niamhmcgall-embroidery

[niamhmcgall-embroidery]

so many articles about Fast Fashion, not enough articles about what the hell is happening to the quality of clothes

Like okay. People own more pieces of clothing nowadays and they wear them a lesser number of times before throwing them out. BUT.

Why do we pretend like this is pure vanity or careless wastefulness, rather than forced by the qualities of the clothes themselves?

The other day, I was going through boxes of old clothes in the basement in search of fabric to practice sewing on. The difference in quality of the fabrics themselves is shocking! The worn-out old jeans from twenty years ago are MUCH thicker and tougher than anything more recent. My old baby clothes are made as sturdy as my work clothes from today.

In the past couple years, I have had entire seams rip out of clothes on the first wash. That's not normal!

Polyester blend shirts that feel cozy and soft when they are new, become scratchy and rough after 20 washes or so. I am trying to avoid polyester, but it gets harder and harder; the other day i couldn't find a single pack of crew socks that was 100% cotton. SOCKS!

Also, pilling is out of control. The newest pants I bought developed pills within a single day of walking around campus with a backpack.

These companies are trying to frog-boil us but touching clothes from twenty years ago, the useless crap of today would stick out like a sore thumb...

[niamhmcgall-embroidery]

If I’m holding the hoop - right hand

But if I have a stand then either or.

Reblog for a bigger sample size

[niamhmcgall-embroidery]

‘Of Meadows and Blue Skies’ by Melody Money

‘Of Meadows and Blue Skies’ by Melody Money was a solo show at Visions Art Museum in San Diego in 2021 that now lives on the form of an online and video exhibition on the Visions website. Melody Money is a mixed media textiles artist who prides herself on attention to detail and is “motivated to take a medium that is traditionally worked on a smaller scale and expand it to a larger version” and that's evident in this show.

After Melody Money received her Fine Art degree from the University of Colorado, she went on to study prismatic colour theory at Rudolph Schaefer school of design, and this schooling in colour theory shines through throughout the show. This works’ colour pallet is almost exclusively bright warm blues, greens and yellows. Few of the pieces from this collection use colour pallets that could be described as realist. Instead, Money opts for the sort of colours that you could imagine a child choosing for a scribbled marker pen landscape that features a buttercup yellow sun in the corner of the page. It’s clear that these colours, maybe even more so them the actual pieces themselves, were designed to invoke a child-like wonder and love for nature.

Money’s piece ‘field studies’ is more reminiscent of a sample board than a fine art piece but that makes me love it even more. The piece itself is a 4 x 10 grid of textiles field studies, these studies are predominantly beaded embroideries of local wildlife like birds, butterflies and various flora. Money clearly prefers creatures that fly as, apart from one solitary fish, all the animals depicted have wings of some variety. I do not find this preference shocking as the sky is a constant reoccurring character in her work, always lovingly decorated with swirling winds. This piece being a series of studies and not one final piece makes the work seem a lot more personal to Money, I feel like I am witness to a before unseen part of her process which is both greatly endearing and gives greater context to the rest of the work in this collection.

Money uses beading throughout these pieces, most significantly in ‘Rain’ but also rather heavily in ‘Field Studies’. All the beads she has chosen have either an iridescent or metallic quality to them, this means that in the bright lights these pieces shine. In ‘Field Studies’ a trio of blue iridescent swallows pull your focus immediately and in ‘Rain’ the whole lower third of the piece is alight, shimmering with silver bead work. These circles of beads and stitch create pools and puddles of rain that reflect both the faux, stitched light in the piece as well as the real, dynamic light of the exhibition space. Melody Money has said that light is the key to making her art sing, and I couldn't agree more, the beading on both these pieces would have been significantly less impactful and appealing had she opted for dull beads; it would have completely lost the magical shifting colours of the swallows and apparent glow and movement of the pooled water. The effect that light has on these pieces and really all of Money’s work make it such a shame I was only able to view this exhibition in the form of consistently lit photos and a lower quality than I would have liked video. I do think her work is lovely but to have seen her work in reality, especially in shifting sun light, would have been something else entirely.

‘Rain’ is an incredibly dynamic work, though the art itself is ever-stationary. Money’s use of layered vertical strips of differing shades of blue draws your eyes up and down the piece. This paired with the influx of cascading, downward-pointing triangles, which colours fade from navy to white, creates a faux sense of gravity, like the fabric rain is really falling. This effect and the way that Money has achieved it is beautiful and, in my opinion, makes ‘Rain’ the most visually stimulating piece in the collection.

By comparison, ‘Chant’ at first glance is a much simpler work; the colour pallet is more muted, and it lacks the flashy beading and intricate forms of some of the other pieces. Instead, most of the piece is made up of layers of silk shaded fields. From a distance this embroidery looks simply like blended colour, but up close the individual threads are evident and reminiscent of thousands of single plants and grasses. Due to the simplicity of the design of this piece, the intensity of the silk shading shines through. The most impressive element is the scale of the piece and volume of stitches - this amount of embroidery is a feat to undertake. But what I can only assume is dozens and dozens of hours of work has absolutely payed off, as all these dense stitches create this sense of never-ending, empty fields. This feeling is accented by the inclusion by seventeen beads of small iridescent birds in flight, up over the fields into the waiting bright blue sky above. These tiny birds seem little and insignificant in scale, compared to the force of nature that surrounds them, to a degree that I can’t help but feel small alongside them.

‘Of Meadows and Blue Skies' is undeniably a love letter in fabric and thread to the ever-changing natural world that surrounds Money’s home in Colorado. Having grown up in an environment similarly surrounded by nature, Money’s work really speaks to me, it reminds me of the importance of enjoying and protecting the wild spaces around us. Money says in her artist statement “I try to shine a light on everyday moments” and for me she does that both completely and beautifully.