The members involved in Culture Clash are now used to having their perception of embroidery shattered by the goings on at London Printworks but the last gathering on March stretched our imaginations and had us chatting away at new ideas and offering suggestions for clashing our chosen cultures
Berit Greinke is studying for an MA in Design for Textile Futures at St. Martin’s Central School of Art She is a weaver searching for material to weave with some man made fibres, she came across some unravelled magnetic cassette tapes. Whilst weaving she began to wonder what had been on the tapes. was it voices, was it music? As an experiment, she passed a photoelectric cell/recording head across her weaving and wonder of wonders, produced a sound, noting recognisable but several different notes. Magnetic tape is covered in graphite and this set off another train of thought. Pencils are graphite so perhaps pencil drawings would produce a sound. Of course they did! She experimented with different pencils and found that 2B pencil drawings created the densest sound. Pressure on the photo electric cell also changed the sound and it was possible to play a tune. The body holding the photoelectric cell also acts as a conductor so movement will also alter the sound.
This has led her to experiment with other conductive materials: wires woven or trapped into fabric or plastic graphite powder in a screen print border, liquid metal paint on fabric, machine stitched lines of different densities and in light and dark colours, all of these producing sounds when the photoelectric cell was dragged across. Raising and lowering the photoelectric cell, making circles, these actions produced different sounds.
All of this led Berit to tape photo electric cells into a row, and this row, dragged across the fabric produced a multichannel response. The black patterns, which we had drawn on squared paper in October were placed over a light box, a photoelectric cell was dragged over and amazing sounds were produced. We all then tried our hands. Kathy Small dragged the photoelectric cell over her patterned scarf and the light reflected off the garment produced much deeper sounds. Liz’s Christmas card was very musical. Berit was very excited about her findings and thinks that the future is in producing fabrics which will work for us, say our t-shirt opening the door for us as we approach for example. She has endless experiments before her and believes that the possibilities are mind-boggling.
So we have had yet another dimension added to our sampler. It is all very interesting and challenging.