journey | ˈdʒəːni |
• an act of travelling from one place to another.
• a long and often difficult process of personal change and development.
• a long and often difficult process of personal change and development.
An estimated 258 million people worldwide don’t live in the country of their birth. What started off as a personal journey as an artist has become much more, making me look at journeys, people on the move and migration. This new textile installation considers both meanings: the rust scarring the cloth, like migration trails across the globe, or personal obstacles to overcome; the cloth meandering through space, traversing the geography of the personal.
Media: Rusted and naturally dyed recycled hotel sheets, fencing pins, cotton twill tape. Thanks to Travis Perkins, Worton Road for the sponsorship of the fencing pins.
It’s all stations go here, as we prepare for the Contemporary Textiles Fair at the Landmark Arts Centre, Teddington this weekend. Ross has been preparing for his second site specific open-air installation and for the past few months, he has been natural-dyeing and rusting recycled hotel sheets. This process has produced 117m of fabric for this much larger piece, to be staged within the ‘wilderness’ – the wooded grounds of the centre.
With 117m of rusted and naturally dyed recycled hotel sheets, we were all ready to set up ‘Journey’, the site-specific textile installation created for this years Contemporary Textile Fair. With iron fence pins, kindly provided by Travis Perkins, it took us the best part of a day to set up the fabric, winding its way through the trees in the area known as ‘the Wilderness’ (though thanks to a very thorough purge by the gardeners, it was a lot less wild than when we saw it on our first visit!). The installation looked wonderful, but sadly due to the freakish -5°C, 40 mile an hour winds and snowstorms in March, we thought it best to dismantle the piece at the end of day Saturday.
All photographs Jonathan Dredge