10th Feb, Imogen Morris, local artist

Our February meeting was a morning social to spin and weave on personal current projects.   We welcomed several new members.  It is good to have an increasing number of members and we have a new family of younger spinners and weavers coming with their own projects to join us.

In the afternoon we were visited by Imogen Morris a local artist with a studio in Digbeth.  Tina took notes during her talk

Imogen Morris:

I am a thread artist.  I studied at Kingston University in London. University teaches you to be an artist but not how to make it financially viable. So I abandoned it after university.

But then I started to do embroidery and embroidered portraits. Looking at my work it is all made up from triangles. I use them to make areas darker and lighter. 

Everything starts with a drawing of lines. Then I mark thru the paper to the board where the nails go. ​The first picture is a thread drawing of an eye and the second shows the layers of threads and the third is a thread portrait.

I have over time worked with smaller and smaller nails. I started with large chunky ones and now I am down to 2ml nails. The nails aren’t important in themselves, but they hold the thread. I am trying to make them invisible.  I have been colouring the heads of nail to match the thread colour. 

I am currently working on combining paint with threads.  So I put paint underneath with the threads over top. So the colours and threads will work differently. The paint is splattered and the threads are precise. Sometimes they work together.

​Blending the paint and threads together to make shape and create tone. It is like painting with thread. The darker areas are done last and I try out with threads on the drawing first.

I am trying to push my work out to 3-D.  I call them thread splatters. I put the threads off the board. I makes it impossible to transport them.  But it means the work is new in each space of display. The hooks come out 3-4 meters and attach to the wall beyond the boards. So it adapts to the space.

Now I am creating pictures with embroidery on triangles covered in tulle.  Then the viewer needs move to get the triangles to align and see the whole face. I have a woman’s body split into 6 pieces and hung them at different heights and depths. So the audience interacts with the work. ​I need to think of my practice as to what is saleable and can be framed and then explore the other work in three dimensional space. I also need to be careful as it is too easy to get caught up in the details and I need to step back to see the whole piece

On 22 March my exhibition is coming to Digbeth Art Space for a month. I have a work space in Digbeth which is a shop front and visitors are welcome.

https://www.imogenmorrisart.com