The uncomfortable spine twisting, back and shoulder straining work required to set the looms up are leaving their trace on me, so appropriate to theme of my work. After all that I have set up a loom and managed to get an acceptable shed and started weaving pockets to contain objects that represented the things we were discovering in Iceland.
A lot of the items have been gathered on our walks around the shore, like the husks of the lupin seed from last years flowers to the empty mussel shell from the beach, some are from visits to places of interest, the tanned fish skin, and some from the leavings in the studios. I have arranged them in a contrived manner to make the work visually pleasing. At this stage, the first is nearly finished, but it requires some terracotta pebbles that occasionally appear on the beaches and as the sun is shining it’s time to go out and collect some.
On our ramblings around the coast, there has been many opportunities to take textural photographs. The black sand at the mouth of the river Blanda where its turquoise water pours into the Arctic Ocean, is particularly interesting. The sand is very soft and easily moved by the tides, waves and outflow of the river, I noticed that there are different traces of leavings as the waves deposit fine ephemeral lines in the sand each time the tide recedes.
In addition to texture there are lots of opportunities to collect images for colour reference for future work
Jennifer Jones
