The first session of our fibre arts block was a little confusing, as it actually involved virtually no work with fibre arts, and our brief wasn't supplied on the day. We began by working on a similar exercise to what we did in the Fine Art block, early on, with drawing items in boxes, however despite my initial apprehension, this turned out to be a much more relaxed process than before. The items included a variety of shapes and textures, and the emphasis this time was not on detail and accuracy, but simply reproducing the shapes quickly. This ended up being quite liberating and I was able to be quite gestural and loose with the representation. We repeated this exercise several times, rotating the materials we were drawing as well as the materials we were drawing with. We began with graphite, and moved onto some less conventional means, including taping two pencils together in an effort to reduce control, which provided some interesting results. We also used Berol markers, with added water applied by brush to disperse the ink in a manner similar to watercolour paints, and this is a technique I want to try out more as the effects were interesting and very easy and fast to implement. We used indian ink, applied with skewers and also brushes, which is also something I would like to use more, perhaps in other ways.
After a while we had produced several different drawings, on a variety of types of paper, and we then were asked to create a collage of sorts out of the drawings, with the option of cutting and re-aligning the pieces. I decided to do this with all my drawings, feeling that the direction the work was heading in at the time was not overly engaging me, and that I would perhaps find more interesting results if I went further into abstraction. I arranged the pieces in such a way as to try to follow some some curves and lines throughout. I used sticky labels to hold pieces together temporarily, as I threaded through the outlines of the pieces straight onto an A2 sized piece of paper, rather than piece the work together first and then apply to paper later. At first, the needle I was using was too broad and it proved extremely difficult (and painful at times) to penetrate two or three layers of paper at once, and after a while I switched to a smaller, sharper needle which was easier to manipulate, however I managed to scratch and poke my fingers multiple times in the process. This has been the most physically painful unit so far.
