Snow Dye 2015

It’s Friday again!  Time to link up with Nina Marie’s Off The Wall Fridays!

I used PRO MX REACTIVE DYES: Eccru, Lavender, Chartreuse and Chinese Red on a variety of fabrics that were left from the summer in a pile already soaked and dried with soda ash.

This year’s  snow dyed batch is quite different from previous batches.  One goal was to leave more white space so that I might use it as a wholecloth piece that I collage with other elements. One reason for this is that I know that it’s hard to mix snow dyed fabric with other fabrics, especially commercial fabrics but also other dyed pieces.  So, I may overprint some, or use photos or thermafax screen prints or stencils with them…who knows?!  I also wanted more muted tones than I previously achieved.  Luckily, I got pretty much what I was after.  The white spaces were in some cases larger than I might have chosen…will now have a better feel for the next time I try this. Could have been more muted but I think I can work with these.

I decided to use one of these snow dyed pieces as a backdrop for my latest finish!

This is the first in a series I’ve been working on.  The Series began with my experiments for the art call for SAQA’s Concrete and Grasslands Exhibit, which I wrote about here. And I continue to play with ideas for this call.

The Series is called “All’s One Under The Sun.” This phrase just came to me as I worked on the first attempt to unite photos on fabric of urban and rural images, man-made artifacts and natural objects.  It seems to me that man made works are imbued with some of the same elements found in nature.  It’s not all that much of a stretch to say that there’s a bit of the divine in some art made by humans and some fairly mundane aspects to the works of Mother Nature. Some architecture fits so well into our environment that I’d be hard pressed to say that I appreciated one more than the other.  Coincidentally (perhaps) as I worked on these pieces I read a recent article titled Nature is Everything, and Everything is Nature in The Textile Blog.  In it John Hopper wrote quite aptly about these things that I was processing as I worked on these pieces. It’s well worth the read if you’re interested.