A Sneaky Peek Inside my Studio!

I recently had a big tidy-up in the studio. It was triggered by getting some wonderful new storage from my Mum's house, with lots and lots of little drawers (so now I can actually find stuff).

It's the first time I've been able to see my window sills in as long as I can remember. They were piled high with bit and bobs, and bags of bits and bobs, all stuff that didn't really have a home, so got dumped there. I had to wipe up year's worth of dead flies and dust when I cleared them of clutter! 

The various bags shoved under my desk are stuffed with all the plastic carrier bags I've collected to create my latest work - you can see my most recent plastic-bag sculpture on the surface in the video. 

I'm sorry I have been lax in telling you about what I've been up to for some time. Basically, I discovered that I was spending more time administrating all my social media platforms than creating actual artwork. So I decided to take a break from regular blogging, to get myself back on track. I will try and look in more often. In the meantime, I now have a Facebook page dedicated to my textiles creations, which has photos of all my recent projects, the stuff that hasn't yet made it onto my website.

Take a look when you have a few moments. If you approve, do please 'like' the page, or even leave me a review!

I Have a New Website!

Regular readers will know that, over the last couple of years, I have got really into fine-art textiles and have been experimenting with different materials and methods, getting rather excited by the opportunity to explore a whole new area. 

I thought it was about time that I got organised, and created the means to display what I've been doing, all in one place. Up until now, I've been relying on a Facebook page...

...which is good for sharing regular up-dates, so I will be keeping that on (so do follow me if you are interested in watching new work as it unfolds), but or course, a proper website looks a lot more professional.

I got someone local to do it for me this time, which was great for sitting down together, talking things through. He's done a great job and took on board everything I said about it looking clean and uncluttered, and being easy to find your way around. 

So do take a look and let me know what you think. Plus you can use the social media buttons (at the bottom of each of the site's pages) to share, which would be great, because I really want to try and let people know what I'm doing. 

Suddenly it feels like I'm a textile-designer for real! 

Moving into 3D - Textile Sculptures

Anyone who has been following new textile work, will have noticed how quickly the work is evolving. It started in 2016, when I began reinterpreting representational artwork from my sketchbooks, to see what would happen. But over the course of a year, things rapidly became more abstract, with explorations of mark-making at the work's core. 

In the last 6 months, I've been playing around with images borrowed from ancient cave paintings, like the recently finished piece above, layering colour and overlaying stitching to echo the build-up of layers of time around cave art. 

But my textile work so far has always been two dimensional. More than that - I have been a working artist for 40 years, but I have always seen myself as a 2D artist. However, something radical has happened since Christmas - I have started making things!

I went on a fun workshop in December, which got me thinking. I learnt a technique for creating highly textured, 3-dimensional textile objects. I ended up with this fish:  

It was far more representational than my usual work, but it got me thinking in new ways and I began trying things out. 

Mostly, I have no idea where I am going, or any expectations about specific outcomes: it's pure exploration again, which is of course, great fun. It's creative play as much as anything, using the materials I have and seeing what I can do with them:

I think this move to 3D was also partly inspired by exhibiting alongside Katie Jamieson in December, who does a lot of wire-binding. Plus, by pure chance, around the same time, I stayed in a hotel where some interested books on textiles were laying around, including Stitch and Structure, by Jean Draper, which was full of really interesting work and techniques.

As soon as I got home, I got the book out of the library. I created a paper 'thread', twisted it into a distorted coil, then bound it around with coloured embroidery cotton. To add a complimentary rhythm, I stitched on little red thorns, which were very fiddly: 

I decided to work bigger for the next piece, which worked on a similar shape, but was created from fabric, bound around fairly thick wire, to make it stronger and easier to work:

This time the embellishments were more delicate. I 'wove' little spines, by repeated knotting, and used dilute PVA to make the thread ends hold their shape. I was thinking about the way undersea objects get weathered and colonised by creatures, like barnacles and anemones. 

I am now working on a piece which was inspired in large part by a trip to Elgin Cathedral, where I took lots of photos of the winged grave carvings:

I also came across a cave painting of a bird, which for some reason really stuck with me. I was excited by the extremely pointy feathers and the blood red paint: 

The two things came together and I felt the need to create something based on the wing shapes. I began binding more wire...

