A Chromatic Shift

Colour is something that I’ve always been a little bit obsessed with. At university my colour palettes were loud: one of my peers once said to me ‘Jodie, that’s not a colour palette. That’s ALL of the colours!’ Learning to dye yarns was a game changer, and it opened the possibility of dip-dying my warps before winding them onto the loom. This is something which I’ve continued to do as there’s nothing I find quite so exciting whilst weaving as the unpredictable, sometimes gradual, other times abrupt shifts in colour that you get weaving with a warp which has been dip-dyed. I’m a messy artist and I work in quite a haphazard way, which I think often works to my advantage - even when I look at the massive grey splodge that I’ve just smeared onto the yarns and looks like I’ve left them alone with a 3 year old. When I wind the warp onto the loom, these accidents (or, subconscious strokes of artistic genius) always seem to surprise me.

For a while now, I’ve been thinking about textiles and their relationship to the environment. Currently, the industry is hugely damaging, and so complicated that a solution just isn’t something that’s going to happen fast. My partner who works as an academic researcher in sustainability and the environment is currently working on a fashion and textiles project. The other night he said to me ‘Do you remember I was saying that the UK consumes 1 million tonnes of new clothing per year? [yes] And that’s the equivalent weight of 400,000 Range Rovers. [yep] I worked out today that that’s a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam of Range Rovers from John O’ Groats to Lands end - and that’s taking the wiggly cycling route!’ What?!

I decided a long time ago that I had no interest in producing commercial textiles, not least because the sort of textiles that really interest me would never be commercially viable anyway. But I’ve still had moments of feeling a bit useless when it comes to looking at the environmental crisis that is staring us in the face. I’m not perfect, but I try to do what I can to limit my contribution. Which is why I decided to formulate a project to look at my working methods and to reconsider areas where I could choose something less impactful.

So, I’ve decided to say goodbye to synthetic dyes and I’ve been delving into the world of natural dyes, which are intriguing to say the least. Like me they are haphazard, and do things that I don’t expect them to do. And this is one reason I find them more interesting and exciting than their synthetic counterparts.