Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

 #100daysofeggcups - drawings of egg cups from my collection  - YELLOW    Watch a reel of days 11-20

Solitary Tea #07 - Wilma Simmons 2023   A single tea cup is often the subject of my textile art work. Yes, I do like tea, especially teas like White Jasmine and Buddha's Tears, and I am interested in the history and all that surrounds the subject of tea.  I particularly love this poem by a classical Chinese poet, Wang Wei:  Softly closing the chamber door Alone I await you in the empty room.  You never came .  Disappointed I drink solitary tea.  Solitary Tea #06 - Wilma Simmons 2023  Combining the techniques of photo transfer onto fabric and collage, I created these vignettes in the last week. They are interpretations of the poem and I hope they convey the simple economy of expression of the poem.  Solitary Tea #05 - Wilma Simmons 2023  Previously, I have interpreted the poem, using actual tea bags in the works and featuring my great grandmother as the narrator of the poem.   Tea Cup :Solitary Tea #03 - Wilma Simmons 2021 Blue ...

  From a recent  Fibre Arts Take Two online course - Processes and Possibilities - Cordula Kagelmann  Photos :. Reflection #1 Materials - gelli plate prints and postage stamp image transfer, cotton thread As I reflect on 2021 and as Christmas approaches, I think of the unsettled and disturbed times Covid 19 has brought to us personally, nationally and globally. The Christmas stamp as a feature in this collage, suggests the feeling of protection and peaceful calm the support of loved ones provides. It symbolises hope and its possibility while the torn gelli plate prints remind me of the surrounding chaos. 2. Reflection #2 Materials - magazine pages, threads In this collage, the restrictions and lockdown experienced during the Covid crisis of this year are experiences that have complex layers of self discovery and emotion - fear, anger, happiness, peace, anxiety , sadness and gratitude … While there were harsher social restrictions in 2021 , there were so many stories of h...

  Artists have always found inspiration  in their every day activities. The very early cave paintings are records of daily life - hunting expeditions for food and responses to the elements.  From the 1800s, Van Gogh's artworks about the daily work of peasants have charmed art lovers and  even in the Pop Art movement, the colourful art of everyday edible items like ice cream cones, cakes and hot dogs by Wayne Thiebaud have become collectable.  It is no wonder that during a pandemic lockdown when walking in the neighbourhood  is  the only exercise allowed  that these walks  take on a new fascination.  Last week, I recorded my walk on a strip of  paper.... I joined a variety of  drawing and found papers  and added /scraped gesso to the surface. As I walked, I  drew with pencil shapes I saw on the way and then came home and added ink and pencil marks to fill in some detail. As you can see from the photo above, I cut the l...

A Chronicle  is a record of things that happened — told in chronological order. ..  The word is  related to and  comes from the Greek ta khronika , which means “annals of time.”  .      While we today blog or instagram photos of our travels,  I imagine travellers of the past might have recorded, on rolled scrolls, their journeys and their discoveries each night after a full day of adventures. This was the inspirations for my table top installation, called " Travel Chronicles : Charting the Unexplored".  The work comprises three mixed media scrolls of varying size and length, created from mark making with ink on papers and fabric,  collage and stitching.  The addition of a flat art doll, in the style of a traveller of a previous era gives a context to these scrolls.  While I have not included text in these scrolls, the mark making suggests that the language is universal.... I have even imagined t...

Days 9-12 of #The100Day Project . I stitched collages created from paper, fabric and used envelopes as a "journal" of my daily walks for 100 days.

For #The100Day Project,  for 100 days, I am creating stitched fabric and paper collages on used envelopes. The theme relates to what I see or what I gather on my daily walks for 100 days.

This year, I decided to participate in The 100 Day Project - I signed up before my life suddenly got a bit busy, but I am determined to continue with it. It is an online art project which attracts thousands of people worldwide every year to create art of some sort every day for 100 days. This started on 2 April  so it's early days... Each participant can decide what he/she would like to create. I had a pile of used envelopes which I saved for an unknown project, so thought this was the perfect opportunity to use them and all the little bits of torn paper, fabric scraps and ephemera I have been keeping. My 100 day project is to create collages on used envelopes.  Did you send me a letter? You may find your envelope as one of the 100 collages. These stitched collages will be inspired by my daily walks in my neighbourhood, so it is also a 100 day challenge to walk each day, even if it only for 15-20 minutes.   Here are the first five days...  ...

Blue Horizon - Paper and cloth collage - Wilma Simmons 2018  Two of my collages sold this week have a touch of blue. This was an accident as I was using my fountain pen ink on these collages and when added to the  previously dyed fabric, it turned blue.  I rather liked the effect and added some more blue fabric.  I know that blue is the most liked colour of all people - what is the attraction of blue?  Blue is the only colour which maintains its own character in all its tones... it will always stay blue;” Raoul Dufy, French Fauvist Painter, 1877-1953  It’s nature’s colour for water and sky, but is rarely found in fruits and vegetables. Today, blue is embraced as the colour of heaven and authority, denim jeans and corporate logos. It is cold, wet, and slow as compared to red’s warmth, fire, and intensity. Blue has more complex and contradictory meanings than any other colour.  These can be easily explained by pinpointing by the specific...

I have just completed  more work on another corset. - no 3 in the series for the exhibtion "Crossing Borders". For background information, please read a previous post....  Borders #1  This corset has been painted with black and pewter acrylic and the lacing and buttons  have been replaced with wire. The corset with an edging of  authoritative, overpowering words  - silence-segregate- subvert - suppress- subdue- stifle-spurn represent the border and the boundary which still needs to be overcome to achieve gender equality.  Inside in graffiti style paint  is the slogan #MeToo The Me Too movement is a movement against sexual harassment and sexual assault. #MeToo spread virally in October 2017 as a hashtag used on social media in an attempt to demonstrate the widespread prevalence of sexual assault and harassment, especially in the workplace. (Wikipedia)   I added exaggerated wire breast covers to the front of the corset to furth...

How to begin?  It's always difficult to start a new series of art works .... researching and experimenting and making samples  Hopefully, these samples I made this week will form the basis of a series of  mixed media artworks I have been planning for  a couple of months. This is my main  "Borders"  assignment for a twelve month Masterclass I have been studying online this year.  All will be revealed in posts over the next month or so. As you can see from the photos, the underlying comment is feminist. I was very lucky to find   and purchase beautifully stitched corsets, complete with boning to work with.   The rationale for this work?  Considerable achievements towards gender equality have been made throughout history. Many ‘societal’ borders have been crossed. Nevertheless, barriers guarding gender stereotypes and the culture which surrounds them remain firm. The appalling statistics of domestic violence, the un...