Looking for Green: Soft Boundaries

I’m working in Paris with Chloé Briggs on a self-directed brief ‘Looking for Green’. Our residency brings together Chloé’s incredible drawing talent and my attachment to thread and my interest in the resourcefulness of historic pieced Welsh quilts. It privileges what is described in textile terms as dead stock, the stuff that’s left over from production runs, or never quite got to be included. There’s nothing glamorous about our dead stock, it’s not the by-product of artisans or small runs. It’s mostly mixed fibre, often polyester or viscose, some cotton and the very rare scrap of linen or wool. It’s definitely not going to inspire the sort of elbows out ‘bun fights’ I’ve witnessed amongst many textile makers.

I think the term ‘stuff’ is correct here. It is one step away from the shoddy of Hanna Rose Shell’s writing. Housed in a warehouse in one of Paris’s liminal spaces it also resonates with William Viney’s thinking on wastelands. This cloth is inert, outside its ‘use time’ (Viney, 2015) but not quite fully of the wasteland. Our task, the two of us working together, is to narrate new meanings, re-story it into what it ‘yet might be’ (Viney, 2015:5).

A cloth-bundle close to 5Kg in weight. I have to get it back to the studio on the tram and a walk of 1.5Km. I can’t bear its heft on my shoulder and carry it – as if I might a child – in my arms. By the time I arrive I am drenched in sweat. I tip the lot onto the floor and leave it there, too tired for sifting. It looks very unremarkable. The next day I set out to make a sample colour palette, tearing small strips from each piece of cloth, taping it to the wall. My enthusiasm quickly evaporates. Chloé steps in and irons each piece, building a colour themed stack that brings some order to the chaos.

Then the work starts. Optimistically, I say how fortunate we are to have our palette imposed upon us. Rather than being ‘spoiled for choice’, which too often leaves me bewildered and constantly searching for the perfect, this is all we have, this is our mix. I instantly regret leaving behind the purple cloth that looked like grosgrain ribbon and dismissing the need for something that might make a good quilt wadding. My theory, that limiting options might be liberating - boundaries have a purpose for they give us form, a path to follow - quickly evaporates along with the optimism I enjoyed on our first day. I think how this might look if I had a particular linen thread, if this were cotton and not polyester, if this shade were slightly less muddy, this more transparent…I think you get my meaning. I see what a challenge we have crafted. How to make something that fits our ambitions, our individual and shared aesthetic, the imagined desires of our audience, this particular brief. To hold ourselves here and resist the impulse to go looking elsewhere; the haberdashery, the vintage clothes store, the flea market, our own wardrobes. The hardest thing of all is to do nothing. To stay with what we have. I am hoping that I might be able to shed some of this ‘whatifness’, that I might embrace these soft cloth boundaries.

I think Chloé is a step ahead of me. We chatted on our way into the studio this morning, me declaring my struggle, and Chloé reminded me that I was the one who’d encouraged her to work with the used, discarded, overlooked. And today has been different, with choices pared back, perhaps I’ll spend less time on that whatifness.