strodetextiles

Latest Posts by strodetextiles

MA stuff

Ideas are also being developed for possible poster designs. Using the cut out hands as a motif to link with theatre, shadow puppets and the theme of LOVE for Romeo & Juliet perhaps, in simplistic formats, that hope to communicate this to younger audiences or a visual references to entice people to the theatre. 

Sooo these are the current product designs showing the development of patterns on various products that could be sold in a gallery gift shop or in this case an outdoor theatre, hence the use of umbrellas, cushions and lampshades for the cafe bar perhaps.

Creative workspaces are important places of solace and wellbeing. It’s good to make a mess and see where it leads you, lose yourself in your imagination, creative play and material exploration is so freeing and so welcome on these sombre grey days in lockdown.

Get your ‘messy mojo’ on and see what happens and don’t tidy up for tea!

Russian Constructivism as a design influence is a wealth of pattern inspiration.

These are designs for possible products for a gallery shop as part of a graphics project. They started by playing with limited colours of paper and card to create repeat patterns to use as design ideas to apply to products.

The title of this work is SQUIRM

I am keen to understand more about people’s phobias. This piece is an interactive piece that invites the audience to choose any number of separate components to touch, feel, explore through haptic investigation and ultimately construct in playful ways as sculptural forms.

The soft structure, almost cuddly textiles, play on our senses as the forms themselves are not inviting or cute but reminiscent of body parts, intestines or roots that might strangle, attack, harm or repulse us. Can something be beautifully ugly? Dangerously pretty? Enticingly revolting? I say, yes but I would like to know what you think.

Expressive drawings inspired by Jim Dine. Rally fun session, learning to let go and loosen up. Well done. A level Art. 

Let me know if you enjoyed it, if it was helpful, what you learned from it.... thanks. Shall we do more one-off drawing sessions?

Developing ideas for printing on fabrics. FAD Textiles workshop rotation 2. Great work so far.

FAD Textiles Workshop rotation 2. Getting into those shadow drawings agin with a new group. Striking silhouettes prepped and ready to take forward into print next week. 

Fun and satire with our new Level 3 Art students.

Let’s tell Boris what we really think 🤔 Get involved. Art is Power! 

#postcardforboris #getpolitical #artispower

So happy to be back in the Textiles zone, working with new Art Foundation students creating shadow paintings to develop into print and stitch this week.

It’s always exciting to start the new term in September but so necessary after such along period away from creative Strode sessions. I have really missed working with our incredible Art students. Welcome back to you all. 

These paintings will be used to explore screen printing, heat transfer printing and surface designs with stitch for the 3 week workshop sessions in textiles.

A great start!

#lovemyjob #creativetextiles #printandstitch #letsbeatthevirus #creative #backinthezone

Beach twine, fishing line, ghost gear, findings repurposed as vessel forms.

Collecting and combining found materials.

Order imposed.

Colour explored.

Enjoying the dialogue between the different objects. Man made and natural, circular forms, threaded, unravelled, holes repurposed, joining, combining. 

A playful conversation..... 

New favourite beach. Wonderful rock formations and so many beautiful pebbles, each one so unique and inspiring. Jurassic and Triassic. Very photogenic and lots of ideas forming. Making drawing tools and using them to capture the scale and drama of the place.

Just re-found these toys that my daughter and I made when she was small. We started with her childhood drawings of animals and imagined creatures, then I made simple templates from them to cut out heads and bodies etc from old clothing. Then we stitched them up and stuffed them. Each one had a narrative, they had names and quirky habits, likes and dislikes- kind of profiles. Some more recognisable than others. Penguin, frog, dog, rabbit but what about the pink one! The frog was only ever a head.

They remind me of happy times on rainy days indoors getting creative and having a laugh together.

Congratulations Jessie Goad!

Jessie’s fashion collection explored the theme of ‘journeys’ and focused on favourite places, memories attached and evoked by walking in the locality. Maps were of particular interest and her digital prints were applied to garment construction to great effect.

