Unit 6 – Personal Project.
For my personal project, unit 6, I have chosen to follow the work of Alison Willoughby. She is an artist who specialises in textile based work.
To begin with I had originally chosen to look at the work of Mandy Pattullo, however, after I found little information and received no contact from her I decided it would be easier to look at a more available artist.
Here is an example of Willoughby’s work. This is one of the skirts I have used to base a piece of my work on. Here we can see Willoughby uses a reverse appliqué stitch to sew her flower patter to her skirt. I have reflected this design idea into my work. I have tried and tested this style of design leading up to my final idea. My intention is to create a dress for a spring/summer collection of clothes, both wearable and up to date.
After looking at Willoughby’s work my decision was to use textile manipulation, for example within my research, experimentation and design Ideas I have used many an example of Willoughby’s productions. I have used manipulation to create movement of fabric, different stitched to join my fabric and layering of fabrics to create different effects.
After much deliberation I managed to finalise my theme as being one of the following: flowers, leaves or a mixtures of both. I took photographs of both to generate a good idea of what my piece could look like. And in the end I chose to follow through with the theme of leaves, I came to this decision as I felt that leaves would be more effective, as I could manipulate the movement of the fabric to mirror the movement of a leaf and the adjoining stem. From here I began to try out different forms of stitching patterns which can be seen in my profile throughout my stitching sample and experimentation pages. I also found this had great reference to Willoughby’s work as she used abnormal stitches to connect the fabrics in her work for example below:
Here we can see how Willoughby uses a different stitch to connect the colourful fabrics to the plainer cream coloured fabric.
After weeks of research and testing on my fabrics I finally decided to use a mixture of linen, net and chiffon. I chose these fabrics because I felt they were best suited to cope with the design of my dress. However I was originally intent on using voil as opposed to chiffon. Yet within my revised design ideas, I have shown that I changed from voil to chiffon due to the strength of the fabric, also I personally preferred the texture of the chiffon. I felt the voil was too rough for the final idea I wanted.
