Sounding Place

Later in the year I will be taking part in an exhibition that focuses on the relationship between landscape and sound. In order to make new work for this exhibition I have been thinking more about my relationship to the sounds in the environment around me, specifically, how I can communicate something that is aural, in a visual manner? What it is the connection between what I hear and what I see in the landscape? And finally how that connection provides a way of visualising sound?

Apart from art, music is my other great love, and maybe you know that in another life (it seems a long time ago now) music and playing the flute was my creative impetus. Although melody and harmony are important, it is often the drive of pulse and rhythm in the music that makes me prick up my ears and listen. I find myself tapping my fingers or wiggling my toes subconsciously to its beat, and the same thing happens to the non-musical sounds I hear around me as well. So, making a connection between the aural and visual rhythms of the landscape is the focus for this new work.

The word rhythm comes from the Greek rhuthmos, a repeated, regular motion, and is also related to rhein, to flow. Musical rhythm is hard to define as there are various elements involved: metre, accent and tempo, but in its most basic form I like to think of rhythm as being a pattern of sounds, and the gaps or silences in between. In music rhythm happens over time, as do the non-musical sounds around us, and it also involves a movement forwards that could take seconds, minutes or hours.

So how can I transcribe the rhythmical values of sound visually? If I take my definition of aural rhythm and transcribe the pattern of sounds to a pattern of marks that could be lines, or shapes, or colours, and the silences as being spatial gaps between the marks, I start to have a way in. 

I’m looking out for the connection between the patterns I hear and the patterns that make up the landscape I see; the connection between how sounds change as they move forward and how shapes, lines and colours change over space; the relationship to the silences between sounds and the spaces between objects. 

The addition of contrapuntal voices or lines, and silences or empty spaces gives me the opportunity to create more complex, multi-layered works. Furthermore (although not directly relating to sound) the connection of rhythm to cyclical movement and repeating natural phenomena such as day/night, tidal movement and the seasons, gives even more scope.

The images here are of small rhythmical works, sound snatches if you like. They are not based on specific sounds but explore the relationship between looking and listening. They are small, abstract works that focus on pulse, pattern, and repetition. They have all been made with regular, repeated marks, but I am enjoying the way the cloth moves to create objects that have a remarkable amount of flow and irregular movement.

Jib

I’ve been beavering away making work, both textile and drawing, for upcoming exhibitions and Open Studios. First up is the 62 Group ‘Tailored’ exhibition which starts next month at Sunny Bank Mills, Farsley, West Yorkshire.

Jib, Linen, wire, hand-collected and hand-ground yellow ochre, linseed oil, beeswax, seawater, Approx. 235 x 50 x 75 cm.

This was a tricky brief for me as the word ‘Tailored’ immediately conjures up ideas of garment design and making. The brief also indicated that the cloth produced at the mill for suiting could be explored or any of the processes of making, spinning yarn, designing, weaving, and dyeing cloth or the pattern cutting and sewing of a garment? Non of this relates directly to my landscape-based practice and when making work for a brief it is important to me that what I make bears some relationship to what I do as well as to the brief.

Lots of thinking and turning over ideas followed, but in a moment of realisation I understood that the making and fitting of a sail to a boat has the same process as the making and fitting of a garment to a body. As the making of utilitarian cloths that evoke my coastal surroundings plays a large part in what I do, it was game on.

Many processes need to be considered when making a sail for a boat and these are listed here, taken from my statement for the Tailored exhibition.

‘The design of a boat’s sail is complex. It is custom-made to the purpose and size of the vessel.  A working sail has a 3-D curved surface and is made of multiple, shaped panels. It needs to be made with the appropriate shape and material to harness the power of the wind and propel the boat forwards. Depending on the rig of the boat, the sail could be triangular or rectangular, and its size is determined by its placement relative to other sails on the boat. 

A sail is attached to the hull and to the mast by attachments at its corners and edges. These take the strain and need to be reinforced. Historically a sail would be made of waterproofed or treated cotton or flax.’ 

As you can see many of the processes of choice of materials, designing, cutting, fitting and sewing are needed for both garments and sails. So I decided to make a piece that took inspiration from a sail from a small boat, a jib, that is a small triangular foresail that sits at the front (or at the bow).

