Review in the Embroidery Magine by Christine Stanford

Artist Statememnts of the Exhibition Figuratively Speaking

 

Michelle Holmes

After reading ‘A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains’ I was inspired to create a series of works exploring the life of its extraordinary author Lady Isabella Bird. ‘Isabella Bird is the ideal traveller’ wrote the spectator critic in 1879 when the first edition of this book appeared. “Their never was anybody who had adventures as well as Miss Bird”

Isabella Lucy Bird 1831 – 1904 was the daughter of a clergyman, grew up in Tattenhall, Cheshire and was advised to travel to America and Canada in 1854 by her doctor to improve her health. This was the first of many journeys she was to undertake alone to then remote places such as Japan, Tibet, Korea and Morocco. ‘The single most curious aspect of Isabella’s curious life is that a women of her background, upbringing and physique managed to accomplish what she did’. (Taken from the introduction)

I particularly liked a note Isabella wrote for the second edition of the book.

‘For the benefit of other lady travellers, I wish to explain that my “Hawaiian riding dress” is the ‘American Lady’s Mountain Dress”, a half fitting jacket, a skirt reaching to the ankles and full Turkish trousers gathered into frills which fall over the boots, – a thoroughly serviceable and feminine costume for mountaineering and other rough travelling in any part of the world’

The works I have made continue my interest in representing the human figure in stitch. By illustrating a story I have been able to create a purely narrative piece, something which I have wanted to undertake for sometime. My central piece is ‘Lady Isabella Bird’s Travel Quilt’ in which I have introduced the main characters and locations of the story. It can be read like the page of a book. The other works are snapshots of particular elements of the stories which have captured my imagination.

Figuratively Speaking

Figuratively Speaking

7^th November -24^th December 2009 at The Edge Gallery, Lancaster

 

‘Figuratively Speaking’ is an exhibition that explores the figure through stitch pushing the boundaries and processes in contemporary embroidery. Exhibiting artists include Cathy Cullis, Michelle Holmes, Priscilla Jones and Alice Kettle.

Cathy Cullis explores personal themes including dreams and memories translating them into tiny pictorial images, these are executed in machine embroidery and demonstrate her unique skill in identifying and exploiting meticulous detail. The embroideries are worked in dense stitch creating an intuitive response to the use of machine embroidery. One of her embroideries titled ‘Owl Dress’ depicts a figure wearing a garment adorned with a group of figures and an owl, the juxtaposition of the two features can only be described as a haunting image that evokes a truly emotional response.                     

Michelle Holmes also draws with stitch but in an entirely different way to Cullis. Focusing on the linier qualities the stitched line can create. Holmes works on a variety of carefully prepared background fabrics. The grounds themselves are considered in the extreme and are just as important as the quality of line she uses to produce her fragile figures. Holmes endeavours to create a sense of faded beauty in her subtle use of colour and tone. A re-occurring theme in her work is an obsession with journeys and for this exhibition she has been inspired by Lady Isabella Bird, whose novel titled ‘A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains’ has been the focus for this new body of work. Holmes main piece in this exhibition captures the visual story of a life lived in this magnificent terrain with all its rugged beauty yet depicted in Holmes’s fine stitched lines. Fragments of fabric are used in soft colours to break the rigor of the stitch and add balance to a complex composition. The piece reads almost like a collection of nostalgic snap shots, stills from distant memories a story, which cannot fail to draw you in to Lady Isabella’s world.

Priscilla Jones’s response to the figure differs to the other exhibitors focusing on a three dimensional approach. A piece in her collection titled ‘Fly Away Home’ is a wire birdcage housing a surreal stitched figure half bird half woman, another piece is created from a mans starched collar depicting a disfigured fairy having lost her limbs long ago. Jones explores identity, memory and the translucency of time, reworking a range of recycled materials including broken ceramic dolls with stitch, silk, wax and wire. The quirky assembled figures are freely suspended almost dancing effortlessly through the air enabling us to watch them move and spin. Jones explores the subconscious depicting haunting and unnerving figures revealing an edge of surrealism that implies the common thread of personal memory.

Alice Kettle has extensively exhibited her embroideries all over the world and has long standing reputation in the field as an artist who paints with stitch. Kettle’s stitched figures are a culmination of many hours spent drawing in a variety of mixed media processes. Included in this exhibition are two of Kettles mixed media studies demonstrating how she creates images for her stitched pieces giving a rare insight into the developmental processes of her visual language.

‘Figurative Speaking’ is an exhibition that seams together the unparalleled work of four well known artists and articulates their individual desire to explore the figure relating to the viewer a truly personal response. Each has developed a narrative that unites them in terms of theme but diversifies them in terms of method, stitch with its long history of storey telling enables us to respond to these implied associations without the prejudice other creative mediums can evoke.

By Jennifer Pritchard Couchman

 

Jennifer has a background in fashion and for the last 12 years has successfully designed exclusive bridal wear through her design studio and bridal boutique in Lancaster. She also lectures at Preston College and University Centre at Blackburn College.

Sirens

 Oil Paintings by Kate Webster

4th September until 29 October

 

‘Now the sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence.’

Franz Kafka 1917.

 

Kate Has always worked in oil paints, producing a whole array of differing images, based upon various subject matter. In her latest exhibition, however, she has chosen to pay homage to some of the glamorous female icons of ‘The Dream Machine’, the golden age of Hollywood. Kate’s paintings, executed in black and white, portray the crisply evocative images of the thirties, forties and fifties. Each image stares out from its own imprisoning canvas, isolated in a static timeless nostalgia. Her subjects are pictured as a series of ’stills’. Faithful to an era in which cinematic special effects were still unknown, and which the main source of light was placed high up in front of the subject, her idealised portraits display faces in which the shadows of the skin texture are smoothed away, and facial contours are exaggerated. This gives them the dual quality of being Sirens, both goddess like and ghostly.

 

Beach

26th June – 20th August

Kirsten Jones

 

Own Art

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The Own Art scheme is designed to make it easy and affordable for everyone to buy contemporary works of art and craft including paintings, photography, sculpture, glassware and furniture.

You can borrow up to £2,000, or as little as £100, and pay back the loan in 10 monthly instalments – interest free.