We were fortunate to invite fashion graduate, Clancy Dawson, into college to run masterclasses with the Textiles students with a particular emphasis on quality finish when making garments. Clancy studied at Glasgow School of Art and has worked on Saville Row as a trouser tailor so her skills were invaluable. Jessie worked closely with Clancy and repurposed an original 1980′s trouser pattern and made it her own, cut from her bespoke fabric these were really successful and unique.

Jessie plans to continue developing her own brand and selling her fashion online. We wish her all the very best with her business plan.

END OF YEAR SHOWCASE -Class of 2020

Congratulations Iona Darneley!

Iona showcases 2 different projects. Firstly her exam unit entitled ’Haven’ was very poignant and relevant, as lockdown plunged the UK into isolation, just as our A level exams were due to begin. Iona investigated themes close to home, including discovering how we explain the need for family, loved ones and friends and our relationships to what we hold dear in times of trauma.  How can this be portrayed in visual terms and through textiles, led Iona on a wonderfully personal creative journey. She was casting miniature sculptural houses and objects of comfort such as hot water bottles in her garden and making delicate fabric house forms to project images of family onto. Adventurous and individual Textiles work.

In contrast, she also explored ocean plastic and this included reworking plastic bottles found during a beach clean up, into sea creatures such as jellyfish to be hung as a ‘sea forest’ installation. She also created posters for Surfers Against Sewage, promoting clean seas. All this with CFS. What a superstar!

END OF YEAR SHOWCASE -Class of 2020

Congratulations Scarlet Crofts!

Scarlet developed her final Textiles collection as sustainable festival fashion. Recycling, repurposing and ultimately developing her own series of digital prints from her meticulously cut and stitched scalloped dress. Such a pity Glastonbury was cancelled this year, I’m sure Scarlet would have been rocking this outfit and turning heads at Pilton. 

The final image is from a ‘Live’ project with the British Red Cross Society, the class created various paper couture garments depicting iconic fashions throughout the 20th century, they were exhibited as window displays around Somerset shops. This one was exhibited in Crewkerne to great acclaim!

Credit to @catherinehydephotorgaphy for image 1.

Scarlet is seeking a creative employment as a GAP year and plans to apply for UCAS in 2021.

END OF YEAR SHOWCASE- CLASS OF 2020

Congratulations Tallulah Stringer!

Amazing, conceptual Textiles project exploring Veganism and the meat industry, showcased as a powerful installation by Tallulah. She has experimented with knit, crochet, use of latex, printing and dissolvable stitched forms in her sculptural approach. A passionate and disturbingly beautiful outcome.

Well done, such a pity this couldn’t be exhibited publicly this year!

Tallulah is continuing her creative development at Strode specialising in Photography and also in contrast she is also very good at Maths.

Excellent model and expert technical guidance and photography from @catherinehydephotography and also T. Stringer.

END OF YEAR SHOWCASE -Class of 2020

Congratulations to Ellen Kinder, A level fashion designer, styling her final project based around a contemporary collection, heavily inspired by the ethos of Punk. DIY fashion, repurposing denim and strong Basquiat influences, with the experimental use of text and symbols. Ellen developed her own bespoke printed fabrics to make up into boiler-suits and garments as part of her collection.

Rock & Roll! We wish Ellen all the best for her degree in Fashion at London MET.

Excellent models and expert technical guidance with alumni Catherine Hyde in charge of photography. @catherinehydephotography 

This is what we call creative collaboration.

Moving forward to cropping and playing around with compositional decision making next. I am drawn to a square format and trying to maintain the expressive, gestural marks when deciding what works as a balanced piece.

 I may add further detail, maybe stitch or I might paint out detail and simplify the image. This is the fun part but something I am challenged by as really my default setting is the playful, experimental stage where I can be free and can work loosely enjoying the edges of one colour next to another and delight in the subtlety of a mark or appreciate the layering of a broad brush stroke next to a lightweight spontaneous drip or dribble. Endless possibilities that I do not want to end.

