The Paper and Fabric Exhibition which is now on show at the Masterworks Arrowroot Gallery stems from the inspiration of meditational walks and spiritualism.

The exhibit is a combination of the work by William (Billy) West and Alicia Wanklyn.

Unlike Mr. West, this is Ms Wanklyn?s first exhibition and she has combined the media of fabrics, dyes and chakras in her art.

Mr. West said his inspiration stemmed from simply walking and collecting items while, Ms Wanklyn said she has been trying to come up with the right idea for the show since January.

?I?ve been coming up with different ideas because I?ve been working in a million different media from photography, filmmaking, with both digital and negative film, also painting, printmaking, fashion, fabric, screen printing, all types of things,? she said.

?So coming up with the idea was difficult because I had so many options and I worked through a lot of different ideas and I came up with fabric, just because I enjoy using it and I would like to be a designer.

?I would like to localise consumers in a way by developing my own fashion to market throughout Bermuda. That is an eventual plan.?

But her ambitions are great and there are so many things that she would like to do, she had difficulty finding time to work and organising herself.

Ms Wanklyn said: ?Each thing that I do paves the way for something else.?

Another goal of hers, is to do portraiture so she started off doing a painting of her friend Michelle, but she had to leave it alone as she did not have time to finish it before the show.

She said: ?So then I did two portraits with fabric and I sort of experimented with embroidery, batik, stitching, dye and all sorts of stuff like that.

?I was figuring out how simple, yet still how complicated, fabric can be. Different techniques that you can use like stitches, heat setting, dyeing, combination of textures, and old and new fabric, they all have different qualities.

?I was developing a series of pieces that came together connected by their materials and by their colour schemes and really just experimenting and putting myself out there, by pushing myself and making it happen and going through the brainstorming, or developing and the hanging process. It all plays a part.?

On the night of the opening, Ms Wanklyn wore one of her pieces. ?If anyone came to the opening they were not going to see it hanging up,? she said. ?It was one of my most successful pieces and that is where my real interest lies, in doing fashion and film.

?I couldn?t put any of my films in because the show would have been called Paper, Fabric and Film, but next time that I have a show I would like it to be film and fashion ? I think it will be a nice combination.?

She added that they were all working towards the future and there has got to be a starting point.

Her other famous piece of the night was her Chakra, which was of mixed media.

?It took the most time and each piece took about ten hours to hand stitch,? she said, ?I had to make the patterns from a thumbnail pattern and it took two days to make all the patterns. It was a real process piece, as each one had to be designed and then enlarged, and I spent hundreds of dollars on fabric.

?Then putting together the different pieces of fabric to compliment each other in the right pattern organisation was part of the process.?

She said chakras, which simply means wheel or disc in Sanskrit, are a theory of energy points in the body that relate to different parts of your personal, spiritual, physical well being and when they are in harmony you are a whole person and you radiate light. While when they are not you are out of balance, but the theory of chakras is to hone in on areas that are specifically troubling you.

Ms Wanklyn said there were seven different chakras and the colours were, red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, indigo and violet.

She said: ?Basically I am a very spiritual person and my hopes and dreams in life are to serve the world, not myself. So what I was really doing with this piece was not a marketable scheme, it was just an expression of myself.

?The chakras to me are something that are very personal, they are something that everyone shares and they are beautiful. I enjoyed working each piece because I thought what each piece symbolised ? and it helped me to really focus on where my direction is in life.

?You don?t need that much to be happy as long as you are happy with what you have. So I guess it is just all a learning experience and I guess coming back in touch with reality, like when you step outside of the whole materialistic side of the world, or the game of life and come back to reality and where you came from and what is your real importance in life, you are sort of able to share with people rather than try and take from them and I think that is one thing that I gained from this project.

?You really learn to share and focus on the important things rather than anything else.?

Mr. West said his work was about the things you find when you are out walking and, although he didn?t walk everyday while doing the project, he questioned its meaning.

?If you walk, where do you walk and what does walking mean here as opposed to somewhere else?? he asked.

Mr. West said the grid on the wall of all the drawings is about how delicate a selection is at random.

?So it is not walking to collect something, it is collecting something through walking,? he said, ?And you know how you walk and you would collect a leaf, a flower, or you would just pick something up off the ground and hold it in your hand.

?It is about holding that object in your hand and kind of meditating on the walk through that object.?

He said when he lived in London or elsewhere walking takes on another form and he asked: ?Do you walk to get somewhere, or for exercise or for quiet?

?There are different reasons, but we all walk.?

He said since the opening on August 6, many people had expressed that they also collect items on their walks.

?It is sort of a weird habit that everyone has,? he said, ?It is something that people do without even thinking about it and that is how the project got started.

?I was just walking and I think I picked up a dandelion and I held it in my hand the hole time and when I got home that?s when I stopped and I drew it.?

Mr. West said it took him about a month to six weeks do the walking pieces and he began in Spittal Pond and along the North Shore.

?I would see objects that are located in a certain area,? he said. ?I wouldn?t think, ?oh I?ll go up to Dockyard to walk today, because that would be forced? and I didn?t walk everyday, nobody does.?

He said he worked on the piece quite consistently and initially it was supposed to be one object a day, but some days he got more than one object.

He said: ?You end up saying wow, I like that and the spontaneity is gone, but you kind of always start with an idea of how you will do a project and you think I?ll walk everyday for about an hour and I?ll collect this and I am going to keep it as natural to this process as possible.

?But then if you are going to keep it natural ? you will allow yourself to make mistakes and allow yourself to not walk and then you can go well I didn?t draw yesterday and in doing that you don?t restrict yourself to what you pick up.

?If I picked up a blade of grass and I see something equally as beautiful, do I have to choose. I can do them both.?

Mr. West plans to continue the project in London, when he returns to university in the fall.

?It is a really good discipline because the drawings are technically accurate and it is fun because it is a style of art that I don?t get to do very much,? he said, ?And it is also quite relaxing.?Mr. West said he believed that inspiration comes in all sorts of forms.

?Right now my work is more about process and just getting it done really,? he said, ?I am at such an early stage right now that I don?t think that I should be doing all finished pieces. I have had a few shows recently, which shows this is what it took and this it just the idea.?

He said the few large figure pieces, that are on show are more colourful and abstract pieces.

?They were before that, but they are still kind of like movement, nature and experimentation with mediums, because I mixed certain media together,? he said, ?I wanted to see how they worked. Like oils and ink react to each other and I wanted to see how the colours all worked together.?

In the pieces he has used oils, ink, watercolours, crayon, cont?, acrylic and gesso.

He said: ?As much as they are freely formed they are quite contained. I was really into the whole you have to prepare and get everything contained into a small area, because they are quite small pieces even though they are bigger than the other ones there is a lot in them.

?They have a lot of bright pink in them and it is similar to the walking pieces, which are kind of hand in hand. The pinks are Bougainvillaea, all colours that you would see, but more exaggerated and also the colours are the kind of the ones that you are given as an artist, like the pink and that purple are very ripe from the tube, which are very stark.

?Everyone has a problem with using paints right from the tube and there is a reason that they give us these colours, as you can?t make that colour.

?Of course I agree with mixing your colours and working at them, but sometimes if you get an extraordinary colour, just use it.

?On the side, I have actually done a few paintings based on cadmium red, black and ultramarine blue, which are like three most obvious colours and people are like you didn?t mix your colours and I am like, ?that is what it is about.?

Mr. West said eventually he will be at the point when he is doing finished pieces.

?But right now I am just working through it,? he said.