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| Walking the Block Foreword |
‘I think ‘fabric’ is the most disgusting word in the English language.When people tell me they’re doing ‘fabric printing’ I feel I’d like to kick them.’ Phyllis Barron My journey into handblock printing began several years ago, in Venice, when I was researching the pioneering work of Mariano Fortuny, his experiments in block printing alongside natural dyeing techniques, particularly indigo. One evening a friend of mine gave me a copy of Fiona McCarthy’s biography of the life and work of William Morris, knowing my interest in textiles, specifically in the Arts and Crafts movement. The more I read, the more I became astonished by Morris’s manic industriousness, his insatiable appetite to ‘discover’ and ‘make’; especially since part of this ‘making’ included writing up to a thousand lines of verse a day. Morris’s letters show that the writing of poems had become obsessive. In his poetic phase the urge to make a poem came nagging at him constantly like one of his compulsive physical activities, a mental equivalent of netting and weaving. He expressed lucid views on how other poets approached the making of their poetry: ‘Shelley had no eyes’ and Keats he found easy to relate to because of his ‘supreme visual quality.’ Of Keats’s poem ‘The Skylark’ he said, ‘WHAT a gorgeous thing it is!’ Morris saw this poem as an entity ‘made’ up - like a textile - from its elements, the words, lines, rhythms, rhymes, cadences and so on threaded together by Keats’s ‘eye’. He also drew a distinction between ‘poets of rhetoric… such as Milton and Swinburne and poets who were primarily makers of pictures, visually observant poets such as Chaucer and Keats.’ The poetry canon is littered with poets who, as with all great artists, practised the tradition of close and accurate observation, such as the detail of cytology in some of the work of American poet Marianne Moore; whose poetic engineering of scientific process and detail into the heart of her poetry gives the work its fine complexity and insights. The English poet, Gerald Manley Hopkins, with his sprung rhythm in verse, may be regarded as creating the poetic equivalent of a woven welsh blanket, with the joy, gaiety and strict symmetries of fine close woven patterns. In short there are parallels and affinities in the making of a poem and the making of a textile, which Morris clearly recognised. Although his approach to ‘making’ later moved away from traditional methods and ideals towards producing his designs with industrial modes of manufacture, using newly emerging chemical dyes and machinery, many contemporary textile artists, particularly women, continued to create their work with traditional hand making methods. They used labour intensive production where the artist had close contact with the raw fibres, handspun threads, handmade textiles and the natural dyestuffs which served as the palette for their designs. Among these women were the weaver and dyer Ethel Mairet, the embroiderer Eve Simmonds and the block printers Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher. They were pioneers of natural dyeing and were, with others, responsible for recovering and reintroducing natural dyes into fine art and design. It was the language of the patterned textiles of Barron and Larcher that drew me to making of the poems that inhabit this book; the unique rhythms, rhymes, repeats and the conversations running through their printed stuffs. Each length of cloth, which they named like a person or a particular place - sometimes the very spirit and essence of a place - appears to take on a personality, which in turn seems to posses a distinct voice, speaking in its own tone, expressing its own mood with its own inflections and nuances. Indeed many of their prints I felt looked far beyond the initial impulse of representation, and startled; altering perception, like language or words stitched together can so often do. At times it was as though the block and print were both the mouth and the menu for the feast. And what a complex feast it was, punctuated with conversations of all kinds, sometimes quiet, at other times jostling; though never vying or breaking the harmonies between the nuance of movement of the block and the finality of design, colour and texture. Even on some of the overprints I never sensed direct competition, just a working out of something through the print. And where one pattern is bold and abstract, you are just as likely to find another that is quiet or contemplative, like a psalm or hymn flushed with subtle cadences. There are fragilities and imperfections that also resonate. So often the language of any art is not quite enough; it discomposes yet does not completely express what it needs to, teasing at the unconscious before it