Experiments
How we find things we love.
Humans, in general, love to experiment. We love to try new things, new foods, new ways of doing things, and on and on…. Not only do we like to try new things, we like to try and make things better. More efficient. More fun. More interesting. We are inventors and creators.
Necessity is the mother of invention. This proverb comes from Plato who wrote “our need will be the real creator.” When you really need to solve a problem, you’ll find a way. This idea has fascinated me since I was a child and I did something really stupid.
Let me set the scene. When we lived in California, my mom took us camping. A lot. It was a great time and at some point, she bought a pop-up tent trailer and we took that thing all over California. One of our favorite spots was Monterey Bay. There is a really lovely state park there and Northern California on the coast in Spring, is amazing!
One night, maybe the first, we started a fire (in our fire pit) and were roasting marshmallows. There was a brick that was blocking my perfect marshmallow roasting spot. Yep. I moved it. With my bare hand. Well, tried to and burned the hell out of my hand. In my defense, it didn’t look hot.
Mom rushed me to the emergency room and we saw the doc and the nurse bandaged me up. Each finger had to get bandaged separately with some ointment and gauze. She had this cool metal cage that fit over my finger and applied the gauze. It was freaking cool! This was by far the best part of the ER trip! I exclaimed how cool it was and the nurse told me it was invented by a nurse because she was tired of trying to wrangle gauze on to injured and painful fingers. This method way was better for everyone involved.
After that, I often thought about this genius nurse that invented this cool thing that ERs probably around the world use for bandaging fingers. I wanted to be like that nurse. I wanted to invent something totally cool that would help people. Ever since then I’m always trying to think about a way to do something better.
It came true in grad school, but to this day I still think about that nurse and I’m always looking at things through that “necessity” lens.
In grad school, I developed a new method to detect antibiotic resistance genes. I wrote about it in a previous post if you want to know more:
I think creatives look at life through this lens as well. Most of the time its because we have an idea and we don’t know how we are going to translate it to something other people can look at or hear or touch. This is also how I think many of us find what materials we want to work with.
I love working with fabric and the work that it takes to express my ideas with it. I have tried other mediums from painting to collage and while I enjoy them, they do not convey the message I want to share with the world. But I had to experiment with them to determine if they were right for me. I took a class a couple of years ago focused on the principles of design and we used collage to do the exercises. It was fun! I had such a great time cutting and gluing and successfully completed my assignment for each principle we were studying. I really love some of those compositions. BUT they didn’t feel right to me until I made them in fabric. Then, they were done. However, if I hadn’t tried collage, I wouldn’t have discovered how much I like designing my work using it. I have an entire series based on collage compositions.
And even once we’re done with the experiments and figure out how we like to work, we are still in the “what if” mode. What if I change that color, or that placement, or that fabric type….
A little over a year ago, I took a mono-printing class and created this little composition. I love it. It was been pinned to my wall since that class because I want to make it into one of my large sewn and quilted compositions.
The thing I’ve struggled with was how do I pull this off??? Specifically, this part:
The texture from the paint and how it lifted off the plastic is so intriguing that I don’t want to lose it. So, I’ve been really thinking about how do I create this. I could use pieced texture like the two pieces below.
I haven’t tried that yet, I think because it doesn’t feel right. I could use commercially printed fabric but that doesn’t feel right either.
I recently revisited mono-printing because I want to translate my line drawings to fabric.
I made these studies and realized, duh, just use paint to make that textured part. It feels obvious in hind sight but thinking through all the possibilities has been interesting. And I think it is a necessary part of the process. Listening to the part of my brain that says “we still need to experiment more” has not been wrong yet. I always find that if my brain is saying it, I haven’t arrived at the right solution.
I’m so happy I didn’t rush in to working on that composition. I probably would have liked it but I don’t think as much if I hadn’t waited for the right technique to present itself.
Now that I’ve arrived at the right technique, I still need to experiment with it. I need to figure out how I’m going to get the right texture, the right colors, and the right density. Then I have to figure out how to scale it up to a big piece of fabric. Those pieces above are roughly 8” x 12” and I need them to be probably quadruple that.
In order to do that I need to be able to create the drawing with the paint on a large surface and then carefully lay the fabric on it, then carefully lift the fabric off the surface without smudging it or moving it. I can’t wait!!