Sample of my written work – From my Textiles A-Level
How can the work of artists be manipulated to take inspiration from moths and butterflies?
I am inspired by butterflies and moths within my work, this subject includes a range of colours and shapes that I can link to the work of various artists. I have found the use of fabric manipulation captures the shapes and patterns in the wings of the butterflies. Aude Franjou’s wrapping and binding technique imitates tree branches, it could also look like the veins visible on wings. Yarn-based work can be manipulated into a shape and style like the pattern of moth wings. Amy Goacher, a knit artist I have researched, uses embroidery on knit to create circular patterns of varied sizes. Though these two artists use different techniques and materials I feel can both link to my theme. Franjou uses fabric strips and string to create her wraps while Goacher’s work features wool being used to knit and embroider her pieces.
Aude Franjou creates large sculptures with thick strips of fabric or string and dense wrapping and binding techniques. She uses a range of colours from neutral tones to bright reds and greens. Her work is inspired by trees, and she often displays it among nature to show this. Her work branches and twists around itself with varying thicknesses of wraps. Some of Franjou’s sculptures branch around themselves completely to make circular shapes while others are straighter and less interlocked. The straighter pieces she makes are the most inspiring to me because they look like veins clear on the wings of butterflies and moths, particularly the plainer ones. Franjou’s wide range of colours means her work links to almost all my theme images, but I found the more neutral tones she used to be more similar to the shades within the moth wings. All of Franjou’s pieces use the same techniques of densely wrapping threads over thick pieces of fabric and completely covering the underneath layer. This technique was remarkably interesting to use and creating the shapes that I did, made the piece more successful in imitating the pattern of veins within a moth or butterfly wing. The artist makes her sculpture on an exceptionally large scale so uses much larger materials and quantities than I did. Her pieces are decorative not wearable and look like trees because of the shape. Her work has a peaceful mood because of the colours and natural inspiration, though some of her pieces use much brighter colours they still clearly take inspiration from tree branches and continue the calm atmosphere created. Her work “can be said to have « emerged » from artistic research into the vegetal growth” [reference i] This inspiration is noticeably clear in her work [Figure One] because she creates branch or root-like shapes. The wraps she creates are enormous in comparison to her [Figure One], the branches of this piece do not curl in as much as many of her other pieces, because of this and the moth-like colour used, this piece is very influential to my work. The focus of the image below [Figure One] is mostly the large size of the piece and its complexity. This is shown with the comparison of the size of the artist and the piece itself. The wrap in this image is very plain with the use of colours, this pallet would link more to the colour of moths than butterflies who usually feature bright and vivid colours. In the background of the image, other wraps and samples line the walls of the room, though not a main part of the image these different pieces show the way the size and colour vary throughout her work despite using the same technique throughout all of them. This piece, like all Franjou’s work is clearly inspired by trees and nature with the way it branches out and twists around itself. Franjou’s Multi-colour Piece [figure two] is more complex with the colour pallet, a gradient from yellow in the top left corner to purple in the bottom right, the way the colours gradually change throughout this piece makes it eye-catching to someone looking at it. The dense wrapping in this piece makes the material underneath hidden, this piece is far curlier than the other one [figure one]. This piece was inspired by tree branches and roots.
Amy Goacher has a focus on sustainability for her pieces, she often alters vintage or second-hand pieces of knitwear and embroiders and decorates them with leftover industrial waste yarn from creating knitwear pieces. The pieces Goacher uses as a base for her work range from very simple pieces to more complex that include cables and colour work. The focus of the image below is the jumper [Figure Three], it is thrown over a stool against a white background, there is nothing distracting in the image which allows the jumper to be the only focal point. The colours used in this piece are quite natural, the green of the jumper is a muted tone rather than being vibrant and the embroidery is done in cream. The ends of the embroidery are left free instead of getting sewn in, this makes the piece seem unfinished and more natural and unique. The embroidery looks as if it is composed of two parts, the outer circle and the inner one. The inner part is composed of small knots or loops repeated over and over and arranged densely. The outer part is straight lines of varying lengths and density to create a circle. The tones used in all of Goacher’s work links well to my theme, mostly similar to the colour schemes in moth wings. The shapes, often circular that Goacher creates make the link between her work and moths more prominent because these shapes are common in the wing pattern. The artist is stood next to a piece she has created in the image below [Figure four] the design on the jumper is noticeably asymmetrical, on one sleeve there is a pattern of colour work while the other sleeve has embroidery circles on it with the same design as the ones on the jumper in figure four. Unlike the previous jumper though [Figure Three], the embroidery uses two colours, cream for the inner part but orange for the outside. This piece is overall far more colourful because the jumper itself uses several colours before the embroidery. The texture in this piece is more interesting because of the various techniques used such as the cable knitting across the jumper and the leaf shapes created using increases around the left sleeve and on the bottom right of the jumper. In this piece the ends of the embroidery are left very long and hang past the bottom of the jumper
The two artists use completely different techniques and achieve results that do not look similar, but can both be linked to my theme with both the colour and shapes created. The colour used by both artists can be similar in some of their pieces such as the wrap that Franjou is working on in figure one and the green one on the wall on the right half of the image which use similar shades to Goacher’s work [figure three]. The function of the work the two artists create are different, the wraps are decorative pieces often designed to be wall pieces while Goacher makes garments intended to be worn. I created a sample by Franjou[Figure Five], the colours are not unlike the ones used in the piece she is making in her work [figure one]. The colours were largely inspired by moths and the shapes created were less twisting and curled than most of her work, instead they were created straight and curled around slightly to show a similar pattern to the veins of the moths visible on the wings. To improve this sample, I would create it on a larger scale because in comparison to the size at which Franjou creates her pieces it is very small. Creating the piece to be larger would take much longer and would most likely use different materials such as strips of fabric instead of string as the base for under the thread wrapped around it.
In conclusion though the methods and materials of the two artists researched are completely different, both can be linked to my theme by the colours and shapes they create. I selected both these artists because of the similarities I could see in their work with the images I took for my theme. I chose two artists who use such contrasting techniques to demonstrate the ways in which different way of manipulating fabric and yarn can achieve a result that shows inspiration from the same subject.
