Monday, July 6, 2009

layers of life...


I somehow found the work of Rosie James last week- either through a comment or someone forwarding me a link- and I was so inspired and delighted by her thread drawings. The hand of her drawing style is very lovely it its loose, sketchy quality.


Previously she did drawings documenting portraits of daily moments and interactions. I love the lady on the shopping cart, above.
She seems to have a particular interest to the daily meeting place of the super market. An odd place in our lives- a place we visit almost daily, see the same people often, but yet still stay in our bubble of space.


I really enjoy how each person represented is so individual and unique under Rosie's hand. And how the layers work together.


Rosie states:

My work involves using the sewing machine as a drawing tool. As I stitch I leave threads loose to create a scribbly style of drawing. I also use hand stitched elements to piece together the images and to create a grid surrounding the figures.

I am very interested in drawing and mark making and in particular the kinds of marks which can be made using these thread, stitch, screen. I draw figures from a crowd individually and position them together as a group as they would have stood in the space or else I overlap the figures to create a sense of crowdedness. Sometimes I screen print drawn figures onto the cloth first and then add layers of stitched figures, this creates different marks and depths to the figures and allows us to appreciate the difference between the stitched line and the printed one...

I try to unpick the crowd and weed out the individuals. I want to look at the differences between individuals in the crowd and look for clues which may tell us what they are doing.


Rosie recently has shifted her subject matter to turn toward documenting her studio space through the same technique- creating some truly lovely drawings celebrating the individual objects amongst a cluttered space. Follow the progress here on her blog.

No comments: