The implications of a job in retail on one's creativity...

I haven't written anything on here in ages. Truth is, work had sapped out every inch of my creativity. Fortunately, I got a place on an internship at my local art gallery/ museum, which has saved my creative mojo. So in the last week, I've been crocheting another blanket. I'm using up odd balls of wool and searching in charity shops. Photograph to follow shortly.

A sneaky peak at my MA work.

I know I have been terribly lazy with my blog and not updated it in a while, but I thought I would share with you a sneak preview of my work for my MA show starting on the 2nd September. These 40 samples will make up an installation in the exhibition and have all been stained using either red cabbage, blackberry, blueberry or cherry. The screen printed images depict weeds and wildflowers I have observed. I have become fascinated with their resilience, their unfaltering effort to reclaim man made urban environments. My aim is to draw parallels between stains and weeds and encourage people to celebrate them rather than eradicate them.

Please fill in my survey for my Masters Thesis!

I promise it will take no longer than a couple of minutes and every response will be greatly appreciated! Thank you! Just click here!

50 Helpful Tips

I know that this link is for Graphic Designers but I thought the large majority of them could be applied to any creative graduate. A specifically poignant one is the one which says about refusing unpaid internships. Companies can use the current economic climate as an excuse for taking advantage of students. Like the website states, it should be at least minimum wage. Lets not let these money grabbing people devalue our work!

When things dont go to plan ...

... its hard to stay positive. I tried out baking the tops as I said I was going to and they weren't successful. The ones with the blueberry burnt for some reason and the salt hardly did a thing. I think I can still do something with them but its just really disheartening when things go wrong. On to plan B. I just need to figure out what that is first!

Fade away....

When I printed on this top the other day I was a bit concerned. It came out bright yellow, it wasn't at all subtle . It was screen printed with turmeric and I think I gravely overestimated how much I had to use. My aim was to create something feint that replicated the existing stain on the garment. I washed the T-shirt, still the colour was almost luminous. Then I recalled a friend telling me how turmeric isn't very light fast. I hung it out on the washing line on a sunny day and viola, feint faded design!

Etro Cooked Shirt Project

I was going through my old magazines last night and came across this in an old Surface Magazine (Issue 71, State of Emergence). Its a design concept by Etro whereby the consumer can dye the shirt by using either, blueberries, salt and coffee. The above image is of the blueberry stained shirt which is put into the oven with the blueberries, juice and some sugar. I feel inspired to experiment. I'll keep you posted with how I get on.

Beautiful Weeds

As a society, we are made to see weeds as the enemy, much like stains actually. They must be eradicated. You only have to walk into the garden centre to find hundreds of types of weed killer, all with horrible chemicals in them. Anything which you spray in the garden which says keep away from children and animals has to be bad. But whats so bad about a few weeds? This one I found in my garden (don't tell my mother, she would be horrified!) is like a nettle with tiny purple little flowers. Isn't it time that we stopped fighting these little things and started admiring them. You have to appreciate nature's resilience; no matter how much cement or chemicals we put in its path, these things always find a way.

Swiss chard

We have got quite a few Swiss chard plants growing in the garden and I had some of the baby leaves the other day in a salad. They were not only delicious but beautiful. This variety is bright lights, which have the bright orange and pink stems. This is the first yield from the garden this year, hopefully there will be much more to come.

Fendi S/S 2011

When browsing through the current issue of Elle magazine I can across a dress from the S/S collection for this year that had stain like patterns on it. Many of them appear burn like, and as you can see from the picture devore has been used to remove a layer of the cloth. I found them really interesting, not only because of my obsession with stains but also because i havent seen anything like it in fashion collections before.

Home Grown

Last year, my mum and I managed to successfully start a small vegetable patch in the garden. We had courgettes, tomatoes, beans and they all tasted fabulous, 1000 times better than that which you buy in the supermarkets.

Its fair to say that this effort had a lot to do with the BBC Two series broadcast last year called Edible Garden, where Alys Fowler (you can read about it and watch clips here) creates a vegetable garden in her small London garden. She also forages in the wild but this is something that I haven't quite mustered up the courage to undertake yet for fear or picking something poisonous. I love the idea of the Good Life, being self sufficient, living off the land and supporting local environments rather than global corporations.

We are expanding the vegetable bed this year, and it seems like other people are following suit. Whilst reading this months copy of Elle Decoration I saw 3 rooftops in London which had been adapted into roof gardens. Homegrown is having a revolution.

Keep your integrity

I sometimes find it very hard to stay true to myself, especially within an academic environment where you know that you are going to be marked on something. I think ultimately though, you have to go with what you believe in and not lose your integrity to please someone else. Someone who agrees with this is John C Jay in his 10 tips for young designers. Amen to this.

Work in Progress

A trace can be defined as a 'track or mark left behind; a sign of what has existed or occurred' (Oxford Dictionary, 1991: 341)

Through this work I have begun to explore the traces that are left behind over time and challenge society's perception of them. I have worked with stained textiles which have been donated to me, items which their owners no longer thought beautiful.

