Chelsea Swan

I wanted to try to find some white night dresses in charity shops, cote them in cyanotype and print images, my drawings and text, on acetate to impress on them.

I have wanted to use cyanotype for a while on fabrics to imprint objects that are precious to me or things I have drawn and then embroider over them. When I went to salford art gallery recently they had an exhibition on of various artists from Islington mill and one of them had used cyanotype on a patchwork dress. I then saw a Tik Tok of a girl using cyanotype on an old white dress using flowers and leaves.

As I don’t like to buy anything new or add to the consumption pile I though if I saw any old nightdresses in the charity shops they would be perfect. They feed into my desire to reuse found female ephemera, and they are also thing and delicate and have an ethereal, uncanny, soft appearance. I also like that they are part of the intimate life of being a woman, they are one of those hidden items, only seen by those closest to us or in out most vulnerable moments. Having been unwell for a while now I am definitely feeling the connection to vulnerability and intimate moments and trust and the unfairness of being a woman. I also think they remind me of when I volunteered at care homes and the delicate, frail, forgotten about old women in there who had to let people in to their most sensitive worlds. All that memory and experience just ignored and displaced.

There might be some issues with transferring images as I have not used cyanotype before. I also want to make sure that the images I create are related to the thoughts that the nightdresses bring up.

Also – strangely – as this is all getting a bit eerie now I think about it – I found this artist while looking up using cyanotype on dresses who actually prints the dresses, as opposed to printing on the dresses, and she is inspired by the Angel in the House, the poem that weedles its way into the mind of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, as I have spoken of in earlier blogs.

angels in the house

I also found this blog where an artist is experimenting with cyanotype and embroidery and mark making.

https://handstories.typepad.com/blog/page/3

and this photographer who prints their images on fabric with cyanotype

https://texasphoto.org/member-spotlight-annie-lopez

and also this artist who has done something closer to what it is I want to do.

https://booklike.blogspot.com/2014/02/cyan-silhouettes.html

Next steps while I am sourcing dresses I want to do some testers on fabrics of various translucencies, as I also have an idea of leaning into the ethereal and ghostly aspects and having layers of fabrics printed and embroidered, I like the idea of history and experiences and obscurities. So this could become two things really.