11/1/11 - birds, J Eastwood and P Clark

Today I have made a proper start to focus 2 of this project.
The project is still (loosely) based on T.S Eliot’s poem ‘The Wasteland’ but I am focusing on the bird imagery and making this my base for visual research. However I am still combining my drawings with text, making text drawings, and hopefully putting text into my weaving.
I began the day by going to the Castle Museum where they have a brilliant bird room. There is every bird you can think of from crows and magpies to pelicans and eagles. I did a few sketches of crows and gulls when I was there but will be going back a lot more over the coming days and weeks.
In the afternoon I had a tutorial with Jane Eastwood (http://janeeastwooddesign.com/index.htm, a textiles designer and weaver). This tutorial really helped me and got me even more excited for this project. She understood where I was coming from when I said I wanted to use words and use them in a more unconventional way, and has given me lots to think about. Jane also gave me the name of artist Paul Clark who makes collages from found papers – maps, tickets, stamps etc. I love his work and the idea of old paper/ text is really exciting. The way he has folded and chosen which papers/colours/textures to use is very inspiring and has got me thinking about my text and where I can source it from.