I have looked to nature for inspiration, particularly how over time surface in nature become consumed by fungus, lichen, moss and ivy. This to me is directly representational to that of a textile surface. Through day to day life they pick up stain and wear in certain areas. I have use my observations of nature as subject matter for my designs- printing images of moss over stained areas of cloth.

As I am concerned with the emotional durability of textiles I have given myself the challenge of making stained and worn textiles beautiful again by printing with natural staining substances such as blueberry, blackberry and turmeric. I wish to develop these processes further, testing in particular their permanence and how they fade over time.

Slow and steady

I started reading a book by Carl Honore called in praise of slow. It is a really interesting observation of how we live at ever increasing paces of life and he suggests that this can have detrimental effects on every aspect of our lives. He claims that we have lost the ability to do nothing and just contemplate. We can no longer just stare aimlessly out of train windows but have to busy ourselves with books, newspaper, phones. The irony of this is that I am currently sitting on a train writing this. However I am partial to staring out a window too, and sometimes I even get the stopping train for this exact reason; to stare out the window and be deep in thought. Honore emphasises that the Slow Movement isn't about doing nothing, its about finding balance in your life and not losing sight of the fact that some things require time to be taken over them.

This is exactly how I feel about my work. Its exploratory, requires a lot of research and thought and its not about producing hundreds of designs. Its about craft and value in textiles and making people slow down and think.
Sent from my BlackBerry smartphone from Virgin Media

Isn't it ironic...

... when you like the underside of the design better than the top. I had one such incident yesterday after printing and stitching into one of my blackberry experiments. I really liked the faded appearance of the print on the reverse and as a result the contrast of the stitching. I took matters into my own hands and washed the shirt until the design faded ever so slightly. It did make me think though that maybe having a reverse that you prefer isn't such a bad thing. Its the area closest to your skin, a secret only you know. Interesting concept.

Will it all come out in the wash?

I have been testing my stain experiments for colour fastness. I did two of each staining substance so that I could wash one and leave one as it is and compare. The difference in colour was remarkable. The blackberry stain in the picture has changed colour to a blueish purple. The worst result was the beetroot which completely washed out apart from a very feint stain. In my future experiments I will perhaps try adding salt to help the colour stay.

Experiments with staining substances

I have started to undertake some experiments with staining substances on cloth. These have ranged from blackberries, beetroot, tea, pomegranate. It's amazing how different the results were. I particularly liked the blackberries and the varying tones in the colour stain they produced, from the watery stain around the edge to the very dark sections where the seeds where. I wish to use this kind of colour variation in my designs. I'll keep you posted on how I get on.

The story so far ...

I sometimes get a bit bogged down by words and inspirational thoughts, forgetting about the fact that I am actually a textile designer making tangible things.

I've started exploring how you can elevate the status of a stain on cloth by designing around it. I've been looking for a long time at the correlation between textiles and nature. Looking at how fungus, lichen and moss take over a surface in nature over time I have adopted the same concept in my textile designs. I have the idea of extending the stains into something of beauty. I have started by stitching around them with tiny, intricate lines.

In the coming weeks I want to also explore printing around these stains with fine lines, taking inspiration from my drawings from nature.

Donate your stained, unwanted textiles!

I am sending out a plea for any plain (white or cream) textiles which have been stained in some way. I have a preference for tops, tablecloths and napkins. Ask anyone you think might be able to help. Its for my masters project so a very worthy cause. I really want to work back into these stained textiles and make them even more beautiful and meaningful than they ever could have been in their previous lives. Contact me at keelyb@hotmail.co.uk for more details. Thank you.

Toast

I'm a huge fan of Nigel Slater so when I saw that there was a BBC television drama based on his childhood I felt very intrigued. It is called Toast on BBC, I missed it on the TV but caught it on BBC iPlayer.

Unfortunately his mother died when he was still a young boy and his relationship with his father was turbulent. There was a really beautiful scene where his dad goes out and leaves him and he feels alone and scared. He puts on a record and gets one of his late mother's dresses from the wardrobe pulls it close to him and smells it. He then starts dancing with the dress, we are transported back with him to a time where he is dancing with his mother in that very same dress. It was such a poignant moment in the film, and it really struck a chord with me. It just reminded me of how wonderfully evocative textiles can be. It may be just to provide physical comfort but often there is a more emotional attachment. The young Nigel not only used the dress to comfort him emotionally, he used it as a tool to re-live a precious moment with his mother. Later his father comes home and finds his son cuddled up with the dress. He removes it, holds it close to him and smells it in exactly the same way as Nigel has previously and breaks down. His tears saturating the dress. Previous to this, the father has been portrayed as very distant to his son, sometimes extremely cold and angry. In this scene it breaks down all of these barriers and humanizes him and probably shows him at his closest to his son, even though Nigel remains asleep throughout. I just thought it was wonderful to show how powerful an item of clothing can be.

I have focused on a very small part of the film but it really is worth a watch. Its beautifully filmed and deals with so many issues which relate to childhood and upbringing.