Must I Art in every Medium? A Powertex Story

In a nutshell, at University I studied Interdisciplinary Art and Design - that basically means, wood, metal, glass, clay sculpture, graphic design, painting and illustration, printmaking - the world was my oyster, before settling down into printmaking and illustration in my final year.

However...

My creativity sometimes wants to break free of the page, put down the pencil, the brush and broom (to the tune of Life is a Cabaret) and doing something a little more handsy. Recently someone told me about a little product called Powertex, a strange smelling liquid which you massage into fabric and it hardens like stone, leaving the fabric cast in whatever flowing shape you gave it.

'Sounds fun', I thought, 'Sounds fun'.

With Halloween around the corner (my most favourite of the holiday celebrations) I began thinking about decorating, and this Powertex kept playing on my mind, especially for costume ideas, but I simply wasn't going to find the time to recreate Guillemero Del Toro's "Mama" - yes my thought process was that fast - Halloween, costume, Mama.

But maybe I could make a spooky decoration. I just bought the original brown Powertex to see if we played well together and decided upon finishing off a shower gel that day to make a mysterious lantern with the empty bottle.

I did it!

Well, I mean I did something. I hadn't really got a vision in my head for this, just built up some cardboard struts around the bottle, cut up some old chinos and stuck it all on, kind of haphazardly to see what it could do.

Now I did recall some advice about wearing vinyl gloves... when it was already too late. So if you're reading this WEAR GLOVES! It does peel of your skin like dried PVA glue, but a bit more stubborn. Wear Gloves.

Halloween passed with not much more creativity, and although my lantern was definitely school project looking, I had enjoyed what this new medium could do, and knew I would revisit it when I was a little less pre-occupied.

A few weeks later an old college friend paid me a visit. We had bonded over quoting lines from David Bowie's song from the Labyrinth "You Remind Me Of The Babe" - seriously, our first words to each other were taking on the part of the goblin king and the goblins respectively and quite randomly reciting back and forth the lines of the song across a desk from each other. Friends for life!

Anyway, we were talking about life and art and she started talking about my problem solving engineer like brain, how I can think to make something and then somehow just work it all out and make it. I'd never really thought about it myself, but it's true, if I wanted to build say a working windmill, I could just sit down and start working out all the parts to design a working windmill - well a model of.

Now I had been thinking about the character illustrations I draw, with their angular clothes and starched fabrics, thinking that they would translate really well with this Powertex fabric sculpting glorious goop, and with a belly full of my friends inspirational words thought "Just get on with it" - a favourite phrase of my Nanan's. So I did. I drew up a side view and front view of one of the illustrations of my Aunts, the formidable Queen Zaleh, and set about making measurements and working out angles to create a body...

reuse and recycle. Cutting up an old cardboard box.

A few Pythagoras Theorem's later, everything slotted together nicely.

The Head, legs and arms I decided we're going to have to be clay - not exactly my strong point, but I'm not the worst.

Then came the outfit. What I had learnt from my lantern was how a seemingly small piece of fabric could go a long way and if you have an idea in mind for exactly how you want it to look, well you can throw every precise ripple and crease out the window if your fabric is too big or thick. The way the fabric folds and creases in my character illustrations are somewhat exaggerated, so I knew in order to replicate this I was going to have to tailor this doll.

There is an arty contradiction always running in my head between my work and the work of others that I see and love. When I see an artist's work that seems loose, lively, free flowing and yet so neatly done I wonder 'was every curve, every line, every wave placed so purposefully, or was there an element of Jackson Pollockery at play, flick the brush across the page and let the universe decide where the drops land'. A big part of me wants that wildness, but the graphic designer in me wants full control.

"Do not waver" I told myself. Fabric can wander, float and ripple in such amazing ways and I have the ability to capture it in a moment of movement, freeze it for an eternity in mid dance, blow a fan through the weave and as it floats and flaps, close my eyes and press pause - let the universe decide where lay the lines and the curves.

"No! Stay true to the illustration, true to the character" and so I continued as the tailored dress-maker.

The model was made, the pleats in place, the heat of the sun beginning to harden every crease. What was done could now not be undone, a moment of dance frozen for eternity. I was satisfied.

I left the model and sculpted parts over night to dry and then went to work bringing in the colours, before assembling it all together.

Now I probably won't model again for a while as I am determined to focus on my illustrations, but thanks to a little light bulb moment from an old friend, I have been reminded that if I want to, well, "Just get on with it!"