Traces

Interiors was a series of paintings, produced over a period of 8 eight years and inspired by a small sample of 18th century block printing. Kathleen Mullaniff.

Textiles with printed patterns grew increasingly popular for clothing and furnishings in Britain from the middle of the 18th century. The range and quality available to customers was constantly widening through innovations and refinements in production methods for the spinning and weaving of cotton thread, which improved the quality of English cotton available to the textile printers. Fine and easily draped fabric was well suited to the softer, less structured style of women's dress developing in the 1780s.

Wood blocks were used to print multi-coloured dress and furnishing fabrics. For this example the colours were built up with a series of blocks carrying madder dye with different mordants (substances which fixed the dye) to produce the shades required. Blue and green (blue over yellow) were added by painting or 'pencilling' indigo onto the fabric with a brush.

by Clare Browne, curator in the V&A's Department of Furniture, Textiles and Fashion. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Patterning Attention

by Janis Jefferies

Stand in front or rather move across the surface long enough to give it some play and it starts to play with you. Try and grasp the pattern. 'It defies you. Try and hold it, finger its details and you are denied. Try to let it 'unfold itself' towards you, perhaps as a musical sequence, then as your eyes flirt and flit around the motifs, listen attentively to it's quiet rhythms. There is an eloquent, soft kind of melody at work here, composed in a funny little speed of brushstrokes that entice a lightness of step in the fingers and the eyes. Observe a field of imprints, traces and gastrula marks as you glance from one canvas to another or perhaps it is a skip. All appears to be remarkably underscored but subtly orchestrated in the coupling of colours that merge as if into a hazy sketch. There's dusty pink here that glides into a blue grey pink and then chases a yellowy pulse. An edge of gold slips over and under a hatched, grey toned slippery grid. Shimmering lines and silvery flicks of black, score and cluster into an optical impression as if it's a 'Monday or Tuesday.'1. 'Do not be deceived, something is jostling for attention, but there is no single area if importance to fix your gaze, nor a hierarchy or priority of where you should fix your attention. There's a plaid, corn like combination (but then it could be Canterbury bells, but they aren't they upside down?) that run the length of the horizontal but it won't be joined up but then at the bottom of the canvas the motifs congeal. There is no more space. 'I am falling down. 'It does not seem safe just now to linger. As a small child and as a young teenager 'I had an aversion to pattern; most likely it was the garish floral frocks of the 1950S or the large blue blooms of the wallpaper in my bedroom, either way pattern for me projected an anxiety if emotional chaos. This was not helped by reading the Yellow Wallpaper. The story confirmed my worst fears. Pattern making itself can be playful and either repetitive or repressive; pattern can make sense - but not meaning' 'It can tease, frighten and enlighten. I am not so sure about pleasure.

Read more...