Alle Gestaltungsarbeit auf diesem Aufstellungsort ist copyright Kirstin Ilse 2011, alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Tout le dessin-modèle sur cet emplacement est copyright Kirstin Ilse 2011, tous droits réservés.

All artwork on this site is copyright Kirstin Ilse 2011, all rights reserved.

Statement:

I have a burning need to find meaning, form and light in the fluid and volatile medium of protein dyes in silk.

From time to time, peoples have perished. Rapture, or the imagination of catastrophe gives surviving people a joyful sense of renewal and belief in the endurance of immortal legacy. This is the topic of my later series.

Topics for me are sublimated in the medium.

I chose this process, a long plotting plan to paint spontaneously in each picture, as a style of addressing culture. The more fast paced, internet hewn, mass produced duplicated the artifacts and imagery of life have become; the more necessary it is that I do this. It is an ancient, low-tech, slow but labor-intensive art. Each brush stroke bears the imprint of science, how the atmosphere convenes with the artifact. These pictures take on average eight months to create. The area has been flooded with every color of the palette, layer by layer of brushed in and marked in dye. A deeper weave will shine many colors out under different lighting, because some colors rest at different layers on the silk.

I use large, mop quill brushes that can be loaded with more than one color. The silk is stretched across wooden bars like a canvas painter uses. Squeeze bottles are used to draw resist lines, called gutta serti technique.

When the paintbrush is down, the painting needs to set. In time, it is steamed for many hours, causing the color to go inside the threads (osmosis). The colors bloom. The surface is then washed off, leaving only the color that shines out from each thread. A woven silk thread is made up of many threads; each is an unwound cocoon spanning about a mile long.

Kirstin Ilse: Fire on Silk

Steam set dye painting on silk with pastes, resists, discharge, marking and washes