Textiles 3 Sustaining My Practice-Assignment 1

Exercise 5 Bridging Outcomes: Crisis-Recovery and Distress-Repair

Building Upon and Developing My Creative Process-Visual Proposal

Gillian Morris Student No. 511388

Ultimately textiles have such an ability to tell stories, through the materials, their use, their wear, the relationship we have with them through our making. Our identities and experiencing are so often wrapped up in and embedded within materials especially bedlinen, of its capacity to calm, soothe and quieten, to enable rest, recuperation, and to restore, to protect and comfort. Material has the capacity to evoke emotion through memory, which naturally promotes reflection and exploration of experiencing to further process prior events, to bring stories to life, to awaken the senses, to increasingly integrate within our sense of self, our identities and who we are.

I now wish to increasingly integrate hand stitching to the surface of dyed vintage cloth to sew and repair damage and distress not to embellish for its own sake for decorative purposes, to illustrate different types of experiencing and different emotional states of distress and repair, from splitting and rupturing to mending, strengthening, and recovering, to consolidate and increase resilience and the capacity to recover.

Experimentation processes have used paper mock-ups to investigate how the printed paper reacts and responds to and with hand stitching. To rip, tear, rupture, and split, to fold and crease to increase my understanding and connection with such processes and their effects, to help create and evoke responses in me. To use hand stitching on my multi-layered prints to explore a greater sense of layering of print with stitch to help evaluate these initial ideas of crisis and recovery within the material in use and in me to help inform the next series of creative processes within larger-scale sampling involving screen printing with stitch.