I received four flat pieces of work of approximately A2 size, two of which were fabric and two paper, all four were self colour print, either white ink or flock on white paper and two white devore print samples, one on a wool mix fabric, the other on a velvet. The print was a lace pattern. All four samples had some additional white hand-made paper pieces attached with pins and some ‘melted’ plastic textured fragments [I believe there were originally five print pieces and one was used for this in the second intervention]. All the samples also had a very pale pink embroidered pink line somewhere on the fabric.
My initial reaction to the pieces was that they had a refined quality, with beautiful textures, and also I had a strong feeling of snow, they looked like fabric pieces of snow. The pale pink thread lines also seemed to lead to something, to be the start of another colour growing.
I started to research images of flowers that bloom in the snow or can survive in snow without the blooms dying, I did several ink, coloured ink and watercolour pencil sketches of these, I drew quickly, mostly with my wrong hand, as I wanted to capture the essence of the shapes rather than particular details.
I then used the two paper pieces as backgrounds for sketches, embroidering back into one with coloured ribbon, these two sketches led to ideas for embroidery onto the fabric pieces. For these I used embroidery thread, ribbon, raffia, tapestry wool and found embellishments. I hope the embroideries have the feeling of a bright textured flash amongst the soft snow. The blue flowers I chose to embroider are called ‘Glory in the snow” and form circles of blue star shaped flowers growing from dryed up leaves, they appear as small clumps out of snow in the alps, apparently the flower is fully formed inside the plant waiting for the right sunny day to bloom, there are no buds that would be damaged, I found this fascinating. The other flowers are crocuses; I loved the bright orange spikes emerging from the snow.
As usual I was very restricted by time and would have liked to have taken this intervention further, perhaps producing prints, further embroidery and even garments. So once again, my intervention is really a starting point rather than a finished piece.
Created by Lucy Chick
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