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| 9.29 in the morning by Gillian Cooper |
Please don’t collapse, but after
last year’s almost complete lack of finished work apart from PomPoms, this year
I’m on a bit of a roll and here is yet another!
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| 9.29 in the morning (detail) by Gillian Cooper |
I’m really pleased with this piece
of work for a number of reasons.
Firstly, because I almost gave up on it, but didn’t. It felt like it was taking way too long and
that it just wasn’t going to work. This
was partly due to the (very) slow production process. I only have one silk screen and it covers any
area roughly 30cm square at a time. I
had to get the pattern onto the screen, wait for it to dry, then print the
fabric, wash the screen, wait for it to dry and then set off again. Oh and fabric generally needed to be printed
twice. The stitching didn’t take too
long, but whilst I was doing it, all I could see was the blue fabric: it was a
piece that only came together at the very end: after the squares were sewn
together and the orange and other wool tops added. So I almost stopped. However, with a little gentle encouragement
from R (and some childcare too!), I finished it in time to enter it for the
SAQA juried exhibition ‘Redirecting the Ordinary’. Having had a number of rejections the week
before I entered, I didn’t hold out much hope – you seem to get into a pattern
of them for a while. I know that rejections
are all part of being an artist, but it isn’t always an easy part, especially
when you seem to get nothing else... But
guess what? To my amazement, it was
accepted and will be jetting off to America in the summer to go touring with
the exhibition. I’m really chuffed and
waited to tell you until I got these lovely photos of it that Alan took last
week.
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| 9.29 in the morning (detail) by Gillian Cooper |
It’s surprising how much better you
feel after an acceptance, especially as the sun is now shining and the
daffodils are out!
