Craft textile maker Fiona Hall applied for a VACMA as she had just moved from working from home into a dedicated studio space, and for the first time had an opportunity to further develop her range of techniques in a more meaningful way.
You can view Fiona's work via her website or Instagram page.
Fiona is a craft textile maker. Her business Camban Studio is predominantly focussed on printed textiles inspired by her local natural environments. She enjoys using slow textile and hand stitch techniques that enhance the printed surface of the textile. She describes her practice as a values-based practice - A fundamental part is using the textiles to tell stories to promote social and environmental wellbeing, and her work aims to have sustainability and circularity at their core. Fiona also places importance on sharing her craft skills and does this through her ‘Community’ courses and freelance work.
Before getting the VACMA funding, Fiona had been working between a spare room and her kitchen table at home, and a lot of the techniques she was interested in had been difficult to do at home around family life.
At the time of applying, Fiona had just moved into a new studio space at Deemouth Artist Studios and this was the catalyst for her application.
She was also wanting to make a move away from a commercially driven range of products and move towards building a collection of works that were personally, creatively and exploratively more meaningful to her and had greater artistic integrity.
“For the first time I had the opportunity and space where I could have all my stuff and equipment out and all at hand and easily available for the processes that I was really interested in exploring. I wanted to see how the space could allow for more slower made, process rich, explorative and experimental one-off pieces. I wanted to do more eco-printing, screen printing, natural dying, developing my hand stitch, learning more about slow textiles, and learning a bit about machine stitch construction too. Basically, how could I push these processes and techniques I wanted to do within my practice to a better standard.”
Fiona used her funding to participate in a day’s online hand stitch garment construction course with an organisation ‘Raas Leela Textiles’ based in Gujarat, India.
“In the course I learned how to stitch together a zero-waste t-shirt, completely from scratch, all handstitched, and all hand constructed. Spending that day and learning from these amazing women from a completely different culture, about their work and how they worked. They are entirely zero waste with this focus on slow fashion and keeping these heritage skills alive within the communities there and to the social benefit of the women working there. I found it really inspirational and amazing, and their story really resonated with me.”
Fiona was also able to purchase new equipment and materials for her project including a new sewing machine. “I had always worked with hand stitch and had never had a sewing machine before, but I’ve been teaching myself some machine sewing techniques and having the opportunity to do machine finishing or smaller scale things or being able to construct one off sample pieces in house has been so useful.”
“Fundamentally, the funding meant that I gave myself time to develop these techniques in my new studio.”
At the time of applying, Fiona had hoped to engage others in her process, but following the bursary award she made the decision to create that engagement with others through workshop teaching and on completion of the project, a public exhibition.
“Quite early after getting the funding I created accountability for myself by setting up my online ‘Community’ courses and workshops where I would share my knowledge of the techniques I was developing as I went along as well. Facilitating workshops was a new thing for me at that point, but I quickly gained confidence as a facilitator. I was doing all the processes I wanted to do through the creation of samples that I could then show the participants. I quickly realised that teaching in this way was so rewarding! Teaching was also really increasing my own skills and made me more mindful of my techniques. Teaching the courses meant I really did have to do what I had set out to do!”
The development of the workshops also provided a significant development of other business skills including online workshop facilitation, website building, video editing, digital skills and much more, and has given Fiona new revenue streams for her business.
Experiencing the Raas Leela business model also had a great impact on Fiona’s own business model and the values that she wants to take forward in her creative practice. It has also embedded those explorative and process rich techniques into her creative practice.
“I learned and developed so much during my VACMA experience. What I achieved with the bursary far surpassed my expectations.”