serena yu.

serenayu858@gmail.com
672-667-1442
@h3ysiri
Serena Yu

...CV


Hi! Thanks for visiting my portfolio site!

My name is Serena Yu, I’m a community and sustainability driven artist, designer, and nature lover from Vancouver, Canada, currently residing in and studying illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI!

My artwork is intuitive, exploratory, textural, and form focused, often informed by research, material culture, and scientific inquiry.  


For more information please refer to my CV above.

... Selected Work  
... Illustration 
... Paint & Printmaking
... Foraged Material Exploration

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Tapestry Weaving & Dye Process

Left: Finished tapestry woven on a Navajo-style loom


Inspired by the natural textures and forms of the wool, I wanted to weave a final image that pays homage to the sheep that my materials were sourced from. The wool used were sourced from local New England farms. Using a drop-spindle, the wool top was tranformed to create single-strand yarn, then mordented with alum and dyed with various natural dyes. 

With this project, I was really excited to learn how animal fibres were processed and used, as I had previously only worked with cellulose fibres, such as cotton, in a fabric form. The bottom of this page is a slideshow documenting each stage of the process. 





my favourite purple dyed yarn!
madder+ iron overdyed with logwood

the madder gives it a rich red undertone

My dye pots!
left to right:
osage (boiled overnight)
madder (boiled overnight)
dirty pot (iron + gallnut)
red onion skin + soda ash 
above: two green dyes
were used for the grass
in my weaving.

left is onion skin, right is 
osage saddened with iron
a little soda ash changes the onion skin from the chartreuse green above to the pink on the left!

 


Navajo style loom made with dowels and a canvas frame
Learning how to spin on the drop spindle! The wool top is pictured on the left
getting better! first attempts under my second attempts. my yarn is thinner and more even. However, the lumpy first attempts were used to weave the ‘wool’ of my sheep pattern!
tried my hand at spinning a second type of yarn top. It was courser, and easier to make thin
building the loom in class, featuring Vera!
this is Vera’s loom piece
starting to dye yarn! I dyed skeins of both types of wool, but decided to only go with the softer, white type
dyed yarn drying in my bathroom
starting to weave! It was more time consuming than I thought, this is 3 hours of weaving!
no one teaches you what to do when a monster starts eating your loom.
nearly finished! you can see the beginnings of the embroidered border pattern and flowers. All in all, this weaving took over 30 approx hours of labour, with over 10 hours of just weaving. 
the final tapestry! I added a fringe bottom, trimmed the top dowel, and hung it on my wall!
Left: Progress images of the weaving process.

As I learned how to spin and weave the yarn, I gained a newfound appreication for how intricate many ancient textiles are. The process is tedious and delicate, and relies on practice and patience to succeed. As I spun and wove, I noticed myself getting better at each step. I was able to control the thickness of my yarn, and affect the tenstion on the weaving. I also began to develop technoques for how to achieve certain patterns and images on my weaving. I also learned what not to do, such as weaving my weft too tight, or not tying my knots tight enough. This process, though time-consuming, was well worth the final product and lessons learned. 






Although I was getting better at spinning consistent thin yarn, something about the crude, lumpy first attempts was beautiful to me. Wanting to make something with it, I not only used it to weave the fluffy wool of the sheep in my tapestry, but I etched the texture onto a copperplate using a softground technique. 

The resulting textural image was used for the intaglio print on the right.