Bridget Harris

Sometimes I wonder why I'm doing this, it hard slog and some weeks and days you get nowhere, rejection is the worst and because of that I have spent along time not over exposing myself . However that really doesn't work. This little book is a combination of my journey, back and forward, finding a solution, working out the best way which is carry on making, working, experimenting and let people enjoy.       

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       

  After such a long time away. Bereavement, pandemic and life throwing another few awful curve balls left me wondering how on earth I would get through a day, no space or time for creativity. Over time I have come to understand it is my practice that propels me, now with space and time and a Distinction for my MA I am ready to embrace the creative world again. So much has been happening over the past few months in my studio, http://Instagram.com/bridgetharris-artist , you can follow all my work on the following link. I will be posting on my blog regularly. 

                                                                                          Final Work  Stain of 71 Women. An archive is an accumulation of historical records , the archive that interested me contained no fabric or object's, only paper documentation spanning from one side of the world to another. I wondered if by investigating and researching specific embroidery stitches could they be used metaphorically. Could embroidery then be used to creative a story by piecing together fragments of data and would the stitch be enough to convey the meaning of the archives ? Or could the embroidery be used for much more complex expression's that hide within archives, one of time, complexity, identity, the stitching of rejected remnants of society?...

So much more is visible when you look at the detail of this print from the plate, the leaf looks fragile , hand drawn and has a historical botanical feel about it, this was printed on paper , however I think being a textile practitioner  I should try this on linen or calico, then I need to see if the body of the leaf changes at all. I have done this in the past with lace and it has been very successful, first printing on cloth and then taking a negative, not only do you get the print of the object but also the weave of the cloth .

Starting my MA  September 28th 

Having become the lucky owner of a secondhand Hawthorn Etching Press I have been experimenting this morning in my studio. Once I had set up the weight of the roller I got some random flowers, leaves and vintage lace, inked up the plate and off I went. After the first print I took off the elements and reprinted the plate causing a negative effect which can be seen in the second photo. This negative effect is really interesting and something I have been investigating with vintage lace when doing my Wednesdays at The Ropewalk  http://www.the-ropewalk.co.uk/ nts. Another interesting factor was how the sap and stamens from the leaves and flowers bled onto the paper thus causing natural dye. As the garden is coming into full bloom this may be the idea time to carry on with investigating this further. 

Print making and playing with order and position. Often I just use one piece of garment or lace to print with , here I am trying to get out of the habit and use a variety of different elements. The reason is to try and link these pieces with further work in some way. I like the difference between the ghostly images and then the block colour of the lace in the right hand corner,I'm not sure if I could now print and over print to get different textures and colours .

Worked in Flowers. All types of flowers were used as an interest for Eighteenth century young ladies, obviously for those of wealth and privilege. Embroidery gave them the opportunity to express an interest in botany working the flowers in silks in running stitch, in  The Subversive Stitch by Rozsika Parker  , Parker talks about the attitudes that shaped eighteenth century embroidery by looking at Mary Delany's work , Mary's sister described a piece of embroidery in a letter stating "the bottom of the petticoat was worked with twined nasturtiums,ivy,honey suckles,periwinkles,convolvuluses and all sorts of twining flowers". Above I have used my print image of a sleeve and started to embroider using very contemporary flower shapes, I shall continue inter-twining and working into the fabric to see what happens to the humble concept of the sleeve. 

I was trying to imagine the turmoil and thought of separation the women who left their children at The Foundling hospital felt.  The stain of leaving a child would be bad enough , however it was to enable the Mother to try and restart her life , often I believe with the intention of re claiming her child, though this rarely happened , often death came first. The process of print on paper using vintage sleeves as a means of communication between mother and child , as you can see stains are beginning to appear on two of the sleeves, the response to the stigma of having to leave your child, tiny little threads at the top of the sleeve are the threads of connection.

An afternoon at  The Ropewalk  printing, I had been given some beautiful tatting done by a friends Mother and also some Vintage lace as a Thank you for talking to students about my work. I thought about how I could use then and decided to make an impression  onto a zinc plate using a soft ground and then it was etched using a Nitric acid solution. I have printed on both paper and fabric , the results are clear and interesting, if you look closely you can see the small stitches are just visible. I am now keen to see how I can develop this further, maybe by adding embroidery myself or looking at other colours and medium to print with 

After spending many hours wondering how to take my pieces of drawn thread work that I had done for my BA and incorporate them into larger pieces of stitched detail. I contemplated the thought of the women of the eighteenth century whose lives were filled with continuous drudgery and fear. Slow Stitch with hand dyed thread to represent the stain some of these women carried with them was worked over poor and rich fabric, the result is quite beautiful and calming .

Natural Dyes. Picking the odd flower from the garden and using it as a source to dye the fabric and paper I will be using in my project Fragments. I'm not sure how they will be used yet, I may well incorporate them into some of my printwork or play on the fact they are fragments, I think the best thing for now is to keep them all together and see how the colours play with each other.

Copper and Elderberries I was very lucky to receive from Alice Fox her wonderful Book Natural Processes in Textile Art: from Rust Dyeing to Found Objects www.textileartist.org/book-review-natural-processes-in-textile-art-by-alice-fox , this book is not only very informative and beautifully written with some amazing photographs but gently guides you through the process of mark making using so many objects you would just walk by or not even think would be capable of dyeing paper or fabric.  

F ragments. A morning in my studio is rare during the school holidays. I felt like a child in a sweet shop, not really knowing what to do or where to start. I took some of the work I had been doing at the Ropewalk  https://www.the-ropewalk.co.uk/  and used this as a starting block.This is a very different concept to working for me as I normally do at least two sketchbooks full of art work etc before I even start to think about anything else. However as I am continuing with the Foundlings I could say alot of the ground work has already been done, this is more about developing my practice and incorporating new ideas.