Louise Saxton

I have been studying the work of Melbourne based artist, Louise Saxton recently as part of my year 11 coursework in Studio Arts Textiles.  On Thursday last week I,  along with another teacher took a group of students to visit her 'Sanctuary' exhibition at Heide Gallery, Melbourne.  The students loved her work, as did I, so I thought I would share it here!  I was so keen to find out more about Louise's work that on Sunday (my usual day of pj's and lie-in) I went to Louise's talk at Heide gallery.  What a pleasure it was to hear Louise talk and have the chance to ask questions!

Louise collects pieces of needlework from op shops and cuts out the embroidery motifs, which she then assembles into these wonderful pieces.  It's hard to make out in the images, but these are actually pinned together, and not sewn.  The tiny bits of embroidery are arranged and pinned onto fine tulle then are pinned to the wall.  The pins are silver or brass and give off a lovely sparkle in the gallery lighting, and the artwork sits slightly away from the wall, which creates wonderful shadows.

The colours and textures of these work are just stunning.  It takes Louise a very long time to arrange and pin these works, which I greatly admire.

Louise based these works from the Sanctuary exhibition on old watercolour paintings (see the emu image below).  It was really interesting to hear her talk about her interest in making homage to the anonymous needlework artists and the art of needlework which is a dying tradition in today's society.  She also talked about how she is paying homage to and highlighting the beautiful illustrations of long forgotten naturalists and illustrators.  Interestingly she does not view herself as a textile artist, as she doesn't actually make the embroidery, she re-works them.

You can see more of Louise's work here, and there is also a great on line interview with Louise here.  She has a lovely blog too, which you can find here.

Hope you like!

This is Louise in front of two of her works at Heide gallery.  They are much bigger than the real life birds which makes you really look and consider the detail in the tiny embroidery pieces.  You are constantly moving back and forward when looking at her work, so you can see all the detail and then when you step back you get to see the beautiful birds better.

Making a crochet blanket

I started this about a month ago and picked it up again tonight after a rather wintery weekend in Melbourne!

Soup is made and the Olympics are on Telly, happy crochet times!

Exam Drawing

A recent doodle that I made when I was supervising an exam...

Wooly Cactus!

I love these knitted cactus plants!  I saw them at this lovely Melbourne shop, After Store.

Babushka

This is my submission for this month's Russian theme for the other blog I am involved with called 'Around the Kitchen Table' (aka Art Club)  I have really surprised myself by managing to complete this project with another week to go! I knew this would take me a while to carve the lino, so I started straight after the Russian theme was decided (go me!).

After googling Babushka I discovered that the word means 'grandmother' or 'old lady' in Russian! At the moment I am feeling quite granny-ish as it is winter here in Melbourne and I am constantly wearing my slippers and trying to stay warm. This is my first winter in 3 years and I'm loving it, but it is taking me a while to adjust. How fitting that I made a Russian granny for Art Club! Is it life imitating art or art imitating life? I wouldn't call it a self portrait, but I think the granny tag is one that I am happy to wear just now.

'Babushka' is a lino print which has been printed in black with smidgens of water colour paint for some added colour. The paper measures 35 x 50 cm.

I love Russian folk art and have collected lots and lots of images over the last few years of many different patterns and designs. I knew straight away that I wanted to make a babushka print and I had a drawing from a few months back that I dug out of my sketchbook.

Hope you like it....

The colours look a bit brighter in these images, but in real life they are quite a bit paler...

These are the three stages of my lino making: the drawing, the carved lino piece and the final print...

I really enjoy cutting lino, I find it very addictive and a very nice sensation when you cut it...

John Brack

I've been looking into the wonderful work of John Brack at school lately and thought I would just share some of his artworks here.  I have only just come to know the work of John Brack and I'm glad that I'm getting to know it!  A very Melbournian artist and he looks at the everyday stuff that people do.  I like it, I hope you do too...

My little blue book...

I've been busy making this little book for the latest theme for Art Club/Around the Kitchen Table which is blue this month.  It is part of another blog that I run, which you can find here. 

The task was to make something based on the theme 'blue' and it took me a really long time to decide on something - blue is such a huge theme!  I finally decided last week on making a fabric book.  I found some great instructions on this blog here. 

My year 11 students are currently working on an artist book project in class and they have to make use of a range of textile based skills to create a book of some sort.  I find that it helps to have exemplars to show students and I also really like getting to make things at school!  This was made using tie-dye, shibori, salt lift, solvent transfer, lino printing, screen printing, hand embroidery and free motion embroidery. Hope you like it...

Solvent transfers on top of tie-dye and shibori dyed fabric...

Lino printing on top of a painted piece of fabric and free motion embroidery on top of shibori...

I used blanket stitch to bind half of the pages together then just sort of stitched all of them together in three lines. It's a bit messy but I don't mind that...

The front...

The back...

The binding...

Detail of free motion embroidery on top of tie-dyed fabric...

This was the first step I took to make the book.  I used a metre of white poly-cotton and painted lots of shades of blue procion dyes and just had a bit of fun really! 

These are the tie-dyed pieces of fabric pre-dye bath...

Shibori...