Back in November I attended my first OCA event, a student study day with a workshop run by Karen Stamper. The focus was Mixed Media sketchbooks and Karen introduced us to her way of working, we were invited to try a multitude of materials, to experiment and to play. The reason I return to this now is not any particular technique or material that I discovered, I was chasing a feeling.
As I constructed the net moulds for casting in plaster, I recognised a similarity to the concertina sketchbooks I produced that day:
I started to think that a folded, zig-zag format might be a more appropriate solution than the plaster cubes. Although I was following Karen’s instruction and using her materials, the work I produced that day felt so much more authentic and true to myself than the cold hard cubes.
I think the sketchbooks came from a deeper place inside myself, the raw place where everything isn’t ordered and neat. In fact I know they did, I experienced that ‘time-standing-still’ phenomenon as I made them, the outside world disappeared and it was just me and the materials.
Part Five has taken longer than anticipated partly due to the amount of reading and research I have done into the broader themes of Textiles, Craft and Art. Via Modernism and Bloomsbury I arrived at Virginia Woolf and rekindled my love of literature “the intoxication of language” ¹. I remembered how good it feels to be engrossed in a book, cocooned against the world.
Woolf’s “wave in the mind” ² metaphor for creativity seemed particularly apt as my idea seemed to swell and grow. The idea of it breaking and tumbling, as if one is not entirely in control, is inspirational. My research and sampling have brought the wave to it’s fullest point, I now have to let go….
The idea: If I expand the concertina sketchbook to blanket-like proportions, it would become a symbol of protection and the way a good book can shield you from the real world. It would be constructed from the carefully folded pages of a book but printed in a looser manner suggesting the chaos it repels.
-It feels authentic, I know what it is like to poke my nose in a book and stay there, in my comfort zone. I know how to make a blanket (Cari said: “too practised, too comfortable”)BUT at the same time it can be raw, I know about imperfection, I understand a ‘Sloppy’ aesthetic, my printmaking can break and tumble like a wave…
¹ WOOLF V, Mrs Dalloway (1925) WordsworthClassics P66
² WOOLF: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/23/virginia-woolf-a-wave-in-the-mind/
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