This is not a fully working, made to measure, authentic sail. I wouldn’t like to see whether it would hold up in a strong wind (although I think it probably would!). Complicated calculations are needed to get the correct shape, size, and curve for a sail and I don’t have that know how – I’m only an artist after all. Instead this sail evokes those seen on small traditional boats and gives me the motivation to explore the processes of cutting, sewing, preserving, colouring and making that make up the traditional craft of sailmaking. I have particularly enjoyed thinking about the attachments and fittings – you probably already know about my eyelet obsession – and I also experimented with making other ‘fittings’ for attaching and securing.

‘Jib’ also uses a traditional waterproofing concoction of linseed oil, beeswax and locally found yellow ochre to preserve and colour the sail. I have used this technique before and it was particularly apt for this piece of work.

‘Tailored’ is on at Sunny Bank Mills, 83-85 Town St, Farsley, Pudsey, LS28 5UJ. 13 May – 2 July 2023. Open: Tuesday – Saturday 10-4pm, Sunday 12-4pm. Closed Monday

Bark tanning (part 2)

Cutch dyed cloth with gesso underpainting

Last time I told how a visit to the Grimsay Boat Haven in the Outer Hebrides inspired me to start looking at the traditional way of preserving and protecting cloth sails using bark tanning and cutch. Today I’m going to tell you about what I have done so far.

Cutch dyed cloth with watercolour overpainting

After my Uist holiday the first thing I did when I got home was to get hold of some cutch and start experimenting. This was easier said than done. Chandleries don’t stock it anymore as no one makes their own sails out of canvas now; modern fabrics are more durable and waterproof. Even classic boat suppliers don’t supply it. Luckily George Weil came up trumps and can supply cutch in powder form – I got started. 

I’m not a dyer. Any dyeing experience I have had was from years ago and largely forgotten. Many of you will have had much more practise at it than me, however, it’s amazing how much you can learn by actually doing it and then getting some books and learning some more. Hands on experience counts.

Cutch dyed cloth with under and over painting

Starting by simply throwing cloth into a pot of dye stuff in the same spirit as the Hebridean boatbuilders, I soon found myself trying other things out: mordanting and post mordanting with alum, copper sulphate and iron water, under painting, over painting and iron wire eyelets (of course).

Cutch gives the most wonderful intense red/brown colour. Mordanting with alum brightens it even more. Splashes of acrylic paint painted onto the cloth before throwing in the dye pot references the incidental, coloured marks seen on the Grimsay sails. Over painting the cutch dyed cloths with watercolour adds yet more subtle colour reminiscent of incidental day to day wear.

Cutch dyed cloth with acrylic underpainting

Although these cutch samples have decorative marks and stitches, I am still referencing the methods and techniques seen on the Grimsay sails and other traditional boat sails: eyelets, seams, and various methods of fixing and fastening. I want these small samples to look as if they were made from fragments of old sail.

I am very happy with these samples, but being directly inspired by the Grimsay sails they are somewhat removed from my normal source of inspiration here on the North Norfolk coast. I have searched for references to bark tanning in the boat yards here in Wells, and although I have information about boat building, up to now I have found no concrete evidence about what treatments sails were given. It is more than likely that cutch would have been available in the chandleries around here, but this is just supposition at the moment. I have no actual proof – more research is needed. 

Cutch dyed cloth with PVA resist and watercolour over painting

However, what I have found out about are the materials other communities have traditionally used to treat their sails. All around the world fishermen and sailors of the past have used tannin rich plants and barks to preserve and protect their sails and ropes. In the South Pacific mangrove tree bark was used, and in Newfoundland sailors and fishermen harvested and boiled their ropes and sails in birch bark. Any tannin rich tree bark does the same job as cutch.

Oak bark tanned cloth with acrylic under painting

Unlike the Outer Hebrides where there are barely any trees from which to gather bark (hence the need, I suppose, for buying in cutch), here on the Norfolk coast we have an abundance of trees. I quickly found that there are many varieties of trees in my local surroundings to source bark for tanning cloth: oak, birch and pine, chestnut and alder.  It is important to me that my bark tanned cloth comes from local trees as it gives the work a direct connection to the place. 

After a walk in the pinewoods along the back of the beach to see what was available I decided to start with oak. It is rich in tannin (my son tells me that when working with oak his hands are stained black with the tannin from the wood) and there are many old oaks amongst the pine trees in the woods. A lot of the oaks have dead branches scattered around the base of their trunks and it is an easy matter to peel some of the bark from these fallen branches – no living trees were harmed in this bark tanning experiment.

