Downing Archive

The Downing Archive was extremely eye opening and helped me to push my practice work into the right direction. I feel like some of the work shown was very reflective of the advice given in my tutorial from the summer project. I now understand how to develop my weaknesses which were; my colour pallet (adding metallics and subtle colours).

The main influence from the archive was the Japanese prints and designs as I enjoyed the shimmer and textures of the samples, the particular Japanese work which inspired me was from the late 19th - early 20th century (I will further research this period in Japanese textile art). The sample book pages were covered in a pearlised solution which really harmonised the work throughout the book. 

The archive also inspired me to further research metallic embroidery, I found various books that contained artists for me to work from, one of them being Metal Thread Embroidery, I descovered an artist -  Ann Sutton, I'm inspired by her use of chunky threads with the gold and metallic couching and basket weave techniques. I would consider using a similar method in my own work as I feel it could work effectively over the top of my prints and patterns to distort them. 

I started to produce drawings and mark making from this archive, these generally consisted of blocks of colours and comapring colour together to see which harmonise and which contrast/clash, and also selection of how drawings couldbe transferred  into stitches.