Visual Arts II
2025 Visual Arts II Workshop with Elizabeth Ives
A Moment in Time and Space: Exploring Star Island Through Textile Arts
Colors found in nature vary depending on the location, time of year, and seasonal conditions. They can be further modified by water, pH, and chemical modifiers like tannic acid. Creating colors from a specific time and location preserves a memory of that moment that cannot be replicated even if you return to the same place at the same time another year.
To take advantage of these unique properties of plants we will employ 2 techniques to create a unique patchwork fabric. We will work with solar printing and eco printing on fabric. This is a quick process that creates unique prints in a single session. The last day will be dedicated to bringing it all together to create a patchwork fabric or a string of prayer flags.
Solar Printing on Fabric
- We will collect natural materials including sticks, shells, small rocks, leaves and seaweed. They will be used on prepared fabric to create interesting negative prints.
- We will be using some eco-friendly processing liquid for this purpose and pre-hemmed silk scarves or cotton squares.
Eco – Printing on Fabric
- We will collect flexible natural materials which will be placed upon long pre-hemmed silk or cotton scarves. These will be rolled tightly and tied with twine before placing them in a steamer to process for 1 hour. Once removed and dried, we will unroll them, remove the natural materials, and reveal a positive print of the material.
Making A Prayer Flag String
- Using ribbon and simple sewing we will use the solar and eco-printed cloths to create a long prayer flag garland.
- If there are materials left, and students have time/inclination they can make more print
Liz Ives is a textile artist living and working in Central Massachusetts. She has a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in textile arts and an MA in history from Villanova University with a focus on material culture. She believes that learning about material culture, the things created and used in daily life, can teach us about the past and inform the present. Textiles are one of the most important “material” items humans use every day in a variety of ways. They serve as a gateway to examine art, culture, and history.
Liz serves as the Registrar & teacher at New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill, where she is passionate about making art and arts education available to everyone. As a textile arts teacher with 25 years of experience in all types of education, from college lectures to private mentorship, Liz believes firmly that anyone can do art if they have a desire to try.
In her own body of work she focuses on the intersection of time and place as seen through the lense of textiles, with a focus on the natural world and our interactions with it. She uses natural dyes, textile-printing, embroidery, sewing, quilting, and a variety of textile techniques to explore these larger ideas. She is currently working with multimedia sculptures that explore a fictional near-future world where the human impact on our planet has taken on a life of its own. These sculptures incorporate natural and manmade objects assembled with traditional textile techniques like embroidery to create a fictional botanic specimen.
Liz is also beginning a new series of work that focuses on our place in the natural world in both space and time by obtaining natural colors from specific locations and seasons. These naturally dyed and printed samples are assembled into larger textile works to tell a story of a specific place at a specific point in time.
Visit Elizabeth Ives’s Website Here
What to bring or wear:
The Textile Workshop has a limit of 12 people (to sign up on island) and there will be a $35.00 materials fee for each participant to be paid to the instructor (cash).
Examples of Elizabeth's work:
