Creation of Living Bricks: A 3-D Work

 On Christmas day 2022 a pipe froze flooding our newly remodeled condominium, leaving us homeless. I was devastated. Yet one week later on New Year’s Day as I walked along Church Street in historic Beaufort, South Carolina I came upon an old brick wall. It was alive with moss, lichen and tiny ferns, one brick so different from the next. I decided to make a fabric brick wall. I discovered some wooden jewelry/treasure boxes on line that were the size of bricks. I then covered the boxes in batting and hand dyed and painted fabrics. Embellishing each brick was fun using nylon netting, Tyvek, wool roving, cheesecloth with lots of stitching with embroidery floss. I then played with arranging the bricks to form the wall. 

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Layers of Meaning Imbue Barbara Schulman's 'Keeper of Memories'

Keeper of Memories

26” x 25”

Quilted on a painted 1897 crazy quilt, by the artist's maternal grandmother. Machine stitched, with vintage fabric.

Keeper of Memories by Barbara Schulman

Printing with Ink and Paint Textured Thermofaxes

In my last post I shared a method that I use to create thermofaxes for my textured backgrounds. Now it’s time to print some fabric with my altered ink and paint texture thermofax! Below is the thermofax image used to create the textures for an ArtCloth piece called Moon Dance.

After masking out areas that I wanted to remain free of color with freezer paper, I used opaque textile paint mixed to match the purple background (tone on tone).

Then after masking the newly printed purple background and figure, I did the second printing in yellow textile paint for the moon.

And finally after some hand painting, stamping and beading below is Moon Dance finished.

Moon Dance, 60x40”.

Materials; MX dyes, discharge, fabric paint, and glass beads on Fuji silk broadcloth.

Hand dyed, discharged, thermofax screened, hand printed, hand painted and beaded.

It is enthralling to watch a piece of cloth transformed from flat plane to a luminous field of dimension with this technique!