Shelley Rhodes workshop

What a great couple of days! As part of Context (Contemporary Textiles) we were lucky enough to have Shelley Rhodes run a two day 'Fragmentation and Repair' workshop. 

Unusually for me, I didn't make a record and take photos of everything I did, as I wanted to emmerse myself in the process ....I now come to write it up and can I remember everything we did? That'll be a no...

But here's what I can remember. We started off discussing the ways that you can manipulate fabric and paper and then made a series of samples where we chose contrasting values eg light and dark and joined them together in different ways. Other sample pieces were created and Shelly kindly showed us examples of her original works. 

For our final project, we painted a piece of calico with gesso and then used one of our samples as a design source, colouring the calico. I used acrylic inks and Inktense pencils. I then tore up and recombined the pieces of fabric in a different order - added hand stitiching and machine stitching. To be honest I didn't like the result - it was far to fussy and detailed, so I cut it up into inch squares. These were then dipped in paraffin wax and arranged as below - now we were getting somewhere! Each one is a small piece in it's own right and could be used for painting , collagraph or textile inspiration. The parallels with Anita Reynold's abstracting the Landscape course that I did ages ago, were clear. So the photos below are of the finished piece - unless I move things around again!