update, 1/11/22: this is the last post here, my now-old blog, my new (well, new-ish, it does have older occasional posts on it as well), is here: https://ursulatroche.wordpress.com/
COP26, the big climate conference is upon us, and the urge for climate action has
inspired the development of more art. So here’s some alternative growth: use up plastic waste, before it goes to landfill and clog up our beloved Earth!
So I had been making lines around and between trees, to show how they are connected through their vast tree network underground – if I had draw this, those lines would have been dots, and I would have taken them for a walk. But I didn’t draw this, so those lines were rolled together in skeins and in balls of wool, and I had taken those lines for a ride, a line-work, a network, a web.
Take a line for a ride: what else can I do with them, and how else can I do eco-art?Climate-friendly art, what could that be? Using up what we don’t need (anymore): the stuff that gets thrown away: packaging, plastic! There is so much plastic, and it all gets thrown away! And then there are those lines of wool, of yarn, that I’ve been using: is there a way the two could go together?
This is where what I have called ‘Stitching to Connect’ comes in!
There are three main stories behind these little artworks:
1: ) We are drowning in plastic, and even if we recycle, the system does not: the mountains of recycling that we make, which in themselves are overflowing, join the landfill, filling up more and more spaces with plastic and taking living spaces. To save ourselves from plastic, let’s take it out of circulation, and transform it into art!
Make art not waste: take items of rubbish, packaging, everything that gets thrown away, and use it for art. Make it pretty but also expose ourselves to looking at our discarded items: plastic tubs, lids, bottles, empty pens, pen tops, cardboard, chocolate wrapping, and other discarded items. – see more photos also on my instagram feed in the gallery.
2: ) I’d been wanting to join pieces, and foolishly used glue. Until it fell off, and then I used needle and thread instead. It was like I discovered a whole new old way of working!
The idea to put things together by a needle and a thread, a piece of yarn, of wool, is kind of revolutionary: to go against glue (which is yet more plastic: the glue itself, and the tube it comes with), and to know things joined together by a thread cannot fall off each other!
3: ) There was this item on the news about plans to transform plastic into food! What a dangerous idea! Before we are made to eat our own plastic, let’s take it away, divert it, reuse it, buy less of it, and make the rest into something. My little tiny contribution to take away from our growing plastic mountain is one among quite a few artists who use recycled material, but there are always more of us needed, to get on top of our vastly excessive plastic. And we don’t want to eat it, so make art for thought!
To see at Studio Pixel in our very own Solway sea-side town of Maryport – four stops south of Carlisle on the cosy little Cumbria Coast Line Train. That’ the same scenic train that also goes through St. Bees and Barrow, and from there goes down to Lancaster, or starts there!
Here is one with a limpet bit! , taking place in.
So my ‘Stitching to Connect’ pieces can be seen here, but there is more:
Exhibition News:
I have got some pieces in the big group-show at the Rosehill Theatre. My star piece here is little canvas in which I worked a photo of mine of a rose. Now that it was coming to Rosehill Theatre, I called it ‘Rose of the Hill’ When travelling to the theatre by train, go on the same Cumbria Coast Line Train and get off at Parton (one stop before Whitehaven)..
Somr of my line-art works – which now is “Stitching to Connect” as well as the lines I layer around trees and “Yarn and Branch” – willl also form a part of ArtCouple’s exhibition at Basement Arts in Leeds, which was scheduled to start at the end of September and continue until the middle of October. As we had been dealing with time issues in relation to this exhibition (which had been postponed due to lockdown) and our art in general (place- time-based) and then found a time-related notice on two of our local railway stations, we called the exhibition ‘Compressed Time Frames’ – only for its own time to be postponed again due to Covid at the gallery!
So now that Compressed Time Frames are being rescheduled again, they will also be re-framed, and the story of the ‘Boat of Inverness’ will be part of it. What that is, will be revealed…
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ColourCirclesite 