India Flint 2018, 'Gardens of the Heart' stitch session

Open session for ‘Gardens of the Heart’ at WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC during internationally recognized South Australian INDIA FLINT ‘landmarks’ exhibition

h.Art, together with India, invites stitchers, writers and dreamers around the world to join hands in a gentle project involving words, cloth and thread.

https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=gardens%20of%20the%20heart 

For some time now, India has been sharing with her students a method of creating poems that are formed by three lines. Each participant is given a number between 1 and 3, and a long narrow piece of paper. Those with ‘1’ write the first line, those with ‘2’ the second or middle line, those with ‘3’ write a closing line. None of the writers know what the others are writing about, there is no common theme decided...but invariably when the lines are placed together, 

beauty unfolds. There is something deeply enriching about creating poetry together in this way.

For ‘Gardens of the Heart’ India is inviting people to stitch a phrase or sentence

on a piece of cloth and send it to be included in the exhibition at the Onkaparinga Woollen Mill Artspace in Lobethal, South Australia.

Linking with CrossXpollinatioN annual festival of textile and fibre art a local stitch chapter for ‘Gardens of the Heart’ will be held at

WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC 79 Main Street, Beeac, from 2-4pm  on Saturday 14 July.

You do not need to be an expert embroiderer to join in, those who follow India’s writings know she is a great exponent of what she calls ‘rebel stitching’. There is a beautiful section of rebel stitching on ‘landmarks’, July’s featured artwork. 

India Flint landmarks (detail) 2017

India Flint Alchemist’s Apron - work in progress

India has used several different stitches on this beautiful apron and all convey the words, so you can chose whatever combination you’d like.

When you attend the stitch session you will be given a mark indicating whether you are to compose a first line, a middle line or a last line. Please stitch that mark on your work (at the beginning of your line of poetry), followed by your words. 

Instructions

• Please choose (or cut to size) a piece of cloth 450mm wide x 150mm high.

• You may like to use cloth that has special significance of some kind. The cloth need not be hemmed, frayed edges are acceptable.

• Stitch your mark on the cloth (at the left hand side), then your words.

• We suggest at least three and a maximum of nine words per line.

• When the work is done, please send it together with your completed entry form to ::

          ‘gardens of the heart’

          PO Box 196,

          Lobethal 5241

          South Australia

When the stitched lines of text are delivered to h.ART they will be gathered together to form “three - line poems” and running-stitched to a calico backing cloth (by India together with fellow volunteers). The resulting three-line poems will be installed (pegged on a series of “washing” lines) in an exhibition at the

Onkaparinga Woollen Mill Artspace, around a cloud of individual fresh flowers that will be suspended from threads attached to the ceiling of the space. We envisage the blooms will dry slowly over the period of the exhibition, releasing their fragrance into the air in a poem of their own.

At the opening event, volunteers will be positioned around the room, ready to take turns to read some of the poems aloud. Members of the public will be invited to join in also. At the conclusion of the exhibition, India will edit a publication that will include all of the poems, together with images from the

installation. Whether this will take the form of unlimited ‘print on demand’ or

limited edition with order by pre-purchase is yet to be determined.

The ‘gardens of the heart’ collection will be kept together for possible regional touring at a later date.

Dates

• December 22, 2018 last date to send completed pieces to PO Box 196, Lobethal 5241

• March 1, 2019 ‘gardens of the heart’ opens

• March 30 , 2019 exhibition concludes

• April – July, 2019 design and production of associated publication.

Participate

Bring your fabric, embroidery threads and sewing kit if you have one, otherwise share ours. Dress warmly, and bring your keep-cup for a cuppa by the woodfire. 

WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC 79 Main Street, Beeac, from 2-4pm  on Saturday 14 July.Free, pre-booking required.

Enquiries 0412 337 001 or windowspacebeeac@gmail.com

Interest

India is known for several seminal texts that changed the practice of natural dyeing. The distinctive eco-print, developed in the course of research for a Master of Visual Arts at the University of South Australia, has become a defining feature of her textile practice.

        

Eco Colour - where it all began: botanical alchemy for beautiful textiles using leaves, roots, bark and flowers to colour cloth. 

