hapa zome
Otaki River by Birgit Moffatt
harakeke sculptures by Birgit Moffatt
community art project by Birgit Moffat
Stille - concrete, paper, ink by Birgit Moffatt

Spending a week learning the art of encaustic with Patricia Baldwin Seggebruch in Wanganui (Fibre Arts New Zealand) was a fantastic experience of experimenting a totally new art medium using hot wax in combination with oils, pan pastels, charcoals, inks – basically anything you can imagine to make marks, plus the addition of fabrics, shellac, plaster and tar.

Back home, I couldn’t hardly wait to get a few basic tools and materials to set my little encaustic space in a corner of my studio, which guess what – took over a big part of my studio in no time…

I found I am more drawn to materials like concrete, plaster, tar and rust that can create beautiful textures, and even applied to flat supports like ply wood or paper the final look feels three dimensional through lots of layers of chosen materials.
These are some pieces I did in the workshop

encaustic by Birgit Moffatt encaustic by Birgit Moffatt
encaustic by Birgit Moffatt encaustic by Birgit Moffatt
encaustic by Birgit Moffatt

Not that this enough, I signed in the 100 day project, an independently run event of repeating a creative task over (guess) 100 days. Because encaustic is such a wide field I limited myself to a square of paper (as canvas) 13cm x13cm using rust, concrete, tar, plaster and some oil sticks. A perfect way of daily material exploration!

These are some of my first works, see more here!





 

 

 

I am happy to run a few more weaving classes. New addition: making puti puti (flowers) from harakeke. Small groups for best learning outcome!

flyer winter 2017

After finishing my arts degree end of last year I spent the first months of 2017 getting my arts career started. This means making work for art galleries in the North Island, designing workshops, running my first couple of workshops, getting the paper stuff sorted, beginning a new Body or Work, networking with artist fellow artists, galleries and customers.

No wonder I needed a break! I was missing the ‘play time’ as a student, when you just explore, experiment not worrying about the outcome or failures (and generally something great comes out of it anyway).

So I gathered some plant materials such as eucalyptus, bark, loquat and osage orange, sorting out some silk scarves – some already naturally dyed, some not really successful. I over dyed with natural dyes, used some random shibori techniques, and basically just had some fun! Here a few images of my explorations. It was definitely worth it, inspired by the results.

plant dyeing Birgit Moffatt
peach leaves soaking in a copper vessel

plant dyeing Birgit Moffatt
silk dyed with osage orange, different mordants – changing hues

plant dyeing Birgit Moffatt
osage orange silk partially dyed with loquat leaves – gives beautiful oranges

plant dyeing Birgit Moffatt plant dyeing Birgit Moffatt
partially over dyed silk

plant dyeing Birgit Moffatt

plant dyeing Birgit Moffatt
merino dyed with barberry bark, over dyed with eucalyptus

plant dyeing Birgit Moffattplant dyeing Birgit Moffatt
silk/wool fabric previously dyed with cochineal, over dyed with eukalyptus bark – detail

plant dyeing Birgit Moffatt
a mix of shibori techniques with indigo, marigold and eucalyptus leaves – detail

plant dyeing Birgit Moffatt

plant dyeing Birgit Moffatt
silk dyed with marigold over dyed with eucalyptus leaves – detail

plant dyeing Birgit Moffatt
silk dyed with cochineal and eucalyptus – preparing for third dye pot

plant dyeing Birgit Moffattplant dyeing Birgit Moffatt

same piece just removed from the dye pot

plant dyeing Birgit Moffatt
result

plant dyeing Birgit Moffatt
loquat dyed silk over dyed with eucalyptus – left to dry creating the crinkle effect

plant dyeing Birgit Moffatt
detail