July 2021 roundup

Although the first year of the two-year City Lit Creative Basketry course finished in June, I signed up to do a four-week contemporary willow basketry course afterwards, as we don’t work much with willow on the two-year course and it’s an area where I would like to be more proficient.

The tutor was Debbie Hall of Salix Arts, who was new to teaching at City Lit but has run her own workshops for many years. She very generously brought in some of her home grown coloured willow for us to use alongside the standard buff and Black Maul the college normally provides, which was great.

We all started by making a standard 3×3 base, and then went our own ways when weaving up the sides. I wanted to try zigzag weave, and Debbie suggested using two different colours to emphasise the pattern more. I also thought I would use a piece of found wood as a handle, as my previous experience of cranking willow to make a conventional handle was not very successful. However, attaching the wood handle was really hard work, which made me think that cranking was not so bad after all!

Here’s the result – you can see that the wrapping on the handle is not very even!

Most of the other students in the class opted to practise rope weaving, which I’ve previously attempted by myself from a video tutorial. So I thought I would have a go at herringbone weaving, which is like alternating rounds of twining and reverse twining with rope weaving.

I was concentrating so much on the technique that I failed to keep an eye on the shaping, so the final bowl was rather misshapen (which you can’t see in the photo). The base was quite small (about 12cm in diameter), so when I put the 5ft stakes in for the uprights they kept falling out. I ended up using 3ft willow for the stakes, which I had always thought would be too spindly, but it worked OK.

It’s made me think that I should experiment with some small scale willow work, which would definitely suit better the space I have available!

Exhibitions

It’s been a busy month for visiting exhibitions now that I’ve been double jabbed and keen to venture into the outside world again.

First there were the colours and textures of Sheila Hicks at the Alison Jacques Gallery – great Rothko-like bands of colour and bobbly comets.

Over at the Hayward Gallery, Igshaan Adams is not an artist I’d heard of, but his combination of weaving and sculpture, inspired by indigenous dance of the northern cape of South Africa, blew me away. Clouds of dust created by the kicking performers were evoked by spiralling constructions of wire and beads, while weavings laid on the floor represented the desire paths created by local residents as they walked around.

Finally, a friend offered me a spare ticket to the much sought-after Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy. A previous exhibition here in 2012 featured his first works made using an iPad, mixed with his drawings made more conventionally, and I remember being quite intrigued at the time. This time all the works were made with an iPad, and what struck me was the limitation of digital mark making. Not only was everything very flat, but in many works the repetitiveness and regularity of the marks was very obvious – it often felt like digital potato printing. (We were not allowed to take photos, so there are no images.)

Maybe working with textiles, where texture and hand-made irregularities are such a feature, caused my indifference. Where the technology did come into its own was in the animations depicting streaming rain or showing the process of creating the work.

A word about the future

Finally, a heads-up about the future of this blog – you are the first to know!

As you may have noticed in the past couple of years, my focus is moving away from upcycling readymade items and more towards sculptural basketry. So in the next few weeks I will be launching a new website and phasing out Flextiles. I’m not sure yet whether the new site will have a blog, but I will post the link here when it’s ready.

I’ll be resurrecting my email newsletter (which has been dormant during the pandemic), so if you signed up previously under Flextiles you will continue to receive this (you can of course unsubscribe at any time).

This blog will remain open for people to read, and I’d like to thank everyone who has read, followed, liked, and commented over the years. It started out in January 2011 as a personal journal of what I was learning in my textiles evening classes, but more than 10 years later it’s become much more to me, creating connections with so many people around the globe who share a love of, and curiosity about, the world of textiles. Please do stay in touch during the next phase of this journey!

Kim x

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May 2021 roundup

Apologies for the lateness of this post – as life starts reopening I suddenly seem to be very busy!

The big news this month is that I’ve managed to get to a real exhibition – the first one for months.

When I first started learning about the shibori technique, I read about a Japanese textile company called Nuno, which created innovative fabrics that often had shibori characteristics. So when Japan House in London announced the exhibition Making Nuno: Japanese Textile Innovation from Sudo Reiko, I booked up straight away.

The exhibition is small but perfectly formed. A loom installation has the reels of thread set up to mimic one of the Nuno designs, and is beautifully lit to create striking shadows. Peering between the threads at the loom makes you feel as if you’ve just hit warp speed (ho ho).

