Research point 1: Kirsty Whitlock

Stitching to mend or darn; mending, repairing, refining; found/recycled materials.

Brief here was to find out more about an artist or designer who uses found, recycled, worn or discarded textiles and materials. Analyse how they select, apply and alter their chosen materials.

Selection of materials

Whitlock uses materials that surround us in everyday life: bus tickets, plastic bags, newspapers, labels, and infuses them with extra meaning, highlighting contemporary issues such as the effects of the stock market on our lives, or the way that supermarkets such as Tesco have come to dominate, and the potentially damaging effects of this.

She is particularly attracted to items that include typography and will often find things in the street or obtain them from friends and family and is known as a 'magpie' for her large collection of found materials.

Sometimes I start with a current affair or contemporary issue, though sometimes the found material inspires the concept. Once the concept or the title of the project is decided I spend a large amount of time researching the subject matter. This concept led research will then feed the creation of the body of work. My initial Ideas are generated and developed through experimentation with materials and processes. These exploratory samples then lead into resolved specific and one-off applied elements. Source: https://www.textileartist.org/embroidery-transforms-kirsty-whitlock

Application and alteration of materials

Materials such as plastic and paper are fused together using a heat press, allowing inks to transfer from one material to the other and for the newspaper print to be visible through the semi-opaque surface of the plastic bag, for example.

As an artist, she is particularly interested in the power of stitch to transform a surface. In Bags of Aggro, newspaper headlines are machine stitched into the fused plastic and newspaper, using the font that we recognise as belonging to Tesco and in the red, blue and black that we also associate with this brand.

Whitlock has also outlined (but not filled in) in machine stitch a Union Jack flag: is this a business that Britain should be proud of? This flag could easily be missed by the casual observer, but subliminally, do we associate the red-white-and blue of the Tesco brand with the flag of Great Britain? The ends of her stitching here are left trailing: what is the meaning of this?

In this work she has also used the heat process to transfer text from an article about Tesco onto the plastic, but in reverse type, meaning that work needs to be studied in more detail to decipher the message.

In Losses, Whitlock has created a stitched grid over the surface of the newspaper and then pushed, ripped or cut out individual squares, perhaps suggesting disintegration within society. The added red and blue threads which seem to pour out from the articles and graphs in the newspaper have a blood-like quality as they stream to the floor, alluding to the impact on real lives of the facts and figures related by newspaper articles.

Sources:

https://www.textileartist.org/kirsty-whitlock-from-conception-to-creation

https://www.textileartist.org/embroidery-transforms-kirsty-whitlock

https://kirstywhitlock.weebly.com/press.html