Bridget Harris

MA Work Journal    This week has been pretty slow in my studio, life gets in the way and important things need to be addressed. I try not to get frustrated and look at it as a time for reflection. I often take my old work out and see if it could fit or possibly elements of it could fit into me current work. Cyanotype is something I want to develop as I really liked the process during my BA and MA courses. Stitch investigation is something I touched upon when doing my MA, it was important for me to look at stitch as a narrative, expression and feeling. I feel much more investigating and work could be done on this as I only toughed on the usual type of stitch, so many more to investigate and develop. I would like to do this but need to have a different approach and methodology .     

Paperlitho New Idea's. Having become fascinated with paperlitho, and somehow managing to get a reasonably good transfer of an image. I want to investigate this within my practice to see where it would fit. I still need to perfect the technique, sometimes I have far too much water on the paper, soaking it up with a sponge and cotton buds work well but I like that grainy edge a blur between the print and paper. Experimentation on seeing how I could add stitch or collagraph to the pieces is my next stage, I think if I do this the paperlitho needs to have more space enabling areas to be exploited.   

      My dear husband bought this book the other day as he thought it would be of interest. Factual books I normally read during the day, but I was intrigued and excited to start it as soon as he gave it to me , it has become my night reading ..only because I have more time. The book written by dress historian Kate Strasdin, after she was given the diary , the story behind that in itself is something I dream would happen to me in my lifetime. The book is beautifully written, it has such a gentle tone to it, packed full of social history it follows Anne Sykes journey. It is so clever as nothing is really known about Anne and certainly the diary gives away no clues, but Anne in a sense is  invisible but you read on feeling completely drawn in to the story. The photo's of the swatches are lovely and there is a QR code in the back to enable you to see more, these are stunning and is the icing on the cake. 

After my last post I thought about an exercise I could do daily to try and unstick myself from the attitude of not wanting to take my work to the next stage by collage. I decided to do a daily teabag collage  now I know the teabags aren't a huge surface area but its more about cutting, tearing , sticking and regrouping my work . If I stick at it , I could turn my collages into a handmade book as a reference to what worked and what didn't,  as I become more confident I could increase the size .

Collage  I find it so hard to work on images and then rip them up and collage them to create another image. The fear of it all going wrong and just looking awful is what stops me, why when I am happy with what I have produced should I push it. I also find it hard to put things together so I am going to practice this, maybe little steps  making small collages. I have come across Seth Apter's 5 principals of collage https://www.clothpaperscissors.com/blog/seth-apters-5-principles-of-collage/ I am going to have a read of it, make notes I think it will help. Looking up collage historically I came across Kurt Schwitters.   I was quite drawn to his work, I found the text interesting and the placement of papers, which he followed no rule for, making his  print work exhibits having a lack of order: artwork, and text are placed in unexpected areas. As a result, the space left between draws equal attention to the text and images themselves.  

Mapping the Forgotten I wanted to look at my practice further, I was feeling as bit lost on where to go and what to do , I felt that by just using stitch I was hemming myself in , expression and development was hard. I came across  www.fibreartstaketwo.com  a course by  www.sallytyrie.com  seemed to fit the brief in my mind so I joined and what a great decision that was. It was the most amazing experience, I have met so many like minded artists and was blown away with the amount of talented people on the course. I wanted to continue with my passion of social history. Please have a look at the amazing work  exhibition.fibreartstaketwo.com/books/lcvj