Fish out of Water - Exchange Student's Exhibition

I will be exhibiting some new work at an exhibition next week. It's the half yearly group exhibition held by the Exchange and Research students currently studying at Kyoto Seika University.
Last semester's exhibition was a great sucess and here's hoping we can pull it off this time around too.
It runs from Mon 12th December to Fri 16th in the 3rd floor exhibition space of the Johokan at Kyoto Seika. See the ad for it here: Fish Out Of Water - Exchange Student Exhibition
Here's the work I am thinking I will show: 



Australian King Parrot & Blackwood Wattle



豪 Australia. Linen Noren

New Works! 完成したばかりの作品

Last week I finally finished two of my initial 'trial' artworks. They've been a way to get back into the swing of Katazome again but I also wanted to try out a few new techniques, including coloured resist paste and using a paper cone (づつ) to apply resist paste. Of course, they are also depicting Australian birds, in keeping with my research here in Kyoto.

First up is a linen Noren curtain dyed using Katazome technique. It shows the Kanji for Australia, "Go" 豪 and Australian flora and fauna.

「豪」'Australia'. Linen Noren. Katazome. 2011

Detail of Wattle.

Close up of my Crimson Rosella

 Second is this piece depicting a male King Parrot and Blackwood Wattle. This piece incorporates both katazome (resist paste applied with a stencil) and tzutsugaki (resiste paste applied with paper cone). I'm really happy with how this combination turned out.

King Parrot & Blackwood Wattle. Katazome and Hand-drawn resist technique on cotton. 2011

You can see the white lines which is where resist paste was applied with the cone. It gives a very different, drawing-like feel compared to stencil resist.

I have two more bird pieces *THIS* close to being finished. Once those are complete, I'd like to see what's been most sucessful in terms of technique and move on to making one or two much larger pieces.

Cut & Paste 型彫り＆糊置き

This week at Kyoto Seika I've been cutting and pasting.
To be more precise, I've been cutting stencils and resist pasting them onto cotton and silk fabrics!

I came up with 3 designs to use for trial artworks.

The first one I am using to dye some noren (narrow width split curtain) for the entrance to my bedroom. The design is based on katazome works by Serizawa Keisuke (one of my katazome heroes) where he takes a singular Kanji (chinese character) and surrounds it with design elements. For example:

Serizawa Keisuke,  「夏の字」 Kanji for Summer. Katazome on tsumugi silk. 1954

Serizawa Keisuke, 「飛の字」Kanji for "Fly". Katazome on linen. circa 1961

I chose to use the Kanji which is used to represent Australia, 豪 which reads as "Go" (you can maybe translate it as 'splendid' or 'grand').

And printed with resist paste onto linen.



Here it is in it's stencil format...





Here are some images of my other two designs in progress...

Crimson Rosella

Getting ready to print the King Parrot design

Close-up of King Parrot's face after I had added some extra details...

The next step will be to apply a soybean mixture that helps stop the dyes bleeding and then I can start dyeing!