A post from our new participant Carol Sinclair:
I have now been an official member of the Aural Textiles collaboration for 2 months, and already I am thinking differently about pattern and texture. It’s always fascinating to get to know another person’s creative process and understand just something of the impressive technical and making skills that they possess. It makes you look up and outwards, and reconsider all of your own creative habits. You reassess your assumptions and push the limits of your thinking and your own medium. I have been making ceramics for over 30 years and in that time I have always enjoyed pushing the boundaries of what my materials can do. It doesn’t make life easy, but it does make it interesting. And Aural Textiles is absolutely encouraging me to keep pushing.
I have had great chat with all of the original 6 members of the group, and was fascinated to learn more about their practices and experiments in the previous part of the project. And I have had more specific in depth conversations with Olive and Dwynwen. They are both knitters, but approach what they do in entirely different ways.
Olive is a machine knitter and we have discussed structure and form, sharing an interesting in making 2D patterns take on 3D forms. We have discussed ways in which we might use the structures of knitting to support the creation of structures in clay. So far we have talked in the abstract, and don’t know where it will take us, but are planning a studio day in the next few weeks to test and try things out. Olive’s expertise also lies in her colour combinations, using harmonious tones to create her work. In my own work I have been enjoying the purity of the white in my porcelain, but feel this project gives me an excellent opportunity to experiment with colour.
Dwynwen hand knits and uses natural dying techniques to produce her own collections of yarn. She creates delicate colours through an alchemy of the abundant dye sources around her - local plants and the vegetable waste from a nearby cafe. I very much enjoy the consideration and sensitivity of this approach to colour creation, and am intrigued to see if any of this could transfer to ceramic colouring agents. Dwynwen and I quickly began to envisage the creation of a piece of work, an installation that expresses our shared interest in memory and the senses. We will work together to build layers that formulate a complex visual picture, which importantly also has missing elements. Dwynwen’s earlier pieces for the project used dropped stitches to represent gaps in sensory perception, and I find this concept intriguing and also very poignant. We share the desire to disrupt spacial planes to create the gaps through which we can view things differently.
So I have begun. I have experimented with recordings, transformed them into patterns using Audacity software and have become more attuned to the sounds in my own environment. It’s is still very early in the process, and there is so much more to discover.