Oak bark tanned cloth dipped in iron water

The inner skin of the oak bark is a rich brown colour and a gives a hint of the possible colour of the cloth. It has an earthy, mushroomy smell.  I started boiling it in the kitchen on top of the oven to make a sort of oak bark tea. Almost immediately my husband banned me from the house and sent me down to the studio with a little camping stove – I don’t mind the smell, but he thinks it’s rank!

The colour from oak bark is much softer than that of cutch. It’s a soft yellow/brown. Repeated dipping and boiling in the dye pot produces a deeper, richer colour. These are my preferred samples but the reason is mainly because of the connection it gives me to this place.

Oak bark dyed cloth

At the moment I am sampling. Trying things out and seeing what might have relevance. Ideas are brewing as I’m making things and I have a little buzz of excitement as something new begins to take me down a different route. 

Saltbags

Recently I put up an Instagram post of this piece of work, and somebody asked, ‘What do you do with these Saltbags?’. I thought it was a very good question and I answered, ‘I suppose that like any artwork they will sit there posing questions and making one think.’

 I thought I would try to explain my thoughts behind these two little works more fully.

Two Saltbags,  Linen, wire, chalk, yellow ochre, salt, 14 x 9 x 4.5 cm 

First, I am not trying to realistically represent the landscape that inspires me, but instead try to find ways of evoking it using other forms, shapes or materials. The form I have used here comes from the traditional shape of the sandbag weight at the end of a heaving line – a lightweight rope that can be easily thrown between boats, or from boat to quay, onto which a heavier rope can be attached. It is small enough to fit into the hand to throw but heavy enough to have some heft behind it so that the lightweight rope attached to it will travel the distance required.

Usually, the weight would have been filled with sand, but I have changed the filling and used chalk and salt in one bag, and an ochreous clay and salt in the other. I collected the chalk and clay locally and the materials form a direct connection to the environment. The salt comes from the supermarket, but of course there is a direct corelation between salt, the sea, and this landscape.

Salt is a material I have used in my work quite a bit and is a material I use to explore changes in the environment and the passing of time. I use salt mainly by soaking stitched works in a salt solution that I have made up myself (actual seawater is only 3½% salt and not salty enough for the processes I use), and as the water evaporates both the stitched work and the salt changes character.

This process is cyclical, and it takes time. When salt is mixed with water it dissolves. As the water slowly evaporates in the air the salt’s crystalline structure is revealed. If the salt crystals get wet or are left in a damp environment, they return to their original form. It can take up to 2 months for the saltwater to evaporate depending on the outside temperature and the amount of water in the salt bath.

The other quality I exploit is salt’s corrosiveness. If you’ve ever been to the coast, you will know how the salt air and water gets into everything and then the rot sets in. I often sew iron rings into my work and within days they start to rust as the saltwater attacks the metal; the first signs of change in the piece. 

As the work dries out completely the salt crystals become stable and remarkably solid and strong, but with the faintest hint of moisture the salt crystals start to degenerate, and with this breaking down the metal and cloth also start to disintegrate. In a damp environment the work starts to fragment and break up and after a period of time, falls apart.

It is the common state for all things to tend from order to disorder – to break down and collapse. Another word, used in physics, for disorder or decay is entropy. Entropy explains why, left to the mercy of the elements, ice melts, glass shatters and salt dissolves.

Professor Brian Cox explains in the television programme Wonders of the Universe that in the wind a sandcastle will always be blown from order into disorder (low entropy to high entropy) and never the other way round (a pile of sand is never blown into the order of a sandcastle). He also explains that this is why time passes from the past to the future. Watch it here – it is a complicated subject and he explains it much better than me!

As Brian Cox says,

‘as each moment passes, things change, and once these changes have happened, they are never undone. Permanent change is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. We all age as the years pass by — people are born, they live, and they die. I suppose it’s part of the joy and tragedy of our lives, but out there in the universe, those grand and epic cycles appear eternal and unchanging. But that’s an illusion. See, in the life of the universe, just as in our lives, everything is irreversibly changing.’

So, when you look at these two little salt filled bags, I am presenting you with ideas of life, change, decay, and the time that has passed for all of that to happen.

Night Walking

Moon Light, Linen, wire, 42 x 65 cm

Much of my work originates from thoughts and memories that are a consequence of experiencing place and paying attention. These three works – Marsh Light, Moon Light and Bend in the Creek, were inspired by a walk along the quay and out towards the marshes in the dark. I love walking at night, and I’m always surprised how well my eyes adapt to the shadowy light. 

