Water, Water

I seem to be doing nothing much but reading at the moment, however by the end of the Easter holidays I need to be sure of what I am going to make or it is going to be pretty hard to get together a whole solo show by July (unless I look for a very small venue).

I have a back up plan - a booking for an unfinished upstairs gallery, but I'm looking for somewhere on street level if I can find something suitable.

Anywhere here is a book that has scared me recently
When the Rivers Run Dry - Fred Pearce. This book was a bit of a revelation. He mentions the term 'Virtual water'. This is the economists term for all the water that was used to produce a manufactured item. It was invented by Tony Allan of the school of Oriental and African Studies in London.

New Zealand sells kiwifruit to overseas countries and is therefore exporting water inside the fruit which ends up in another country. Which is Ok for us, at least we have rain (often a bit too much rain). But what if it is a dry country exporting tomatoes which have been irrigated -  the amount of water inside the tomato is added to the water that was used to irrigate the tomatoes. The 'Virtual water' count can be huge.

Fabric grows in a hot climate and needs lots of water for irrigation, then gets dyed, rinsed and rinsed and rinsed then scrubbed and faded (In the case of jeans). The Virtual Water count for cotton is enormous.

If it takes 25 bath tubs full of water to grow enough cotton for a t-shirt then it is probably similar for a metre of quilting cotton. The water for growing cotton is being pumped out of rivers and used to irrigate the cotton which is grown in very dry places, almost deserts, and this is causing the rivers to run low and in some cases dry out. Have a look here for pictures of the Aral Sea. This is before the fabric gets dyed and rinsed and then taken home and washed to remove the starches and finishes and to shrink it.

 

The Aral sea 

The water was pumped out of the rivers which feed the Aral Sea to irrigate cotton.

Now I love cotton, and I love to dye cotton and I'm no purist but I'm starting to think about the implications of my choices of materials so I'm reading books on sustainability. I haven't found many books by contemporary quilters which consider the environmental issues of the materials they are using. However there are lots of people in the fashion industry who are looking at becoming more eco-friendly or sustainable in their work but there are so many factors to consider.

You can recycle and use up scraps - quilters used to be very good at this and to be fair, some still are.

People are designing clothes which use every scrap of fabric instead of all the trimmings going to the landfill

You can use organic cotton (try googling suppliers of organic cotton in NZ and it isn't easy to find)

You can dye with natural dyes

You can make things out of more sustainable fabrics like Tencel

But it is pretty hard to do all of this at the same time.

So I have an idea for an exhibition but it involves lots of 3 metre long white fabric lengths. I would have had no difficulty in the past in buying a 50 metre bolt of homespun and getting started but now I'm having to consider how I am going to get the fabric by other means.

Recycled fabric?

Upcycled fabric?

Pieced together scraps?

What if I buy the 50 metre bolt of new fabric and promise to use very scrap of fabric? Does that count? Or should I try and find organic cotton (and believe me that doesn't seem to be an easy task). And in my heart of hearts I'd love to use cotton organdy, which is white and crisp and has been treated with starches and chemicals causing goodness knows what environmental problems.

Now time for some more light-hearted stuff. Check this website for weird craft.

 

 Here is something I found in a op shop in Wellington, New Zealand.

 Its a crocheted doiley with swans. Anyone know what is is for? Is it just decorative or does it hold scones or something?

Experiments

Hi anyone who reads this occasional blog. I go through spates of writing lots and then write nothing for weeks. I think it is time for a catch up.

I have a mixed media piece in the "Changing Threads' exhibition  which is on in Nelson at the moment.  It is called Tsunami (II) and commemorates the 2011 Tsunami in Japan. My sons and I had been travelling in the area that was hit by the tsunami only 6 weeks before.
The layers are kimonos stacked on top of each other.

