Spent some of Thursday, Friday and today getting studios ready for our open studios event over the next two weekends 25 & 26 October and 1 & 2 November. I know what I want to show. It will be a series of 'banners' which aren't really banners. They are pieces of found fabric with images applied to them via photo transfer paper. I'll show them on the walls of my studio. I like the fact that I don't know what sort of banners they are. Or what they are 'for'.
I've been thinking quite a bit about my use of fabric and questioning it. As a support and with this photo transfer method, it is quite easy to work with. I wonder how I feel about showing a number of cloths. It all feels terribly feminine to me. Apart from my Ingeborg Bachmann piece, which I am very happy with, this seems problematic. But I am going to go with it. I have considered using clothing when I have seen garments that would be suitable to transfer images onto in charity shops. But I have so far rejected the idea of using clothes. So, this much I know, they are not cloths to be worn. Not clothes.
Neither are they protest banners nor interior soft furnishings.
The pieces of fabric are:
a small white hemmed sheet about 100cm square
a white cotton lawn handkerchief
an old faded curtain with a floral print on it from my (maternal) granny's house
an embroidered tray cloth with drawn thread work
a length of curtain lining fabric removed from the curtain mentioned above and which is a very nice soft beige colour
I'm going to show these in my studio space as well as displaying my Peace Banner / Pea Spanner piece and setting up a laptop with this blog on it in case anyone wants to look at it.
I'm also transferring an image of a scrunched up lump of brown parcel tape onto some white museum object handling gloves. The brown tape was taken off the packaging that was wrapping the Incommensurable Banner and was given to me by Michael Maydon at Fabrica as genuine Hirschhorn parcel tape. I like the idea of this throw away material decorating museum gloves that would be used to handle precious or fragile objects.
