Bridget Harris

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.