Getting my colour mixing mojo on. Painting outdoors in the Spring sunshine feeling inspired by the fresh colours around me in the garden and from walks in the surrounding fields, lanes and woodland.I had forgotten how much I love this!

In the late 1980′s and early 1990′s after graduating, I worked freelance as a textiles designer and also travelled to South America after winning a travel bursary award in a design competition. I was inspired by the pre-Hispanic, ancient textiles of Peru, where the Incas and other ancient civilisations used natural dyes to create their woven cloth. I travelled through Peru, Columbia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and down to the very south of Chile and had the best time. I researched natural dyes, spending time of the beaten track, living with indigenous people and learning from them. We picked roots by moonlight and gathered plants on specific dates linked to the Inca calendar, there was lots of superstition surrounding the dyeing process but also much wisdom and understanding of the life cycle of each plant and when it would give the best sources of colour.

On my return, I spent most of my time mixing colours from gouache and saving the match pots in 35mm film canisters as sample colours. This was pre-digital when everything was hand painted and drawn out in detail for selling to design companies. I had forgotten my love of colour matching and mixing and remembered my workshop space had literally hundreds of these hand mixed colour swatches lining the shelves for reference when recreating new colour palettes.

Thes images show my process of stretching fabric, priming, layering colours over a series of days with time between to ponder what colours to mix and add for balance, harmony and also composition. Enjoying myself!

Gestural marks, fluid and expressive. Enjoying overlaying inks and acrylics with potential to print scaled up marks?

Hello everyone!

A cheery little face appeared in my experimental mark making today. planning the next stage now to explore composition and get my machine cranked up.

#creativeisolation #isolationartschool #markmaking #toast #patternity

Thanks 

Developing abstracted compositions, cropping and enlarging to explore sections for repetition and textile designs for garments. The loose, expressive marks and gestural brushwork retain the spontaneity of the original line and translate an urban, edgy print as a theme of unisex wear.

Inspiration everywhere. Look up, look down, keep your eyes open and SEE what’s around. Love the layered road markings, grates, drain covers, yellow lines and markings on our roads and pavements.

Shadows can be very inspiring for further development as prints perhaps.

Such beautiful sunshine out there as we are in lockdown and isolation, thinking what I can use these for. Getting my machine out, happy creative isolation!

Fifty Bees #4 exhibition at Frome’s wonderful Black Swan gallery. 

This is my response to the habitat and lifestyle of the Lobe Spurred furrow bee.

I enjoy using found and repurposed materials in my own arts practice, so this is created entirely from fabric washed up the beach at Charmouth and fishing line, horsehair and natural fibres to stitch with. This bee was virtually extinct in the 1980′s but then made a dramatic come back, to now becoming a species with no risk to its population. My quest to discover the reasoning behind this encouraged a journey of discovery and research to try and understand its story.

I travelled around to visit habitats of known sightings, scrubland, agricultural sites, beach cliff locations but did not find my bee. I did discover though,  that the prevalence of Oilseed Rape planted on a mass scale across the UK in the 80′s had a detrimental impact on many indigenous insect species particularly bees. The nicotinoid pesticides used in agriculture was the culprit but fortunately for the lobe spurred furrow bee, it thrived on the blooms of rape and where others perished it increased in number.

My piece uses loopy stitching and intense surface coverage to signify the bees activity. The yellow plant dyed colour references the rape blooms and the undulating surface is linked to the patch of land investigated on site.

A parking fine inspired me to channel my frustration into something more positive. The yellow colour palette and use of repetitive imagery and text were the focus when creating this new sketchbook. Surprising what can inspire you!

Lockdown can be a time for CREATIVE isolation and I am really enjoying being at home with access to a table and sunlight to play and experiment with monotone mark making.