Exhibition at Sidcot Arts Centre

Still a few days left to catch this exhibition – it runs until Sunday.  Well worth a visit, we have work on three floors, a selection of cards and small gifts to buy plus plenty of tea and homemade cakes.

The full address is Sidcot Arts Centre, Sidcot School, Winscombe, North Somerset, BS25 1PD – follow the pom-poms when you get there to find the entrance.

Here are my two engine pieces hanging together for the first time – they look much smaller in this lovely large space than they do at home!

A rare opportunity to have my animated piece ‘Resolution’ up and running.  I ended up remaking it from scratch - the software available now is so much better that it was easier to start again than to persuade the original file to run on my current computer.  I also made a slightly smaller and much lighter backboard, so I think of this as the rebooted version.  Making a new backboard was, of course, a purely artistic decision and nothing to do with the fact that my current car is 10cm narrower than my previous one.  Honest.

As a group, we decided to mark the WW1 centenary by each making a small piece on the theme of poppies.  I was puzzled by this for some months as I don’t really do flowers, or at least not realistic ones.  When I sat down to have a go, I found I didn't have any reference images at home and no poppies in the garden so I had a look at The Commons in Flickr.  If you are not familiar with this, it is a very useful resource – images from public institutions that are out of copyright.  Searching for red poppies I came across a page from a seed catalogue dated 1914 which made me pause as it seemed so poignant.  The association we have now with the red poppy and remembrance of war is so strong, but when this was published, that lay in the future.  It was just a flower in a catalogue. This is my finished piece, which is the page printed on fabric with a little hand stitching.

 
You can see lots more photos of the whole exhibition over on http://gordanotextileartists.blogspot.co.uk/ where Jenn is doing a great job blogging about the group.


Now, attentive readers may have noticed that there is no mention of the piece of work based on Irish dance dresses that I was blogging about back in March
  http://jinny-gallimaufry.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/progressing-slowly.html
Well, it is there but in a very different form.  Another long story, so it deserves a separate post (and I will try not to leave it so long this time).

The Same but Different - Work in Progress

My machine has been red-hot since my last post.  Engine 18 is officially finished and mounted on stretcher bars (approx 16 x 28 inches).

And work continues on the larger piece - working title Engine 21 (don't ask what happened to 19 and 20.  Just don't ask).  Using the same photo and background as a starting point but rendering it differently.  The finished size will be 54 x 36 inches - much larger than I am used to working so quite a challenge.  Here's a taster.

You will be able to see both of these in October if you come to The Gordano Textile Artists exhibition 'Distractions' at Bristol Guild Gallery, 68/70 Park Street, Bristol, BS1 5JY.  Open Mon to Sat 10am to 5pm from 5th to 26th October.  Head across to the Gordano Textile Artists Blog to see some more of our work in progress..

Exhibition - Gordano Textile Artists

A quick plug for our exhibition coming soon - it is my first time with this well-established group so please come along if you are in the area.

 Gordano Textile Artists at the Toll House Gallery, Clevedon Pier, North Somerset.
2nd to 30th August, 10am to 5pm Mon-Fri, 10am to 6pm Sat and Sun.
Meet the artists each weekend 11am to 3pm - I will be there on Sat 6th August and Sat 27th August.

February ATCs

Well, I've been so busy posting to my other blog last week that I forgot I hadn't updated this one. I have decided to make a hanging for the Gloucester exhibition in August and count it as one of the pieces for my course, so if you wander over to Gallimaufry you can see how I am getting on.

Meanwhile - here are the ATCs I made for the February swop on Facebook on the theme of love. They are made from torn bits of magazine pages that have been scrunched up momigami style, paper bags and offcuts of painted paper that I made decorated for another project. Plus a little bit of free machining.

The other thing I have done recently is visit the RWA in Bristol which was showing two exhibitions - Celebrating Paper, and Urban Evolution - Anne Desmet. Of the two, it was Anne Desmet's incredibly detailed prints which caught my imagination on the day, especially the ones which were cut up or broken. I really liked her collaged fragments - small pieces of prints of buildings applied to fragments of glass, mirror or tiles, suggesting decay, destruction and dereliction. In her British Museum series, the prints were made on semi-transparent Japanese paper so that they came through lightly on the back. She had then cut the print into strips, turning over alternate ones and transposing them from left to right creating a new, more complex image that is still recognisable.

On a similar theme, in my local butcher's, the mirror behind the counter combines a normal mirror with one-way glass in narrow vertical stripes. When look into it, you get a fascinating combination of a broken reflection of the people in the shop mixed in with the movements of the butcher cutting and packing in the next room. I have often stood there and thought I should use it as a starting point for a design. It's on the Big List of Things To Do.

Knitting and Stitching Show, NEC Birmingham

Last Saturday was my annual treat - a trip to the Knitting and Stitching Show. My favourite because it combines excellent exhibitions with shopping. I have been going to Alexandra Palace for years but this was my first try of the NEC show. At first I thought I had come on the wrong day - getting off the train at Birmingham International, it was a 10 minute walk through endless corridors and escalators to reach the room, and in that time I only saw one other person (also looking for the K&S). To be honest, seeing that huge place deserted in the middle of the day was a bit spooky; presumably there were no other halls in use. If I had found that out beforehand, I would have taken the car and saved myself a couple of hours travelling time (and about half the train fare). Still, it was well worth it once I found the hall. No photos to share, I'm afraid, as there were 'no photography' signs all over the place but I have added to my postcard collection.

I always enjoy going around the graduates showcases - my absolute favourite this year was "The System's Erupting" by Felicity Clarke. She has used cables and wires and plugs inside knitted tubes or wrapped with vivid yarns to create an installation in which all the electrical 'gubbins' are literally bursting out of the wall and rising up in a giant tangle.

Another personal choice was "Memories Are Made of This" by Carol Quarini, part of the Divergence Exhibition by the Westhope Group. This is 3 long narrow panels suspended from perspex rods which represent the degeneration of memory. The first is a complete length of large scale lace, the shapes representing nerve cells in the brain. The second is begining to break with clouds of silk paper replacing the shapes. Finally, there is just the cloudy background with a few last threads of memory. I found this a very poignant visualisaton of gradual memory loss.

Now, I always like a bit of audience participation, so I had to join in with Alfreda Mc Hale's interactive installation "Seeking Pearls". She has collected thousands of old and unloved buttons, spools of thread and skeins from old collections, and preserved them by bottling them into jam jars, preserving jars and even the tiny glass jars that herbs are sold in. There are dozens of these stacked on shelves like an old-fashioned sweetshop, and visitors are invited to take one, empty the contents into a large bowl of buttons and refill it with their selection from the bowl. You could then mark it with a sticky star, so no-one else will touch it, and replace it on the shelf. So the collection is gradually rearranged and the buttons have been appreciated and chosen once more. It brought back old memories of spending wet Sundays tipping out my mother's big bag of beads and sorting through them, loving the colours and the feel of them and the different shapes and sizes.

Finally, it was good to see one of my favourite charities at the show. The Sailors Society exists to combat the isolation of seafarers and give practical support through a network of centres and chaplains. They regularly distribute woolly hats knitted by volunteers (about 20,000 each year) and were holding a wonderful display of entries to their recent competition to make an outrageous hat that no self-respecting sailor would want to wear. I like to occasionally knit hats for them to keep my hands busy while my daughter is in gym class (or swimming, or dancing or whatever) so I handed one in while I was there.