Tie-Dye Cartoon Festival Figure — Life-Size Sculpture, Somerset

Fifty years of the same festival in the same fields, and the art on site had never outlasted the weekend. The organisers wanted one permanent object, and they had a clear idea of what it should be wearing.

The brief

A figure at the edge of the main field, about 2.2 m, standing in the way people stand at a festival after three days: hands in pockets, head back, looking at nothing. Cartoon proportions. And the shirt had to be the loudest tie-dye anyone has ever seen.

Making dye behave

Real tie-dye has a specific structure that a printed pattern does not. There are concentric rings, but they never make clean circles, because fabric resists dye unevenly. At the boundary between two colours there is a zone where the two have bled into each other, and at the edges of each ring the colour is raw and irregular.

Ours is painted in the sequence a dye vat would produce: white ground, then the lightest ring, then each subsequent ring laid over the one inside it with a wet edge so the two bleed. Five colours and eleven rings across the tunic, plus two on each sleeve and three around the hat. There is no hard edge anywhere in the pattern.

The one concession to legibility is the face. Tie-dye over a face would have destroyed the character, so the neck and head are left in an off-white with only two rings, low and behind the ears, as though the dye ran down.

Weathering

It stands outdoors for six weeks a year and is under cover for the rest, which the festival arranged itself. The gloss clear coat means the whole piece can be hosed down with the barrier fencing at the end of the season.

In the field

It stands on a grass bank at the edge of the main field at 2.2 m, facing the stage rather than the crowd. The organisers report that more photographs are taken of it than of the painted sign that has stood on that bank since 1979, and that nobody has said a word about it being replaced.