blackfisharts ABOUT my art

There is something about slow stitching - ie by hand and not sewing machine - that i love. it can be done anywhere, any time, while chatting with others, alone in silence at dawn or outside in the sunshine, in front of diversions like the TV etc. It can be meditative and as it grows slowly it can become satisfying. Musings on Found Poetry took me to thinking about collage and the slow stitching i do each evening - the pieces become a collage of cloth over time. Cloth is 'found', picked at random and added to with stitch and /or other cloth or even same cloth torn up and added to itself creating texture and a collage of elements. Examples here show what can be done with a minimal range of stitches that i use - that being straight stitch or a derivative of it such as couching, cross stitch, seed, backstitch, wrapped stitch and sometimes knot stitch. Often texture is created with stitch but also with layering of cloth, such as in these examples that include weaving strips into a...

Slow stitching for me is mostly wall hangings, fabric style collage and richly layered with stitches using mainly running stitch, back stitch and couching. I find an enormous amount of diversity in limiting the stitching and utilising different weights, colours and types of thread and materials. I rarely stitch anything 'practical' but found i needed something to keep my needles under control. So i created these two variations of a needle book - they came about from playing around with ideas from bookbinding (a scroll and Japanese style binding). a short video below on the needle books I made using bits of woollen blanket from my collection. (above) video on needle books with boo boo !

  Is your passion a problem ? I am talking about your life's passion. It was a problem for me, for decades, while i worked in a career that paid the bills - but i always sought out 'that other thing' I felt I wanted to do. In my spare time and holidays I photographed, played with digital enhancements, did collage, calligraphy and wrote poetry. Sometimes with some success that was measured in being published and works purchased by private collectors. These days I am following my passion. I spend all day (and evenings) doing stuff - stuff i love - painting, collage, assemblage, photography, book making, slow stitching and writing. I am never bored, I quite like my boss, I enjoy going to work and I don't want to take days off or go out to gatherings, get togethers and coffee mornings. I feel so fortunate. What is your passion ? Do you do the things you love or are you in the process of re-discovering your passions. Perhaps we need to go back to our childhood to re-di...

i had completely forgotten but was woken with a kiss and a 'happy Valentine's Day love' ... so nice. And then i was into my day ! - dental appointment, picked up some veggies to plant, a load of washing, and 3 hours in the studio painting. and it seems i have to get ready for dinner too .... how nice, feeling that fortunate feeling i get every day. dinner where? its a surprise ! ... we shall see so ... for Valentine's Day i remembered all the hearts i was stitching over time (and a little mosaic) ... here they are ... HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY TO ALL - i hope you too enjoy the fortunate in your day, time, space. 

  back to these again .... well, unpacking a bag ful and these two are both 'finished' ... as i have been musing over the past two years of journals and painting and art making i am back to considering mark making ... very obvious in the stitch, i think. Again, intuitive, no thinking apart from maybe shapes and colour but otherwise exploring 'my' stitch and some technique. the spiral is a 'rope' made from a hanky torn into strips ... the square it is on is a rusted bit of cloth, against a bit of light muslin all on wool blanket piece.

New place, new space, settling into ways of working and after many months concentrating on setting up the house, gardens and studio spaces I have finally got back to slow stitching at night. Picked this one up again and started that crazy fill-in stitch i do. I plan to blog a lot about sections of art i do, including stitching. lots to do, lots to talk about and lots to discover and explore.

one of my favourite activities is contour drawing. I have taken these two self portraits and translated it using backstitch on prepared cloth. The top one (not quite finished) is a shibori style scrunch cotton hanky dipped in tea and the bottom one is commercially dyed shibori style cotton.

  Last night i picked up this cloth again and continued .... its a reverse-dyed cloth (bleached) of black 100% cotton open weave. I love bleaching cloth where it removes the original colour leaving you with shades of the underdyed colour which can be anything from gold through to reds and sometimes greens. The nuances of colours come from the length of time its left in the bleach. too long and it can strip it right back and sometimes rot the cloth. Stitching is an intuitive response to the marks created by the dye and the torn cloth stitched onto the original cloth. love that ragged edge created from tearing the strip cloth. Musing on the piece as i look at it i am getting shades of landscape. This may be, in part, because i am continually looking and walking within the landscape and the mapping project is high in my thoughts and daily doings. There is, to me, definitely a mapping aspect going on here. I akin it to an internal mapping and an external mapping ... perhaps an internal...