Innholdsfortegnelse for March - April 2023 i Embroidery

How did the group start? Originally calledThe Prism Group of Textile Artists, the group was established in 1998 by the late Julia Caprara. Exhibitions were held annually at the Mall Galleries in London as an important focus for the work of students and tutors from Opus School ofTextile Arts*. In 2010 Prism established itself as an independent, member-run exhibiting group, which retains its original focus on showcasing high-quality textile art and craftsmanship. Prism currently has a membership of 70 UK and international artists. *Opus was initially founded in 1983 as Stitch Design, by Barbara Marriott, Julia Caprara and Alex Caprara. Later, under the direction of Julia and Alex, the school grew in reputation as one of the UK’s leading textile art schools, specialising in teaching stitched textiles and art and…

AS THE WAR IN UKRAINE continues, a group of women are taking a stand against the Russian occupation, not with guns, but with needles and thread. The collective Ariadne’sThread was founded in March 2022 by Polish curator Magdalena Glowacka as a safe meeting place for Ukrainian women in Greater London and Surrey. Now it’s an international network, with members in East Sussex, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Norway and Ukraine itself. And currently, they’re working on Blue Cornflowers…: a tapestry to raise funds for Ukrainian refugees and awareness of Ukrainian culture, and Russia’s attempts to erase it. ‘It feels like you are a part of some beautiful mechanism that creates an art object and every stitch helps to find a picture that was dissolved in white canvas,’ says Olga Ochkas, a Ukrainian…

ONE OF THE BEST-KNOWN British artists working today, Sir Grayson Perry has made a career working across a range of media, notably ceramics and tapestry, and is famed for his sense of fashion, as well as his egalitarian approach to art. This new exhibition at Midlands Art Centre in Birmingham comprises more than 100 eclectic works of art made by a handful of professional artists, popular celebrities, including comedians Jo Brand and Joe Lycett, but primarily by members of the British public who were selected from submissions to the third series of Perry’s hit Channel Four TV series Grayson’s Art Club. The exhibition is divided into themes – love, holidays, the future and ‘normal life’ – broad enough to cover pretty much any artwork submitted. This openness is likewise reflected…

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■ Willemien Downes-Wechgelaer’s brightlyhued embroideries bring something of a colour rush to the head. ‘I like the impact of colour,’ she says. ‘I can look at a Mark Rothko, just one colour on canvas, and I find it fascinating.’ Many people find Rothko’s large blocks of colour overwhelming but Willemien’s growing passion for Modern Art has influenced her kaleidoscopic colour combinations which are faintly reminiscent of the Op Art movement, although there are no optical illusions here. The heady intoxication is created by the compelling juxtaposition of colour and shape. Willemien’s love of embroidery goes all the way back to elementary school. She still has her very first artwork, two textile rabbits surrounded by stitches. Formally trained via a four-year City & Guilds course, from 1997 to 2001, where at…

Rain pelts against the house, bouncing off the windows in shards of silver. The garden sings with relief as a week of dry August heat concludes with a downpour. Sheltered under the eaves of the woodshed, we watch as water runs in streams from furrows along the corrugated roof. Together, we lift the vat further into the woodshed and begin moving the already dipped indigo cloth inside, too, protecting it from the rainfall. There are too many swathes of damp cloth to fit inside the small woodshed and the remaining pieces hang heavily in saturated lines between the willow and pear tree. Summer is nearing its end, though our dyeing work is far from done. My mum darts up to the house, pulling from the porch the collection of umbrellas…

■ REBECCA DEVANEYWAS 18 when she began harbouring what she refers to as‘an extremely romantic idea of embroidering in Paris’. Born in a village outside Dublin into a literary family (‘My grandmother owned the village bookshop’), Devaney describes herself as growing up with‘my head in books, but I was always interested in art. I loved beauty.’ However, it wasn’t until studying for a degree in art and design education that she began to experiment with textiles. ‘I fell in love with the fine art approach to textiles. I remember being introduced to the sampling process and I was, “Oh my gosh, I can just play around with fabric and stitches and paper.”’ Scrolling through her website, Devaney’s gift for narrative, scene-setting and sense of detail is evident. ‘If I hadn’t…

■ Amanda McCavour is a Toronto-based artist who works with stitch to create large-scale embroidered installations. She is interested in thread’s assumed vulnerability, its ability to unravel, and its strength when it is sewn together. McCavour has a BFA from York University, Canada, where she studied drawing and installation and an MFA in fibres and material studies fromTyler School of Art in Philadelphia, USA. Can we start by talking about your work The Horizon, The Ocean, The Sky (2021-2022)? It’s made of hundreds of embroideries pinned to the wall and arranged almost to look like wallpaper with a repeat pattern. I’ve worked with free-motion embroidery on to water soluble fabric to create connection points and structure. My background is in drawing and a lot of the pieces are based on…

