Community Art

elangdon — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:18:53 +0000

A selection of community art projects:

Mr Monkey

elangdon — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:32:05 +0000

‘Monkey’: red and white striped textile, wadding, two glass eyes and embroidery thread.

Felted Tea Cosy

elangdon — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:24:13 +0000

I made this tea cosy from a angora wool, a beautiful wool to work with. I then used some embroidery threads to add some gorgeous colour.

Exhibition: ‘Emergence’ 2009

elangdon — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 17:34:37 +0000

2D Textile Painting.

elangdon — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 16:40:40 +0000

‘lillie’: tissue paper, cotton fabric, needlework.

Drawings

elangdon — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 11:27:40 +0000

Little shoes for Little people

elangdon — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 11:15:51 +0000

These felt shoes were made from wool from the Yorkshire Moors. After washing all the waxy lanolin out and brushing out those stubborn knots, I felted these shoes onto a foam cut out of my Nephew’s footprint. To finish off I embroidered them with some ickle fishes!

Prints

elangdon — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:58:27 +0000

Printing

2008 Degree Show – Connection and Consciousness

elangdon — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:16:18 +0000

Cloth of my feet i celebrate you,
from nature you came and with every step it continues to mould you.
Your fibers hold witness of your creation,
you were formed out of animal and worked into cloth
you hold witness to the very nature of your own making.

I envy your closeness to your cycle of being.
You know more of the earth than the crease of my skin, thus i’ll bind you close, to embed you in.
The contours of my foot will bruise your soft nature, the choice of my ways will mold your looks, but you the vehicle of passage will hold the evidence
you are the thing that connects me in.

You know the nature of my bend and the paths of my choice
you’ve traced the land and mapped it within you.
you have density and luminosity, you cannot escape the cycle of you

‘Where production and consumption meet and bear the threads of connection.‘ Susan Küchler

To acknowledge the place, the process, the person and to recognise the time taken are threads that run consistently through my work. We appear to be becoming increasingly alienated from the human element of production and from the ‘nature’ that we extract resources from.

I am intrigued by connections and journeys that clothing, undertake. By creating garments I want to experience and present the threads that connect them to a place, a process and a person. ‘Walking on North Yorkshire Moors’ is a piece that does exactly this. The landscape of the Moors is intrinsic to the shoes; the resource, the wool, was collected from the moors and then the finished felt shoes were employed to walk back into the same landscape. The embroidered map serves as any map does, as a simplified diagram of a landscape, as an impression of that place. However, in wearing the shoes back into the landscape a union between the impression of the place and the actuality of the place establishes itself in the fibres.

Bayly, a British historian talks of the links between biography and clothing; of fusion between person and material of the ‘porosity of cloth’. With a fast fashion culture no fabric seems to be left long enough to form a ‘fusion’ between cloth and skin. The felt shoes pay tribute to the cycles of nature, to our responsibility as consumers and to a valuing of human connection and in that respect addresses our relationship with material culture.

Emily Langdon