Pin Bone • Macro Weave
Taking inspiration from architecture, fashion, and her travels, Ealish Wilson’s work is rooted in materiality. Her textile designs are manipulated using traditional techniques such as pleating and smocking; these are foundations of her pieces. Ealish’s textiles are created through photography, painting and print. The fabrics are digitally printed and meticulously hand manipulated.
For her piece Pin Bone, Ealish visited the Archive at Sunny Bank Mills. The Mills, known for their suiting, led her to research suits and their construction, discovering it takes over 5000 stitches to create a handmade suit. Reading the Mills’ Archive blog, Ealish found that herringbone* patterns were woven at the Mills for suiting. Combining these parameters, she designed a herringbone textile from a photograph of sewing pins. Digitally manipulating her image to create a herringbone pattern, printing it onto a twill fabric and hand smocking over five thousand stitches to create the work.
Ealish’s work is often influenced by images of pattern, particularly in repeating forms. Macro Weave is a pattern development of Pin Bone. Whilst researching the Sunny Bank Mills Online Archive, Ealish started to look at weave structures, zooming in on the construction of a cloth and the patterns within the weave. Taking these forms and playing with different versions of smocking, Ealish chose the lattice technique manipulating the fabric to give the appearance of a woven structure.
*Herringbone is a V-shaped zig zag pattern that is usually made from tweed/twill fabric. The herringbone pattern dates to the Roman Empire, where it was used in road paving systems, and in the textiles and jewellery of ancient Egyptian elite. Its name quite literally derives from the bones of a herring fish, which it closely resembles.
(Sunny Bank Mills Archive Blog May 8th 2017)
