For my component of the project, I will recreate various 18th century textiles with watercolor. Specifically, I will focus on the seasonality of the textiles and how the patterns and materials change from season to season. Until the latter part of the 18th century, original French design ideas for textile patterns were limited. The majority of the textiles were direct either imported from India or direct copies of Indian or Chinese prints. The French developed such a taste for the Indian calico prints that the East India Company was unable to meet the demand. Thus, Indian prints started being reproduced on printed cloth in Europe. The French government initiated the production of these Indian calico prints in order to limit the amount of textile imports.
I intend to express my point visually by careful rendering some of these prints in watercolor, which is a medium that I am not only extremely familiar with, but is often used to illustrate textile patterns. Specifically, I will focus on the seasonality of the textiles including:
• Wall and bed hangings
• Upholstery materials
• Carpets
• Window treatments
Ultimately, my renderings of the textiles will be scanned, edited, and uploaded into Rhino or another program and used to virtually upholster the furnishings with. Ideally, there will be a feature on the blog where it is possible to click to upholstery and change it according to the season. It is also possible that another member of my group will use my textile renderings to create clothing for the people that will inhabit the room. According to Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide, the two short sides of the Tesse room that are now paneled were once upholstered, so it will be interesting to recreate the room with the original upholstery.
Until next time!
Jordan
This is a wonderful project and there are many possibilities for what you can do with the textiles once you make the watercolors. A few thoughts:
1. Similar to questions I posed about Samina’s project, how will you choose which textiles to watercolor? Do you have a sense of how many textiles you will be rendering? Will you be making watercolors from the cloth or from the textile patterns you mentioned? The decision about the number of textiles you render seems particularly important and could help you structure the project. Will you be doing one from each season, so a series of four, or more for each season, which would give you a few years of textiles to work with after you make the watercolors? Do you have a sense of the size of each watercolor? How would you archive the watercolors once you have made them? Would they be together in a book, or would they be separate, single objects? Would you include any images of the furniture you mentioned or the room paneling?
2. Your project is in many ways about translations: historically, there was a geographical translation with the objects as manufacturing from India was copied in Europe. You are enacting another translation through a shift in the medium of these objects, from cloth to watercolors. Then there is the possibility of a technological translation, from the analog to the digital. I would encourage you to think more about this translational aspect and ways this could be a generative component of the project. Since your project is in part about time (the changing seasons necessitating different textile designs), you might experiment with various ways to display the watercolors online. You mention wanting to click to images of the watercolors from the blog–perhaps you could make a simple website that you link to from the blog, with the textiles. You could work on a way to show the watercolors online not as static objects, but as objects that change after a set period of time. You could experiment with duration and representation–how long would a viewer see each watercolor? Would they fade into another object, or would they immediately become another watercolor if the viewer clicks on a textile image? Would you include detailed views of your watercolors, or would the views be 1:1 reproductions?