pattern-making with soul: a way of using pattern to re-enchant and beguile the eye, encouraging people to look more closely and care more deeply about the world around them.

A HUGE thank you to the pattern-makers - Stinky aka Sarah Newton and Isabelle, Eileeen Ward, Beverley and Thabo Witter and Tim Gundry-White. Thanks also to Martin Cleave for the beautiful photographs.

You can meet the pattern makers by watching a short film I made about them at  http://youtu.be/ft2Fh6x_dZY

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Recipe for pattern

I've started to make patterns on my allotments. I want to find out what makes a good pattern

Here is one of my best patterns - a co-design between gardener and grass. All the best patterns seem to be a collaboration

chance + place + time = magic

But you have to find a pattern to start with in the first place. I was inspired to try and grow my own pattern using a carpet pattern that meant a lot to me.  My first experiment was with with cress

I used a simple stencil to make these patterns with pigment - I wanted to watch them change with time. Everything alters with time and weather on the allotment.

 

Stinky and Isabelle have shared their own patterns with me - these are inspired by the sweet chestnuts we planted as well as a great dress Stinky wears alot. I'm hoping to make patterns with other allotment friends too

Another way of getting under the skin of pattern is to project it. Karin helped me to make these projections onto carpet, metal and wood.

I've got to find a way of capturing my patterns at some stage of their life-cycle. So I have been printing them as a resist and then dying them with indigo. I'm printing onto found fabric - it has been loved before and adding another unknown pattern story into the mix is thrilling.

So far my recipe for pattern is something like this

1. TAKE a pattern which inspires you
2. PUT it in a place that is special to you - grow it, project it with light, stencil with pigment
3. WATCH your pattern change with the weather, time and chance
4. EXPLORE how smells, tastes, sounds and other feelings enter and transform your pattern
5. IMAGINE ways of capturing your pattern through this shifting cycle

The best patterns are always changing because they are ALIVE

Curtains

These are the final printed lengths for my latest project - Space Invaders. I experimented with readymade patterns, transforming them through resist printing, overprinting, dying and bleaching. I learned that gloss binder resists well but was unable to rediscover how William Morris got his indigo to discharge.

I also learned to start looking a bit more slowly - even though I don't think I will ever stop printing too fast. I'm preparing some more resist designs - light projections taken from natural shapes and forms.  I'm inspired by the Japanese designer, Soetsu Yangagi who describes patterns - not as reproductions of nature but as new creations, visions of what is reflected by the imagination. So I've been keeping a pattern diary. Each day collecting at least 6 patterns from the world around me. It's becoming addictive.