apron parts...to glean or not to glean?

 





The aim of the summer gleaning workshop was to glean and cut the cloth into to parts and sew these parts into aprons.  The apron pattern was the starting point for the design of the print for the cloth.  This pattern acts literally and metaphorically as the building blocks for the design.

Each apron skirt is a brick, and the waistband/tie panels look like the weather boards of the summer gleaning 'house'.  Reflecting back on this process makes me wonder whether this is really gleaning if this intentional use of the cloth actually partly shaped its design.  It is the leftovers from another use of the cloth, but it was one that I intended and embedded into it, although not at the inception of the project.  The initial idea was to create a canopy of cloth that would evoke to the viewer/occupant an experience of a bygone summer.  The canopy is like a harvesting machine that I knew was going to be imperfect in gathering the entire crop, so knowing that this would be the case, I thought about how the gleaning after the canopy could take place.  This projected action shaped the gleaning cloth.  Notions of harvesting and gleaning get rather slippery here, the cloth in some ways harvests, and in other ways gleans.  I feel that the obvious is a harvest, and the peripheral, less tangible aspects are gleanings.