For our first project for our first year fine art degree, we were invited to Newstead Abbey to contribute our own art work to their "Lace Legacy" collection, based on the images we collected on our tour of the house and ground, as well as the experiences we experienced. The public will be able to see our contributions when the exhibition opens to the greater public at Newstead Abbey on October 15th.
Newstead Abbey was formerly an Augustinian priory. Which was converted to a domestic home following the Dissolution of the Monasteries, as it is now best known as the ancestral home of the poet, Lord Byron. The house is now home to the Nottingham Museum of Lace archive, where all sorts of historical pieces of lace are professionally stored to keep them preserved for years to come.
Whilst on the tour of the Abbey, I found each exhibition to be very immersive, as all of these different artefacts show us the amount of attention to detail the lace makers put into their work with different techniques, thus making them more historic and valuable. As we walked through each room, and saw that many things were preserved, it gave us the sense of being transported back in time to an important era where it was based from, and showed the social status of the people that could afford these items such as lace to be worn and shown, as it took a lot of time and expertise to make. Lace was a decorative fabric used to accent and embellish clothing and home decorative items.
A little while after our tour of the exhibitions, we walked the grounds, taking photos and collecting different types of foliage with unique textures which we could use at a later time that day to create Cyanotypes and Photograms. A temporary dark room was created by blocking out the windows, and any other sources of natural light, to create the photograms of the foliage that we had collected. In the darkroom, we used photographic dark room paper with the foliage exposed under a specific kind of light only for a few seconds, more than that would be too much.
We also created Cyanotypes, which is a similar technique to Photograms, apart from the fact that the red light is replaces with natural light. The paper that we were given for this technique was treated with a type of emulsion, we laid our foliage on top and exposed it to the sun for about 5 minutes. When we returned, we saw that the foliage has blocked out the sun, resulting in a pattern where the sun could not reach, we tried these a couple of times so we could familiar ourselves with the techniques, and hope to get better at this.
In my opinion, the process of these creations were fun as I had not done this before and they were something new to try out.
Some images of the foliage I found:
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