Collage & Weave is a workshop series originally developed in partnership with the Huguenot Museum, Rochester, and in collaboration with artist Hannah Robson for her exhibition Bizarre & Curious Silks.
As part of the exhibition, Hannah produced a specially-commissioned series of woven pieces which used motifs lifted directly from items in the museum’s collection. Read more here
As an invited artist, I drew on several of Hannah’s points of interest in developing her new works. She was interested in the ‘floating threads’ which appear on the back of many patterned Huguenot silks; these reimagine a distorted version of the intricate frontal pattern. She also used many shapes and partial motifs from the museum’s artefacts to rearrange and build into patterns, overlaid onto striped backgrounds.
I wanted to continue this process of distortion, fragmentation and rearrangement, so I prepared materials for participants to work with, which included images of Hannah’s silks which had been distorted by dragging and waving them from side to side across the scanning bed of a photocopier. I also isolated and mass-produced laser-cut paper copies of some of the shapes she had used, in colours corresponding to the body of work. These allowed participants to experiment with colour, texture and pattern-building through collage.
Next, the participants are asked to slice their collage into strips and learn a simple paper weaving technique to acheive the final layer of transformation – further fragmenting their design, but in weaving, building an entirely new composition – allowing chance to play a part in the final outcome.
This workshop has now become a more generalised collage & weave activity which I have delivered for Faversham Library, and also now forms part of the Creative Colour & Collage course which I teach through UAL Short Courses.
As an activity, its ethos is firmly rooted in process, and helps children to focus on the act of pattern-making, colour choices and weaving, without worrying about the final outcome. It also introduces an element of chance into their art-making as something positive and exciting.
A free activity sheet produced by UAL can be found here