It's not finished yet, but it's getting there. I know my Mum will hate it, because she will think it looks like spiders legs. Sorry Mum!

UNBOUND: Exhibition of my Textiles

I am so pleased that I was approached to be a part of the Unbound exhibition. I really enjoyed getting it all together with the 3 other women who were showing, and it is interesting to see your work alongside the work of other artists. The four of us were chosen well - the artwork was very different, but the artists' approaches really complimented one another.

I have not shown my textiles work since the Orchard Square residency exhibition. I have created so much new work since then, which seems crazy, given it was only 9 months ago and I spent 4 of those months away in Australia, so not stitching at all. 

It was really useful to have a reason to get it all mounted up and on the wall, because it's quite hard to get of sense of what you are doing, when your recent body of work is not visible but, being an attic, my workspace doesn't lend itself to putting work up.

I also showed 5 large chalk drawings that I created a short while before I started creating the textiles. They are based on my experience of being out in the landscape:

I haven't looked at them for over 2 years, but was going through the plans chest in the run-up to the show and suddenly noticed that there was a strong connection to the textile mark-making and flow, so I thought it would be good to show them alongside the more recent work.

We had around 100 people at the private view, which was fantastic. I was kept busy, chatting away all evening. I'm told I got rather squiffy, but that can't be true, can it? It was such a great space for it - so big! I loved the post-industrial look to it (it was once part of a scissor-factory, I'm told).

We had a lot of fun, then it was oh-so-suddenly time to take it all down again. The space looked so bare when we were done - just like when you take down the Christmas decorations in the New Year.

If you missed the show, you can see all my new work on my Facebook page Lynne Chapman: Fine-Art Textiles. This is in lieu of a website for the moment. I'll get that sorted sometime next year. It feel like I only just finished setting up the Lynne Chapman Urban Sketcher site and it's such a lot of work. Which of course stops you doing the real work. At the moment, I think the most important thing is to keep going with the textiles as much as I can, seeing where it takes me.

Mounting Work for my Exhibition

I'm spending this week getting ready for my exhibition. It's less than 2 weeks away! I have been working hard and so have a plan's chest drawer full of textile pieces which need mounting up:

Because the raw, uneven edges of the fabric, and the slight unsquareness, are an important part of the work, I surface-mount each piece onto a stretcher, which I create myself, with John's help. The first time I showed my textiles work, as part of my Orchard Square residency, I bought a big roll of lovely raw cotton from Whaley's, to make the canvas stretchers. Luckily, it seems I have just enough left to do what I need.

That first time, John made all the stretchers for me from scratch, which took ages, but we have now discovered a company where we can buy individual, ready-cut, wooden pieces at different lengths, so it's a much quicker business to put them together. Here's the first one, hot off the press, so to speak:

We have to hand-stretch each one, which is a bit of a tedious business. Pulling the cotton tight to keep up the tension, ready for stapling, makes your fingers hurt, but we'll get it done. 

After that, I use Bondaweb to attach the work to the stretcher fronts (plus a little stitching here and there for the larger work, just to be on the safe side). They look so lovely once they're done. Here's the latest piece I finished early last week, now all mounted up and looking posh and ready for the exhibition:

The show, called Unbound, opens at the Gage Gallery, at KIAC in Kelham Island (Sheffield S3 8DB) on Dec 7th. I am sharing the space with 3 other women artists. Here's a short bit about each of us:

Lynne Chapman
Lynne hand-stitches into fine layers of textile, building up areas of intense colour and texture. Her most recent work is inspired by petroglyphs: the frayed, ambiguous glimpses of ancient stories, the idea that we leave behind an echo, consciously or unconsciously.

Helen Purdie
Helen’s precise and colourful studio paintings and her gestural plein air works are influenced directly by the world around her. As a recently, late-confirmed autistic woman, Helen will also be exhibiting a new autobiographical piece exploring the challenges and beauty of her day-to-day human interactions.

Katie Jamieson
Katie chooses to use materials that have the qualities of softness and absorbency. She is constantly responding to the organic nature of the work. It reflects the balance between creation and destruction; building layers up and knocking them back down again until the whole piece emerges.

