I had rather a productive couple of hours on Sunday afternoon. I'd begun looking at patchwork and researching it's history to see whether there are many examples of paper being patchworked. I got an awful lot of hits about paper punching as an English embroidery technique and lots of craft books for paper patchwork but I struggled to find examples of using paper in place of fabric to create a sewn patchwork. I presume this would likely fall under a combination of collage and mixed media. I did enjoy reading an introduction to quilting and patchwork on the website of the V&A.
The idea stemmed from long distant memories of hearing the countryside and forests describe as patchworks. It's something that strikes me whenever I look at the forest on google maps. I used Google Earth to scroll back in time and gather all the available pictures of the forest dating back to 1985. When viewed all together the differences in colours become really interesting, as well as areas of planting and harvesting coming and going over time.
It would seem very obvious to create something in the shape of the forest, using the paths and fire roads as areas to piece different images or textures to, but I want to create something less obvious. I keep going back to the idea of the hanging paper representing a tree, a very fragile tree, and this tree carrying the marks and story of the rest of the forest. The presence of the trees is, after all, what creates a forest as opposed to a heathland or a meadow.
I went back to a book I love by Shelley Rhodes called 'Fragmentation and Repair' which mainly deals with textiles and mixed media, but she does also include paper. She starts by looking at the history of patchwork as a means of mending. She introduces kantha, the Japanese notions of boro, wabi-sabi and most interestingly momigami, the Japanese art of paper kneading where the paper is folded and and unfolded to soften it and becomes more like fabric. I plan to investigate this further.
I never throw away prints that have mistakes or are made as tests so have a drawer full. I dug some out, along with some of the texture tests I'd made and played around with ways of stitching them together with a sewing machine.
These are the resulting pages from my workbook:
I am now working on creating a variety of prints with a common palette. I will stick to my favourite mix of pthalo blue and burnt umber, extended slightly for translucency. The challenge will be to recreate this in etching inks which aren't available in exactly the same colours. As soon as some of these are dry I will lay them out and see how they look.