Shirley Nette Williams

I have decided to look into works by Shirley Nette Williams an artist who creates her own unique style through multimedia portraits and landscapes linking how the clothes we wear effect our persona and the emotional connection between use and clothes. Williams uses her bare hands and/or sewing machine to stitch images of intriguing faces/landscapes.  In the process she experiments with various mixed media forms such as fabric dyes, acrylic paint, plastic mesh and even teabags, reusing and up-cycling whatever she can find.  The result is an intricately layered piece of art that amazes with its detail and provokes curiosity and fascination with the form, lines, colour, shape, technique and her talent of working with so many materials.
http://shirleynettewilliams.com/

Here you can see one of Shirley's landscape creations, I chose to look into and analyse this piece as Shirley normally tends to stick with portraits but in this instance she adapts her skills and techniques to produce a beautiful landscape observation using a range of mixed media's such as, stitch, dye, clothing. I particularly love the use of minimal colour and the abstract sense of scale and proportion with the multitude of straight, curved and sketched lines.
This piece has a very cold feel to me mainly due to the sombre pale dirty blues and white tones, also giving the piece a very wintry feel.
Over all I love the vintage reworked aesthetic this piece emits with its thick stitches and fine machine stitches, but also down to the sketchy cross hatched effect running up one side of the piece adding a layered translucent look.
This is my favourite portrait by Shirley Nette Williams from her new series of portraits "cut from the same cloth" I particularly liked this piece for the precision Shirley has achieved by using a sewing machine and threading lines to create this very delicate continuous lined drawing which is something I could take forward in developing my observations from YSP and the Hepworth.
I think the way Shirley has incorporated this assortment of materials in the back ground to help shape the face and depth is very clever and thoroughly planned out, having a very vintage reworked look but also being very clean cut and finished to a high standard which again is something I would like to achieve in taking some of her techniques forwards. 

 Here you can see another one of Shirley Nette Williams work, this time a work in progress using a plethora of layered fabrics in the background to produce this very summery fresh vibe, with a continuous lined portrait worked over the top creating a contrasting look between the bright colours and the black lined drawing in the foreground. I love the way the lined drawing is very experimental and not very precise yet it is still clear to me what the portrait is.


overall through analysing Shirley's work I can see how many of her techniques can be incorporated into my development as I begin to look at other media's such as plastics, clothes and foils, using these materials to working previous drawing and developing them further to incorporate continuous sewn drawings.