Tuesday, April 26, 2011

In the making. What is felt II

We choose a lot of things spontaneously in our lives, only later realizing the meanings of the processes. I had been a dancer for 10 years in my life and I quit dancing as I started my psychology studies. I always longed for dance and just recently realized that perhaps felt in some way has become a compensation for dancing . It’s not me who is dancing now but my hands make the wool and other fibers dance, move, entangle, interlock. If one could film this process with a macro camera, we would see a dance of these migrating fibers. Even my finished pieces have movement encoded in them, they are flowing, organic, and never static.

It’s my quote from the article that was written about me and my work in Dutch magazine about felt VILT Kontakt

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Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Workshops

When I came back from the Netherlands I found a CD waiting for me in the post. Agostina’s (Italian Felt Academy) husband Gosta Zwilling was taking photos during the workshop and sent them to me as well. It was really interesting to see these photos after some time has passed after the workshop in Italy ended. There is always something you see and realize in the moment it is happening, and always something else that comes to your perception when the time passes.

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I pay a lot of attention to working on samples during my workshops. And here are some of the samples the participants made in Italy. Their concept for the workshop was combining archaic spirit of the woman using raw fleece with modern, subtle femininity using tactile surfaces from various fabrics.

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The workshop in the Netherlands was taking place in a perfect studio of Truus Huijbregts. It is always more inspiring to work in the surroundings like these and create a healthy environment for creativity in a relaxed way without the stress  that is no good at all during such workshops.

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The students made lot’s of beautiful and promising samples, as well as dresses, but I didn’t take any more descent photos to be posted. One of the reasons is that after the workshop the dresses are still quite wet and the process of working with textures is not finally finished, thus I never get to see them in a full beauty, but knowing the technique and what it gives, I always know, what the students will discover when they go home with their dresses and finish them 100%.
Workshop in Belgium gave me an opportunity to meet one Lithuanian woman living in Belgium and also making felt. We had quite a lot of conversations about creativity and felt making during the workshop and the time after as Sigita accompanied me on the trips to Antwerpen where we also visited MOMU – Mode Museum with an exhibition on knitwear in fashion “Unravel”.  And I felt really happy when she sent me a photo of a dress she made straight after returning from my workshop, inspired by what we did and talked during the workshop and the knitting exhibition we saw. When I see something like that, I understand that my student got the point (which is not always easy, especially for people who are used to working just inside the box), and that my teaching is not just a mere play of techniques, it makes people create using the language I teach. And that is my goal as a teacher.


P.S. You can always check my schedule of workshops on my blog which should be updated soon with more workshops in Autumn, 2011.

Meeting and teaching

When I started something like a workshop tour in Europe this March (which started in Italy at Italian Felt Academy), I never imagined what it would bring to myself. Except of the joy or elation that one feels when the students are capable of opening up, setting themselves free and letting the creativity flow; and when the students are advanced and you don’t have to explain ordinary technical things too much, then something special starts in the class, which I could call a play of higher substances.

After returning from a very special trip to the Netherlands and then Belgium, I’ve been thinking a lot of how much this traveling has given to me. Special people, meetings, lot’s of conversations, places, mysterious coincidences, deja-vu, all the feelings that help you to understand where and why you are and where you are going or why you are doing the things that you do.

 

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 a card that one of my students gave to me after the workshop: “a whole new world has opened up”. I could say the same about me…

Sunday, April 3, 2011

In the making: what is felt. I

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…the process of felting is like a witch craft. Wool, silk, flax, all the natural fibers and water and you get a whole that puts a spell on the observer. Archaic codes that we recognize in our collective subconsiousness…
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….vėlimo procesas – lyg kerėjimai. Vilna, šilkas, linas, visi natūralūs pluoštai ir vanduo – sukuriama visuma, kuri užburia stebintįjį. Archajiški kodai, atpažįstami mūsų kolektyvinėje pasąmonėje…

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