WEEK 2 - CONCEPT RESEARCH
On my second week, I was still waiting on my raw wool from James to arrive, as it was my family who were picking it up for me whilst they were on holiday. I started to look at my landscape paintings I had done for my context, and how they could be pushed further into more interesting ways as I felt they were not progressing. I had the idea of using collage to make more contemporary imagery, cutting up my images and painting into strips and placing them into my sketchbook. This allowed me to pick out specific colours and patterns that interesting me and place them into different layouts, with contrasting colours and textures. It was successful as the end results gave a more contemporary and unique look, more than the paintings did. I continued this week to create different collages ranging in colours, patterns and directions.
During this week I started to further research into my wool with the story behind using it and its importance. Due to the wool that I will be processing being from the blackface sheep, I began looking into Scottish sheep farming, its history and where it is currently at today. During this I came across information on the recent decline in wools value and price, with it dropping from 14 pounds per kg down to just under 30p per kg. I investigated news articles such as the BBC that have spoken to farmers directly about how it is not worth selling anymore, with some farmers storing and even burning the wool. It has been stated many times that it costs more to sheer the sheep than to sell its wool. The reason or this has been covid and the rise of fast fashion and synthetic fibres. I started looking into the idea of wool traceability, learning of its importance in being able to produce wool that can be ethically and sustainably traced right back to the farm it came from. I found a very interesting article called ‘The golden hoof’, which discussed the lack of traceability within British wool, a company that receives wool from framers all over Britain and puts it onto the market. This article helped me understand how important it is for materials especially within wool products to be traceable, so that farmers can have the recognition they deserve. I arranged a phone call with James who provided me with the wool as I wanted to learn as much about the wools tracible background as possible. I learned some very useful information and placed a typed-out overview of our conversation.
This week has been very interesting to me, and I feel very inspired due to finding out importance within traceability and the decrease in value of wool, it gave a lot of meaning to my projects overall theme and the issues it will be tackling. Next week I will be receiving my wool. It will be centred around my first-hand experience of processing it, with cleaning, brushing and hopefully transforming it into yarn. Whilst doing this, I will be researching online to find other people’s experiences within spinning Blackface yarn to help aid my processing experience.