Marsh Light, Linen, wire, 45 x 63 cm

This walk took place earlier in the year just before the spring equinox. There was a huge, bright, full moon that lit everything up as if it were daytime. The moon light was so strong that it obliterated all but the brightest stars in the sky and left shadows on the ground in front of me.

These are the words I wrote when I got home.

An evening walk, early spring.

Down at the water

quayside shops give out a bright fluorescent glow.

Along the beach bank I expect a darkening,

But instead, the full moon emits a light

so bright it could be day and not night.

Looking up to the cloudless sky the stars have faded in the moonlit brilliance.

Looking down there are shadows on the ground.

Bend in the Creek, Linen, wire, 42 x 66 cm

The three works are the outcome of an outer sensing and an inner seeing. They will be on show at NR23, an exhibition that celebrates the creativity of artists living in the NR23 postcode in and around my home town of Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk.

NR23 is on at The Handa Gallery, The Maltings, Staithe Street, Wells-Next-the-Sea, Norfolk NR23 1AU.  Friday  24 June – Sunday 10 July 2022. 10am – 4pm daily. Free entry.

Fragments

At the beginning of this year, just after the first lockdown began, I was supposed to be having an exhibition of new work here at the Art Gallery in Wells. Unfortunately, lockdown happened and it was postponed. For various reasons, and the fact that everything is so uncertain at the moment, I am unable to reschedule it in the near future.

I have been wracking my brain as to what to do. I am still hoping to find a gallery to show this new body of work soon, but in the meantime I am going to do what others are doing and just show some of the works to you digitally here on my blog. In the New Year, I hope that there will be a new publication with writing and photographs as well.

Day Moon, 104x104cm

I have called the whole body of work Fragments and it is a response to diverse recollections of my experience of walking the coast, both during the day and at night. I have created word-sketches, drawings, 2-D and 3-D textile works that explore evidence of natural phenomena and the continuous, and often infinitesimal processes of change that transform the landscape and the objects in it.

At the heart of this work are words that I have written. In the essay at the beginning of the book I say, ‘At first, I just write down words as I recall, and try to articulate the experience. Nothing fancy, just a stream of narrative consciousness. But very soon I find myself trying to find a different, or better word. I move words around. I cut words out. I simplify. I compose. My aim is to find an expression that is the essence of the experience.’

The first two pieces I am going to show you today are titled Day Moon and Night Walking. They highlight two really very obvious phenomena, things that you will probably have noticed yourselves, but the two works came about when I questioned what I was looking at and didn’t fully understand what was happening or I was seeing. Curiosity, I find, is one of my fundamental criteria to making work.

Day Moon, detail

Norfolk Fragment: Day Moon

Afternoon.

The first week of January.

For the past week, around midday, I have been watching the moon rise.

Hanging low in the sky a slivered crescent has slowly grown

to its present bloated, waxing gibbous state.

In a few days, after the full moon, the pale day moon 

will again become a luminous night moon.

Question – I always think of the moon as being in the sky at night, so why exactly do I see it during the day? I didn’t know, so I looked it up. The answer?

• Half of the moon’s surface is always illuminated by the sun. 
• It takes 27.3 days for the moon to make a complete orbit around the Earth (sidereal period)
• It takes 29.5 days to for the moon to appear in the same phase in the sky (orbital period)
• The moon goes through 8 phases in the orbital period
• At the start of the cycle, when closest to the sun, the moon is hidden by the brightness of the sun and disappears for 3 days before it appears again as a New Moon.
• The only phase that the moon is in the sky all night is the Full Moon when it rises at sunset and sets at sunrise. After that the moon rises about 50 minutes later each day. (which is why we see the moon during the day).

The second piece that works very well alongside Day Moon is called Night Walking.

Night Walking – Betelgeuse, 110x108cm

Norfolk Fragment: Night Walking – Betelgeuse

Late evening. 

The beach bank, wrapped in darkness,

Catch at the back of your nose cold and very, very clear. 

Looking north, away from the sodium glare of the town, 

more and more stars are revealed 

as my eyes become accustomed to the dark.

To the west, an indistinct smudge of light above is the Milky Way,

Orion’s spear is clear and bright beneath his three-starred belt

and W-shaped Cassiopeia. 

To the north the Plough.

And then a star falls, and another, and again, 

out of the corner of my eye in my peripheral vision, 

another falling star and another. 

Five shooting stars in a row are a rare treat.

Night Walking – Betelgeuse, detail

Question – what stars am I looking at?

