It’s funny looking back on the previous blog posts; it’s been ages since the first couple of posts and it’s quite interesting to see how things seemed in the early stages of the project. The project is almost finished now, after an incredible and intense amount of work – and now I finally have time to actually write about what happened.
The first month of the project (as outlined in the posts below) were mostly involved with technical issues – in particular determining exactly which materials and methods I would use to produce my new fabric sculptures. As mentioned below, a major turning point came when I decided to buy a digital embroidery machine (using my own funds, not the project budget) – which theoretically would allow me to produce my own iconography in the form of embroidered patches.
The original plan had been to print whole sections of the sculpture directly onto ‘tarpaulin’ vinyl – then simply sew it together. But my worry about this process was the surface quality: it would be flat, slightly blurry (due to the quality of printing machine used for vinyl printing) – and surprisingly expensive. And although I had seen handbags constructed from tarpaulin materials, I worried slightly that the sculptures wouldn’t evoke the feeling of handbags and other fashion accessories – which was one of the key effects I wanted to evoke with in this project.
So when I discovered that I could create my own imagery and have it embroidered as patches – with all their textural qualities – I knew it was the path to take. The next question was: what to embroider onto? The usual solution is to embroider onto twill, the material often found on patches. But it’s problem is that you either need something called a Merrow machine (in order to stitch around the edge of the patch to prevent fraying) – or else you have to iron a special plastic onto the back of the twill after embroidering – then melt the edges with a soldering iron. The Merrow machine was too expensive – and the plastic seemed too time-consuming.
That’s when I decided to embroider onto artificial leather. I’d already decided to use artificial leather for the main bodies of the sculptures – to create the texture of handbags, running shoes, furniture, and other contemporary fashion goods – but I realized that it also works well as a support for embroidery. The added bonus is that it doesn’t fray, so all I needed to do was cut the shape out after embroidering and sew it onto the sculpture. I performed some experiments with the embroidery and leather, to figure out how to affix it tightly within the hoop – then began creating the ‘patches’ for my sculptures.
Depending on the size of the iconography, I could print multiple images on a single sheet of leather – helping to keep costs down somewhat. I worked out the cost of a square of artificial leather the size of the embroidery hoop…so it meant I could calculate how much the iconography alone would cost, based on the number of images on the artworks.
I also did a “mock” layout of all of the sculptures onto artificial leathers, to see how many metres of leather I’d need in order to build the artworks. I was often shocked how much was needed! I should have realized though: sculptures have tons of surface area, even if you can’t always see it. One of the fabric sculptures required over 15 metres of artificial leather (not including the material needed for the patches).
All of this meant I could roughly calculate the production costs early on in the process. Unsurprisingly I suppose, the costs proved far higher than I’d initially anticipated. This meant that some of the artworks I’d initially hoped to produce would be infeasible within the project budget. There was quite a long period of time where I desperately attempted to rejig the designs in order to fit them all within budget – but in the end I had to make some hard decisions about which pieces to sacrifice.
One of the artworks I’d originally intended to create wasn’t going to be made of fabric at all. It was going to be created from Dibond – a material created from plastic sandwiched on both sides by aluminum. It’s a great material that I’ve used before on several mural projects, such as the one below at Oxford University Museum of Natural History:
In this case I was planning to create digitally printed panels (similar to what I usually do) then have it cut into shapes that would get bolted together into a sculptural form. However, what I didn’t realize was that the manufacturer could only cut broad, large shapes – not small, intricate designs. In other words, I would have had to find a separate workshop that could CNC cut the designs after printing (and hope that they didn’t ruin the surface design in the process!). The cost of this became prohibitive: the single Dibond sculpture I wanted to create would have consumed half of the entire manufacturing budget!
So I had to omit it from the project – something I’m glad I did in the end. The fabric sculptures were proving such an interesting new medium to work in, and now they could become the primary focus of the project. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize just how long they would take to build. Unlike my cardboard sculptures, which take weeks to design, but only a few days to built, the cloth sculptures ended up taking weeks to design AND weeks to build. At that point I didn’t realize just how much work I was in for – but I would soon find out.
