Toxic Attraction

I have finally come up for a breath. I have been working on wall hangings for my solo exhibition and working late at Whitireia in my studio or coming home and sewing until late in the evening. Over the next 6 weeks, there will be a whole series of Whitireia graduating student shows on in Wellington. I will try to put as many as possible on this blog as I find out the dates.

Toxic Attraction
Textile Artworks by Clare Smith

Dixon St Gallery
1st Floor, 15 Dixon St
Wellington

16th-20th July 2012
Open 10am-5pm Monday to Thursday
10am-4pm Friday

I'll be setting up the show on Friday 13th - is that a good thing? Then I am teaching classes in machine quilting and printing on fabric the weekend of 14-15th for Pinestream Quilters (Upper Hutt, NZ) so I need to be finished ahead of time not working at the last minute. There are spaces in the classes, and  if anyone wants to join in, contact me and I will forward your email to the organiser.

I'm now half-way through making the pieces. They are 1.5m across and 2metres long.  They are based on the Willow pattern plate and start as 'white on white' and quite see-through. Each has a scene on it and each day a new one will be dyed - vertically!

Here is the photo which is going on my poster and in the advertising. I don't have an image of the actual wallhangings which will be in the exhibition , don't want to give the game away! This is actually the picture of the prototype.

Above each hanging is a shelf of cups, dye drips down a thread and percolates slowly through the scene, following stitching lines and applique areas.

The theme is environmental. I have been researching dye pollution, water useage in the textile industry and consumerism. The first research on dye pollution was about China, hence the willow plate shape. However I soon discovered that many other countries have problems with water quality due to dyes being dumped straight into the rivers.

Demand for cheap clothing often means that corners get cut with dyeing processes and water treatment. In New Zealand we don't really have any textile mills anymore, we rely on importing our fabrics from overseas. So we can stay 'clean and green' and somewhere 'Out of Sight: Out of Mind' gets polluted instead. However is is all tourist propaganda - our streams and rivers are polluted by dairy farming and run off from roads and although we wouldn't put up with our rivers turning bright red/turquoise/pink, there is plenty of research to say that we have water quality issues too. In fact - in Friday's Dompost newspaper, front page news was about water quality in Wellington and it wasn't pretty.

The title was chosen because even though I know that a lot of the processes for producing textiles (particularly cotton) are toxic and cause massive environmental issues, I still love textiles. The conclusion I have come to is - I will try to use fabric I already have in stock or recycle used textiles if I possibly can. If not - then I will try to use every scrap of the new stuff with no wasteage and make things that can be upcycled if necessary (I once made 3 of my quilts into one big coat).

For those who don't know the Willow Pattern plate,  blue and white china was being imported into England from China and people had whole collections of it. In 1790 imports stopped. As pieces of the Chinese china got broken, people needed replacement pieces and Thomas Minton designed a plate which had features taken from lots of different original plates. The process of making transferware was developed around the same time and eventually a large number of potteries started making the Willow Pattern china using transfers. It is still made today.

Here is an image of a Willow Pattern plate (a.k.a Blue Willow) similar to one my Grandmother had which has been passed down in our family. The rumour is that they were given to families who had more than 12 children during Victoria's reign. However, I can't remember who told me this and can find nothing on-line which says anything like that.

I'll try to update the blog daily till after the show. Next I have to complete my poster, a sign for the wall, invitations to the opening (if you are Wellington local just contact me and I'd be happy to send you a copy).

Now I have to go and make stuff!
Clare

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?

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.