Jenny Blackburn PSG :: Janet Stoyel
Textile Innovator
Initially as Tutor & Student we first met 25 years ago, thereby laying a solid foundation for a future full of mutual respect and friendship. Creative Dialogues offers the opportunity for two people with a passion for embroidery and textiles to collaborate together, conjoining aesthetic values and design experience to create visual outcomes that portray an intimate marriage of the combined skills of embroidery and high tech metal materials.
Janet Stoyel
The design training I received from Jenny, so many years ago, has continued to inform my professional practice to this present day, and it is a constant source of amazement to look back in time and to realise many of my contemporary design decisions may be traced back to my City & Guilds Embroidery training with Jenny.
A BA (Hons) in Constructed Textiles, UCE and a Master of Philosophy, RCA led me down an environmental route whereby the materials I currently design and manufacture use no dyes, chemicals or wet processes in their production and a further step towards total recyclability, no extraneous stitch. Instead, CO2 Photon Laser and Ultrasound technology is utilised to create patinated colours, integral patterns and burnished surface effects on a wide variety of metal, natural and synthetic base materials. These material adventures are purchased by Architects, Interior Specifiers and Fashion Designers.
It is a delight therefore to collaborate with Jenny on a project whereby her personal stitching plays such an integral aspect of a collaborative design solution, I am sure this will open up a whole new world of collaborative opportunity that we may explore together for years to come.
Jenny Blackburn
Having worked together as tutor and student years ago, a long lasting professional and personal friendship exists. For many years in my work I have been using the fabric off cuts that Janet saves, and now Creative Dialogues has afforded the opportunity for me to work with her woven metal fabrics to produce a collaborative piece. Initial discussions centred on materials and stitch; how we could investigate them in conjunction with a high tech woven metal and a complementary natural linen fabric, and how we could incorporate traditional stitch, thereby achieving a blend of old and new techniques.
Material and stitch informed our outcome and we decided to make a hanging triptych that incorporated woven copper and phosphor bronze on a complementary dun coloured linen ground while exploring appliqué; drawn thread and Hardanger embroidery techniques. Mock up ideas in paper informed the basic design and provided solutions for scale and pattern location before final decisions materialised.
In times of stress during her degree course Janet used to send me postcards saying
“B****y H*** it’s all your fault”.
I now wonder if we will both be saying this in the future?
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