Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2023 i Embroidery

■ IN A BUSY CAFE inVantaa, Finland, Polina Laamanen sits across a table telling me about her life and work. The interview is conducted via Zoom but it’s as though I’m there chatting with her. Wearing a maroon beanie with the slogan‘Bad hair day’, mums with two small children everywhere will be able to identify with this inventive artist who is currently finding it hard to carve out the time to spend on her passion. Polina grew up in St Petersburg, Russia, in a single-parent family. Her mum was a seamstress for theatrical productions, making and repairing costumes, so there was always fabric on hand for Polina to play around with to create dolls’ clothes. The family was poor but ‘there was a lot of culture’. ‘I was going to…

Textiles have a history embedded in the use of regulation and pattern, from the weave of the cloth to the embroidery on its surface. In Record, Map and Capture, Jordan Cunliffe gives a contemporary voice to the regular rhythms of weave and stitch through ideas surrounding the graphic representation of information and data with thread. Describing her embroidery as like a ‘time capsule’, Cunliffe engineers her work into ‘markers to record data, codes and algorithms’. Cunliffe provides a useful insight into processes and ideas on how textile art can be a visual and tactile response to explain abstract themes. In the chapter ‘DataVisualisation’, she explains how, by using grid systems, you can represent the idea of linear time through the slow repetition of hand-stitch combined with the use of pattern…

■ HAND-STITCHING DESCRIBES both the functional and symbolic dimensions of joining and being attached, and as such it has become a daily social encounter for Gavin Fry. In the exhibition Things Put Differently at Wolfson College, Cambridge (until 10 September), Fry presents stitched works and ideas, including works by others and found objects. The slow rhythms of hand-stitching allow the artist to carve out space for himself and make time for reflection. The embroidery here is not a rogue element but is integral to the making stages as a dialogic element that adds to both the narrative and the making process with its idiosyncratic imagery. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of having an art practice, is to use it as a trampoline to bounce around questions that might not otherwise…

On show AYLESBURY Blooming Threads: 400 years of embroidery blooms – an exhibition delving into the Embroiderers’ Guild Collection. Until 2024. Discover Bucks Museum, Church Street HP20 2PQ. discoverbucksmuseum.org BOVEYTRACEY Summer Show 2023: The best work by maker members until 2 September. MAKE Southwest, Riverside Mill, DevonTQ13 9AF. crafts.org.uk BRISTOLThreads: Breathing stories into materials 8 July-1 October. Arnolfini, 16 Narrow Quay BS1 4QA. arnolfini.org.uk CHANDLER’S FORD Winchester Textiles and Embroidery Group, Hampshire Open Studios, 26–27 August at Fryern Community Centre, SO53 2LE, 10am-4pm, with sales of art, gifts and cards, and interiors accessories. winchestertextilegroup.co.uk CWMBRANThe Huff and Puff series by Vivienne Beaumont is at Llantarnam Grange until 29 July. St David’s Road, Cwmbran NP44 1PD. llantarnamgrange.com DUNDEETartan until 14 January 2024. V&A Dundee, 1 Riverside Esplanade DD1 4EZ. vam.ac.uk/dundee ELYThreadsThrough…

AS PART OF LONDON CRAFTWEEK in May, the new Future Icons Selects exhibition saw 70 artisans take over Oxo Tower Wharf’s iconic Bargehouse. Among them was Hong Kong couple Merry and Ngai, now based in the UK. The duo have a love of films, having worked in the film industry as costume assistants, and base their tiny embroideries on scenes from movies. Calling themselves‘Merry Antbroidery’ taps into their summation that they are like ants, ‘tiny but powerful’, but also incorporates their names. Merry is Ngai’s husband, while Ngai’s name in Cantonese has a similar pronunciation to ‘Ant’. Together they discuss which scene from the movies they should embroider, pick the colours and then start outlining the background. Depending on how many layers there are, they might create them separately and…

■ ONE-TIME HAT-MAKER and now project-based artist, Bridget Bailey’s Clockwork Studios space is known as‘The Greenhouse’. Its conservatory-like glass ceiling and walls serve as a liminal space between the interior and the exterior world, a tenuous membrane that details, often too keenly, the weather outside. It not only lets it in with random drips but sometimes sanctions the occasional‘early visitor’. ‘Once a tendril of a Montana clematis came in and grew along my washing line and, though it wasn’t spring outside, it started flowering. It was beautiful,’ says Bailey. Whether it’s velvet lily seed heads from her allotment or feathers from the colony of crows she encounters on her daily cycle ride across Peckham Rye to the studio, Bailey, a maker of nature-inspired, exquisitely-wrought installations, brings the outdoors in. Hence…

Threads: Breathing stories into materials is an ambitious project spearheaded by Arnolfini, Bristol’s centre for contemporary arts, comprising a major exhibition of textile work from 22 national and international artists and makers supported by a wider community-focused programme of activity. The exhibition itself is co-curated by Alice Kettle, renowned artist and professor of textile arts at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, and brings together a range of work to explore the connections between textiles, cultures, memory and storytelling across all three floors of the gallery. ‘I came into the project as a voice adding to the discussion, working alongside a dynamic curatorial and public engagement team who develop seminal exhibitions and events for Arnolfini. ‘My aim with Threads is to affirm the prominence of textiles within contemporary art…

