In 2006 I found myself looking for a pastime – my life no longer revolved around just work and socialising and I needed something to occupy myself. After a brief flirtation with bonsai I turned my attention to photography – I owned a camera, liked taking images and had trained on it during my art college days.
Skip forwards to 10 years and I had an awful lot of (digital) images – mostly shared through Flickr – and I realised I had an awful lot of images and, save for zines, photobooks and the occasional exhibition I wasn’t doing very much with them.
Textiles
So, when invited to submit a work for an exhibition in Paris, I chose to combine some images created at a previous event by the same group in London into an assemblage piece which involved some embroidery…
I felt that textiles would be a good ‘photography-adjacent’ media to build skills in – and attended a number of workshops and courses in both weaving and embroidery – as well as following online learning (and remembering I’d done some of this as a child – cross-stitch)
Ceramics
In summer 2021 my partner and I spent a few days at a hand-building ceramics workshop at Sunken Studio in Leeds. I had made clay in the past but had hated trying to use a wheel. However this workshop (and subsequent workshops) taught me that I both love making clay at a bench – but also that it’s very mindful and great for mental health.
I am now building on the techniques I’ve built in both these media and working out how to apply
Painting and Sketching
To follow
References:
- Weaving workshops – were with Agnis Smallwood
- Embroidery workshops – were with Hayley Mills-Styles, Elnaz Yazdani and Claire Wellesley-Smith
- Crochet workshop – was with Jen Sharp (at Stitch-up)
- Ceramics workshops – with Rebecca Appleby and Rebecca Catterall (Sunken Studio)
Jon Eland 