Libbystitches

I’ve been working on exploring the textures and colours of the segment of wall that I chose from my trip to the Lion Grove Garden.

Exercise 1 is to choose a piece of wall to study –

image taken at Lion Grove Garden, Suzhou, China, October 2017

I chose this area as it has a range of textures, materials, colours and shapes to explore. I printed out a larger copy of this photograph to paste into my sketchbook. I then identified all the areas of interest in it, pointing out interesting shapes, areas of colour and where the texture changes.

  Exercise 2 asks for a series of rubbings. I took a few rubbings on my visit, using tissue paper and oil pastel, but wasn’t convinced that it revealed much to explore. I also took a series of close up photographs of parts of the wall to identify obvious, and not so obvious, textures.

Once home I copied the rubbings and enlarged certain areas to hunt for patterns or shapes which could inform the work.

The first exercise in the Embroidery Foundation Module is to find an interesting surface to study. I had a quick look around the compound in which I live – which was built approximately ten years ago from concrete, like many of the apartment blocks around here. Grey concrete isn’t the most interesting surface to study in depth, so I packed up my camera, tracing paper and pastels and headed out to one of Suzhou’s classical gardens. 

I’d heard nice things about the Lion Grove Garden, which is a small garden just down the street from the much bigger, famous and incredibly popular with tourists, Humble Administrator’s Garden. As a westerner, when you think of a garden you think of immaculately manicured lawns, designed flower beds teaming with colour and the occasional sculpture or pond to break up the view.

Classical Chinese gardens are very different. Often they were originally someone’s home or getaway, so they tend to consist of linked buildings, with windows overlooking patios or open spaces with trees or rocks. The Main Feature of the Lion Grove garden is the huge collection of TaiHu rocks at its centre. TaiHu stone comes from TaiHu Lake just west of Suzhou – they’re limestone which means that years of water erosion has usually resulted in them taking on strange other-worldly shapes or filling them with holes.

So I wandered around the garden, it was a nice day, a slight chill in the air and only about a couple of hundred tourists wandering round taking selfies, instead of the usual thousands! I was looking for a wall a little way from the crowds as I was feeling a bit self-conscious. I managed to find a place at the back of the garden where only a few people came by – all wondering why this strange laowei woman was taking photographs of a wall – once I got the tracing paper and pastels out to have a go at rubbing I got even more strange looks!

I decided to focus on this piece of wall:

You can see the textured TaiHu stone at the centre, but also the concrete above it (this formed a supporting wall for a more modern building). I think it encompasses some of the things I want to explore while I’m living in China – how the country is dealing with embracing modernity while still acknowledging its ancient history.

I’ll do another post soon about some of the interesting patterns used by the garden designers while constructing the buildings at Lion Grove. Attached to the garden is the Suzhou Folk Custom museum, which has some interesting embroidery pieces – pictures to follow.

I’m looking forward to the next steps in the process, which is about pulling out some of the textures from my rubbings and photographs, looking at the colours within the wall and then translating them into stitch.

Hi there! It’s been a while since I last posted on here. Though I have been posting semi-regularly on Instagram.

Anyway, I have more time on my hands these days (now I’m a housewife/expat tai tai – more of which will probably become apparent!) so I’ve begun a online embroidery course.

I’m undertaking the Embroidery Foundation Module with Distant Stitch in order to get a bit more serious with my embroidery practice and to test the waters to see if undertaking more indepth course of study will be appropriate.