Maxine Bristow

Maxine Bristow's work references industrial textile production very heavily, and is steeped in regional history as well as the relationship to particular materials that we all develop from an early age.

3 x 19: Intersecting a Seam (1999)

These pieces are intricately and precisely designed, but owing to the nature of heavy fabric they are also irregular in individual, variable ways. They resemble sleeping bags, or large sacks, and look comfortable, evoking a tactile response without physical contact. The material was laboriously prepared, with the material treated with a mixture of Gesso, a PVA and chalk powder mixture, whcih seals the material and adds to it's texture. The Gesso is then partially removed by hand. The handmade approach to all of Bristow's work creates small differences so that whilst the pieces often look the same in repetition, upon closer inspection they are more separate.

18 x 51 over 11.44 (2002)

In this piece the reptition is enhanced, magnified many times over in several ways. The objects themselves are multiplied, again appearing similar but owing to the hand-made techniques they are all individual, with each button hole also having the same degree of separation from the others near it. The same process is applied to the material of the fabric as before, again creating an imperfect, inconsistent quality to the fabric.

Light-switch ref 20318 (2004)

With this piece, the repetition is magnified even further, as seen in the above image, stretching out past the line of sight. Equal distance between the switches and their piping, following neatly along the curvature of the wall, reinforces the theme of functionality within her work more literally.

Bristow experimented with a variety of different mixtures to create the concrete blocks that form the basis of the "lightswitch" design. Various materials involving concrete mixed with other powders were tried, with various degrees of success. In this image you can see Bristow trying the fabric component of the shape with different blocks that she has produced, testing her response to each one. The image clearly demonstrates the different qualities each block provides in texture and colour tone.

In this image you can see the finished result of the selection process. The block again looks distinctly uniform in design, but the handmade nature of both the concrete mixture and the piece of fabric applied to it create individuality that is distinct. Specks in the concrete make it unique, amongst the many that sit either side of it.

This image demonstrates Bristow applying another part of the design, regular to each 'unit' of the piece. Holes will have been drilled into the wall at perfectly spaced intervals, providing clips for the handmade fabric pieces to attach and give the impression of securing the piping to the wall. Similar items appear regularly in virtually any building that a person might enter, but they are incidental, even insignificant to observation. Bristow has instead made the insigifnicant details of functional interior design something tactile and interesting, but without making them singular and obvious.

Fibre arts

Today's session was a good extension on what we had been doing previously. We looked largely at transferring, and I spent a good deal of time working on using transferable wax crayons on paper and using a press to transfer the wax colours from paper onto the fabric. The results were surprisingly good, at least on the artificial fabrics, where the colour transferred very cleanly and smoothly, almost loosing no detail in the texture.

Above are the wax on paper originals, with lettering done in reverse on the first example so that lettering comes out in the right direction on the print. With these pieces, there wasn't much attachment in my mind to the notion of using sewing objects as inspiration, and I decided I would rather pursue a different direction. I decided to use a stencil and reproduce my date of birth, tying the work at least superficially to myself in a direct manner. I then used other elements of the stencil to create solid lines and blocks, and using the underside of buttons to create reproductions of the four holes, in turn creating a pattern of these. I tried to keep the colour usage minimal, so as to be high contrast and to work blue shapes around red numbers, and vice versa. This was actually the second plate I produced, the first one being the second image above - which is mostly freehand drawing with button relief, and where I started experimenting with the pattern of the four dots from the underside of buttons.

Not the best quality image but good enough to show that the colour and detail has not been lost in transferring from  paper to fabric, and the reversal of the image has produced the numbers in the correct orientation. Further prints from the plate became weaker as the wax was transferred repeatedly.

The first plate as transferred onto organic fibres, resulting in a more washed out, less distinct transferring.  Other attempts at transferring onto organic fibres were less successful than this one.

Further work still needs to be done with transferring, as I did not have time to use ink transferring.

We were also shown how to use bondaweb to bind fabrics together, and continuing on with the motif I used earlier with my date of birth, I created a sort of collage piece using bondaweb and a selection of different fabrics, and using the sewing machine to link fabrics together solidly. I also rolled up a piece of gauze tightly and sewed through it on the machine straight onto the fabric, an then chopped at it with scissors to created a rough effect but with the material still tightly bound to the backing fabric. Lastly, I folded and sewed together another piece of material, and then sewed this onto a corner of the collage to create a hook, as I thought it would look interesting if the piece were able to hang freely.

Fibre Arts

In our second fibre arts session, we began with an exhaustive list of artists who work in textiles, both in 3D and more two-dimensional styles, under the umbrella term of fibre arts. Of these, the following caught my attention in particular:

Sheila Pepe
Janet Echelman
Susie MacMurray
Shelley Rhodes
Caroline Bartlett
Michael Brennand Wood
Ma Ke


More on these later.

The remainder of the session was almost entirely practical, with the aim to try out and experiment with a variety of different techniques using a sewing machine, an embellisher, dyes, 'stitch and reveal'. I spent a considerable amount of time with the sewing machines, as I have never used them before and I found them intriguing. It took me some time to get to grips with the basics of the machine, and I wanted to practise more so I spent perhaps more time on the machines than was intended. As such, of the pieces I produced, most were made with the use of the sewing machine.

Stitching and folding

Folding with stitch

Stitch and reveal

Stitch gauze over wool thread, onto white material (1/2)

Additional stitches to hold over the thread, and keep it in place, and also to segment the fabric into cubes (2/2)

Wax relief onto fabric, with dyes washed over the fabric (high resolution scan). Wax was rubbed onto the fabric over  various shapes, as well as being rubbed freehand onto the material.

Fibre Arts

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.