Lisa Wallbank
Lisa's whimsical approach to assemblage presents curiosities, fragments and debris from the toybox, in amusing and puzzling combinations. Each artwork invites the viewer to construct a story, but obvious narratives are confounded by details that just won't fit. Or will they?

I'm Having an Exhibition of my Textiles!

Hi all. Sorry for the absence. I have been trying to concentrate on my work, specifically, I've been getting stuck into my hand-stitched textiles. I am building up a new body of work, getting ready for my exhibition in a month's time, at KIAC, here in Sheffield.

My work has been evolving since I got back from Australia. The trip was a long time to break off from what I was doing; after four months I felt I'd lost my momentum. But it's turned out well in the end, as it made me pause, assess the work so far, and think about what I was interested in. As a result, a lot of the newest pieces are a reflection of my fascination with passing time. This has been a preoccupation for a while, but in the past it has been more a part of my reportage sketch-work.

During my trip with John to Scotland, I saw some ancient carvings, in Elgin. That got me researching images of very old mark-making and I found myself getting excited by petroglyphs - the scratchings and paintings left by ancient peoples on rocks and in caves. 

My new work tries to evoke the sense of different people's inhabiting a space, like a cave, through time: the marks they leave; those which almost disappear and those which don't. I like the idea of layers of time embedded in the rock, like my layers of organza in the work.

The show is in a huge industrial space, the Gage Gallery, which has its own feel of layers of habitation. I am sharing the space with three other women artists from Sheffield. We all work in very different ways, using different materials, so I am really excited to see how it all sits together.

If you are based in our part of the world and want to come along, the opening evening is on Friday December 7th, from 5.00 until 10.00. There is also a 2nd late night though, the following evening. The work is only up until Tuesday 11th December, so mark it in your diary now, so you don't miss me. If you are a Facebook person, here's the Event listing.

Hope you can make it!

Rebranding Myself on my 10 Year Anniversary

Those who have been following me for a long time, will have watched the unfolding of quite a few changes in my work. When I first started this blog, almost exactly 10 years ago, I was working as a full-time picture book illustrator. I had just finished the artwork for Dragon's Dinner. I was at the peak of my time in children's publishing, winning awards and performing at major festivals like Hay and Edinburgh. I had no plans for things to change and could not have imagined what the coming years would bring.

It was during that year, I was invited to join Urban Sketchers and become a correspondent. Again, I could not have known how important that invitation would be for my future adventures. It almost immediately took me to Lisbon, for my first Urban Sketchers Symposium then, the following year, I was invited to run a workshop in Santa Domingo! 

I had always found the isolation of studio work frustrating - I am a people person - so the international travels which urban sketching brought, really opened out my life. I got extraordinary opportunities to work alongside artists from all around the globe. Who would have thought I could wind up sketching on the Sugarloaf mountain in Brazil!

10 years on, I find myself in an entirely new place. Okay, I am still based in my lovely attic studio in Sheffield, but I no longer illustrate picture books. My new creative life has two very different facets. The urban sketching has evolved into my research-sketching work, which still occasionally takes me off on adventures overseas. Anyone who has been looking in lately will know all about my research work in Australia.

One of the key things which I absolutely love about this work is the fact that it is not studio-based. Every day is different, because I am working with different people in different places, learning new things. I have just begun work on a couple of new projects with York University and it gives me a huge buzz to be around such clever and interesting people, sucking up knowledge as I paint.

The other new development has been my textiles work, which came absolutely out of the blue. Actually, the seed was planted by a chat with researchers at York University a couple of years ago. We were putting in a bid for a sketching project and they asked me to think about how I might create a single piece of artwork, which could illustrate key elements from my research sketchbooks. I didn't like the idea of re-drawing my sketches as illustrations (even though that would seem the obvious thing to do, given my illustration background). I got the idea that changing medium, stitching the artwork rather than drawing, would be more fun and a more creative experience for me. 

Unfortunately, we didn't get the funding for that project, but that little seed had already grown roots and I couldn't shift it. I decided to explore the idea anyway and, my goodness, what an exciting plant it is developing into! The early textiles pieces were based on specific sketches, with me trying out the new language of stitch and exploring different ways of using it. When I was funded for a 2-month residency at Orchard Square, I felt for the first time that this was more than just play, that it was a legitimate path of work for me.