■ When Toni Buckby – artist, needleworker and PhD researcher at Sheffield Hallam University and the Victoria and Albert Museum – put out a notice with the Embroiderers’ Guild and online asking for 40 experienced embroiderers to contribute to a blackwork stitching project, she wasn’t prepared for the response. With the final works becoming part of an exhibition in December 2023, then being donated to the V&A collection, she was inundated. She ended up having to expand the project to 140 stitchers and after that, could handle no more. The administration involved was mind-boggling. Part of the core project had become about solving a puzzle. Buckby was on the mysterious case of the lost stitching and the missing embroiderer. It became a whodunnit. She says: ‘We’ve got this really sad…

■ TUCKED AWAY IN A corner of Bermondsey Street in South East London, the Fashion and Textile Museum nevertheless shouts its presence in dazzling orange paintwork. Their current exhibition, Andy Warhol: The Textiles, includes more than 45 of Warhol’s previously unknown textile patterns, created between the 1950s and early 1960s, during his early career as a commercial designer and illustrator. A dark and minimalist gallery space allows all attention to be focused on the fine details in these brightly coloured fabrics and garments. Showcasing uncut lengths of material alongside garments made from matching designs, brings out the tactility of the material. Multiple colourways are shown for many of the exuberant designs. The space is punctuated by large black and white photographs of Warhol, serving as a constant reminder that this…

Exhibitors enter a whirlwind of green-fingered artistry when displaying at RHS Chelsea Flower Show, each garden and stand preened to perfection. For Zena Holloway, an underwater photographer and material innovator (Embroidery March/April 2023) it was also fruitful. She won a silver medal for her sustainable wedding dress, grown from the roots of wheatgrass in templates carved from beeswax and stitched into a striking gown. She caught the attention of the press for her pioneering ingenuity. Aware of the depth of the plastic crisis in our oceans and rivers, Holloway was taking underwater shots of a model against the awe-inspiring roots of a willow tree when she was moved to ask: can we grow sustainable clothes from seed? Holloway’s pieces show that the power of plants is infinitely renewable and nature’s…

Eppie Thompson, founder of The Fabled Thread Embroidery Kits, is on a mission. ‘The whole point of producing the kits and launching The Fabled Thread was to get people sewing,’ says Thompson. A creative act that she regards as ‘almost meditative’, Thompson believes in its therapeutic power: ‘I really think that people benefit from it; there’s so much in the process of doing it that’s good for us mentally.’ Despite having the seemingly ubiquitous grandmother who sews – in fact both of Thompson’s grandmothers sew, one of whom, now approaching her hundredth year, still does so every day – as a child Thompson didn’t take to it. ‘My grandmother did try to teach me when I was about eight but I didn’t have the attention span required.’ Prompted to have…

■ WITHTHE RECENT ESCALATION of tensions in the Middle East, the decision of Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, to stage Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery seems a prescient one. Originally intended to open in June 2020 until scuppered by Covid, its timing might, nevertheless, be seen as controversial, and indeed, partisan. Rachel Dedman, a specialist in contemporary Middle Eastern art at the V&A Museum and the exhibition’s curator, hopes not. ‘For us this is an exhibition about material culture. Palestinian embroidery is an ancient practice, a craft that’s been of central importance to them for hundreds of years. Of course, the political is present – it’s the context, the backdrop to the whole exhibition. But where it is addressed, it is addressed in, and through, the objects. It’s shaped by them and they…

■ IT IS DIFFICULT TO categorise the work of Matthew Harris, but perhaps that’s the whole idea. Freedom comes from eschewing labels that others would attach to us. A graduate of the fine art textile course at Goldsmiths, London, over many years Harris has worked across paper and textile, using a combination of different techniques, from drawing and painting to cutting, folding, pleating and stitching. He has shown in a number of group and solo exhibitions throughout the UK, Ireland and Japan and his work is now the subject of a solo exhibition at Ruthin Craft Centre in Wales, called Matthew Harris: Cut, Shift, Repeat, from 8 July to 24 September. For this show, Harris employs dyeing, cutting and hand-stitching and is concerned, primarily, with abstract imagery and the translation…

Hello Goodbye is an exhibition marking the retirement of Lesley Millar MBE as professor of textile culture and director of the international textile research centre at University for the Creative Arts (UCA), Farnham, where she started out as a visiting lecturer in 1986. Taking place at UCA’s Crafts Study Centre, the exhibition celebrates many of the significant achievements of Millar’s career, including exhibitions and publications, by showcasing much of her varied collection of textile works. ‘The exhibition includes textiles that I have been given by artists over the past 20 years, most of whom I have worked with or whom I know very well, with two pieces that I have bought. It features most of my small collection. It has been a devil of a job to hang all this…