For my new piece about Richard Arkwright I wanted to use the same techniques as for the other more narrative works in the Tangled Yarns show: painting on patterned fabric. So the search for a fabric began – ideally the reproduction of a type of 18th century fabric that would have existed during Arkwright’s lifetime. Also, the picturesque landscape of the Derwent valley had made a strong impression on me and I wanted that to be reflected in the fabric.
I very quickly narrowed my search down to a type of fabric called Toile de Jouy, which seemed to tick all the boxes. The name comes from the very successful copperplate-printed fabrics produced from 1760 in Jouy-en-Josas near Paris, although the copperplate printing technology had actually been invented in Ireland in 1752 and came to England shortly afterwards. The typical Toile de Jouy pattern consists of single-colour pastoral motifs, e.g. rich people haven a picnic in a very idyllic countryside, or idealised scenes of peasants going about their work. Due to the success of the fabrics made in Jouy-en-Josas, “Toile the Jouy” became the term used for this style of pictorial printed fabric, irrespective of where it was produced.
I love the ambiguities involved when using this fabric in a work that explores the changes Arkwirght’s factory system brought to the Derwent valley (and later the rest of England) and the lives of its people: Yes, the location he chose was (and is) rural and picturesque, and many people living there would have been farming, but their lives would not have been nearly as charmed as that of the happy peasants frolicking on the toile – they would have been dirt poor, life would have been a hard slog, and most would have died young. And of course only rich people like Arkwright would have been able to buy the fashionable printed toiles at the time.
The patterns of 18th century Toiles de Jouy were typically dark blue or dark red on cream-white ground; other colours (black, brown, green magenta) were apparently rare. For my piece, it absolutely had to be green – like the landscape around Cromford. And I’m not even that keen on green in my art practice. Well, nothing like a challenge.
The other challenge was size: Like most toiles, the fabric I chose has a very large pattern with a big repeat, around 7o cm each way. To get a good pattern effect I would have had to make quite a large work, but this would have been difficult to fit into the space at Cromford. Also, it seemed a good idea to keep the size similar to that of related works in the show. So I ended up with a 80 x 100 cm format, where suddenly each scene of the pattern becomes a unique, and quite large, element in the painting’s composition.
At the same time, these patterns don’t have a lot of weight because the motifs are line-drawn rather than set in blocks of colour. This is fine if you want to use the fabric just as a background pattern. However, I was aiming to interweave the fabric pattern with the painted elements of the work, and this is quite tricky if the pattern is both large and “light”.
My idea was for elements of Arkwright’s factory system to increasingly “invade” the pattern from bottom left to top right of the canvas, then morphing into an industrial landscape of the 19th century that completely “pollutes” the pastoral scenes. Being particularly interested in the impacts of the factory system on people, I had fun “trapping” the people of the pattern in the gears and wheels of Arkwight’s machines.
Aside from machines, factory buildings and smokestacks, clocks feature prominently in the painting, because I think that the factory shift system, with its long hours and strict discipline, really forced a huge change in people’s lives.
The clocks in the picture are modelled on the clock of the Greyhound Hotel in Cromford market square (also built by Richard Arkwright), seeing as the original factory clock does not survive. The dials are set to the start and end of the day shift – 6AM to 7PM.
In the middle of all this is Sir Arkwright….
…. proudly presiding over his inventions – and unable to see the industrial hell they eventually led to.
All that is solid melts into air.
