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“My aim is to produce stylish products with colour combinations that are not always very fashionable,” Michelle explains. The orders started coming in and now she produces scarves in most of the popular Australian football team colours. The football scarves came about when she was asked by a friend to make a cotton scarf in her favourite team colours. It is complicated and slow going but in good demand.
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For her patterned scarves, she uses vintage patterns dating from the 1800’s. Then there is the third production loom where she produces her plain-woven football scarves.įor Michelle weaving is a craft and a means to earn a regular income. The first one is her Tapestry loom, the second is an Ashford table loom where she weaves her complicated patterned scarves. “I am happy to do both, but it is important to understand the difference and not to mix it up.” When she’s not working on her tapestries, she makes woven scarves. I want to be recognised as an artist, not a weaver or needleworker.”īut Michelle is an artist as well as a crafter. I tend to enter non-textile art competitions. Fibre is just a medium, the same as paint or clay and can be used to create either craft or art. “I don’t like it when people make a distinction between fibre art and ‘real’ art. Her work can also be seen at the current Heallreaf 2 International Exhibition of Woven Tapestry in the UK. Michelle has been a finalist in several art prizes including the Port Pirie Art Prize (2016) where she was the winner, as well as the Emma Hack Art Prize 2016, and the Contemporary Art Award 2017. But a surgeon recently told me he is clearing out his store room and I can have all his old x-rays. “Those are interesting and I will work with them.
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Michelle has recently been offered a series of x-rays showing steel pins attached to a spine after a car accident, and someone offered an x-ray of her hand with a crochet hook poking through. I don’t use x-rays from people I know, but strangers contact me to offer their images, and if there is a story I will gladly accept. I’m aiming to portray a combination of their current condition and who they were before.”Įven though Michelle only work with anonymous x-rays she still insists on telling the story behind the image. They always retain a certain degree of self. “People with dementia never lose themselves completely. Even though the patients stays anonymous, Michelle aims to portray a part of their personality. It is worked in the patient’s favourite colours. The work-in-progress on her loom is based on an MRI scan from a dementia patient. It is a ‘secret window’ inviting the viewer into the core of what makes us human. She is currently working on a series called Windows based on x-rays and MRI scans.
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With lots of shading, it gets complicated and I spend lots of time figuring out how to achieve the look I want.” “It’s like building blocks – I work on one colour until the next colour overlaps then I change. Although she has an idea of where her work is going, it only really develops when she starts working. Michelle approaches her Tapestry the same way she approached her needlepoint. The effort to plan a design and to figure it all out. These days we have YouTube, but I had to learn it all from books.”īut that is exactly what Michelle finds so attractive these days – the complicated nature of Tapestry. It took my five years to complete and must have been one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. “I enrolled in a TAFE correspondence course as I couldn’t find any class-based courses in Adelaide. It irritated her to a point where she decided to learn ‘real’ Tapestry in order to demonstrate the difference.
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Michelle also found that many people referred to needlepoint and cross-stitch work as a Tapestry. Neither one of these were particularly successful. Michelle designed a few cross-stitch kits which she sold online. “Geometric designs without a graph looks terrible” she admits knowingly. I develop the picture while I stitch, making decisions about shading and colour changes as I go.” It is only with the geometric designs where Michelle design the pattern on graph paper first. “Once I have an idea I draw it directly onto the fabric. I loved the medium but could not find anything that suited my style, so I created my own.” Michelle’s designs were mostly created without a graph. “I started to design my own patterns in 2000. “I’m the only one who does anything creative.” Michelle grew up in a very uncreative house. “I used the books to teach myself cross-stitch and needlepoint. “It opened a new world to me,” Michelle recalls. Then one day while working at the public library she came upon books by Kaffe Fassett. None of the traditional art mediums stirred any passion in her. As an art student, Michelle knew that she wanted to create but she wasn’t sure which medium to use.