Charlotte Bird's handmade multimedia wall hangings all have a personal story to tell. They contain bold, graphic styles that are liberally salted with whimsy. Charlotte grew up making her own school clothes each summer with her mother and became fascinated with the world of textiles. Learning about fabric at a young age has given Charlotte child-like sensibilities, which emanates from her beautiful fabric art pieces. Over the years, she has developed a narrative style of telling stories through fabric. With a combination of screen printing, stamping, immersion dyeing and sewing, Charlotte creates fun and intriguing works of art inspired by such things as nursery rhymes, riddles and counting games.
Each piece of wall art starts with an idea--deciding on the end product and images to be used. She does not create a sketch but would rather jump right in and create works through trial and error. Charlotte makes her own silk screens and carves her own stamps for printing images on her textiles. Then she prepares the fabric. For the base color, she scrunch-dyes the length of fabric in a first color and processes it for up to four hours, until the dye sets. Then she rinses and dries the fabric. When using thickened dye for some of the images, the fabric needs to be soaked in a soda/ash solution. Then the fabric has to "batch" (sit for 24 hours in fiber-reactive dye) and then dry completely. To prepare the fabric for printing, she tapes the fabric to her worktable and begins to print or stamp images until the entire piece of fabric is printed. Charlotte adds detail using textile paint, which must be heat set with an iron. The last step is to hem the wall hanging before it can be hung. Charlotte’s delightful fiber art tells cheerful and nostalgic tales through lively images. They tend to evoke merriment and joy with the use of bright colors, patterns, and scenery reminiscent of childhood.
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