The exhibition focuses on three of Nuno’s innovative fabrics. Polyvinyl alcohol is a synthetic resin that shrinks at 60°C. It is screenprinted onto polyester taffeta in a grid pattern and then heated to produce the wriggly “Jellyfish” fabric.

“Chemical lace” is made by stitching ribbon onto a water-soluble base, which is then dissolved to leave just the ribbon design.

The third fabric laminates washi paper onto velvet, producing a rich contrast in textures. Sorry there’s no image of this – it was white on white and was difficult to get a good photo.

A series of films shows the production process of many other fabrics in different mills around Japan and is worth watching. Upstairs, a patchwork “curtain” showcases samples of even more fabrics.

Making Nuno: Japanese Textile Innovation from Sudo Reiko runs at Japan House until 11 July.

Twining and coiling

On the making front, I managed to finish my twined dodecahedron!

I wasn’t sure whether to trim the ends further or leave them wild and woolly – Instagram opinion was fairly unanimous about leaving them wild. 🙂

In class at City Lit we made some twined ladles with paper string.

The string I used for the first one (on the left) was a bit bulky, so I made another one (on the right) that was much better.

I also had a go at starting twining with an overlapping base, which was a bit fiddly but worked OK in the end.

I also experimented with coiling, trying out a technique described in Annals of the South African Museum, a book owned by my tutor Polly Pollock. This technique, which incorporates ribs in the coiling, was used on bee skep in South Africa.

First of all I tried making a flat sample with rigid ribs (cane) and a bundle of dried unknown vegetation as the core, wrapped with very fine chair cane.

Then I tried it in the round using softer materials (polished flax for the ribs and core, and hemp for wrapping). This was much easier.

Finally, the first issue of the Basketmakers’ Association Newsletter that I edited was published this month. It was hard work for me and the volunteer designer Anita, but we’ve had extremely positive feedback, so it’s good to know that our efforts are appreciated!

Arctic: Culture and Climate at the British Museum

As England moves into another lockdown tomorrow, yesterday I took the opportunity to go out while I could to visit the British Museum’s latest exhibition.

Arctic: Culture and Climate examines the creative resilience of the indigenous peoples of the region, using local resources to survive and adapt to their environment over the past 30,000 years. There are more than 40 different ethnic groups, but they share many cultural traits and were trading and communicating with each other long before the “southerners” arrived.

“We’re from the High Arctic”, says Inuit seamstress Regilee Ootoova. “We rely on what’s available to us.” And what’s available to them is largely animals – seals and walrus, reindeer and caribou, fish and whales. They view hunting as the giving and receiving of gifts – that animals will only give themselves up to those who treat them with respect, and that the souls of these animals will be reborn, keeping them infinitely renewable.

Marie Rexford prepares muktuk, frozen whaleskin and blubber (photo by Brian Adams from the photographic series I am Inuit)

But animals are not just hunted for food – almost every scrap of them seems to be used in some way. Here I focus mainly on textile and basketry items, but there are some fine carvings and paintings in the exhibition too.

This bag is made of salmon skin, seal oesophagus and caribou fur. There’s a very good post on the British Museum blog on how fish skin is processed.

Seal gut, being waterproof and breathable, was used to make parkas. The seams of this one incorporate beach grass – if any moisture enters the seam, the grass absorbs it and swells, thus tightening the seam and keeping the wearer dry.

Gut parka by Flora Nanuk

Another bag, this time made of duck feet.

Duck feet bag by Zipporah Innuksuk

This lovely basket is made of baleen, with a walrus ivory handle.

Baleen basket by Marvin Peter

Baleen, sourced from whales, is flexible and does not freeze, so it was also used for making sieves to scoop away slush from ice fishing holes. The frame of this one is made of reindeer antler.

Certain animal characteristics were often thought to endow the wearer with similar powers. So this visor decorated with sealion whiskers bestowed the animal’s hunting prowess on its wearer – each whisker represented a successful hunt.

Sometimes hunters would mimic animals so they could get closer to them. This ice scratcher, made from seal claws bound to driftwood with sinew, made a noise like a seal sunning itself on ice, lulling the prey back to sleep so a hunter could approach it unawares.

Plant materials

As well as animal products, beach grass was woven into mats, bags and socks.

Wooden fish traps like this were placed into holes cut into frozen rivers.

In north-east Russia the Sakha people hold a summer festival, or yhyakh, asking the gods for good weather and plentiful pastures. As part of the celebrations, large birch bark containers stitched together with horsehair are filled with meat, wheat porridge and berries with whipped cream for serving to everyone.

