Merlins Magic creates mystery at the Spellbinding Textiles Exhibition

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Tracy Curtis’s piece ‘Merlin’s Magic’ was crowned a very worthy fourth place in HotHive Textiles’s Spellbinding Textiles Competition and we spoke to her to find out more about her mysterious creation.

Tracy read about the competition in our monthly newsletter and was encouraged to enter as “the theme so appealed to me.” She cites myth and magic as inspiration for much of her work and so found the theme relatively easy to work with. She told me, “When I thought about the theme Magic, and in particular Spellbinding, the idea of a wizard actually creating his spell immediately attracted me. However, I also wanted to create a complete magical scene, so the idea of including the slightly mysterious standing stones and a unicorn, and then having the whole scene being watched by a fairy came into being. The owl was literally a last minute thought, added when I had completed the painting and before I started the embroidery. Looking at the work, I decided that an image should actually appear to materialise from the spell and an owl seemed an almost obvious choice.” Living a few minutes from Dartmoor, and having Bodmin Moor relatively close by, makes standing stones a fascination for Tracy and something she was eager to incorporate into her work. “It was easy to imagine the wizard standing among stones such as these,” she says.

So with her ideas sketched on paper, Tracy set about the creation of her piece. First she stretched a piece of cotton onto a frame and used clear gutta outliner for silk painting for the main outlines of the wizard, stones and the unicorn. She then wet the background, using silk paints, and sprinkled salt in the area where she wanted the stardust effect for the spell. More silk paints were used to fill in the main images then once dry the finer details such as Merlin’s face, the unicorn, the fairy and eventually the owl were painted using a combination of fabric and acrylic paints. Tracy must be relieved to have won the £100 voucher so that she can replenish her stocks!.

Once the whole piece had dried Tracy washed the gutta off, before allowing it to dry again so she could start on the embellishments. She used free machine embroidery and couching in silk fibres for the unicorn’s mane and tail and Merlin’s beard. Finally, hundreds – “it seemed!” – of tiny running stitches, stars and French knots were added by hand, using metallic and holographic machine embroidery threads. Altogether Tracy’s piece took her in the region of twenty hours to complete – and it certainly shows!

Although very happy with her £100 Art Van Go vouchers for coming fourth, it was the opportunity of exhibiting at Forge Mill which had really interested Tracy. She says, “My friend and I had visited the Forge for the first time only a few months before the competition was announced and I knew it was a very popular venue. The chance of possibly being chosen to exhibit at the museum was particularly compelling.”

Tracy got her wish to exhibit at the venue, and if you can make it along the detail in her piece is well worth viewing. And if it really grabs you, Tracy tells us she “has no qualms about parting with it if someone wanted to buy it.”

As well as featuring in our exhibition at Forge Mill, Tracy is working on several other projects at the moment. She is currently “tweaking an embroidery that I first completed in 2007 of Wistman’s Wood, a strange and beautiful little wood on Dartmoor where stunted oaks are literally growing out of huge clumps of granite.” Tracy is hoping this piece of work will be included at The Cancer Research Art Exhibition in Liskeard, Cornwall.

She is also keen to complete several pieces of work depicting photographs her husband took while out at sea in Georgia, in the Antarctic. Tracy says he took many beautiful photographs including, “icebergs with the sunset reflected on them, blue ice caves and an ice shelf photographed in the moonlight.”

If you would like to own a piece of Tracy’s work she is also very happy to do commissions. She explains, “I find out from the client exactly what they have in mind – what subject, how big, what sort of colours and styles appeal to them, etc. I never take money in advance, but give them a rough idea of the cost. I want the client to absolutely fall in love with the piece, if they do then they pay for it, if not and luckily this has never happened so far then the work would go up for sale in a show or exhibition.” If you are interested in commissioning Tracy to complete a piece of work for you, she can be reached on 01752 254202 or you can email her at tctextiles@hotmail.com.