Robin Paris - News and Events 2011

Still not moved home… but I've kept busy over the summer.

Early on in 'the holidays' two 15-year-old students came here for a batik workshop. One was on an art scholarship at King's School Canterbury and because batik isn't offered there (shame!) her mother felt she was missing it. She'd learned under the tutelage of Rosi Robinson, head of art at Cumnor House School in Sussex (and an internationally respected batikker). Rosi and I have known each other for years - from those early days of the internet when only a handful of batikkers were online and 'bonded'. The accompanying student was her cousin, from North Devon.

Devising a personalised workshop to offer following someone's education with Rosi was a little daunting. It had to both extend what she had already learned and yet be different, but not so advanced that the cousin would be out of her depth. Although having somewhat moved on myself from this creative phase, I proposed a workshop using scrap, found and homemade tools for wax application, taking inspiration from moorland streams. But dyeing with woad rather than painting with fibre-reactive dye.

Proposal accepted, I then had to find a suitable stretch of stream to fit with planned timing. This was fantastic fun, revisiting many former haunts on the moor I somehow haven't been to for years. But also frustrating, as having been such a dry spring and summer the intended close-by streams were low or even non-existent with required visual effects lacking. The best locations were too far to reach in the time available but compromising I settled for Bowithick and saving 30 minutes elsewhere in the day.

Bowithick has a small stream that drops gently but steeply through a narrow valley from a marsh above - offering a range of falls, flow patterns, currents, undulations and streamweed weavings, and when the sun is out (as we had that day, luckily), lovely highlights along the stony streambed. Lie down with your head right by the falls and wonderful rhythmic sounds are heard, with entirely appropriate names such as glup, fizz, whoosh. Sensational, literally.

When mother came to collect them at the (already delayed) end of the day she remarked 'they're still working! That's a good sign!' Whilst I think the two did enjoy themselves and did learn new approaches and techniques, the workshop could have done with a second day. I always prefer teaching this way, with the first day devoted to learning and experimenting and the second to put the skills to use in a finished piece.

More recently I ran a woad dyeing workshop at Callington Primary School, for Year 6, part of their eco week known also as Green Britain Week. Not only was this my first woad workshop in a primary school but my first school workshop for five or six years. I used to run half a dozen or so a year but wound them down when taking the PGCE, which needed me to focus on the post 16 age group. Or adults in normal-speak. And since the PGCE I stepped back from nearly all teaching while sustainably re-orienting my practice, and having my house on the market. But I have been planning this workshop for over a year and it was motivating to get it organised and put into practice.

Callington's workshop brought together woad dyeing, organic cotton, and shibori techniques, three eco aspects in one. There are of course arguments for and against the eco credentials of natural dyes: can they globally replace synthetic (ie petro-chemical) dyes, should they replace food crops, is the problem more about western fashion consumerism, or (suggested to me a few weeks ago) should future plant dye crops be grown hydroponically? Similarly, although globally cotton agriculture uses 16% of all insecticides (or more?), is organic cotton really a viable alternative when producing it still uses large quantities of water, albeit less than 'conventional'? All big questions and too big for a day in a primary school but by using them the seed of thought is introduced. I certainly believe they are better alternatives and time will prove they are the long-term and wide-use future. Shibori though is definitely already an eco-technique for patterning of material. By folding cloth up into a little bundle it can be introduced into a smaller dyebath or vat, thus saving water and dye matter.

Although all 46 children folded, bound and dyed a piece of cotton in a school day without any of the four vats getting exhausted I had been over ambitious. In terms of me managing different concurrent activities as well as numbers. In this respect it is no different to batik when experience showed 15 students at a time was my comfortable maximum (but 12 preferred) for providing the ideal balance between children having a meaningful experience with an artist with good individual outcomes, and 'getting the max of any quality to show by the end of the day'.

In August I attended a three-day masterclass: Organic Indigo Vats with Michel Garcia, at the Birmingham NEC, part of the Festival of Quilts. More than just methods and recipes for organic indigo vats, we were introduced to natural resists and mordanted pastes. The latter enables combination of indigo with other natural dyes in a way not possible with wax-based resist (the heat needed to dye, say, madder would melt wax). I am very excited by the possibilities learned and frustratingly wish I could get on and experiment! But I doubt I'll move away completely from wax-based resist as hot wax is far more subtle and expressive than I think this paste could ever be. Organic vats though… mindblowing! They are the way forward for me, something I have wanted to find but probably never would have with limited chemistry knowledge, time and space. So I am itching to get on and experiment.

