I've been away to other shores than Spurn's. The school holidays always disrupt the normal work pattern and things have to be fitted in differently or put aside for a while. Since my week at Farfield I've put Spurn things aside and I realise I haven't posted anything here. It doesn't mean that I'm not thinking about it all though: I carry it with me wherever I go.
I want to take a step back and show a little of what happened to Cloth #2 before I started constructing it at Farfield.
Back in June when I was unwrapping rust bundles and discovering the marks that had been made on cloth by the rusty groynes, the base cloth for cloth #2 had its first experience of Spurn.
This long piece of linen (actually several pieces joined together) is long enough to hang in the tall lighthouse room half way up the building: approximately an 8 or 10 metre drop. Although this piece of cloth forms the base to bring together the marked and dyed fabrics I wanted it to take on something of the place itself. I wanted it to get salty and sandy and to experience the place in the way that the fabric that had spent time wrapped and submerged by the tides had.
I laid it out on the beach and allowed it to get wet in the waves. The water pushed it about and slowly it took on the shape of the leading edge of the waves in the way that the sand and debris is moved around and left wet in a curved line.
This long and seemingly large piece of fabric was suddenly dwarfed by the scale of the beach but its length and width seemed right in proportion to each other: a long thin strip being quite appropriate to this drawn out fragment of land with its strips of land/sea interface.
I started constructing Spurn Cloth #2 today. Again, this was a case of laying things out along the floor of the studio and playing about with things until they looked right.
It was good finally to be able to see how all the textures and patterns I've been collecting on these pieces of linen will work together and how they relate to cloth #1.
Joining all these strips together is a quicker process as I'm using the machine for this one. This cloth will hang in a very tall space in the lighthouse where the light levels are relatively low, therefore the detail isn't as important on this one. I've concentrated on creating a cloth with bands of texture that will give an overall effect rather than be viewed up close. There will be time to add more detail before it is shown elsewhere (with better lighting!) after the show at Spurn if needed.
It's been a quieter day at the Mill today with fewer visitors. The weather is still damp and grey, but there was an hour or two of sunshine this afternoon to throw some good light into my studio. I'm also preparing for my talk here tomorrow afternoon, picking out the key images to tell the story of my project.
