Competition Winner intrigues with magical entry

Article Added: 23/01/2009
HotHive Textiles was delighted to announce Janice Myers as the winner of our Spellbinding Textiles Competition last week. Her piece, ‘Hat Trick’, features a giant top hat and a flight of doves – though the work has a special spellbinding twist. As winner Janice was presented with £1000 to spend at Pfaff, sponsors of the competition www.pfaff.co.uk. We spoke to Janice to find out more about ‘Hat Trick’ and those intriguing doves, her work in general and to see what she hopes to do with her prize money!

Janice first heard of the competition after a friend passed her a leaflet about it and she was inspired to submit an entry, feeling that “it was a theme that suited me.” Janice’s entry consists of two separate pieces – a hat and the doves. She made the hat out of a dustbin liner with a cardboard base and then lined it with a second dustbin liner, featuring machine embroidered stars to give that magical look.

The doves are stitched on greenhouse polythene and are multi-layered to suggest movement. Janice designed the doves herself, drawing them by hand and then digitising them using Pfaff software. She has used wire in each of the doves’ wings to allow them to be placed in different positions. Each of the doves’ heads is made from paper balls, with a beak, eyes and a mask made from tomato puree tubes. Each bird was then painted and textured before Janice then added some finishing touches to the birds: “some have aerials to indicate they are ‘switched-on’ while others have skeleton heads and wear plumes on top to add to the surreal effect.”

So what about the questions Janice posed to us along with her entry – Why are the doves masked? Why is one so different? And how did they all come out of that hat? We asked Janice to shed some light on this: “Initially I just wanted to make the whole thing a bit surreal. Then, once I felt I had done that, I made up a ‘story’ to go with it to make sure the viewer actually looked at the doves and not just the piece overall. They are masked and different to cause intrigue! It worked didn't it!”

We certainly think so!

As with all creative projects, ‘Hat Trick’ did not come to life without a few challenges on the way. Janice explains, “I didn’t want the doves to be doll like, but I didn’t want them to be flat either. This involved a lot of time consuming experimentation and I had many failures. In the end I discovered that if I stitched the polythene in a certain way it curled up and looked how I wanted it to look. I initially wanted the heads to be very skeletal and hollow – but it was difficult to attach a body with a bit of weight to a hollow head!”

However, Janice certainly did get there in the end and her piece is simply fabulous. We felt her interpretation of the theme and original idea made her a worthy winner of the main prize, and many of the people who attended our launch day certainly agreed. So, what is Janice intending to do with her £1000 prize money? “I love gadgets and I have got my eye on a special hoop and a new piece of software. I am then going to wait until Pfaff bring out something new - and they do this all the time – to spend the rest of the money. Sheila has promised to let me know as soon as something comes along!”

After the exhibition finishes in March Janice is hoping to take ‘Hat Trick’ to further events, beginning with the ‘Second Flight’ exhibition by South West Textile Group – of which Janice is a member. Over the next year she is also hoping to be included in international exhibitions and currently has submissions for events in France, Hungary and the Ukraine.

Janice loves being creative and enjoys doing commissions “as long as I am not too tied artistically by the commissioner”. So if ‘Hat Trick’ has inspired you to want to own a piece of Janice’s work then you can contact her through her website www.janicemyers.co.uk