IC:Innovative Craft Blog

Patterns are Everywhere – the workshop

Posted Friday 16 January 2009, 07:12pm

Amanda Game writes:

From the virtual to the practical.  After Liz’s latest blog on a novice’s response to podcasting, I can report on a novice’s response to a pattern making workshop, run on 13 January by Edinburgh ceramist Frances Priest.

A capacity gathering of 20 artists, historians, curators and first timers began by handling a collection of the artists own incised, coloured, glazed ceramic samples followed by looking at a tiny drawing by Henry Moore of some garden plants, shown alongside samples of his abstract textile prints in the current exhibition. The first exercise allowed us to experience pattern through touch and the latter showed us, very succinctly, how an almost incidental sketch of a natural form could inform the designer’s eye when he went on to create the abstract pattern of the textile. We were then encouraged to hold this thought and go round the Jerwood Contemporary Makers show, looking at formal patterns that appeared to us, capturing our thoughts with drawing. When I was drawn to the work of jeweller Lin Cheung, Frances’ instruction to look quietly first for some minutes before making any marks was invaluable. Material that I knew well became richer through this exercise in considered looking, and I became fascinated by the ways in which Cheung had ordered her pendants;bowls; photographs to create lines and rows, rather like a textile pattern. Her total jewellery room suddenly slid into focus as not just as a rich exploration of the role of jewellery in our lives but as an exercise in visual perception using the elements of jewellery.

After the drawing came the making and a wonderful hospital trolley full of coloured card; pastels; the inside of envelopes – those bank envelopes which have blue patterned interiors; chalks; scissors and glue were pounced on by workshoppers and a half hour of contented scribbling; cutting; gluing and ripping went on. Like a quilting bee each table also chatted on wider things with busy hands. Finally, the squares of patterned paper were laid down for general inspection and a sense of wonder prevailed. 

Although partly one felt the extreme comfort of being looked after in a well planned workshop – a sort of regression to primary school as one participant expressed it – we all left thinking more deeply about the relationship between making and looking.