Integrating traded materials

As Arctic peoples came into contact with “southerners”, they started incorporating their materials into their tools and garments. The first Europeans arriving in the Bering Strait traded beads for furs. This national costume of the Kalaallit, Greenland’s largest Inuit group, incorporates sealskin sewing with the embroidery and beadwork on northern Europe.

In the 19th century, Moravian missionaries encouraged Yupiit basketmakers to make coiled baskets that appealed to collectors and tourists, like this one with a puffin design.

More recently, on Nunavak Island, Alaska, basketmakers have recycled nylon fishing rope washed up on the beach to crochet into colourful bags.

Sadly, as in so many other instances, this contact led to colonisation, forced conversion, imposed migration and forced settlement. And now there’s climate change.

The exhibition ends on a hopeful note, with displays curated by two indigenous organisations explaining how they are transforming their heritage by adapting, innovating, collaborating and resisting to determine their own future.

Arctic: Culture and Climate is due to run at the British Museum until 21 February 2021, although it’s temporarily closed until at least 2 December due to lockdown. Please check the website for updates.

Lockdown week 9

I wondered if I should call this post Semi-lockdown week 9, as the traffic in my part of London seems to have reverted to normal levels, and the fine weather has brought many more people out on the streets. But my situation remains the same, so I shall stick to lockdown for now.

After all the sampling for my coiled tortoise piece I’ve done in previous weeks, this week I’ve focused on actually making it. Having established that linen thread was my material of choice, I ordered some in colours closer to the radiated tortoise and set to, making 10 individual scutes.

Then I joined them all together.

That’s as far as I’ve got this week. Next I have to make the overall border and then start thinking about the base.

I realise that I forgot last week to post the link to the online Prism exhibition In Search of (Im)Possibilities. The exhibition has been divided into three themes – environment, materials, and place – and each day a post is published featuring four or five artists relevant to the theme. Here is a link to all the posts so far. My work is featured in Chapter 2, Day 1 – Materials. Click on an image to see the artist’s statement.

Finally, although I’ve stopped posting about the V&A kimono exhibition, you can now watch a series of five short films of the show with the curator Anna Jackson. Even better!

Stay well!

Lockdown week 6

Week 6 of lockdown and my creative mojo has gone walkabout. When I look back on the past five weeks I can see I’ve tried a lot of new ideas and materials. By comparison, this week has mostly been about collecting materials and honing familiar techniques.

The weather hasn’t helped. April in the UK has been the sunniest month on record, and the lockdown finally goaded me into getting my bike fixed (bike shops remain open). So I’ve been getting more of my daily exercise on two wheels, discovering the delight of relatively quiet roads in the city.

I’ve also been out gathering materials. The one new thing I did try this week was making cordage from dandelion stalks. Much to ESP’s horror, I failed to remove all the dandelion heads before hanging the stalks up to dry in the garden. So I may not have to go too far to gather dandelions next year! 🙂

Once the stalks were dry, I sprayed them with water to rehydrate before twisting into cordage.

I’m fascinated by the dried dandelion heads left over – they remind me of miniature jellyfish.

I’ve also been gathering dying daffodil leaves for more cordage and coiling. It made me reflect on how things have changed. Four years ago I was obsessed with collecting the dead flowers to dye with; now I’m more interested in the foliage!

I still do some dyeing, mostly with indigo, so I’ve been shibori stitching some recycled items ready to go into the next vat.

I’m currently working on a fiddly coiling project for my City Lit course, which involves lots of sampling. I’m not ready to talk about that yet, but for relaxation I made another coiled bowl from sash cord and wool. Unlike the coiling for City Lit, it’s something I’m able to do while watching TV (another activity I’m doing rather a lot of!).

Talking of shibori, this week’s kimono from the V&A exhibition is a modern garment made in 2019 by Yamaguchi Genbei, decorated with a dramatic depiction of Mount Fuji.

Made from machine-spun hemp, this summer kimono was part of the Majotae project, which aimed to produce hemp on a commercially viable scale for clothing, as it is particularly suited to the Japanese climate.

Stay well!

Lockdown week 5

My experiments with coiling continue, some based on previous work, like this coiled bowl made using a core of sash cord wrapped with knitting yarn.

I’ve also coiled a couple more pear trays.

For the borders I just used the thickest thread I had in my stash – together they remind me of those hot Indian colours.

I also had another go at making rhubarb cordage. This time I left the peelings to dry out, then sprayed them lightly before twisting them. It was much more successful, and smelled nice to boot! The colour was stronger too.

