Collect Week: Michelle House - Celebrating What Remains
“My mother was always sewing: sewing curtains, sewing clothes,” says textile artist Michelle House, known for her vibrant, brightly coloured screen prints. “The sewing machine was always on the table. She’d be sort of kneeling on the carpet, pinning linings on curtains or doing something. So I learned from her.” The influence of House’s mother is such that House created Celebrating What Remains – (What You Stole from Me), a poignant work that reflects on her mother, who died last April, to be shown at Collect Open in late February.
House’s mother was a peripatetic hairdresser, with three children, elderly parents to care for, and a husband working nights “She was very busy woman, but I don't think my parents ever bought curtains in 65 years of marriage,” House says. She also made clothes for herself and her children. That interest in sewing, combined with her mother’s habit of keeping odd scraps of material and her father’s similar attitude to metal, rubbed off on House, though she didn’t immediately see textile as a possible career.
After a Fine Arts Foundation at Southampton, where House didn’t touch textiles, she went onto Goldsmiths, concentrating on large collages, before experimenting with print in her second year. “Up until then, I was a bit lost,” she said. “I’d always really loved colour. When I got to Goldsmiths, no one else was doing it around me, and I felt like it wasn't allowed. It wasn’t serious.” Fortunately, the extremely impressive teaching body, including Mary Restiaux, Michael Brennan Wood, Shirley Craven, Sally Grieves, and Janice Jeffries, and visiting lecturers like Lois Walpole and Alice Kettle, encouraged House’s development.
That included an interest in architecture. “I would go and sit on the curb of a building site in Canary Wharf with my drawing board and start drawing all the buildings and the structures and builders wandering past looking at me,” House says. “I took loads of photographs. My degree show was a time-based piece about public and private space. It was connected to my family home and the things that I felt important and had a connection to.” That connection to home has influenced her work for Collect Open.
After graduating in 1992 as a recipient of a Crafts Council Setting-Up Grant, she set up a studio, printing in her bedroom and working part-time in the Crafts Council Gallery shop. “The main thing for me was not making money,” House says. “It was just to do my work.” She was soon selected by Contemporary Applied Arts (CAA), a gallery and organisation that supports British artists, and then Peta Levi of Design Nation, which also champions British designers, before joining and exhibiting with The 62 Group of Textile Artists. With her work recognised by Sir Nicholas Goodison, she undertook several large commissions for The British Academy’s Art Committee. She became a teacher, and then a full-time mother.
Today House specialises in hand-printed and painted, bold, abstract, textile artworks with colour at their core. She employs a mix of screen printing, photography, hand-cut stencils and painting; creating layers of colour on combinations of linens and natural fabrics. Her juxtapositions of textures reflect and absorb light, affecting how the colour is seen. In some pieces she can use as many as 22 individually mixed colours and each colour can take an hour to mix.
House retains her earlier interest in photography, responding to the graphic imagery and pattern in architecture, shadows, patterns, and marks on surfaces that she sees in the environment. She plays with the scale of photographs, enlarging elements or using fragments in her compositions. “I take a lot of photographs,” she says. “They can be architectural, but they might be a pattern, or something I see on my walk. I’m always translating it into print in my head; I do little thumbnail sketches in the sketchbook, but often I work digitally. I take my photographs into Photoshop, take them into Illustrator, and then use Illustrator to design the compositions.”
She transfers the enlarged photographs on to silk screens, then crops and edits them. She builds up the composition as if creating a collage or painting. “I use the image on the screen as a way of mark-making on to my textiles. The marks form a relationship with the layers of bold flat colourful shapes in an abstract way. I might have a screen that's got a whole texture or a pattern from something, but I rarely use the whole screen as it is.” She reuses small elements in different works, but they are unrecognisable in the wall hangings and stretched textile works that she produces.
Her work in Collect Open is a direct reflection on her mother, who sadly developed Alzheimer’s more than 13 years ago. House started working on the project over four years ago, but has changed it considerably as it has developed. It’s not a sad piece about degeneration, but a more a celebration of her mother. “I’d written a whole list of things I could remember that my mum had made, because she didn’t appreciate her own talent,” House says. “So it’s almost a ‘thank you’. I’ve got those memories; she didn't have those memories of who she was.”
House has used her process of selecting elements of an object in this new work, based on over 450 photographs. “I was photographing things from mum’s sewing cabinets,” she says. “I like her collection of knitting needles and buttons and tape measures and lots of dress patterns. Then I found a little scrap paper on which she’d written instructions to herself. Obviously she was knitting something, and it was instructions of the next step. So I took photographs. I’m just inspired by all those objects.”
She has used them in three works. The largest, wall-hung textile 2 metres by 90 cm combines visual references to the honeymoon suit her mother made and also to a Henry VII outfit her mother made for her brother at his primary school. The various abstracted images compose the piece. Her framed work At Least We Have Neil Diamond, which is printed and has needlepoint, reflects on her mother’s enjoyment of needlepoint. The format is based on a brooch she created for CAA’s Platinum Jubilee exhibition. “I used some offcuts from my prints along with needlepoint and attached them to wooden geometric shaped cutouts; these shapes floated over a one-off print. The Neil Diamond piece is a scaled up version of that idea.” It also references the Neil Diamond song “Sweet Caroline,” which was a family favourite. “We used to dance around the kitchen table to ‘Sweet Caroline,’” House says. It was also poignantly the music her family played to her mother during her illness. “It was,” House says, “her happy place.”
The references are very personal ones to objects or events, but noticeably there are no photographs of her mother. “I haven’t shared any photographs because she can't say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and I feel that people should always ask someone before doing that,” House says. “I’m a very private person. I tend not to show, to share anything private online. It’s only about my work. So it was a big decision to do this because it’s emotional, and I’ve never shared it.”
She continues: “I see this work for Collect as the start of a new body of work; I have more to create with plenty of ideas. Following this project on my mum will be one related to my father, who cut down my print table and adapted the angle iron frame with his metal working skills.”
Written by Corinne Julius
-
Further Information:
Michelle House: Crafts Council: Collect
-
Image Credits:
Lead Image, Video and Images 3, 7 and 9: Alun Callender
Images 2 and 6: Todd White Art Photography
Images 4, 5, and 8: Crafts Council