I am fascinated by doilies. I still remember the doilies on my parents' dressing and bedside tables, sqashed under a sheet of glass which I longed to take off so I could touch them. Especially the ones on the dressing table, a large round one in the middle, a smaller oval one on each side, featuring a lacy image of the cathedral in Cologne.
Doilies are pretty much obsolete now and heaps can be found in charity shops. I often get seduced into buying - I've got some heavily beaded ones, quite unusual. A friend sent me a really beautiful one with lots of different colours from New Zealand.
I also like felting them with merino wool - as the wool shrinks, the lacy structure of the doily gets trapped and bits appear on the surface like fossils.
There are some modern takes on the doily - cut-out of thick felt in deep colours (gallery shops, e.g. De La Warr Pavilion Bexhill), Ray Beldner (cut out and sewn banknotes), Hildur Bjarnadottir (crochet skulls).
Yes I like the way the doily is partly submerged in the felt with only some areas of it rising above the surface, a bit like the tops of partly submerged rocks, or islands rising out of the sea. And the whole thing undergoes a process of transformation through which it becomes and means something entirely different.
ReplyDeleteI like how you reuse textiles having belonged to members of your family or bought in charity shops.
ReplyDeleteA statistic read in the Independent:
'one hundred million bin liners full of 'textile waste' (mostly discarded clothes) go into landfill in Britain every year'.
Hard to believe, but it must be true ...