Project 4 Stage 2 Ex 1

Shape

This is a detail from Fijian bark cloth called "masi".  Bark is stripped from the Mulberry tree.  The inner layer is soaked and scraped then beaten to flatten it.  It is then either glued or beaten onto another piece of bark.  All this hard work is done by the women.

Patterns are stencilled, stamped or smoked onto the fabric and the images depict the environment and way of life.  Nowadays the fabric tends to only be worn on ceremonial occasions and tourists can watch the making of the cloth.

I like the fabric because it is elemental and both simple and complex.  I wanted to check out the pattern repeat and made several copies and stuck them together.  I developed a real appreciation of the work involved and the skill of the painters.

The three parts I have isolated show different design details.

The first one feels very settled and repetitive.  It is taken out of context - the reality is a diagonal line.  I couldn't grasp the way the positive and negative shapes work so I spent some time trying to make a similar stencil.  I used card but the Fijian people used banana leaves.

I had to focus really hard on the positive and negative  (I didn't always get it right).  I had a very sharp craft knife but I expect the traditional tool may have been a shell or something similar.

Pencil sketch for the stencil

The cut out stencil

My finished print

This was all very tricky and the nearer to the end of the cutting the more nervous I became.  On the printing there are some splodges where the paint seeped through but it's turned out better than I had hoped.  It taught me a lot about the process of stencilling and perhaps the fact that I was trying to make a copy of something made it harder.  It may look like a simple thing to do but it's certainly not.

This one seems very dynamic with its point and crossed lines.The negative shapes are very important but once again I found myself getting very confused between the positive and negative. 

I wanted to use odds and ends of natural material for this so opted for newsprint, string and bits of undyed wool.  I began by cutting out shapes from the folded newspaper then coloured them in with felt tip pen.  I like the arrow shape because it keeps the energetic feel of the original.  The straight lines and the newsprint triangles work well and keep the feel of the piece as does the bobbly wool. I'm not so happy with the "X" shapes because they don't look cohesive.  This may be because the shape was hard to achieve.  I hadn't realised how important it was to have things in line.  The "X" that it off line looks awful. 

The last detail shows a variety of stencilled designs and is very busy.  The pale lines in the diamond shape look very prominent.

I have really enjoyed the natural way this fabric is made and decorated but I decided to take things to the other extreme and manipulate the pattern digitally and use bright, mainly primary colours just to see what happened.

I used Paint.net with the "twist" effect then introduced colours in the negative spaces.  I used the default positions except for "direction" which I set at 9.3.

This is the first time I've tried painting on the computer and it was fun.  I tried to use the colours I've been working with recently and stay conscious of what was happening to them.  As I've found previously the darker blue tends to get lost on the black and so does the green.  The yellow and the red however leap out of the page.  The central river looks turbulent and exciting and although it divides the page somehow holds the thing together (probably more than the original central line did).  My first impression of this detail still applies even though the media is so different.  It's still busy and what were the white lines still stand out but now they are yellow.

As a matter of interest if the setting is changed to -19 things start to look a bit different.  I'm sure there's a long way to go with this sort of work and I'll enjoy playing with it.

I got very involved in this piece of work and enjoyed trying to re interpret using other media.  Having to look very closely at work I might previously taken for granted opens up a whole new world of ideas.  The notion of taking a detail, then taking a detail of that, then again ad infinitum is a lovely way to make creative opportunities.

I've just read through my course information and see that I have deviated from the instructions.  I'm hoping this is going to be OK.


John Gillow and Bryan Sentence, 1999, World Textiles, Thames and Hudson, London.
www.matangi-island-figi-resort.com