Textile show at Mornington Art Gallery

I went with a couple of friends to visit the opening of two exhibitions at the Mornington Art Gallery on Sunday. There was an interesting exhibition of circus related works, connected with the Flying Fruit Fly Circus. We went specifically to see the other show, a textile show that is touring the country. There was a rich variety of techniques and some inspiring works.
It was very inspiring and I came home all enthused about doing some tapestry weaving for my final piece for the course I am doing. I worked for about 4 or 5 hours and have stopped because the side is coming in and I am not sure if I will have to take it out. Not something to look forward to! So I have put it away till I see my teacher on Wednesday.

Tapestry weaving

I have just read about Tapestry weaving on another blog. I, too, am studying tapestry weaving, at RMIT. I have just been working on a textural piece. I enjoyed it greatly but I must admit that I find tapestry weaving very slow! Here are some pictures of the work in progress.

It was fun playing with various thicknesses of warp and weft as well as differently textured threads.

Silk Paper hat dyed with Eucalyptus bark

I have made a sunhat, based on the bushman's hat with corks bobbling to keep away the flies, using silk roving (sliver?) which I dyed using the lemon scented bark. I used all the different colours I obtained with the different mordants that I showed in a previous post. The spiders are to scare the flies away. The scarf was also died using the lemon scented eucalyptus dye.
The silk was laid out to make silk 'paper', also known as silk fusion. I used the instructions from Judith Pinnell's books and Silk Paper for Textile Artists by Sarah Lawrence. The two authors describe slightly different techniques but I mixed and matched them to suit me. I was quite happy with the outcome.

Butter sculpture - Nepal

Parlance commented about butter sculpture mentioned in an episode of The Spirit of Things. I listened to the episode with great interest. It is about a priest, a monk and a swami living in an interfaith community in Melbourne.
In it there was a reference to Nepalese butter sculptures.
It is interesting where the musings that I have here lead me! Who would have thought that I would have ended up with this topic when just talking about the hat assignment I had in my Experimental Textiles course.
Here is a link to some images of Nepalese butter sculptures (and some others).

Amazing ephemeral art

Someone sent me an email of some amazing ephemeral art, an artist called Liu Bolin. He has painted himself to blend into backgrounds. You have to wonder how long it takes and why people do it. But, I must admit, it is well worth the viewing. Here is a link.

Pretend Food Sculpture

I am making a sculpture of small hats for my Experimental Textiles assignment. I have been looking up those profiterole towers that you see in some cake shops. I decided that my hats were pretty, frivolous and like confectionary. When I looked up some examples on the internet, I found them by entering the word 'croquenbusch' because that is what they had them labelled as at our local cake shop. But there is no such word in any dictionary.
It turns out that the word is actually French - croquembouche - meaning crunch in the mouth. So now I am thinking of calling my work croquesurtete - crunch on head.
Here are links to a couple of photos I found on the internet and I am thinking that they are good inspiration for my sculpture.
Photo One
Photo Two

Here is a shot of it in the making, not finished yet. It needs a few more fascinators and I will be putting some Angelina Fibre on it to simulate the syrup.


My work is influenced by the fact that it is the Spring Racing Carnival here and there are hats and fascinators around all the shops.

Food Sculpture

While researching my assignment about hats I came across some interesting sites with amazing food sculptures. (Don't ask about how I got to these while researching hats.)
Some chocolate and dairy food ones, some fruit ones and some general food sculptures.
You might need to be a little bit patient with the first one, it has a lot of photos on it and takes time to upload them all.