By Ann Goddard Taking what might be considered unusual materials, lead, bark, wood, plastic, Ann Goddard challenges the textile maker and artist to explore the three-dimensional possibilities of constructed form with stitch. Set out with clear guidance and examples throughout, the first two chapters look at themes to be explored and how to research. Goddard asks you to think about the subjects that are of interest to you and how to generate research from local exploration and via collections in museums for ideas, as well as through the work of other artists. The book provides examples by makers such as Nerissa CargillThompson, Hilary Bower and Michael Brennand-Wood as well as her own work. Personal themes such as ideas relating to‘boundaries’ or ‘ebb and flow’ are threaded throughout the book to…

Congratulations to Eliza Gomersall who won the Textile Art – Student category in the Hand and Lock Prize for Embroidery 2022. Eliza also won the Worshipful Company of Broderers Associate Award. Eliza said she hoped she had made her family proud. She has recently started a scholarship with the Prince’s Foundation in Gloucestershire. We featured Eliza in the November/December 2022 edition of Embroidery. Congratulations also go to Lucy Newman who won the Textile Art Open category. Her winning triptych imagines a nuclear wasteland where pen, ink and watercolours have been forgotten to be replaced with cotton and scraps of fabric. In her portrayal she says: ‘the natural world is fused with the technological and makes glitches and distortions.’ The Hand and Lock Prize 2023 is now open for registrations at…

■ Presented by Canopy Collections and fresh to the UK art scene are contemporary Mexican duo Maria Fernanda Camarena and Gabriel Rosas Alemán. Together for six years as a couple and four years as an artistic partnership, they offer an innovative take on artistic life, homing in on their talents as hosts. A visit to their exhibition atThe Wing Gallery in London (until the end of January) was a chance to walk into their world and experience their interpretation of guests’ visits to their home inTepoztlán, a town they both love. Gabriel explains: ‘When family and friends come to our house, it is a really important time for us. We prepare rooms and meals and give them tours of the house. We wanted to bring this dynamic to the studio.’…

Since I was a baby I had watched my mother embroider. I remember occasions when my mother wouldn’t be able to complete a pattern or several embroideries; she would invite my aunts or her friends over. They would work on them together over delicious traditional snacks and tea while I, my sisters and the other children would play. It was always fun and like a summer holiday. My childhood played a significant role in developing and seeing beauty around me, spanning from the natural surroundings to the tactile, texture, pattern, colour and a holistic form of art being a way of life. I had access to almost all art forms apart from weaving. I had never seen a loom till I was studying at art college. Running stitch, technique of…

Textile artist Stewart Kelly is, quite literally, watching himself sew. Currently in his second year researching for a part-time PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University, Kelly is meticulously recording his creative practice through film, animation, drawing and writing. ‘I’m looking at stitch as a reflective practice. I stitch on a daily basis as a sort of reflexive journal, as a way of documenting the act of stitching and what happens within that experience.’ He describes the action of sewing as akin to a conversation, where the cloth or paper, acts, as he says, ‘as a kind of catalyst’. ‘It’s a sort of reciprocal conversation that looks at what is transmitted through the cloth and then received back through the body.’ An artist who has not only frequently taught within the arts…

There can’t be many exhibition spaces with the phrase ‘embroidery gallery’ in their title, but Sunbury Embroidery Gallery is one such. Nestled in the corner of Sunbury’s Walled Garden on the edge of the park, and just a stone’s throw from the RiverThames, the award-winning gallery opened in 2006 at a cost of £450,000, raised mainly from the local community. Now, the gallery is embarking on a major expansion plan for which it already has planning consent but needs, once again, the support of the local community and embroidery enthusiasts. Since the gallery opened it has been self-funding, with income from the café with its stunning terrace overlooking the Green Flag and gold medal-winning garden, plus gallery sales and the contribution of over 45 regular volunteers keeping it in the…

A casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ruthin Craft Centre’s (RCC) showing of MOTIVE/MOTIF is a belated one. Conceived by the London College of Fashion (LCF) as a means of marking the 100th anniversary of the passing of the 1918 Representation of the People Act which legalised women’s suffrage, it should have been exhibited in 2019. The genesis of the show’s concept was a handkerchief embroidered in 1912 by 68 suffragettes then incarcerated in Holloway Prison. Taking what is a startlingly modest object as inspiration, LCF commissioned 20 artists to design an image which their specialist technicians then embroidered on to a handkerchief. In addition to the 1912 handkerchief and the 20 commissioned pieces, MOTIVE/MOTIF also includes three wall-hung banners, a video screen showing footage of the coordinated ‘living artwork’ marches…