Second Skin - a book about the provenance and prospects of the textiles in our lives (with a chapter devoted to bundle-dyeing and the ecoprint).

www.indiaflint.net

instagram@prophet_of_bloom

INDIA FLINT-JULY 2018

‘landmarks’

 plant dyes on repurposed wool skirt

WINDOWSPACE – BEEAC during the month of July welcomes internationally recognised South Australian artist India Flint and her work 'landmarks'. While looking somewhat spare as it hangs in the Beeac window it very much gives a true sense of belonging to the space with the strength of Flint’s effortless stitch and the colour of her surrounds.

'landmarks' is evocative of an aerial view over a parched landscape featuring perhaps an ancient watercourse, or a long ridge of mountains, with creeks and waterways now dried but with the promise of running again to fill lakebeds. It hangs in a billabong shape with the trailing fabric suggesting landscape. 

It is graceful, simple and a privilege to have.

_____________________

Underpinning her practice, Flint describes that most important consideration - a sense of place…

I am botanical alchemist & string twiner, storyteller, forest wanderer & tumbleweed, stargazer & stitcher, working traveller, dreamer, writer and the original discoverer of the eucalyptus ecoprint...dyeing for a living in the deep south.

I work on a rural property at the end of a dirt road, dusty in summer, muddy in the rainy season, dyeing the things that I make with leaves that I gather from the paddocks, in a cauldron over a fire fed with twigs. Small twigs burn bright. My work conflates the visual and written poetics of place and memory, using ecologically sustainable contact print processes from plants and found objects together with walking, drawing, assemblage, mending, stitch and text as a means of mapping country, recoding and recording responses to landscape - working with cloth, paper, stone, windfall biological material, water, minerals, bones, the discarded artefacts and hard detritus of human habitation, the local weed burden. the work has been described as using " the earth as the printing plate and time as the press".

I negotiate a path between installation, printing, painting, drawing, writing and sculpture - immersing myself in and paying deep attention to the environment, gathering thought and experience, imagery and marks, as well as harvesting materials for making; trying to step lightly on the land while being nourished by it. The work of each day, philosophically rooted in topophilia (the love of place), literally begins with a walk.

image courtesy of India Flint  (www.indiaflint.com)

‘landmarks’ has its roots in a walk by a railway track, collecting odd scraps of rusted steel.

The few leaves I used were gleaned not from a forest floor, but from the floor of a florist. The substrate was a wool skirt acquired from a thrift store in New Orleans.

I have a somewhat maternal feeling about the eucalyptus ecoprint, as it originated in my studio in the early 1990s. I first publicly presented it in a paper at the White Nights Textile Symposium in St Petersburg, (Russia) in 1999. The technique has old roots in the dyeing of eggs that was practiced throughout Eastern Europe for thousands of years before Easter was a festival. I simply transferred the process from eggs to cloth using local flora.

I wrote extensively about the eucalyptus and its glorious prints in my MA thesis of 2001 (‘Arcadian Alchemies :: Sustainable Eucalyptus Dyes for Textiles’) but deliberately chose not to patent the ecoprint. Why? Because I was concerned that the technique would be picked up by one of the unscrupulous companies that make a practice of scanning freshly registered patents, and then churned out on an industrial scale. No matter how sustainable a concept is, when industry becomes involved the sheer quantities of (in this case) leaf matter, water and eventual waste material make the whole thing problematic. It seemed much better to share the process with individual makers. My commitment to this art that blooms at the confluence of craft, chemistry, physics, history, botany, medicine and ethnography has been a long one, well grounded in the textile traditions of my family and sometimes it feels as though it’s embedded in my bones.  Each bundle I wrap feels like a gift to myself, each time I unroll one the wonder and delight is as fresh as it was the very first time.

India Flint :: 2018

www.indiaflint.net

instagram@prophet_of_bloom

'Gardens of the Heart' is an international, hand-stitched poetry project convened by India Flint in collaboration with the h.ART group based in Lobethal, South Australia. https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=gardens%20of%20the%20heart 

Linking with the district annual festival of textile and fibre art CrossXpollinatioN, we will hold a local stitch chapter for ‘Gardens of the Heart’ at WINDOWSPACE Beeac Saturday 14 July 2-4pm.

Free, pre-booking required.

Enquiries 0412 337 001 or windowspacebeeac@gmail.com