Happy International Women's Day! Actually, that's tomorrow ...

Tomorrow is International Women's Day.  Which inevitably produces a grumpy response from blokes along the lines of 'When's international men's day, huh?'.  To which the obvious answer is, 'Everyday is international men's day, fella.'  Anyway, if you want a daily dose of inspiring, courageous, clever women and are on 'X' (a.k.a. Twitter), try following @TheAttagirls.  I've only recently come across the account, and it's a treasure trove of often forgotten women's history.  

Leeds Art Gallery have a new exhibition on, called 'Found Cities, Lost Objects', and I had a peek at it yesterday.  It's an exhibition about discovering cities through the eyes of women, and there are really good, thought provoking artworks on show.  Apologies for my dodgy photos, by the way.  I was taking them quickly and they were more 'memory prompts' for me than anything remotely professional looking.  I was at the art gallery to take part in a two hour stitching workshop.  The idea was to get inspiration from the exhibition, and make a small protest banner loosely based on what we saw.  Applique could be used, freehand machine sewing, we were encourage to make a slogan or put wording on our banners.  Of course, with these kind of workshops the time flies by, so I didn't make much progress, but the seeds of the idea were sown.  Work by an artist called Rebecca Chesney had particularly caught my attention. 

This is the info about her given in the exhibition's leaflet: 'Rebecca Chesney says her work is concerned with 'how we perceive land: how we romanticise, translate and define it'.  Much of her art deals with the human impact on nature.  The collages in the Future Landscapes series present an apocalyptic vision, where the seas have consumed the land and only a few remaining buildings rise above the surface of the water.' 

She'd embroidered on to maps, which I loved, but the main piece that appealed to me was a map of Preston.  The artist had not only mapped the city streets, but also the plants growing there, like figs and rosebay willowherb, hartstongue and dandelions. 

I used that map as my jumping off point, with thoughts about allowing Nature to flourish in a city like Leeds.  Once we were in the workshop space, we were given squares of unbleached calico, and encouraged to dig into an enticing mountain of fabric scraps.  I choose various shades of green.  My aim was to have a leafy green background to represent Nature, all curves and flowing lines, very organic shapes.  Then over top, to embroider a rigid grid of black/grey lines to represent the city, all the concrete and tarmac.  My wording would be something like 'Let Weeds Grow in our Cities' or 'Let Nature Flourish'. 

There was another artwork that I was intrigued by.  At first, from a distance I didn't realise it was textile art.  It looked like a painting or manipulated photograph, but when you drew closer you saw the threads.  It's called 'Burning Love'.  Once again, sorry the photo's not great.  It's a huge piece and I didn't want to inadvertently get other onlookers in shot.  You can just about make out the lines of stitching and the threads hanging down in this picture, if you look closely.  

A bio of the artist.  

Here's another view of it.  

I did wonder about incorporating threads hanging down from my banner too, to represent the city expanding beyond the boundaries of my banner (if that doesn't sound too airy-fairy pretentious.)

In the two hours I didn't get a massive amount done to my calico square, but in the evening I worked on it some more.  Then this morning out came the Inktense blocks - a present to myself in my birthday week! - and I added colour to the plain calico.  Greens and yellow. 

I'll add more applique leaves and stitch into it, then at some point I'll work out whether the rigid city lines will be hand embroidered or maybe I'll actually machine sew them.  

I want to have another wander around the 'Found Cities, Lost Objects' exhibition, as well as a good delve around the art library which is based on that site too.  They've got a new-ish collection of locally produced zines, as well as a display themed around feminism.  The building itself is beautiful, and I keep meaning to make time to take decent photos of the interior, including the splendid and very grand tearoom with its barrel-vaulted mosaic ceiling.  
Meanwhile, I'm continuing with playing with my new Inktense blocks.  Tori from the YouTube channel 'Kool Kooky Kreatures' did a video about making your own variegated thread using fabric dye and white crochet cotton.  She used Dye-Na-Flow, I think it's called, but as I haven't (yet) got any, I'm experimenting with using Inktense instead.  Luckily I bought a bag of crochet cotton from a charity shop, probably over a decade ago!  Well, it all comes in useful in the end, doesn't it?  I've dyed three skeins of cotton so far, and they're drying on top of the radiator.  Will show you those on another day.  

That's all for now.  I'm going to get stitching, and probably nibble on a couple of early-Easter mini eggs too.  Bad for the waistline, but oh! So yummy.   Bye for now.