soaks away. This effect is visible in the work of Barron and Larcher, particularly in their experimental pieces. Sometimes the narrative or story is told with starling clarity; at others the patterning fuzzes, fades away making something not quite heard. It is interesting seeing their patterns printed on different kinds of cloth, how the dialogues or monologues alter depending on the context; silk brocade, crepe de chine, linen, cotton, or velvet. And in different lights the emphasis often shifts, and very like a poem read in different rooms to different people, patterns the air in such a way that it is always received differently. Sometimes you discover poems, something heard or seen or read breaking away like bread. Barron and Larcher did this too, exploring and experimenting with the idea of what a block is and what it could achieve. They used found objects such as car mats, kitchen utensils, mollusc shells, cotton reels and seed heads, conjuring a kind of magic out of the ordinary and by so doing transformed the nature of shape and line and contour with colour. Experimentation and play characterised their approach to developing their designs, reflecting the philosophy of Robin Tanner, the teacher and etcher and a close friend, who believed in the connection between play, creativity and work. The design philosophy of Ethel Mairet - think in cloth, not on paper - was reflected in the way Barron and Larcher worked through their design and production processes. A significant range of their textiles have survived, such as the ‘Girton curtains’, because they used durable stuffs to dye and print as well as in collections of their work kept in several archives which offer accurate insights into how they worked. Barron and Larcher were part of the English revival of hand block printing that followed the second Post Impressionist Exhibition in 1912, organised by the artist and critic Roger Fry. There was a powerful resurgence of activity in the British Arts and Crafts movement, with an emphasis on traditional modes of production, which led directly to the formation of the Omega Workshop community of artists by Fry and the development of several other important communities and groups of collaborative workers between the two wars and after, including Enid Marx, Paul Nash, the Footprints group, Crysede, Cresta, Susan Bosence and Yately Industries. Their printed textiles embraced the eclecticism of modernity through movements such as Vorticism, with an emphasis on movement through image and its abstraction on cloth. Barron and Larcher’s work, combining traditional production methods of hand block printing and vegetable dyeing with their avant-garde designs, attracted substantial commissions from a range of wealthy and influential clients. Although their strict adherence to traditional handmade production methods limited the volume of their output, it did not diminish the range or diversity of their designs. The significance of their work in contemporary art was recognised by critics like Roger Fry who commented in Vogue (1926) that ‘something of the native grain survives in these stuffs.. some vital quality that has not been pressed and stamped and tortured.’ At a recent reading there were a couple of women knitting in the audience as I read. It was wonderful. I read one of my poems ‘Hand Knits’ to them as a sort of offering. The faint dolphin clicks of the needles resonated with the sound of my own voice. What more could I ask - except for it to be repeated! Bibliography Anscombe, I., A Woman’s Touch, Women In Design From 1860 To The Present Day, Virago, 1984. Barron, Phyllis, ‘My Life as a Block Printer’, unpublished transcript taken by Heather Tanner of a talk given at Dartington, April 1964. Barron, Phyllis,The Block Printing Of Cover Paper, Dryad Handicrafts, Leicester, 1928. Bosence, S., Hand Block Printing & Resist Dyeing, David & Charles, 1985 Coatts, M., A Weaver’s Life, Ethel Mairet 1872 - 1952, Crafts Study Centre, Bath, 1983. Fry, R., in Vogue, 1926 Greensted, M., Arts and Crafts Movement in the Cotswolds, Sutton Publishing, 1993. Harrod, T., The Crafts in Britain in the 20th Century, Yale University Press, 1999 Jackson, L., 20th Century Pattern Design: Textile & Wallpaper Pioneers, Mitchell Beazley, 2002. McCarthy, F., William Morris, A Life for Our Time, Faber & Faber, 1994. Powers, A., Modern Block Printed Textiles, Walker Books, 1992. Roscoe, B., 'The Biggest And Simplest Results', essay on the commission of Girton College, Cambridge, in Crafts No 144, Jan - Feb, 1997. Seaby, W. A., Colour Printing With Linoleum And Wood Blocks, Dryad Handicrafts, Leicester, 1928. Tanner, R., What I Believe: Lectures and other Writing, Crafts Study Centre, 1989. Weir, J., 'Cytology and the Strawberry Plant in the Poetry of Marianne Moore', Unpublished essay, 2004. |