Last year I mentioned a batik that would appear on the cover of a journal and book published by the National Academy of Sciences, in the context of a colloquia 'In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation and Conflict'. And here they are.

I feel more than well chuffed!

More information about it all on the PNAS website, with the text related to my picture here though the book also includes the following:

From a young age, Batik artist Robin Paris has found ants fascinating to watch and study. This was reinforced on her Australian and South East Asian travels when she encountered ants of many different sizes, habits and ferociousness - but always in active, orderly societies. Here, a pair of ants facing in opposite directions ensures safety for each other.

June 2011

Frustratingly I've not had much time for creative work in recent months, mainly down to my house going on the market. Several years later than intended but as a wise great-aunt always said, everything happens at the right time. Over most of last winter I seriously cleared up and cleared out, all sorts of areas of my house and work space sorted through with 'stuff' (which is what much of it was) recycled, given away or, last resort, thrown out. It felt good but a few more 'deep', 'old', 'what on earth is there' corners are still to be tackled… scary!

The answer to many people's question of where am I moving to is, not far! So long as I can have a proper workspace, imperative now my dye vat is in the kitchen, and can move what's in my rented work storage room back under my own roof, that's what counts.

The screen on my otherwise trusty laptop had been playing up most of last year (and is now dead) so rather than be caught out as I was five years ago when also trying to sell, I bought a new laptop to allow setting it up around my time rather than it taking precedent. I was assured that Windows 7 wasn't a nightmare to learn, and although it seems to have a lot of unnecessary 'gadgetry' or even wizardry, I think I'm OK-ish with it now. Except… colour issues. Cannot scan in and see something good enough colourwise on the screen. Adjust to match, and it prints out very wrong. Grrr. Colour management is apparently the new thing (for Windows 7 users). I have tweaked and twiddled, googled and goggled, spoken to and emailed techies at Dell, Canon and around the corner. Reading this article from Corel has finally helped me grasp it, I think. I just need to put it into practice – after the colour calibration tool has arrived and sets the screen to a confirmed standard. Or will prove that it was a dodgy screen from the start. But should a new laptop need this?

I would compare learning about digi colour management and embedding colour in documents as about equal to learning how to code up websites by hand. Steep learning curve, and then suddenly it pops into place. I hope. I am so close to calling it a day with computing. Life was so less demanding and certainly cheaper before, and I had much more time to make art, go for walks, dawdle, ponder…

My planned winter project was to re-vamp my website. With monitors having ever more pixels my original 1024 x 768 based design makes some images like thumbnails. Other images that used to fill the screen hardly look large at all. Also, the website has grown to something like 60 pages total (apparently), something like the way my house became before de-cluttering. So a re-hash in content is also on the cards. And there are new xhtml standards, so it's time to update coding too (fourth version since starting the website in 1999).

House-moving and computer woes have not taken up all my time thankfully. In March I ran a batik workshop at newish venue Westcountry Creative in Lifton, Devon, with six people on the course coming from Cornwall, Devon and London. Another wire stamp workshop but the first using woad as dye. Wire stamps are great for making repeat patterns, not as exquisite as traditional Indonesian copper caps but a mid-step between potato prints and traditional batik prints. It's surprising how much time and effort they take to make whilst looking deceptively simple, and then need practice to get the 'knack' for waxing. Woad dyeing worked out according to plan, meaning the vat didn't cool off or go off while being used.

Later in the year I'm going on an indigo dyeing masterclass run by Michel Garcia, with the focus on traditional but unusual methods of reducing the vat using waste products such as fruit peel. This is my ultimate direction, to move away from chemical vats to using natural methods, so it will be fascinating and motivating. Several leading natural dyers are also going making it an even better few days away!

For six weeks over the spring I had a wonderful part-time job working for the census, following up households still to return their forms. Working in parishes near where I live, I walked around each village and hamlet to track down houses with only a name (no street number or even street name, the norm for the countryside), I travelled down narrow lanes I hardly knew existed, up farm tracks to find stunningly renovated barns, and endeavoured to solve mysteries of house names that no one around knew of. I met many lovely people and a few not-so-lovely. The weather was sunny and warm for all but one day of this work, and even then it only mizzled. An absolutely wonderful job, I loved every moment of it. And it paid for the new laptop.

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