Textiles Specialism- St Ignatius Church Project

For my specialism I have chosen textiles focusing on fashion as an output. The brief required for us to choose a location where we had to produce a whole series of investigative drawings and photographs, the location I chose is my family church, St Ignatius Parish Church Wishaw.

I thought it was interesting to choose a location that perhaps we visit often but take for granted, and within spending an hour walking round taking the following photographs I had discovered hundreds of things I had never noticed over the last 18 years.

An outside viewpoint of the church capturing its silhouette.

This image (above) is of a vent on the window sill, but i found it wonderful the amount of intricate detail we take for granted.

Carpet in the confession boxes.
Inside the confessional box there was this very old carpet which had been left and not updated during the refurbishment, something which I could defiantly later develop in to material of some sort.

Stained glass paintings in the Baptistery.
Stained glass painting is something I really love and these paintings all ranged in scale but included the most intricate details, the image below is a tini round window, definitely my favorite window in the Chapel and it would be covered with the palm of my hand.

Also during my time exploring the church I was able to visit the bell tower with the help of Bill Woods, a truly terrifying journey up a very wobbly and very old ladder. Although the result was this fantastic photo below, the bell being something very few members of the church ever get to see. Thanks again Bill!

During my time spent inside the church and from working from the photographs I created Ten A1 & A2 drawings, and a whole sketchbook (roughly 200 pages) of developments to textile samples and a final outcome- although I came out with four and creates these as you will see further on.

These were a couple of drawings I created whilst in the church exploring some of the shapes I found on one of the altars.

I then thought of mimicking the idea of vestments but as a fashion output rather that for a priest, a sort of shawl shown below was one of my original ideas.


During my time spent at the church I noticed the amount or older people at the morning mass and this led me to examine them as I had done with my "People of Paris" it was then I came across the idea of creating head scarfs as well as some sort of vestment or dress.

The head scarfs were made via a heat discharge paper, I firstly cut the detail designs I had drew earlier (about 60 different shapes) and then pressed these on the satin leaving the most wonderful patterns, although rather subtle at the same time. I used a whole range of colours to mirror the colours of the stained glass windows.





The Scarf could also be worn as a neck scarf (above). It was this flexibility between neck scarf and head scarf I decided to create a sort of Snood (scarf & hood ). For these I decided to use bright bold colours to continue the colours of the stained glass windows.

After some tie dying I decided to make my vestment out of stripes of tie dyed cotton and the heat pressed patterned satin I had create. The end result is shown below.










After this I felt like exploring the bold colours of the stained glass. As the stained glass in the church was surrounded with lead I decided to explore metal as an output. In my first semester I had used aluminium sheets with a rainbow flash through them for my jewelry piece, and as a common idea of mine is to burn things I decided to see what would happen to it if I blow torched it, the heat resulted in making the metal mailable and much easier to sculpt, so i decided to create a stained glass dress, inspired by the wonderful colours of the windows and lead surrounding. These images following are of the dress and collar.












Friday is my final hand in exam for first year......cant believe thats my first year over already. Ive loved every minuite of the last year and never want to leave. Already soo excited for second year and all the new techniques to be learned, will be completly lost over the summer without projects to be completed so guess I will have to set my own. So wish me luck for Friday and thanks for following my work over the past year.