Photo Friday : Wendy Cotterill

 This week's image comes from Wendy Cotterill, whose blog you can find here, and whose shop, Gallery Textiles,  is here; Wendy specialises in Spunbond fabrics.  Wendy says about this particular piece:

 

Lutradur

The inspiration for this piece (and many others) has been an interpretation of a seascape, or more specifically, waves. The resulting piece itself is not particularly inspirational, but more what it represents - embryonic techniques and the expression of movement.

 

This piece was created from a piece of 30g Lutradur which was initially painted with water colour type paints in the early days when I first started experimenting with Lutradur.

Water based paints are okay, but dry to a much paler finish.

The pink section near the top of the piece were coloured with transfer dyes, and although not immediately apparent, has letter forms on the surface. Again, this was the first time I used my now favourite technique of transferring text onto fabric.

 

 

Once the piece was coloured I cut the Lutradur into section with a soldering iron using a  vermicelli type pattern on the edges and reassembled the sections laying one over the edge of the next and stitched them together with a free running stitch.

 

 

This overlaying technique creates a colour combining effect, although on reflection, not a very good one in this instance. The colours are too 'muddy' and similar in tone.

 

This experimental piece did however turn out to be quite pivotal in informing much of my subsequent work with spunbonded and synthetic fabrics;

This where I first tried out my transferring text with transfer dyes and have used it to great effect many times since.

 

It is also where I made the decided not to use any kind of applied paint to the surface of any of the spunbonded fabrics including Lutradur, as any heat distressing is compromised. I also learned (eventually) that a soldering iron gets very hot and burns you if you touch the tip!!

This is the piece of work that I did as a result of the one described here

 

Artists Statement

When Marion asked me for an Artists Statement, it took me back a few years as I have not written one since I graduated with a Fine Art degree in 1993.  When I read them I find a lot terribly self conscious, but here goes!!.

I carry a lot of 'textiles' baggage around with me, enough to have invented the term 'bag lady' and once threatened that if ever I wrote my memoirs they would entitled 'My Life in Carrier Bags'. In my early 20s I worked in the fashion industry as a pattern cutter, a job that is now done by computers and subsequently taught in further education passing on my skills to young fashionistas in the 1980s - you may remember the 80s?? Big shoulder pads and mahooousive jewellery?? I honed my teaching skills but a combination of events - a terminal decline in UK based manufacturing, my hankering to return to my first passion of surface pattern & decoration and an unexpected left hand turn took me back to study for a degree in Fine Art where specialised in experimental photo/printmaking and colour on canvas which very much informs most of the work that I still produce. A short hiatus in producing any kind of work at all - ie unemployment - eventually led me down the road of gaining a whole new set of (digital) skills and have adopted the ever increasing possibilities of desktop technologies which has subsequently enabled me to reinvent my world of textiles. I still do a bit of stitching when I have too!!