“Without obsession, life is nothing.” — John Waters

After I completed my latest textile coral cards this spring, I’ve been thinking about what my next coral textile art would look like. There’s been this niggling feeling to do something different but not depart from the message of fragility. Ideas don’t come with a snap of the fingers (although I wish they did!) - remember Gru’s light bulb moment in Despicable Me? - but they do come after our brains connect all the creative dots between our thoughts, and the images we capture and sketch during our walks. There seems to be an internal dialogue happening with lots of triggers and firing between the synapses in our brain. Sometimes, it could develop into an echo chamber and we begin to have doubts and negative thoughts, but then that’s why we turn to others to get reassurance or other insights that help us to grow our ideas further.

Which brings me to my next point about why we should be obsessed. If you don’t get obsessed over something then it would be near impossible to have that dialogue inside our brains. It’s not okay just to plant idea seeds….. we have to obsess over it, give it attention, and develop them further. When was the last time you dove right into and immersed yourself into a topic that you had an intense interest over, and read everything you could about it?

Developing my coral ideas further

textile art experimentations

I took time to look over my earlier coral sketches, and have been keen on going from textile collages to 3D textile sculptures. It will definitely take more than a few weeks to find my voice in this area, but little did I know that it would take close to 8 months! My development included:

a) Visiting Keppel Bay in Singapore to view the coral reefs

b) Researching the various coral forms and reading up on corals - I made full use of the local library!

c) Experimenting with different textile art techniques came to mind for experimentation, including couching, using wire for the 3D sculpture, broderie anglaise and shibori. I will post more about these at another date, so I will keep this post short and sweet.

d) Sketching lots of ideas and keeping notes on all of the above. It really felt like my textile art project was a science one!

Experimentation with Shibori

Free motion embroidered coral textile designs by Agy — First experiments. This was in March.

After several months of experimenting and seeing what worked and what didn’t. This was the first iteration. I had an idea of layers of free motion embroidered pieces but somehow, the pieces did not gel. It looked like a mass of scribbles and each piece did not physically hold on its own. I will probably relook these pieces at a later date, but I wasn’t feeling it at this point!

I decided to stick with shibori for the time being. I think I might even combine certain elements of the other textile art techniques at a later date. I would take it a step at a time. I’m not sure what you think, but when I decide to add things to the original idea, things don’t gel very well.

The shibori technique is currently associated with indigo, but you can use it to manipulate synthetic fabrics such as organza, to create ethereal looking forms. I have had success with it for Bowls of Fragility, and wanted to take it a step further by incorporating more of the free motion embroidery.

By August, I had gone through a few significant rounds of experimentation but the break through was creating these shapes (below). At this point, I had to take a step back and decide on where I wanted it to go. Although they looked like blobs, I did feel that they could be improved.

It was then I decided to look at past coral works that I had made, especially the coral brooches . The stitch work was not random and had a star-fish like effect. So instead of creating random stitches, I focused on more orderly stitches.

After perfecting the technique, I made my molds, and started creating plate corals, both and big and small! I also used the couching effect to recreate textures too.

What do you think so far? I’m definitely enjoying my coral obsession!