Lighten & Lyrical

Collaboration with Shetland based artist and textile designer Barbara Ridland. Part of Shetland International Textile Festival 2013.

I worked alongside Barbara to help her realise the printmaking potential in her work. We setup a DIY screenprint studio in Barbara’s existing knitwear studio to experiment with different methods to transfer the knitwear to print - including how existing knitwear can be scanned or photographed, then processed before being output to film to expose to the screen.

Knitting studio come DIY print studio setup...

... help from Harriet! Making sure we were doing it right :D

We also experimented by exposing a piece of knitwear directly to the screen which gave great results. Both methods were used in the final work.

Exposing knitwear directly to the screen

During the project I advised how one of the semi-transparent pieces could have an interactive element, that when someone was in close proximity to the object, a light would be activated and start pulsing at different speeds - almost like a lighthouse or a beacon in the sea. I used Arduino with a motion sensor and an LED within one of the pieces which made it subtly glow when someone was nearby.

Arduino was concealed in an adapted switch box, with motion sensor on the front

First test with blue LED - before changing to white LED

Final Photography: Chloe Tallack
(Process Snaps by Jono)