Indholdsfortegnelse for May - June 2022 i Embroidery

COURTESY AYA HAIDER REPAIR, VISIBLE MENDING and repurposing are languages familiar to many textile makers. A new material economy of care has emerged in recent times, along with a recognition of the role that making and craft can play in self-care and caring for others. For many, objects hold an emotional resonance, none more so than the clothes we wear and the textiles that surround us. Aya Haider understands this more than most. Haider spent three months as an artist working with Syrian refugees as they entered the UK. This experience, along with first-hand accounts, resulted in the ‘Soleless’ series – a succession of embroidered stories stitched upon the underside of worn shoes. These highly-charged intimate artworks evoke the separation, loss and perilous journeys forcibly endured by people fleeing their…

What does your studio mean to you? My studio is everything: it’s been variously, as well as a studio, a workshop venue, a gallery and, from the start of the pandemic, a classroom. It was here in my garden in Tunbridge Wells, when we moved in 1996. It was unloved and unheated so over the years we insulated it and installed proper lighting, heating and water. It’s a rectangular shape and it seems as if it was built around odd windows. It’s half clad in wood so looks a bit cabin-like. On the inside it has a large L-shaped workbench with storage underneath and shelving on top. What supplies do you always keep to hand? I keep my studio for making and have a separate office for writing and administration.…

An interview with Michael Brennand-Wood is the spoken equivalent of his artwork. Rich in ideas and layered with details, considered yet playful, it is a dialogue with depth. Questions are being asked. Threads explored. Inspirations shared. Boundaries stretched. The thinking never stops. Nor does the questioning. Michael has the restless curiosity of a natural explorer. Combine that with independence of mind, a scholarly knowledge of his subject and a passion for communication, and we have an artist guaranteed to keep us on our toes. Toe-point was precisely the place Embroidery magazine last encountered Michael (July/August 2019) in an article that ended with En Pointe. ‘There’s a symbiotic relationship between the choreography of a needle as it moves through space, piercing, twisting into the fabric ground, and a dancer as they…

Alicja Kozłowska lives, studies and works in Warsaw. I spoke to her over Zoom where we were joined by one of her six rescue cats, a satisfied looking Devon Rex. He wanted in on all the interview action. And he almost definitely noses in on the embroidery action in her room too. Kozłowska has been embroidering since she was 17. She is now 22. Accomplished in her chosen craft of embroidery, she’s also mid-way through a BA in Design at the School of Form in Warsaw. She’d taken along a portfolio of textiles to her interview and they obviously saw potential. Even now Kozłowska tries to incorporate her textile work into everything she makes there. And she’s experimenting with furniture and ceramics, amongst other new (to her) materials. PHOTOGRAPHY: ALICJA…

Karen Nicol offers an exclusive glimpse inside her creative practice in a new exhibition at Sunbury Embroidery Gallery. The London-based designer has collaborated with fashion houses including Alexander McQueen, Jasper Conran, Schiaparelli and Giles Deacon, as well as leading interior designers and gallerists. Nicol knows a thing or two about embroidery and this exhibition explores the creative process, from initial inspiration to final design. For Nicol, the real thrill lies in expanding the possibilities when it comes to surface manipulation. Expect mood boards and samples, as well as sketchbooks and video footage – each offering a unique insight into the methodology behind the work of this extraordinary textile artist. Karen Nicol: A Visual Journey at Sunbury Embroidery Gallery until 15 May. Artist’s talk 12 May sunburygallery.org…

PHOTOGRAPHY: LOL JOHNSON THE SPACE AND SURFACE where Emily Jo Gibbs sews represents a delicious sense of familial continuum. She not only works in the same Dulwich house that she’d lived in as a child but also on the self-same kitchen table her father had designed. ‘My Dad made the table when he was a furniture design student and I remember it always being in this position. When my parents down-sized they left a lot of their stuff,’ she laughs, ‘some convenient, some inconvenient’. Evidently in the convenient category, the table inspires warm memories. ‘I learnt to sew on it. My mother studied Fashion Tailoring at the RCA and it was here she taught me to sew.’ Indeed, the table, whether by intent or serendipity, seems to determine the scale…

Celia Pym’s practice is kind. Exemplifying a habit of thoughtful, quiet care, Pym mends things. And it all began with her Uncle Roly’s sweater. ‘He was no longer alive,’ says Pym, ‘so there was no pressing need to mend it. That wasn’t the point. I was just incredibly moved by this feeling that the damage represented a trace of his body and that it was evidence of a kind of neglect, something left unnoticed.’ That was sixteen years ago and articulating her reasons for the repair is far from straightforward. Having shared a house with her uncle and his sister from the age of ten, Pym inevitably felt grief at his death yet, she has since realised, the emotional pull of his sweater wasn’t about her uncle but her aunt,…

