Printing images on fabric

My poor painting skills led me to printing photographic images on fabric. Specifically, it was an inability to paint faces and bodies. I had a cache of old black and white family photographs that I wanted to reimagine as larger, colorful paintings. I was at ease with the background landscapes, but never felt I was rendering correctly the people in the pictures, starting with my mother. I had a photograph of her as a teenager, sitting in front of a big tree at the edge of some woods, her black hair pulled back Lana Turner style wearing a shirtwaist dress, a cross on a necklace and bobby socks and saddle shoes. If only I could just insert the mother portion of this photograph of into the space where I had been trying to paint her! I solved the problem for this particular painting with iron-on transfers meant for T-shirts but, used by me, on muslin. So my mother’s image would fit the painting, I scanned and enlarged the original photograph, all new skills for me in that nascent digital world. I wanted to do more mixed media paintings like this and, after a lot of talking to people and trying things out, eventually I figured out how to print directly onto the fabric of my choice. I could do this by coating fabric with an acrylic medium made for this purpose, and then running it through my printer, taped to a piece of card stock acting as a substrate. My printer was not always happy with thicker materials and more than once I have taken it apart to pull out tape that came off of the fabric and stuck onto some printer part. But, generally it all works. My printer size limited the size of my prints. Eventually I worked around this to print larger pieces by dividing images into several pieces. I laid out these multiple picture components on my painting like puzzle pieces to create the larger image I wanted.

And then I began to see the possibilities of printing whole photographs on fabric. People had been doing polaroid transfers for a while, and these fabric photos had that same kind of emotional feel to me. I couldn’t really control the way the fabric took up the ink, so images with a softer focus seemed more appropriate for fabric printing. Most of my prints were 5x7 or smaller so they would fit onto a piece of letter-sized card stock. Sometimes I framed them--floating them between mat board and glass--and sometimes I sewed them onto to other larger pieces of fabric that I wrapped around a stretcher frame like I would have a painting.

And then I took a break from making art. In the last years of my day job, the job got more stressful and it felt too frustrating to try to make good art on the fringes of my energy depletion. I still took photographs, but did not try to show any of them. And then I left that stressful job. And it still took me a few years to come back to art, to think about it as a vocation, even as I did not expect an income from it. I began writing a second book, and then traveling for research on that book, and taking photographs as part of that research, and then the photographs became an equal partner to the words and it became a project more than a book. And then I was sorting through photographs I had taken of lush poppy fields on Fehmarn Island in Germany. About the same time, I also was going through a box of various fabrics, some I had recycled from various projects in the past, and all at once, I imagined a photograph of a gorgeous poppy field printed on a worn piece of cotton I had used in an experiment with avocado dying, giving it the barest tint of pink. The only way I would be able to use this fabric for my poppy field image would be to cut it up, print the image in pieces, and sew them together. And that is what I did.

I made the poppy field picture and then a half dozen more and included them in a submission for an artist grant to continue with my (now) writing/photographic project. And then after my travel for that grant, I found a set of photographs to create a new set of fabric prints for--softly focused meadow landscapes taken on my father’s old Imperial 620 camera, the film digitally scanned and images enlarged for new work. I created each piece a little differently from the others--different fabrics, different sizes, different configurations numbers and sizes of sections. The only requirement for each piece was that I had to be able to fit a printed section onto a letter size piece of cardstock to go through my printer.

I worked through a few technical bumps in the road. I had some of the acrylic medium on hand, still usable from years before, but not much. I tried to find it at the local art supply store but it was not there. Another product was available online, so I ordered it and tested it out. It worked fine, and through an email with the people who own the company that makes it, I found out that it is the same product I used to use, now with a different name. And they have more variations of it now, and there are a cadre of people out here in the world using it in different ways. It is called Ink-Aid and the people who make and sell it are lovely. The other technical problem was intermittent printer orneriness. I have more or less figured out now what I can ask of my printer and what I can’t, and we have reached détente.

I had to make some aesthetic decisions about these pieced images. I will never have as much control over a photographic print on fabric as I do on paper. To me, this is part of the beauty, to see how variations in the fabric take up the ink differently and create something unique. I can print with the same digital file over and over and always get something different. I do not finish the edges of fabric or the seams that bind the sections together. I use various colors of thread to sew pieces together and I leave the strings showing sometimes. I like it when the images in each section match each other perfectly in the corners, but I’m not bothered too much if there are small imperfections in this. I sew everything by hand. I tried to machine sew one piece but I find it much easier to control how it fits together by hand. I’ve worked out a system for identifying which pieces go where and keep them in order, but I’ve taken seams apart to resew them when I got them out of sequence. I’m sure this will never be an efficient process for me, but I continue with it as a labor of love because of how I feel about the finished product.

I continue to struggle with the question of how to present this work. The materiality of the fabric adds movement to it. For the pieces on my own walls, I sew loops around the top corners and hang pieces from a bamboo rod. To take photographs for exhibit and publication submissions, I tack the corners to the wall using wall putty, leaving some of the hang of the fabric apparent. For those pieces I’ve shown in galleries, I felt they needed more formality and float each of them in a frame between glass and a piece of fiberboard, leaving a small space between the fabric and the board created by acrylic spacers. I will continue to create new large images from my project landscapes. I will continue to think about other ways of hanging them. Also, I am also planning to print smaller versions of the meadow images for photobook with fabric--once I’ve figured out some technical aspects about the book part of it.

Several ideas come up for me as I write about this process. One is that sometimes a creative idea arrives in a flash, but then there is a process of experimentation and refinement that continues on. This is never really finished. There is the next thing and the next thing that I might try. Sometimes your ideas and how you execute them take your work out of comfortable categories, but that is only a problem if you care about that. Sometimes I do care, but I try not to. There are some risks to always working at your edge, but for me it is a more satisfying place to be. My creative process is less conceptual and more material. I often have materials that become art in my head instead of the other way around. Usually there is some simultaneity to it, and I am grateful for those electric moments.

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Please leave a comment here or contact me through my website if you have questions or thoughts about printing on fabric.