Robin Paris - News and Events 2013

April 2013

Leaps and bounds! That also explains the gap in news updating…

Last October came a phone call from Ian Howard of The Woad Centre in Norfolk with a proposal to dye a dozen or so t-shirts with an image on. Now if I had still been working with chemical vats and hot wax it would be a doddle – though somewhat mundane to wax someone else's image over and over and it would use A Lot Of Wax which in our resource-conscious times is Not Good.

Having worked for months already with resist paste, screen printing with it was on my to-do list – and here was the opportunity. An ideal process for avoiding repetitive re-tracing, printing also offers the ability to apply an image faster and more precisely. It is, heavens Robin, commercial thinking! It took some practice to get the knack and I appreciated early experimenting with Tessa Sulston (artist printmaker) and especially help from Steve Brown of Advertees (proper commercial, and eco-minded, t-shirt printers near Truro) for making up a screen for me and giving all sorts of useful tips. There is a future in screen printing with this paste. It is incredibly exciting!

T-shirts are much bigger than the A4 sized pieces I've been working on until now and it was time to take the plunge with a larger vat. Previously with a chemical vat I worked only at 25 or 33 litres (small dustbin) yet with the natural vats only at 3 and 4.5 litres. The difference is due to the greater quantity of woad pigment used in the natural vats… and needing to be sure of how to maintain them rather than losing good money in mistakes.

The 25 litre proved too small for the t-shirts and was gently decanted to the 33 litre. With these natural vats a lot of sediment sits at the bottom and fibre should be kept out of it. This reduces the working space to about three-fifths of the entire container and if the fabric is not suspended in the vat then it needs a container to keep it off 'the gunk'.

One of my beliefs about life is that everything you learn sets you up for something else. I used to make living willow structures and learnt a bit about weaving and strengthening. This came in so handy for making wire baskets! The first took several attempts to get sturdy but then proved too shallow for the t-shirts. And wouldn't fit anyway when switching to the larger vat. The second attempt, less elegant more flimsy, was more adaptable and allowed more working circumference. Also, having less wire meant less indigo would attach itself.

Having still not moved house workspace here is limited. The sitting room with its large table became the screen print venue and printed t-shirts waiting for paste to dry took over the sofa and coffee table. The utility aka dye room became a maze of dye vat, rinse buckets and waste/settling tanks (majority of water recycled for loo flushing). The three 3 litre vats previously worked with were moved to the hallway and are still there awaiting imminent resurrection. My studio also was overrun by aspects of 'the project'.

Drying… ha! It rained incessantly throughout this project, never mind the cold of winter. Weather records in The Link, the newsletter of the neighbouring parish, show December 2012 with only 2 days of no recordable precipitation (and indeed only 63 days in all of 2012 with none recorded!). And here there isn't an allocated indoor drying place – well there is in an outbuilding but as it doesn't have ventilation or heat and is storing a lot of work stuff I didn't want to create a damp atmosphere there. So progress was slow. It also was slow because the kind of vat used, a lime/ferrous sulphate or copperas vat, likes to rest and recover after a few dye sessions. To err safely, I dyed just one t-shirt at a time. An even larger vat may have fared better.

Resist-printing textiles both as an art form and more commercially is an intention for when I move and get a proper workshop, so this t-shirt project was great for experiencing workspace requirements. But not again before I move, the house became too much like my old house – all work, no home.

Not all was a fun adventure though. A few days after the t-shirts job came I was caught out by a spoof email… and stupidly thought excess spamming was about to descend. But instead I'd been hacked though it took some weeks to realise that and by then 'they' were too deep in, and I hadn't and didn't prioritise sorting it over the t-shirts. It has taken months to shake them off, and only came about by losing my 13 years old email address robin(at)robinparis.co.uk, moving my web domain to a newer and more secure package, getting a new router, and separating work from internet use with a second laptop. A downside (though may prove beneficial as I'm ultra-security conscious now) is I didn't start my new intended website over the winter and computer work is definitely a winter job.

During autumn 2012 I began experimenting with madder dyeing – just test pieces trying different timing and pH and temperature and so on. It was refreshing after working only with blue and only with woad but will take time and practice to gain expertise. A year or so ago I had intended to become solely a woad dyer and work only in blue. But since Michel Garcia introduced me to madder and weld dyeing, and learning to 'read' the dyeing process of old naturally dyed textiles, my mind has welcomed the chance to introduce other colours – in fact I am relieved!

Talking of old textiles, I joined a weekly WEA course earlier this year on the life and work of William Morris, run by design historian Rachel Miles. Although only one session was on his textiles and wallpaper production the whole course was interesting and cleverly brought together so many aspects of the man, only snippets of which I knew before – life history, family life, student days, social circle, architecture and the Red House and Kelmscott Manor, his vision of medieval and gothic revivalism, 'The Firm's' vision, philosophy, practice and creative works, the Merton Abbey dyeworks, the Kelmscott Press and his writings, lectures and social vision. Rather worrying was the tutor's occasional comments on Morris's lifelong obsession with perfecting his indigo dyeing technique!

Rust Dyeing and Shibori was a workshop I attended last autumn. It was great to meet local textile and community artist Sue Field who led the course. Rust dyeing is wonderfully straightforward and being orange a great contrast to the blue of woad but I hesitate to use it for artworks from reading of its corrosive nature. However I can see other possibilities. Sue's shibori examples were mostly stitch-based and despite sewing never being my forte I was pleased with the samples I produced. Being creative outside your own box is always so refreshing, just like walking or visiting somewhere different – even just a new walk in your own area.

I met up again with Sue Field at Liskeard's first Wool Festival 'Three Bags Full' in early April. She had the most beautifully decorated stall in the wool market – an artwork in itself – and I wish I'd taken a photo of her colourful felt items. The festival was incredibly inspiring and showed what quiet talent East Cornwall has. Quiet that is compared to Devon where a lot of woolly events seem to happen – such as the natural dyeing experimental research being undertaken on different fleeces by Isabella Whitworth and Jane Deane, who I visited a fortnight ago on madder dye day.

I heard yesterday from a town councillor there's a hope, nay an intention, Liskeard's Wool Festival will become an annual event – I am sure everyone who took part or attended would think the same. And next time I'd like a stall! So my work is on cotton or other plant fibre, that is just because it's batik. Before, using synthetic dyes, wool dyeing was another world to me. And yet, and yet, I live on a moor inhabited by sheep – some even walk past the house several times a day! And in nearby St Neot (a village my grandmother's grandfather William Kitto came from) are the seventeenth century Dye House Cottages. The St Neot Kitto family were cordwainers though, not dyers. Finding out more about this house and St Neot's dyeing history is one of ten projects on the list I brought from my old house. Perhaps Liskeard's wool festival is the prompt to progress this research and also consider how I might bring together woad dyeing with wool!

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