Exploring Composition In This Textiles Piece Created From Hand Dyed Indigo Vintage Linens And Painted

Inspiration everywhere. Look up, look down, keep your eyes open and SEE what’s around. Love the layered road markings, grates, drain covers, yellow lines and markings on our roads and pavements.

Getting my colour mixing mojo on. Painting outdoors in the Spring sunshine feeling inspired by the fresh colours around me in the garden and from walks in the surrounding fields, lanes and woodland.I had forgotten how much I love this!

In the late 1980′s and early 1990′s after graduating, I worked freelance as a textiles designer and also travelled to South America after winning a travel bursary award in a design competition. I was inspired by the pre-Hispanic, ancient textiles of Peru, where the Incas and other ancient civilisations used natural dyes to create their woven cloth. I travelled through Peru, Columbia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and down to the very south of Chile and had the best time. I researched natural dyes, spending time of the beaten track, living with indigenous people and learning from them. We picked roots by moonlight and gathered plants on specific dates linked to the Inca calendar, there was lots of superstition surrounding the dyeing process but also much wisdom and understanding of the life cycle of each plant and when it would give the best sources of colour.

On my return, I spent most of my time mixing colours from gouache and saving the match pots in 35mm film canisters as sample colours. This was pre-digital when everything was hand painted and drawn out in detail for selling to design companies. I had forgotten my love of colour matching and mixing and remembered my workshop space had literally hundreds of these hand mixed colour swatches lining the shelves for reference when recreating new colour palettes.

Thes images show my process of stretching fabric, priming, layering colours over a series of days with time between to ponder what colours to mix and add for balance, harmony and also composition. Enjoying myself!

Russian Constructivism as a design influence is a wealth of pattern inspiration.

These are designs for possible products for a gallery shop as part of a graphics project. They started by playing with limited colours of paper and card to create repeat patterns to use as design ideas to apply to products.

Cultural Appropriation brief exploring Native Americans and Indian artefacts to inspire decorative cloth and screen printing on fabrics.

Amazing fashion illustrations by talented AS Textiles student.

Excellent use of ‘extreme’ paper collage on Vogue fashion imagery to personalise her own designs. Love these!

#paper collage #origami #time consuming #fashion illustration

Got my work selected for the Millfield Summer Show exhibiting now. Come and visit, some great work this year!

Rusted and naturally dyed fabrics from salvaged and scavenged materials found on daily walks, plotting the ancient field boundaries. Visual diary. Slow-stitched cloth. Recording traces and tracks.

Developing abstracted compositions, cropping and enlarging to explore sections for repetition and textile designs for garments. The loose, expressive marks and gestural brushwork retain the spontaneity of the original line and translate an urban, edgy print as a theme of unisex wear.

Congratulations Jessie Goad!

Jessie’s fashion collection explored the theme of ‘journeys’ and focused on favourite places, memories attached and evoked by walking in the locality. Maps were of particular interest and her digital prints were applied to garment construction to great effect.

We were fortunate to invite fashion graduate, Clancy Dawson, into college to run masterclasses with the Textiles students with a particular emphasis on quality finish when making garments. Clancy studied at Glasgow School of Art and has worked on Saville Row as a trouser tailor so her skills were invaluable. Jessie worked closely with Clancy and repurposed an original 1980′s trouser pattern and made it her own, cut from her bespoke fabric these were really successful and unique.

Jessie plans to continue developing her own brand and selling her fashion online. We wish her all the very best with her business plan.

Lockdown can be a time for CREATIVE isolation and I am really enjoying being at home with access to a table and sunlight to play and experiment with monotone mark making.

Fabrication brief.

Student were asked to donate 5 items of old clothing to explore this communal response to the fashion industry and sustainability. This activity asked them to wrap and layer their garments as a parcel to collate as a collaborative wall installation. The first image shows a focused drawing of one talented students response to this task. A beautifully observed watercolour study.