This was the initial design I wanted to create on the loom. The simplistic nature of it is very effective, especially if I added highlights of a rich red colour at the top to represent lava and eruptions so it becomes a volcano. There is not really a deeper meaning behind this, it just looks cool.
I started to weave on my loom but I only had string so I had to colour pieces of string with grey markers to create the various shades of the volcano. Here you can see the beginnings of it. However I had done it way too shallow in the loom and it wasn’t going to be wide enough to go from the top to the bottom. I was also rapidly running out of ink in my pens so I decided it would be best to start again as I wasn’t too far into this to back out. Next I wanted to create something with more meaning as well as colour.
Here is the beginnings of my next idea. This one has a lot more meaning to it which will become clearer as it progresses. It is also inspired by an artist who has caught my eye before who I will mention in a bit. I’m going to be using a simple, geometric style to represent a much deeper theme. You can see in this image a white circle against a white background. Other colours will be added.
The idea behind my picture is how innocence is slowly tainted and destroyed by the pain and corruption of world. We’ve all heard the saying “Ignorance is bliss!” and this is something that all humans have the luxury of experiencing when they are first born. Many will remember various experiences they had as a young child were they didn’t understand something. I think a key example of this is discipline. I could not understand how my parents could get so cross with me if they were meant to love and protect me, I thought they were cruel and sadistic monsters who should not have the right to discipline me. However looking back I completely understand why and am grateful to them for it. I know this isn’t quite the right example for explaining why ignorance is bliss but I think its a highly relatable example for how as we get older, we can understand things that we once couldn’t out of our ignorance. When we’re younger, many of us don’t know the meanings of things like death, war and the brutality of life. Sadly there are those who do learn these things too young and it can be extremely damaging for them. As we get older, this innocence is stripped away and doesn’t survive against the currents of real life. Reality gradually seeps into our lives and changes us and as well as our outlook. It gets harder to laugh, harder to have fun and harder to ignore the problems that surround us every day. This is what my picture is going to be on.
Mijal Zachs
The artist that partly inspired the style I’m using in this weave is Mijal Zachs, a Mexican painter and collagist who uses a very geometric style for her pieces. She is not well known at all but I really like some of her work. Some of my favourites by her are below.
You can see she focuses on using basic shapes and patterns with simple colour schemes but they are very effective. I especially like the last two and think the abstract shapes they make are very interesting. There’s also a beautiful contrast between the cold greys and white and the warmer yellow and orange in the center of each piece. I really wanted to take something of this into my new weaving picture. Below is a link to a profile page of hers at an online gallery.
Here are the next few steps of the weaving process, I started to add blue into the picture to depict the sky and how all of this relates to the real world but in a slightly abstract way. I was then given a scarf to use which I unraveled to create a very beautiful thread which included a variety of tones of blue. It made me think of Japan and their sunsets with the rich red sun against a stunning turquoise sky.
Conclusion
I started off this project which very little idea of where I wanted it to end up but somewhere along the line I came up with a fairly deep concept to run with. I tried to make the weaving correlate with my idea but it didn’t go very well and I ended up with quite an abstract piece in which very little actually had anything to do with the origination idea of innocence being corrupted by the world. The red and white circles are still fairly effective but the fact that most of the piece became blue, rather drowned that out. It’s still a nice piece to look at despite the questionable weaving skills in the contrast between the red and white circle. Next time I would definitely go into this with a better idea of what I want to get out of it and what materials I’m going to use so I have a more controllable outcome. I don’t think I realised how much using some materials dictates the final piece and you have to choose the correct materials in the piece to get something close to what you set out to achieve.
