journeys

The Creative network of which I am a member has an exhibition running at present called journeys. It demonstrates not only the personal journeys as an artist but also physical journeys.
The piece of work that I have entered is based on photographs that I took of our old farm machinery when we retired from farming. The free time allowed me to begin my journey as a textile artist, basing a lot of my work on rusting machinery, nature and the lives of people all over the world who have worked the land. The exhibition piece is a photo transfer of our old combine, worked over in hand stitch. I am always amazed at the beautiful colours obtained when something decays, in this case, pinks and lime greens. The technique that I used to transfer the photo involved bonding the reversed image onto calico using bondaweb and then gently rubbing away the back of the paper with a sponge and my fingers. The image, below left is one of my photos of the combine. On the right is the hand stitched image which is almost like an abstract and it is left unglazed to get the full effect of the crunchy texture.