Nothing new under the sun

Way back in the day before there were babies and life in general and all those other things that sweep one up and away and on through life, I started a degree in Textiles at Goldsmith's. It was a strange time for me - I'd been informed in no uncertain terms by various tutors (I was at the time studying at Gt Yarmouth College of Art and Design) that I was unlikely to land a place at such a prestigious school. Well, I did land a place - but one way and another, I ended up not staying. 

Anyway, back then, I had started to experiment with using text in my work. Given that I have always had a decidedly literary leaning, this makes sense to me - but I haven't found a way to make it make sense to anyone else. 

But now somehow a whole bunch of things have come together and I feel moved to find a way to roll my compulsion/attraction to re-use/re-purposing (or re-cycling, or up-cycling, or make-do-and-mending...you decide) and the impulse to 'say' with actual words, to make some kind of statement perhaps, or simply pass comment, or (with luck) deliver some of that special thing that great prose or a poem can deliver - that ineffable thing/movement/moment of recognition/realisation/release that can happen in the body when the mind engages with the words.

So, without trying to pick all of that apart (not right now at least), I have all this table-linen from my mum. I won't use it as table-linen, but I don't want to just 'let it go'. I want to 'mark' it's existence somehow, the importance of it: all those family meals, just the normal everyday stuff that families do every day - the basic stuff of mothering, parenting, being-in-a-family-ing, that we all do. 

So I'm just writing it down on the tablecloth - unedited and spontaneously - and then sewing it into the fabric. I'm not totally sure if it works or is even a good idea (there are many precedents: samplers in general, Elizabeth Parker's sampler and the extraordinary Lorina Bulwer) but I'm going to go with it for a while and just see if it starts to make sense.

This is the back - I'm holding off on showing the front yet, and the back is actually (to my eyes) more 'lyrical' and interesting. Of course, you can't actually read it presented like this, but the words are still 'there'. 

Anyway - it's a big tablecloth, so it's likely to take a good long while to cover the whole thing with text. 

Next up: more inherited table-linen. I have tons of little linen 'coasters'. I want to embellish them, to touch on that tradition of embroidered embellishment. So I'm playing around - very early days - with 'drawing' on the fabric with thread.

Here is a dead fly. It's a close up - 'he' is about 5 cm long. 

And again...I rather prefer the reverse. He looks more 'dead' somehow, don't you think?

I know I'm not the first to light upon the notion of choosing non-traditional - or even 'anti-decorative' subjects to use in an embroidery/embellishment context, but hey ho...nothing new under the sun and all that.

Anyway - that's where I'm at right now. Making a few tentative 'new' moves, while clearly thoroughly re-visiting my past.