I mentioned in the last post that I am doing research on cotton production. Mostly I have been looking at the pollution that results from dyeing cotton. Most of the pictures unfortunately come from China. Greenpeace has been doing a lot of research on textile pollution in China and has targeted some of the big sportswear companies to show them what is really happening in their supply chain. I watched some videos from the Greenpeace website and I came very close to tears. We can pat ourselves on the back and say how 'Clean and Green' we are, while China is trashing it's environment to bring us cheap goods. The big chainstores have demanded cheaper and cheaper clothing and to do that, manufacturers in China have had to cut a lot of corners in order to make a profit. It makes me look at cheap jeans in a very different light. Ok so I know there are a whole lot of other factors at work and I don't want to get too much into that. As an artist I'm more interested in showing rivers which change colour depending on what the next season's fashionable colour is. Pink is the new black etc.

I have tentatively chosen the title 'Out of Sight, Out of Mind' for my project/solo exhibition which has to happen some time before the end of July even though I haven't booked a space and don't really know what I will be making.

In the meantime, here are some of the experiments I have been doing. I'm playing with 3 dimensional shapes instead of quilting for a change. Perhaps it is time to move away from 2d into mixed media, but it depends on what works.

 These are experiments with plastic bags when I thought I might like to have a look at plastic in the oceans and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

 Here are some strange things made in a hotel room on the weekend I had to drive to Auckland to drop off my son's drum kit. I got bored with plastic bags and changed to an old wool blanket I found for $2 in an op shop. Mostly I made sort of worm shaped things.

 Then when I got back to a place where I could work with messier stuff, I tried dipping wool in wax and plaster of paris. The red ball of wool dipped in wax is great because it looks so soft but when you pick it up it is hard.

 Then I started doing research on jeans. Stone wash and sand washed jeans are very unfriendly to the environment and also to the health of the people working in the factories.

I had fun with satay sticks and a hot glue gun until I found I was on the same path as several other students without knowing it.

More to follow...

Teaching and Learning

I had high hopes of making more regular posts on this blog this year but as usual life got in the way.

I am teaching 3 hours a week at Whitireia Polytechnic in Porirua, I'm a Tutorial assistant for 2 days a week and I'm also a Graduate Diploma student there. So I'm back to being a student again.

I'm trying to get my brain organised so that I don't forget anything, or miss a deadline.

I hope to be able to put some images here when I have something to show.  At the moment I am trying to get research done on where our cotton fabric comes from (as Quilters) and what environmental issues we should be considering. However I keep getting distracted by research about pollution from dyeing jeans in China.

Artisit Residensi day 3 - discahrge paste

The spelling part of my brain has been affected by discharge paste fumes.. This is a seriously cool process but rather smelly and it was quite windy today so with all the doors and windows open for ventilation, every piece of paper I put down flew across the room.

The discharge paste I used is available from CCG in Auckland. I haven't tried the Jacquard version but I am sure it does something similar. You have to mix the paste with a catalyst to get it started and after about 24 hours it was starting to be a bit less effective.
You can screenprint, paint, stamp the stuff onto fabric. You let it dry then steam iron it and the colour change happens while you are ironing it.
I tried it on dark coloured silk, cotton and wool with varying results.

 

This is my favourite, it is a black tussore silk. The violet is even more screamingly violet than the photo shows. 

 This is some old Japanese silk from the lining of a kimono.

Some fine red silk, also from a kimono.

Another piece of textured kimono silk.

Some indigo kimono cotton. It has discharged to a lovely muted violet. I printed about 160cm of this. It is only about 30cm wide.

This piece of blue wool didn't work well at all. There is a slight colour change.

The top piece of velvet is cotton and looked good when it was discharged but when I washed it, the picture became very faint. The discharge must have only happened in the very top layer which washed off. The bottom piece of velvet is some sort of stretchy synthetic velvet and it turned out very nicely and has great possiblities for use in clothing except that I haven't got very much of it and doubt I can get more :-(

I was going to try exposing a silk screen in the sun as an experiment but the sun went in around then so I used the screen to expose a piece of a blueprint for a train. My father used to make models of East African railway train and this is a fraction of a Garrett. I have used the discharge paste through the silk screen, onto the indigo cotton. I wanted it to look like a blueprint. This is more of a 'purple print'.

I also tried mixing pigments into the discharge paste with the idea that when the underneath colour bleaches away the pigment colour will take it's place. Those pieces are still wet so will have to wait till tomorrow to make it onto the blog.

NB Special thanks to Lee-anne  who told me how to upgrade this blog so that the photos come where I want them!