A series of floating maps captured on silk organza depicting personal boundaries and the spaces-in-between.
I use the simplest of hand stitching to record linear marks on lightweight translucent fibre. Using sustainable plant dyes on silk I create landscapes from which stitched lines drift & surge over the soft surfaces in a similar manner to mapmakers recording timeless tracks. 'Falling Sideways' is a subtle and sensuous collection of soft map-like documents where lines of energy are played out in multiple relationships over time and recorded as stitched lines to be viewed concurrently.
My use of running stitch has a meditative quality, small neat 'steps’ or larger more urgent 'strides' capture the reflective patterns and nature of interactive soul energy. Lines conveying the tensions of enmeshed relationships combine with areas of dark stains seeping in a fluid manner across and down silken plains reminiscent of threatening storms. These contrast with the sacred spaces-in-between where stitched lines dance uninhibited as if suspended in space & time, loose threads left to hang limply or lift into space defying gravity suggest the gentle falling sideways into different dimensions. Raw silk edges reveal a vulnerability traditionally hidden.
I migrated with a small stash of cloth from South Africa to Australia in 2001. I knew it would be used to express part of my personal story although textiles were not to date part of my artistic journey. Soon after this I began gathering leaves, bark and sawdust from strangely unfamiliar plants and began experimentally dying cloth over wood fires in the remote West Wimmera District of Victoria in 2002. Discovering the resulting rich range of warm & cool earthy colours initiated a change in my style and artistic medium and the beginning of a close bond with the Australian land and cloth.
What at first appeared to me to be dull washed out greyish brown wrinkled cloths when pinned out to dry in the harsh sunlight have become a springboard for a series of personal metaphysical maps. Subtle organic patterns with dramatic contrasting areas of clamped, rusted and machine-stitched surfaces of silk are extended through limited areas of simple stitching, layering of fabric and subtle silk-screened marks. What initially appears to be random organic print marks on the cloth suggest close connections with the earth’s surface and rocky eroded layers that characterise the ancient weathered and vast Australian continent. For thousands of years women have gathered organic materials for dying fabric. This same timeless ritualistic process of collecting, wrapping and clamping cloth and plant materials have enhanced my bond with the land, providing me with a meaningful link to what I perceived initially as a somewhat harsh and foreboding land and climate. Adapting from a colourful & fast paced city life in Africa to a relatively isolated slower lifestyle away from familiar environments, family & friends on a foreign continent forced me to deep a introspection ideally suited to the slow process of hand stitching.
Turning intuitively to my creativity to express not merely the unfamiliar physical environment but to map out the patterns & tracks of an internal journey has sharpened my senses. It enabled me to search deeply and produce a series of works; a testimony of well grounded textile responses with great aesthetically sensitivity. My background & training in Fine Arts combined with valuable skills, knowledge and the infectious passion of textile artist Glenys Mann, whose master classes I attended in 2007-2009, have formed the basis from which this series of soft maps have evolved.
Ingrid Wimbury, 2011
To view available works from this series please make your enquiry through the
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