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Memories

Posted on by Sandy Webster

In less than two months I will be going back to Australia for the tenth time. I have found a way to take some of what came from there back home. They are a combination of old and new technology. The impetus for the work is an old technique of white line printmaking.

Stitching on White Line images
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These wood block prints I have carved in Australia and sometimes printed with the soils of that country. I reproduced them with an archival printer and altered the images to look more like colored etchings. Some of the printed images will be enhanced using watercolors I made from the soils of Australia. Onto the prints I am stitching with threads bought in Australia, purchased in sewing shops at the end of train travels as a way of recording all the colors I saw along the way. Bits of silks bought in a Japanese shop near Hobart, Tasmania are selected from precious bundles along with samples from Beautiful Silks in Melbourne and stitched onto the paper as well. And finally a tiny envelope is tied in place holding small parts of prints I have made here in my own studio. They are full of memories.

It Starts with an Idea

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Ties to Home nest detail with branch
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As an artist who is creating something, it must start with an idea, an idea that I feel strongly about fixing into a visual form. It must be something that matters to me and worth the expenditure of time and materials to resolve. The choices made along the way to completion are continually in service to that idea. There is no deviation through the seduction of materials and I will keep the processes of making within my own range of learned and practiced techniques.

I am not interested in making someone else’s art. I don’t have time for that. Nor am I interested in simply “playing” in the studio. The work that happens in my studio is exactly that, work.

It is an unwavering commitment to an idea that requires continual choices in a particular order of selection, combination, completion and assessment.

Waiting at Home

Posted on by Sandy Webster

stonestories
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I am seventy years old.

I have too many books I will never read and more that I never should have bought in the first place.

There are too many things picked up along the way when they looked indispensable. And now there is a guilt connected with some that I took to draw later and have no way of putting them back. I can’t even remember where some of them came from, only that they found their way into pockets and suitcases and once home were placed in the studio with care and promises.

Now I am promising myself that on my next trip I will remember them still waiting at home for whatever I had in mind and keep my hands in empty pockets.

The Talisman Bag

Posted on by Sandy Webster
The Talisman Bag
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The Talisman Bag

Since I work in mixed media, there is the constant draw to collect bits and pieces that could be useful. Usually they are dried pieces from Nature saved for their history as much as their potential. They lay there waiting to be made into something new and different so they can start all over again. And my job is to do just that – find a way to place them in a setting with others then step back and wonder if this is what they would have wanted.

The Talisman Bag is part of an ongoing series of titled HomeWorks. They involve  contact printing using plants from home, stitching, spinning, drawing and collected found pieces. Although this looks as though it could be worn, it like the rest of the HomeWorks are mounted in deep frames behind glass.