MACHINE

The idea behind this work came from the idea of a lace machine, in a crude, elemental but also decorative form.

Ive been thinking a lot about the idea of craft vs industry/ nature vs the machine.

Taking the elements of lace- cotton and linen with the floral

elements of lace decoration and the element of wood to represent a frame

and combined these natural materials into a sort of tapestry,the idea being that the drift wood is the machine and the loose threads coning down from it are being transformed into a decorative fabric.

The dried flowers have been stitched on in and intentionally crude cross stitch, literally capturing the design.

Atheistically its intended to look natural, raw, I have chosen light, muted tones. I used tea to tone down the original bright white of my cotton fabric.

The circle is to symbolise the cycle of nature and the wheels of a machine and general feeling of repetition and cylindrical happenings.

I noted down words that came into my mind as I was making the work. It was quite labour intensive/ time intensive, hand making all the tassels and stitching on the flowers, but a gentle, pleasant and meditative type of labour.

Overall I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.

i had originally planed to place cotton bobbins on the spikes of the sticks, which gave me the initial idea from playing around with it, to make a lace machine, but as it progress into more of a tapestry I thought it looked more ambiguous without the bobbins. I think they were too obvious. its hard to see when you are so close to the work difficult to see through fresh eyes. I asked fellow artists their thoughts on the bobbins and the general feel was it looked better without and i thought so too.

its quite hard to edit out the original seed of the idea, but I guess that's development.

I made a baby version as a prototype and the design on that was an " S" shape, just because the two floral pieces fitted together really nicely and I thought it was an interesting shape.

I was limited in the amount of dried flowers I had to work with. I had dried the flowers in the summer as part of my research but didn't have a set use for them. In hindsight I would have collected more as think the design looked quite sparse and I would have liked to see it as a full floral wreath for the final piece to represent luxury and abundance of lace and nature.