Tracey Kendall: Lecture Report

Textile artist Tracey Kendall came to Stockport College to give a guest lecture.

Tracey Kendall told her audience that she started out by studying fine art and that her specialty at the time was printing. Kendall now works in creating beautiful wallpaper. Kendall in also interest in silkscreen and interested in the process of relief. Her inspirations include magazines newspapers and photographs that she has personally takes whilst she is out and about. She also explained how she is interested in films; not for the plot though, Kendall prefers to look at the interiors and the scenery of the scenes with a film.

Kendall’s work ethic is to work big as this is what she likes doing. She also doesn’t work to a strict colour range so anything and everything can be expected from her work.

The big break for Kendall was her degree show. Her tutor saw the worked and liked that much that he put in an order for her wallpaper.

Kendall described the jobs that she has had through out her career and recalled one particular job she had to do and that was creating lampshades. When she was asked to design lampshades she thought she’d give it a go and revealed that she really didn’t like designing for that purpose!

To create her work Kendall uses mostly found objects, the objects she told the audience that she had used in the past included feathers, large stems of grass and flowers. She continued to say that she used anything organic. Then with these objects she would use a black and white photocopier to begin the production process. Due to the organic look of her work Kendall says that people want stroke her work at trade shows. Kendall explains a reason as to why she uses black and white both in her photocopying and her work, it is because males and male architects in particularly are more drawn to it. From this notion I gathered that Kendall is very motivated by money.

Kendall ran a list of materials and techniques she uses in her work, they included:

· Laser cutter for laser cutting paper

· Stitching

· Digital stitching

· Sequins

· Jigsaw pieces

· Lace

· A work force of people on sewing machines

Kendall was keen to mention that her work and practice has been affected by the economic downturn, the factory where she gets her supplies of sequins from has been closed down.

Kendall talked about one piece of work in detail. On a trip to France Kendall visited a market and picked up a piece of lace that she really like for €3 she then went onto use this piece of lace in her wallpaper designs and produced a blue and white roll of wallpaper priced £55 per roll. In the end she revealed that on that wallpaper design she made £40,000 - £50,000! (The wallpaper is pictured at the bottom right hand corner of the image below)

image from google.com

I felt that Tracey Kendall has done very well for herself and is a great practitioner in the varieties or work she has created over the years, but I was a little bit disheartened by the fact that she concentrates and refers to money so much and that she doesn’t really explore any sort of idea generation or concept as she just uses found objects that she happens to like in her wallpaper work.

This was a great lecture for learning virtually everything you need to know about Tracey Kendall although there were some disappointing aspects of the talk as mentioned above.