©WILL CRUICKSHANK Will Cruickshank makes machines that in their turn make things. Mechanised by a clattering hotchpotch of cement mixers, potter’s wheels, buckets, sash weights, ropes and logs, Cruickshank’s Heath Robinson-like contraptions spin, wind and form sculptural objects some of which, when cut, burst into blooms of glorious, kaleidoscopic colour. As the author of this alchemical process Cruickshank is engagingly diffident. ‘I develop these machines and processes but often things don’t go to plan. The machines are unpredictable – it isn’t NASA-level engineering – they’re makeshift. A lot of the time I’m not sure what’s going to happen.’ Built from essentially what’s to hand, Cruickshank admits: ‘If I can avoid going to the shops I will.’ As a child Cruickshank remembers being allowed ‘to go mad and make little things’…

Compton Verney’s folk art collection is founded on a personal collection acquired by Andras Kalman in the decades between 1950 and 1990. An art dealer who was instrumental in establishing the careers of many 20th century British painters, Kalman was also a fervent advocate of British folk art which he described as ‘the endangered species of the English art world’. It was an astute observation, and something his collecting began to rectify. Shop signs, toys, baskets, weathervanes, paintings, patchwork, embroidery: all took his eye. Each a piece of everyday art by unheralded makers pursuing a particular tradition. ‘Naïve art has a freshness, crispness, originality,’ Kalman wrote. These were qualities he sought out, in the process creating a collection of national significance. Annelise Hone, Compton Verney’s Collections & Exhibitions Manager explains.…

A COUP FOR IKON, this major survey of the work of Swedish artist Britta Marakatt-Labba (b.1951) is a revelation. Under the Vast Sky presents framed embroideries, textile hangings, video and even examples of Marakatt-Labba’s recent foray into sculpture – in total around 45 works dating from the 1980s to the present day. Although not widely known in the UK, Marakatt-Labba is a veteran of documenta (2017), since when the art world outside Scandinavia has woken up to her practice (this year she’s an invited artist at this year’s Biennale in Venice). For this artist, there’s no more powerful way to tell stories than through visual images, her medium of choice being stitch and cloth. For more than 40 years she has chronicled the history, culture and cosmology of the Sámi,…

PHOTOGRAPHY: CINDY TRIM I MAKE ART ABOUT SCIENCE and my work takes me out of the studio to places like the vaults of the Field Museum in Chicago, the guts of an experiment at Fermi National Accelerator, and farm test plots at the University of Illinois. One of the most unusual residencies I’ve completed was aboard the Research Vessel Endeavor. It’s hard to care about what we can’t see, and my art makes visible the invisible and complex world of sound in the sea. We are visual creatures. But at sea, light only penetrates a few hundred meters under water. Visibility falls off dramatically in deeper water, so the kinds of visual observations that biologists use to study terrestrial ecosystems is not particularly illuminating. Ocean acoustics uses sound to describe…

1 The wealth of surface pattern adorning the objects that enrich our lives is testament to the inventiveness of designers and craftspeople throughout history. This generously illustrated sourcebook brings together more than one thousand historic and contemporary examples of pattern and ornamentation from around the world, each one identified and succinctly explained. Arranged thematically The V&A Sourcebook of Pattern and Ornament (Thames and Hudson £35) is a timeless and inspiring visual reference you won’t want to be without. 2 Discover 28 artists from around the world who are maestros of crafting colour. True Colors: World Masters of Natural Dyes and Pigments (Thrums Books £30.12) celebrates the historical importance and environmental sustainability of natural dye practices. It offers a fascinating insight into regional wisdom and traditions, offering a window into the…

RADICAL ACTS: WHY CRAFT MATTERS is the second Biennial at Harewood House. It features sixteen practitioners whose work in wood, textile, ceramic, metal and ceramic is shown across the State Rooms and estate grounds. The previous Biennial, also curated by Hugo Macdonald, shared the same premise that ‘craft matters’ but explored it from the perspective of Useful/Beautiful (2019). The current works are also useful/beautiful, (Sebastian Cox’s Sylvascope, a tree house of woven wood overlooking managed woodland being a highlight) but that is not the premise on which they have been selected. Rather they have been chosen as exemplars that illustrate how craft with social and environmental purpose can help us address ‘the urgent issues of modern life’. One such issue, the pandemic, caused the delay of the Biennial by a…

1 SMOCKING WEEKEND Ruth Singer shares the basics of traditional English smocking using a variety of classic stitch patterns on this weekend course in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. You also get to explore contemporary, experimental variations using unusual materials and new stitches. 7-8 May £150 shopbeyondmeasure.co.uk 2 HAND EMBROIDERY Join Richard McVetis at Ray Stitch in London, and experiment with a combination of traditional hand embroidery techniques, while exploring the versatility and potential of embroidery for drawing and mark making. All materials are provided for this one day workshop. 13 May £90 raystitch.co.uk 3 STORIES IN STITCH Explore Jessie Chorley’s signature style of hand embroidered illustration, and experiment with stitching techniques including couching, running, stem, seed and back stitch, as well as simple appliqué and hand embroidered text in this weekend…