Night Walking simply satisfies my curiosity as to what stars I am looking at when I look up. It highlights Betelgeuse, the red star, and you can see it just above Orion’s Belt in the Orion constellation. It is the rusty red eyelet.

Night Walking – Betelgeuse, detail

The slightly larger eyelet below and to the left is Sirius or the Dog Star. It is in the constellation Canis Major and is the brightest star in the night sky.

Shop update

I have been meaning to address my online shop for some time and things just kept getting in the way – you know how it is. First, all my children and their partners descended on Wells for a summer/post lockdown holiday (which was wonderful); and then a local gallery asked to take some of my collages, so a few went there; and then I had an open studio and I sold some things, so, coupled with the fact that the weather has been so good and I wanted to get outside, updating the shop went to the bottom of the list.

   

Sometimes you have to welcome bad weather. We have had simply atrocious (and destructive) weather over the past few days. 60 mile an hour winds have blown down trees and sunk boats, and heavy rain has caused flooding. It is grey and damp. But the upside is that I have been able to spend a bit of time at my computer doing things that I don’t always find time to do.

I have put some work up for sale. Some collages….

Some watercolours….

And some individually painted handmade cards….

The collages have all been created intuitively and they are images of the North Norfolk coastline (mainly from just outside my studio on the salt marshes in Wells) that come from my memory: the shape of a bend in the creek, the rocking of moored boats or the outline of the creeks. They are about shape, colour, light and space. I go out with my sketchbook and draw. These drawings are never ‘copied’ in my collage work, but instead the act of drawing sets an image into my mind that I can draw on later (no pun intended).

The small watercolours have been created ‘in situ’, and I go out with my paintbox and draw my impressions of what I see and hear. Again they are about shape, colour, light and space but executed with a watery medium that I think expresses so well the local landscape.

Finally, these little cards originally came from a body of work that I did a couple of years ago and considered the connection between the visual and aural landscape of the North Norfolk coast. Again they are interpretations drawn from my visual memory, and are a combination of inventiveness and actuality. 

You can find my online shop here.

Fish Traps

My studio was formerly an old whelkshed – a place where fishermen would bring mussels and whelks to be to be washed and cooked. It is in an area which is still very much the working part of Wells-next-the-Sea and I am surrounded by buildings and paraphernalia that are used today by fishermen and the staff who keep the harbour running efficiently. In the unadopted lane that runs past the studio there are always stacks of both old and new lobster creels and traps, and old anchors and massive pieces of worn oak (the remains of wooden sailing ships) rest outside the boat park having been scooped out of mud by the dredger as it keeps the channel clear for boats. These are all an indication of both the town’s past and present activity.

Although my work does carry latent indications of man’s intervention in the landscape as I echo man-made objects such as jetties, sluices, and the remains of old wooden structures that can be found all across the marsh, I realise that I don’t very often directly address the idea of man in the landscape as my bias is mostly towards the effect of natural processes. With this in mind I have looked just outside the studio for inspiration to the objects lying there that are the immediate evidence of human activity in this environment – lobster pots.

The pots, or creels, used here on the North Norfolk coast for catching shellfish – mainly lobsters and crabs –  are D-shaped and covered with black netting (apparently black netting is more effective at catching shellfish than any other colour). There are usually 2 or 3 entrances, each with a conical inner net that leads to a hard ‘eye’ to allow the shellfish to crawl up and then drop into the ‘parlour’ or main body of the creel.

So here is the first ‘fish trap’ that has been inspired by some of the features of the traps outside the studio: black net, a crawl space and an inner ‘eye.

I’m not a weaver or a knotter but I am a knitter, so that was my chosen method. The material I am using is Habu Textiles, Shosenshi Linen Viscose Paper. It is a 4mm wide flat tape that is made from 100% linen and covered with a permanent viscose sizing. It is very crispy and crackles and crunches in my hands as I work with it. It is a posh sort of raffia and when knitted up I like that it looks a bit like Thongweed, a long thin type of seaweed.

This is my first ‘fish trap’ and there is another on the needles now. I must say I am really enjoying the process of making these objects that relate so directly to the Norfolk landscape.

The protective coast – 2

Last time I spoke about some of the research I have been doing around tidal surges and rising sea levels, and the ability of salt marshes to protect the coast by buffering wave actions from the force of the sea.

Ordnance Survey Norfolk Sheet 111 SE, 1907, 2nd edition.