Another satisfactory olfactory experience was working with pine needles. There is a long history of making pine needle baskets in North America, where some pines have incredibly long needles. The longleaf pine, Pinus palustris, for example, has needles that can be up to 18 inches long!

I collected the needles I used from the ground beneath a tree in Kew Gardens a couple of months ago when such things were still possible. They were only around 5 inches long, but this was fine for making a small rustic basket. 🙂

As I mentioned previously, the straw vessels I’ve been making were for a Prism exhibition called “In Search of (Im)possibilities”, which was due to open in London in May but has been postponed, probably till next year. However, the group has decided to organise a virtual exhibition instead, starting on 13 May. This means that those of you who are not in the UK will also be able to see it – a silver lining!

This week’s garment from Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk at the V&A is an ensemble created by John Galliano for Christian Dior in 2007. According to the label, “The sweeping lines of the outer garment reference both uchikake (outer kimono) and the swing coat pioneered by Dior in the 1950s.”

The layers of colour at the neckline also evoke kasane, colour combinations found in the garments of aristocrats during the Heian period. The hat is by Stephen Jones.

The photo below shows some of the lavish embroidery with silk threads and hand painted lace appliqué.

Stay well!

Lockdown week 4

Cabin fever must be getting to me – I’ve started coiling household objects! I had a moulded cardboard tray used for holding pears, which I cut up into individual sections. This is the result of coiling the first one.

I did consider stitching into the cardboard itself, but decided to go for the minimalist look, especially as the bottom is quite textured (it looks like an avocado).

Over on Instagram, I was inspired by Suzie Grieve’s amazing rhubarb baskets to try making some rhubarb cordage. I used fresh rhubarb peelings, which was a mistake. They were very wet and slippery to work with, and they shrank a lot when they dried.

Wet rhubarb cordage

Dry rhubarb cordage

I rather like the open helical structure of the dried cordage, but in this case it wasn’t what I was after. Another lesson learned!

The series of straw vessels for Prism continues. This one is a combination of cobbling and coiling (coibbling?). Cobbling, as I understand it, is bunching soft material together with random stitching.

Only a week after planting, my Japanese indigo seeds have germinated and are doing well.

This week’s kimono from the V&A exhibition is a bit unusual. It’s a kimono for a young boy commemorating the first flight from Japan to the UK in 1937. Made from printed wool, it’s decorated with images of Mount Fuji, Tower Bridge and the route taken by the plane.

I’m not sure what the other flag is next to the union flag. It looks like the international maritime signal flag representing the letter T (tango), which usually means “keep clear”. Or maybe the T stands for Tokyo?

Stay well!

Lockdown week 3

I got a bit carried away with the blue and white coiled sample I started last week, and ended up with a fully fledged bowl! The finishing was neater on this, so I am improving. 🙂

I also completed another straw vessel, this one made of coiled cordage. I found making cordage from straw a bit challenging, to put it mildly.

Although I soaked the straw and left it to mellow, some of it still had a tendency to split, and the stiff nodules made it difficult to twist. If I cut the nodules off I was left with very short fibres.

Also the resulting cordage varied in thickness, which made for a bit of an uneven pot. Still, I got there in the end.

Making the straw cordage reminded me that I still had a lot of dried daffodil and day lily leaves I saved last year. So I also made a bit of cordage from day lily leaves. It was so easy compared with using straw – quite relaxing and meditative! You can see last year’s post on making cordage here.

The weather warmed up this week, so I planted my Japanese indigo seeds, saved from last year’s plants. I was also delighted to see green leaves unfurling on some willow stubs I stuck in a pot about a month ago.

I don’t think I will have enough to make a basket for a couple of years, but it’s a start!

Slightly further afield in my local park (the one that hit the headlines when it was shut down on Sunday), the swans are nesting.

I thought the weaving was a bit loose. 😉 But it was interesting watching the bird plucking down from its breast to keep the eggs insulated.

I also came across a dog with a stick (or should that be a stick with a dog?)!

The dog certainly didn’t give up – I came across it carrying the stick shortly after entering the park and then met it again on the other side of the park, still with the stick!

This week’s kimono from the V&A exhibition is actually a kamishimo, an outfit for a male. Samurai wore these for formal occasions – this one is probably a boy’s. It comes in two parts – a pleated lower garment (hakama) and a sleeveless jacket (look at those shoulder pads!) called a kataginu.

Stay well!