Craft Journeys - Lou Gardiner Contemporary Embroidery

it's very emotive my work it's like good-cop bad-cop of me people might think it's only very visual and floral and colorful and maybe sometimes even feminine but actually it's quite complex and layered and full of the different feelings that I go through on a day-to-day basis I have a love-hate relationship with the medium and often fantasize about giving it up but actually it's totally addictive so it's a bit like a drug which for embroidery people would be quite surprised there's different stages to a piece of work there's the idea that little tiny seed in your head can sit there and roll around your brain for months when you get the idea or the title Lord they actual the concept you get a buzz then you've got to do the drawing stage and that is really complex and can take days and days having to really dive into my own imagination to find that visual material when the drawing becomes realized when that comes alive and it looks quite different to the actual finished embroidery of course there's a buzz there but then you know that you've got this process to go through which is immense of applying that drawing to the canvas of hand painting it with the tiny brush applicator fabrics you doing all these processes and bit by bit you're building this things I use a variety of materials the first material that I started using was calico and canvas so it was just literally like getting a great big page of a sketchbook in fabric and starting to draw on it my work is very drawing based so it's threads on canvas or on linen and it's literally just drawing with this huge mechanized pen so to speak don't really think of the sewing machine as a sewing machine it's almost like this needles punching this linear ink through the canvas the thread is probably the most important aspect of the work but being the person I am I love using lots of different materials and have become very drawn to fabrics that have a relationship with light metallic fabrics leather black PVC has become a big favorite because it looks like oil pearl essence linens and things that sort of glimmer and shine I'm a bit of a magpie I go to the public shops in Soho and I'll literally wander around and see what's new I went down and spotted this high risk of brick and I just thought bloody brilliant I love a bit of that so I brought a metre of it it was about 90 quid brought it back to the studio and now use it in a lot of my work people often don't notice it and then they'll suddenly get a flash of high-vis in the design and be surprised I love surprises and literally had this epiphany one day adverts graph the work really well someone once said to me must vote scrappy work you create a good portfolio I thought our Princeton - silk and this make scarves I mean it was literally as simple as that I found a local printers and then I took these high-resolution photographs of my work and started to work with a designer and create these wonderful square designs out of all the artworks that I've completed and then onto velvet as well so starts to create velvet proofs velvet cushions silk scarves you know pocket handkerchiefs but the first time in 20 years thought to wear my own work and it literally transformed me talking about my work because I could just show it and then start selling it and see other people wear it which was so exciting there's so many different layers to the work there's so many different concepts involved it's not only about displaying embroidery as an exciting medium it's about pushing the boundaries of embroidery and applique and saying butter embroidery is cold for me it's about inspiring individuality and it's about thinking out loud about life and about dealing with stuff and getting on with it and in the best of scenarios you can see that peace have a physical and mental effect on people

Channel: R&A Collaborations - Craft Journeys

Views: 3,370

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Louise Gardiner, Lou Gardiner, Craft Journeys, Contemporary Embroidery, machine embroidery, textiles, fabric, Cloth, textile art, craft, materials, canvas, time, sewing machine, music, sherry, workshops, studio, Bill Fox, embroidery

Id: Gskod1gLB6c

Length: 4min 38sec (278 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 28 2020