This is a concern that is very real here in Wells. During the last tidal surge, in 2013, hard defences protected the west of the town – the floodgate was deployed and a glass flood wall held back the huge sea – however to the east of the flood defences the water built up flooding local businesses and houses along the quay. The solution for future surges could be to allow the eastern marsh, Slade Marsh, to flood. Lowering the height of the sea wall (or possibly removing it altogether) would relieve the pressure created by the ‘hard’ defences during exceptional tides by releasing the high water over the marsh and farm land and therefore protecting the buildings along the quay. This of course sounds counter-intuitive but this area used to be a place where the tide regularly flowed before the land was reclaimed for farming in around 1719.

Sample 1 – taken directly from map

My studio sits to the east end of the town and during the 2013 surge the water rose up flooding the building to about 1 metre (a former occupant has marked the level). This issue is of importance me.

Sample 2 – taken directly from map

So where to start with a project that addresses some of these concerns? Well I decided to start with a map of Wells and in particular the area to the east of the town. The map is an Edward Stanford Ordnance Map of Wells, dated 1907. It was very kindly given to me by a friend (thank you Helen Terry) and shows the creeks, the marsh and the town very clearly and in great detail.

Sample 3 – taken directly from map

When you don’t know what to do, or which direction to take, I think it is often best to start simply, and in this case I began by just copying parts of the map. I like that these first efforts depict the creeks as they were over 100 years ago as it gives me scope to research the changes that have actually occurred since then.

Sample 4 – Using shapes from my observation of the landscape and ‘colouring in’

The samples are 50 x 50 cm, sewing cotton on painted linen. The white on blue hints at blueprint maps. I have to say I really like these first three samples and learnt quite a lot stitching them, but they are much too literal…. too map-like.  So my next move was to come away from the obvious map shapes and to use shapes that come from my own observations of the landscape.

Sample 5 – Making marks with white paint and then stitching

Again, I feel they are sterile – there is nothing for the imagination to work with. So, I tried making my own marks with paint rather than just ‘colouring in’ and there is much here that I like, especially where in sample 5 the paint looks like a stain that is almost accidental.

Sample 6 – Making marks with white paint and then stitching. 

I thought I might be ready to make a larger version – to make a ‘finished’ piece – but I put everything away for a week and now I look at them again I know I’m not ready to go bigger or finished. I like the fluid, wavering lines that suggest shifting boundaries. I like some of the painted marks. I like the distressed cloth background and the eyelets. But the imagined shapes in the later samples have no meaning for me.

Sample 7 – Making marks with white paint and then stitching. Couched wire.

My next move? Well I think to do more research. I need to walk the creek at low tide. Draw what I see and notice the effects of the water on the mud and the sand. And then I need to move inland and walk the sea wall and the fields behind – to look and to listen in order to really understand what is at stake here and to give meaning to the marks I paint and stitch.

This is a long term project and I have no idea how it will end. Maybe some of these ‘samples’ will turn out to be actual work (it often happens), but I intend to document each move here, so next up some drawing.

Shadow Pots

Hello everyone! A couple of weeks ago I posted about some tiny salt pots that I had made and today I am going to show you two bigger ones.

They are both about 80cm long and I’ve hung them up on the wall so that you can get an idea of their scale. This little corner of the conservatory has become my working spot in the last few weeks, and sometimes I think I might take root in the chair. At the moment I feel uncomfortable spending a lot of time in the studio and so I have been bringing materials back to the house to work on here.

These pieces originated from asking myself the simple question, ‘how would it be to make some big salt pots’? Their final form comes from the technical problems encountered in trying to salt them. Normally I turn the pots upside down, put them in a shallow bath of salt water and wait for them to do their stuff. But the length and unstable nature of the pulled thread work means that  I couldn’t use this technique here as they would droop and topple over.

In the past I have filled bags with salt, soaked them in water and waited for them to dry and form crystals. So I considered putting loose salt in the bottom of the container, soaking and drying. But this would mean the salt might fall out and be messy if moved and I didn’t want that. The solution was to make a separate little bag filled with salt, a salt bag, (a bit like a sand bag), soak it until it was thoroughly saturated and then put it in the foot of the bag whilst still dripping wet. The salt has had to soak through two layers of cloth so the salting is subtle with a slight, weathered encrustation. I am really pleased with it. The salt bag also gives the work a bit of weight.

I waxed the solid part at the top of the pot so that it would hold its shape.

They look great in the evening when the light is switched on as they cast shadows on the wall. The blue is cast light from the lampshade.

And it this casting of shadows that has started me off thinking about other ways that I could use shadows in my work.