Sustained Investigation #13

Artist's Statement:

Jillian Wight

Medsker

AP Art and Design 

15 March 2023

With this piece, my goal was to add some more experimentation with texture to my portfolio.  I’ve wanted to try out needlepoint for a while, and I had a lot of fun creating this piece.  Needlepointing and quilting are both traditionally female-dominated art forms, and were for a long time even called “crafts.”  I wanted to play off my material’s maternal qualities with my subject matter, so I decided to depict a young girl running wildly through the yard with grass-stained knees.  I used a childish style and color palette.  

I think that the contained, meticulous nature of the needlepoint represents the responsibilities of motherhood and creates a little tension with the subject of childhood innocence.  Though the piece is largely needlepoint, I filled in the sky and grass with scraps of fabric.  The sky is made of some tie-dye bed sheets I made at a birthday party when I was younger.  The grass is made of sun-printed fabric from a kit that I made with my mom when I was much younger.  I thought these connections added something a little more personal to the piece and reflected my own memories of childhood and my mom.  I also grass stained the subject's knees with real grass from my yard!  

This piece was definitely a challenge, as I don't have much experience with needlepoint.  It took me a really long time, but I’m really happy with the result.  I think something that I would do differently going forward is doing a little more research into different types of stitches to add a little more variation and dimension to the piece.  I took a simpler approach to this one, and while I like that the lines of thread almost look like scribbled marker strokes, I think I could have taken the piece to the next level.  Another thing I had a hard time with was adding shadows to my work.  Since I’m doing the drawing portfolio, my goal has been to add more dark darks and light lights to my pieces.  Though I made sure to add dramatic shadows to the legs of this figure and to the grass below, I don't think I chose a thread with enough richness of color.  This piece is pretty gray, and I’m thinking about adding some paint to revise it.  I do like the gradients in the grass fabric which add a little depth.  I also like the perspective I chose for the piece, as I really wanted to emphasize a sort of out-of-control look, as well as the grass-stained knees as a symbol of freedom and a carefree nature.

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