It is ironic that I began my artistic journey with a degree in Printed Textiles at Middlesex University, way back in the 1980s. I never worked as a textile designer then: the textiles industry in Britain was on its knees when I graduated and my path was already bending towards illustration. It's funny how things work out. 

The textiles work has now evolved away from the sketches and, on my 10-year blog anniversary, I am enjoying two thoroughly rewarding, but very different avenues of work. It might seem odd to be following two such disparate paths at once, but it feels good, and the shift back and forth keeps both things fresh. I suppose it's similar to the way I used to shift back and forth between my book illustrations and my sketchbooks. They were very different too and I needed the contrast to keep my creativity from going stale. Does that make sense?

The more observant amongst you might have noticed a subtle difference in the blog today. Ten years on, I have realised that the label 'illustrator' is no longer the best way to describe myself. So I have re-named the blog An Artist's Life for Me! I feel that better encompasses the new and exciting things I am doing. 

What a journey. Thank you so much for coming along on the ride. I hope it has been interesting for you, Gentle Reader, and continues to be so. I wonder what the next 10 years hold in store? 

A New (Sort-of) Website for my Textiles

Hello! I am so sorry that I have been a wee bit 'off-air' of late. There has been so much going on that I have been a bit preoccupied. 

One thing which has been happening, is that I have been applying for funding for projects to do with my textiles work. Doing this is a bit boring - there's lots of sitting at a computer filling in forms - but it does help focus your mind on what you are doing and want to do. Anyway, I immediately realised that I needed a website which showcased the work, and my existing websites, for the children's books and the research-sketching, just confuse matters, when it comes to promoting my textiles.

But, I simply don't have the time to create another full-blown website right now, so I thought the easiest way to get it together quickly and without having to fork out cash, was to create myself a new Facebook page. For the very first time, there is now a body of my textiles work available for people to look at, all together. 

I have uploaded all the lovely new photos I had taken (thanks Matthew), as well as several zoomed-in details from the work, like these, to help you see the stitching more clearly. There's a bit of background info with each piece too, so you can get more of an idea what I was going for. 

Do take a look and let me know what you think. Pretty much everything I have created is there, since that very first experimental interpretation of a sketch on a train, back in 2016. 

That piece really started something for me!

Photographing my Textiles

Last week, I decided to bite the bullet and get professional photographs taken of my textiles work to date. They are so hard to photograph properly, because the beauty is often in the detail, which never comes out well when you do it yourself. Colours are an issue too. The light is never balanced right and never even across the surface.

I took a dozen pieces out into Derbyshire, to the Little Longstone studio of photographer Matt Swift. Watching him in action was fascinating and really emphasised why my own photos of the work are never very successful.

It took a couple of hours to work out the best way to light them. He tried a few possibilities, each of which brought out different aspects of the textures and materials. The organza in particular was interesting. Lit in one way, you got a lot of sheen on the surface, which was lovely, but it emphasised the top layers, so that the stitches beneath were less visible: a bit like looking at the sea through polarised or non-polarised lenses. 

Another lighting set-up really brought out the stitched texture of the surface: the way the top fabric has a subtly 'quilted' quality, as each stitch pulls the layers tight. This added a pleasing 3-dimensional element, but needed to be reined in to some extent, or it was more pronounced than the stitches themselves.

We played about with different effects, using my Ladybower piece as a tester. Each time he took a shot, a battery-pack the size of a small dog in the centre of the space powered a blinding flash not unlike a lightening strike. A second later, a new image appeared on the huge monitor beside me. They were so incredibly sharp you could zoom in and in and in, until tiny stitches were big as string.

Typically, we decided that the first arrangement he'd tried was the best, so he moved the 8ft reflection screen and the two big, black umbrellas, and re-arranged tripod lights until all was perfect.

Once we got that nailed, the rest was like shelling peas. One piece after another was carefully secured in place and shot through with the lightening. I am delighted with the results and would highly recommend Matt if anyone else in my part of the world needs the same thing doing.