'Landscape Surface', a talk by Julia Wright

We were very pleased to welcome textile and jewellery artist Julia Wright to our monthly meeting today at Harrogate Creative Stitchers.  Julia describes herself as a prolific maker who is process led and is fascinated with tiny scales and close-up shapes, patterns and textures found in nature.  She brought along many of her pieces to show us as well artwork and sketchbooks.

  

Julia explained that she comes from a very creative family and trained at Edinburgh College of Art which gave her a good foundation in mixed medias.  She went on to lead workshops for adults in the UK and Japan and is now a teacher in A Level Textiles and Art Foundation.  Julia also regularly exhibits and sells her work which is often displayed alongside the found objects which have inspired her.

As well as making, Julia spends a lot of her time drawing, collecting, photographing and observing nature and found objects in woodland, the coast and sometimes urban environments.  She dyes her own fabric and threads, particularly rust dyeing, and often embeds metals such as copper into her textile work creating some beautiful textural three dimensional surfaces.  She loves the tiny detail, pattern and texture in small objects such as fossils and lichens but also larger scale tree roots and rock formations.  Her process is all about replicating these structures and surfaces and she went on to explain the methods and techniques she uses.

  

Julia uses crochet, knitting and weaving to create some of her pieces.  She loves the repetitive and meditative nature of crochet and can sometimes work at a really small scale with very fine thread.  She describes her knitting technique as ‘Wonky Knitting’ as she uses different thicknesses of wool, thread and fibres with different sized needles (even a broom handle size!) to create a variegated structure and is worked in a very spontaneous way.  Sometimes Julia uses the knitting as a surface and will stitch into it and sometimes employs a knitting machine to help her ‘wonky knitting’.  She also uses weaving, knotting and macrame in her work.

Julia also loves to stitch and embroider particularly on a small scale (she often shies away from larger pieces!).  Some of her work is inspired by the time she spent in Japan using ‘boro’ style stitching as she is interested in the simplicity of running stitch and mending.  Often these are done on rust dyed fabrics and can incorporate metals.  She was very proud that one her embroidered pieces was used as the cover for a book entitled ‘Little Stitches’, a poetry anthology.

Julia went on to show us several series of work including ‘Strata-section’ and ‘Root Series’ always using natural fabrics such as cottons, muslins and linens and explores holes, erosion, growth and decay.  Another of Julia’s obsessions is wrapping and binding using scrap fabrics and incorporating ‘stuffed blobs’ which give the wraps more texture and three dimensional form like a tree root.  She is currently drawn to collecting and framing groups of found objects and she showed us some of her displays.

 

We were all so fascinated to listen to Julia’s method and process and were able to take a closer look at her work after her talk.  Thank you so much Julia – we can’t wait to welcome you back for your workshop in the summer (we all want to know how to make a wrap now!!).

For more information about Julia's work you can find her on Instagram at julia_._wright on Facebook as Julia Wright Jewellery & Textiles and her website at juliawright.co.uk