The photographs in this post show the notes in my sketchbook; images of each artist's work can be seen at the links given under references.
Michelle Loughlin
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Michelle
Loughlin is an American textile artist who
made a series of work using hand stitching on photographs in
2007/2008. Urban Weavings is a
collection that celebrates the urban landscape in her home city New Jersey City, NJ, using photos of
sites that are interesting historically or important to the community. These could be
demolished or abandoned buildings, or buildings being redeveloped all of which Michelle recorded before they changed as the area became gentrified. Her motivation was personal, a reaction to feeling helpless in the face of rapid redevelopment of the place she lives in and knows well.
These are
small works, less than 20cm square, and mounted very simply. The photograph is printed onto cross-stitch
fabric and then stitched freely, with bright threads adding
colour, texture and life.
Rather than simply recording the scene, she responds to it and uses the
stitches to complete the picture, to make it more beautiful and vital. She has said of the building that inspired
her piece 410 Bergen Lafayette that she 'would drive by and think how can I
make that prettier?' Her stitches have a boldness and simplicity to them, as if doodling with crayons, highlighting selected areas; a stitched intervention into the street scene.
References
Home Sweet
Home, Embroidery Jan/Feb 2009
Clare Lane
I first heard
of Clare Lane when I visited her solo exhibition at the Stroud textile Festival
in 2008, and I was immediately taken by
her hyper-realistic images of urban and
industrial sites in decay ; I was struck too by the emptiness, the absence of
people.
The stretched canvases
on show were large, over a metre each way, displayed
unframed, and showed photographs that had been digitally manipulated,
simplifying the colours into chunky blocks.
These had then been stitched in some areas with matching threads,
creating a change of texture and depth.
Clare
describes what she does as 'unashamedly process driven', starting with walking
the streets and taking hundreds of photographs. The next stage is to work with the images
in Photoshop. She may use a single image
or create a montage, cutting elements from several photographs to create her
composition. She may also add layers of
scanned images, for example drawings, painted backgrounds, paper cut-outs,
text, and apply a variety of filters.
The key part of the process is digitally overpainting the whole picture,
concentrating on colour and shape and working at such a high level of detail
that she may spend hours on a tiny part of the image, looking at it as an
abstract arrangement of colour and shape. Because of the size of the
finished canvases, she cannot see the final
effect until it has been printed on fabric. Then comes the stitching, using an Irish machine to fill in solid
blocks of colour on parts of the image, which relieves the flatness of the
digital print. This is so subtle that on
first glance you may not realise it is there, and it is not always apparent in
photographs of her work.
Clare Lane
came from a background in architecture and surveying before studying for a
textile degree, and her inspiration comes from urban dereliction, our
contemporary ruins, which are rarely looked upon as kindly as those that are
hundreds of years old, yet they hold the same stories. She describes how she is
interested in the 'visual cacophony' of the urban landscape, the way that
buildings are surrounded by all sorts of other things that are there without an
overall design - rubbish, street signs, road markings.
References
Urban
Fabrication,Clare Lane, Design-It issue
76 (Computer Textile Design Group),2011.
Toil and
Rubble, Jo Hall, Embroidery July/August 2008.
Stroudwater
International Textile Festival Catalogue 2008.
www.urban-fabric.co.uk Clare Lane's
website.
