Patchwork Object

Items

• Patch by Anna
  This piece is typical of the way that I currently work with stitch and collage. The paper background is taken from collaged images in a series of sketchbooks that I have been working with for about thirty-five years. I do very little ‘sketching’ in my sketchbooks, but use them as a way of storing found images I want to keep. Sometimes they are saved just for the colour, sometimes the images are chopped up and reassembled into grids or abstract montages. This forms the foundation for the stitches, and dictates the colours used in any individual piece. Colour is everything to me, not just in my creative work, but in how I experience day-to-day life. The stitching is the part I love most of all. I’ve found that blanket stitch works as a flexible building block, a simple, practical stitch that creates line and structure. The colours of the background interact with the stitches, inviting the eye to wander around the piece. Stitching feels like a fundamentally feminine creative process, historically practical, but also beautiful. Portable and easily worked on during ‘in between’ gaps in daily activities. The colours used here are those of a domestic space: my kitchen. I have come to realise that this making and stitching is something that connects me not only with my mother, and her mother – women for whom sewing and colour were such a source of pleasure. But it connects me to a community of makers, known and unknown, stretching back through time and across the world. So much skill, history, and beauty is contained in the act of working with a needle, and this is me, in the present, stitching.
• Patch by Claire
  As an experienced Architect, Associate lecturer and designer-maker of concept jewellery and handheld objects, I have been creating uniquely expressive statement pieces exploring materiality for a number of years, however it is only in the last five years that I have begun to understand that a major driving force for my creativity is my thirst for new knowledge. Recognising this has led me to explore the potential for design as a research tool, undertaking a practice as research PhD at the University of the West of England. This patchwork represents my PhD research project “Ply Could?” which explores the potential of thin plywood, as a sustainable material for making. Combining tradition craft practices with digital making techniques, I am pushing the material to its limits and exploring its material affordance. By means of craft based creative enquiry and research by design, can the exploration of novel material affordances uncover new opportunities for the use of thin plywood? Plywood is a natural material, strong, lightweight, and extremely versatile. Its method of construction, layering alternate veneers perpendicularly, makes it immensely strong for its size, and reduces the likelihood of shrinkage and warping when exposed to variations in environmental conditions. Despite the recent increase in use of plywood as a sustainable alternative in construction, it is currently little-used on a small scale. The embodied carbon value for plywood is a fraction of that for plastics and metals. Plywood can be softened and moulded into complex three-dimensional forms, providing increased strength, much like in an eggshell, resulting in good economy of material. By working on a small scale (using 0.8mm and 1.5mm thick sheet) it is possible to push the material to its limits, activating it using moisture, heat and pressure and utilising 3D printed formers to set it into complex shapes.
• Patch by Clare
  I wanted to highlight repair as a creative and radical act. My square uses recycled fabrics and darning, patching, and seaming.
• Patch by Gail
  My Creative Identity I have made a patch showing a Venn diagram of what I consider has led to me being creative. Did I know I was creative? No. I just do what I can do, what women do. What challenges me and gives gives me pleasure to do, and do well. A label of creative lifts it from Craft to Art giving it credibility. Genes A Paternal Great grandfather a tailor, sitting crossed legged to stitch suits . A Paternal Grandfather an overseer in a mill weaving worsted fabric. A Mother who taught me to knit and sew, I can’t even remember learning it was so long ago. Teaching School needle work, City and Guild embroidery. Devon Weavers Workshop and Sue Dwyer teaching me to weave. Bradford College and a textile design course. Aptitude Able to sit quietly and practice and learn and improve. Opportunity Being in the right place at the right time to see and take advantage of the opportunities, which actually came later than I would have liked. - Patience. Good friends and mentors who have encouraged me.
• Patch by Ruth
  The fabric for these 3 patches came from my friend Ros' stash - pieces of which were given away at her funeral. She dyed them herself. Ros was a dear family friend. She was a teacher by profession and quilter. She sadly passed away in 2023. I wanted to include her in this patchwork project because I always think of her when I’m stitching a quilt, I wanted to mark her influence on me personally at a sew-er. Her family have said they're are very happy for these patches to be included and agreed the subject of this Art of Fiction project would have been right up her street! One of the patches has words sent to me in an email by her husband telling me all about her creative quilting practice. Her family are currently in the process of cataloguing (and potentially exhibiting) all the quilts she made, of which there are many.
