Jennifer Cantwell lives and works in Forres, Moray. Jennifer is one of four makers who is taking part in the Making Progress 2011 – a HI-Arts mentoring project for mid career makers as part of the HI-Arts Craft Development programme . Jennifer’s exhibition ‘Birdsong’ opens this weekend at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery and then runs from 13 August – 10 September 2011.

Here Jennifer talks about her background and work:

‘I’m a mid career maker, I work in textiles and have a design practice called Sporran Nation, I also work across mediums in a more experimental way using traditional hand skills combined with unrelated materials and methods. For the HI-Arts Spotlight show I’ve been working with knitting, sound processing software and mobile phone technology. The work I’ve made looks at issues of immigration, emigration, identity and belonging’.

‘The patterns on the birdboxes are based on the soundfiles of birdsongs and ambient sound recorded in specific locations. I worked with sound designer Dave Martin to record a sonic snapshot of each area. The sounds were processed using Logic Pro music software and I worked with the soundwaves, the midi templates and the velocity peaks visually, blowing them up, shrinking them, deconstructing and reconstructing them and using the colours of the midi templates and the velocities. With a nod to the far northern knitters I worked with stranded knitting but adapted the designs for a 24stitch repeat punchcard knitting machine, wanting to use a more industrial process but not an automated process, I wanted to keep the hand of the maker obvious, a mix of human and machine’.

‘The patterns are site specific, a visual representation of the sounds of the area, a tag, an identifier, like a football strip or a school uniform, they are representative of each place on a minute, mundane and daily level. The idea evolved just after I’d moved to Moray and after a random chat about birds having regional accents, I was reading about fisherman’s ganseys from the Moray Firth at the time and was hearing lots of Doric being spoken by my partner’s family. I started thinking about accents and language and how language travels and spreads, about regional differences in the spoken word and how that also happens in textiles, how each area has its own brand of lacemaking, embroidery and knitting, about how stitches literally traveled the world on the backs of people and patterns spread from area to area. Then I thought about the concept of knitted thumbprints, a knitting pattern that could identify a country or region or individual, about how identity is measured, about homelands and belonging and movement, birds, migration and communication, about online communities and about how data spreads in the virtual world and is used to track movement, information and location’.

‘Lots to think about… what came out of it was… the idea of visually branding an area by taking something ambient and completely natural from it i.e. birdsong and analyzing it and turning it into a product using mechanisation and technology, then presenting it as a physical object, a sound piece and a geotagged link to an online visual + audio map via a barcode and a smartphone, taking the exhibition out of the gallery and into the virtual world’.

‘The process involved field time recording the birds and the sounds of 4 different areas;

• Forres 10am Tuesday – house sparrows in the park, children in the playground
• Ullapool 5pm Saturday – seagulls and the 5 o’clock ferry
• Kelburn 6pm Sunday – birds in the woods
• Glenuig 3pm Thursday – sheep, birds and the Lochailort post office chicken

My thanks to Dave Martin, Pamela Conacher, Deirdre Nelson, Catherine Weir and Cathy, Dean and Lucy at the Highland Exhibitions Unit for all their help’.

Find out more about Jennifer and her work by visiting her website: www.jennifercantwell.co.uk

Find out more about Making Progress 2011, Jennifer and the other makers who are involved in the programme here: http://hi-arts.co.uk/services/creative-development/crafts/making-progress-2011/

Funding for the HI-Arts Making Progress programme is through HIE, Creative Scotland, Rural Innovation Fund.

Details:
Jennifer Cantwell – Birdsong
Making Progress Spotlight Exhibition
13 August – 10 September 2011
Inverness Museum and Art Gallery
Castle Wynd
Inverness
IV2 3EB

Source: HI-Arts Craft Development