Textile Final Piece Evaluation

Black Death

I decided to call my piece 'Black Death' simply because that is what it's about. Black death is the supposed most common name for the 'Plague'. I based my piece off of the rhyme "Ring-a-ring o' roses, a pocket full of posies". As I wanted to include a certain material I found related to flowers, I thought this'd be perfect. The basic idea behind my piece is that appearance isn't everything, like the rhyme for example. Although it is sung happily, it has a dark meaning as it is related to the plague.

   In a way, my title is quite misleading if you don't understand what it is. Whilst it has a dark meaning, the appearance of my piece seems quite the opposite. The use of mostly bright colours would lead the viewer to believe, at first glance, that it may be positive.

Although I hadn't sketched my initial plan for my piece, I had quite a few variations along the way. Originally, I was to present my piece on a flat surface, or maybe even the floor. I had thought this would be a good idea because flowers are mostly seen on the ground, of course, and so I thought it could appear more natural that way. However as I was in the process of creating it, it occurred to me that it may look better, and withhold more meaning, if it was hung from the ceiling at about the average head height (around 5 feet 5 inches). 

   The sketch above is one of the last stages of my thought process. Before I sketched this though, my idea was to have the background as half dark felt and half bright felt, using the technique of wet felting. However this idea changed when I planned to hang up my piece rather than lay it flat. I decided to have loosely attached rings, with the felt cut up and stuck on, to the outside parts of the centre piece (roses with the pocket on top). However my idea changed again when I decided to have one colour of felt per ring instead of having both colours alternating on each of the rings. Also I only wanted the three overall pieces to be attached vertically, by ribbon, only on the top half. This allowed the rings to move a little more loosely than if there were more connections anywhere else.

   Before I wanted my piece to become slightly more sinister, I had planned on free-hand stitching an image of a girl lying down with her eyes closed, from a bird's eye view. Although it would've also shown her possibly to be dead, due to the plague, or just lying on the roses, I decided it needed to be more effective.

On the pocket, I wanted to draw something directly related to the plague. Although it isn't necessarily recognisable, I really like how it turned out. It's an image of the masks that the doctors wore during the plague to prevent it from spreading to them. There were beaks at the front of the masks that contained aromatic items, which protected them from the rotten air (thought to be the cause of the infection). I drew it on in black to further relate it to 'Black Death', but also because it almost looks like a shadow, which is effective as it can be intimidating in the dark. I put it in the centre because the doctors were the most important thing in those days, and so I made it the focal point.

The different coloured rings had very different meanings. The outside ring which had the brighter colours on was related to where the rhyme is usually sang. I knew that it was typically, in my case, sang on a field or area of grass as we needed a big area to do it in. In preschool, we would all stand in a circle, hold hands and spin in any direction whilst saying the rhyme. The fact that we formed a circle to say the rhyme gave me the idea to have rings/ circles around the roses. Also, as the rhyme says "ring-a-ring o' roses", it only made more sense to do so. Furthermore, by putting the pocket in the middle of the circle of roses, it created a literal ring of roses. As the word ring was repeated twice I thought it best to add another and so I made the darker one too. I used the colours black, brown, red and purple for different reasons. The purple and black symbolised the stages of of having one of the symptoms for the plague. The skin often turned purple and then black as it was dying from the infection reaching the bloodstream. The blood was represented through the small areas of red felt. There were only small areas of it as it was taken over by the infection which was shown through the brown and black, of course. Finally the brown was used as it has connotations of emptiness. This links to it all as the infection almost 'eats' the inside of the body until there's nothing left working, like it's been emptied out.

My whole idea was based off of the fact that I wanted to include these embroidered roses into my piece. I loved how they looked and I knew that they could make any artwork look even better. I cut them out from an unused, unwanted jumper. The meaning they have in my piece is very literal. It is simply because they are roses and that is one of the main focuses of the rhyme. I positioned them all in a circle so that the rings would look a lot less disorganised when placed around them.

This part of my piece was very literal as well. 'Posies' is another word for 'flowers' or a bouquet, so I simply got a small bouquet of flowers and placed them in the pocket, like the rhyme says ("a pocket full of posies"). I, of course, made sure that it looked quite full so that it was as literal as possible. As I continued creating my piece, I noticed that from the very centre, and outwards, the meanings are figurative, then very literal, and then figurative again. I really like this combination, because even if the objects used are meant to show what they physically are, it is still possible to come up with a meaning for them depending on your perspective of the piece as a whole.

Next time, if I were to create this again knowing what I know now, I would have focused on the felt areas a little more as the layers of felt were separating a little which was awkward to work with. Also, I did want to use pressed, dried flowers to put in the pocket so I should have done so when I first started making the piece. If I'd have used dried, flat, dead flowers, my piece would have had a little more meaning as they would have represented all of the people that died because of the plague in that period.