• Patch by Ruth
  The fabric for these 3 patches came from my friend Ros' stash - pieces of which were given away at her funeral. She dyed them herself. Ros was a dear family friend. She was a teacher by profession and quilter. She sadly passed away in 2023. I wanted to include her in this patchwork project because I always think of her when I’m stitching a quilt, I wanted to mark her influence on me personally at a sew-er. Her family have said they're are very happy for these patches to be included and agreed the subject of this Art of Fiction project would have been right up her street! One of the patches has words sent to me in an email by her husband telling me all about her creative quilting practice. Her family are currently in the process of cataloguing (and potentially exhibiting) all the quilts she made, of which there are many.
• Patch by Ruth
  The fabric for these 3 patches came from my friend Ros' stash - pieces of which were given away at her funeral. She dyed them herself. Ros was a dear family friend. She was a teacher by profession and quilter. She sadly passed away in 2023. I wanted to include her in this patchwork project because I always think of her when I’m stitching a quilt, I wanted to mark her influence on me personally at a sew-er. Her family have said they're are very happy for these patches to be included and agreed the subject of this Art of Fiction project would have been right up her street! One of the patches has words sent to me in an email by her husband telling me all about her creative quilting practice. Her family are currently in the process of cataloguing (and potentially exhibiting) all the quilts she made, of which there are many.
• Patch by Ruth
  This patch represents the women artists who have inspired me and let me believe that my bedroom drawing, making and sewing could be taken seriously and that I could become an artist too. Cornelia Parker, Rachel Whiteread, Tracey Emin, Clarissa Galliano, Frida Khalo, Phyllida Barlow, Vivian Westwood, Mary Quant, Sarah Lucas, Sister Corita Kent, Louise bourgeois, to name just a few. I still think about that little girl dreaming that she might one day be an artist, I feel lucky that I get to do that in my real life now I’m all grown up!
• Patch by Ruth
  I was recently doing a project that required me to use some of this silver material and it took me back to when I was an art student in the 90’s, when I found a very similar roll of the same silver material in my local Scrap Store (a warehouse filled with industry off-cuts where you could load a trolley and pay £5 for the lot!). I remember taking it home and sewing together a pair of flared trousers which I then proceeded to wear to a party that same night. I didn’t have a sewing machine in those days so they were constructed by hand. I didn’t care for their longevity, more for their one night of fun. I remember literally sewing myself into them just before I left the house. Needless to say, the material was not the most comfortable of things to wear on a hot dance floor! This piece of fabric represents the fact that my mother taught me to make my own clothes when I was 12 and how this knowledge meant that I could be creative (and be spontaneous) with how I expressed myself, which for a shy teenager was a powerful gift. I have continued to sew my own clothes throughout my life, made clothes for my children and taught them to sew their own too. Thank you to my mum, Moira Broadway and to my Granny, Betty Irvine who taught her.
• Patch by Tricia
  My patch has been inspired by the women who have helped me on this project. Though there are many more than I can name, some are: Jane D., who taught me how to dye with indigo; Ruth, who showed me how to wrap thread around the fabric to get the circular shapes and reassured me that there was no wrong way to do it; Julia, who coaxed me into putting the first stitch in the fabric and showed me how to sew a running stitch; Emma, whose instructions I followed on how to make a chain stitch; and all the ladies at Weave Wednesday, who shared their work with me and gave me confidence to continue. The Honiton lace thistle that is appliqued on the patch was inspired by Margaret Oliphant, the subject of a chapter of the book this project is enabling me to finish, and her character, Rose Lake, a Honiton lace designer whose favourite motif is the thistle. In her Autobiography, Oliphant wrote, “I acknowledge frankly that there is nothing in me – a fat, little, commonplace woman, rather tongue-tied—to impress anyone; and yet there is a sort of whimsical injury in it which makes me sorry for myself.” This is a sentiment that has often guided me on this project. I see in this statement a woman who considers herself and her work ordinary and commonplace because she writes popular stories of women’s lives and domestic life. She does not see herself as a literary genius, and she would not claim to be an artist, but she also recognises this as the injustice of a culture that does not value women’s work, women’s stories, and women’s lives as it should. This project has sought to highlight that work and those stories, and the response from the contributors has been astonishing to me, and I hope to everyone who views the patchwork project object.