Indholdsfortegnelse for November - December 2023 i Embroidery

■ IT IS traditional to remember and support charities at Christmas time, but have you ever thought of giving a gift to someone you don’t yet know – and one that would make a huge difference? With our readers’ collective wealth of talent, ‘sharing the love’ and giving the gift of embroidery through volunteering your skills could make a positive change to someone’s life. One remarkable charity is Fine CellWork which aims to rebuild the lives of prisoners with the transformative power of needlework to break the devastating cycle of reoffending and repeated imprisonment. They have over 100 volunteers, including embroidery enthusiasts and experts. On rare occasions there are opportunities for skilled stitchers to go into prisons to teach embroidery, needlepoint or quilting so prisoners can reach a level where…

History in the Making: Stories of Materials and Makers, 2000BC to now, at Compton Verney until 11 February 2024, will share the stories of the people and processes behind outstanding examples of historic and contemporary craft, by bringing together a treasure-trove of objects from the Woburn Abbey Collection, the Crafts Council and Compton Verney. Historic masterpieces from Woburn Abbey include the Mortlake Tapestry after Raphael, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, c.1660; 18th century Indian bed textiles; and fragments of hand-painted Chinese silk dating from 1752. On loan from the Crafts Council are painted silks by award-winning artist and designer Christian Ovonlen and works by Matt J Smith, including Hide and Seek (2019) and Study in Pink and Grey (2019), plus the artwork Craft Kills (2022) by artist-knitter Freddie Robins. comptonverney.org.uk…

■ You’re known for your use, celebration and subversion of traditionally ‘feminine’ skills such as crochet to make works like the brilliant Burnt Breakfast and Packed Lunch (1976). How would you describe your work? I would describe my work as domestic, female-friendly, subversive, attractive, humorous, issue-based, political. It’s an iron fist (crochet hook?) in a velvet glove. What attracted you to working with textiles? Did you have any training or go to art school? Since childhood, I’ve always enjoyed fabrics and colours: designing and dressmaking, recycling, re-purposing, collecting materials. I did a two-year foundation course at Newcastle College of Art and Design, then a three-year diploma in art and design, specialising in graphic design, at Leeds College of Art and Design, as well as a one-year Post Graduate Certificate in…

How did the No Rules Textile Society start? In March 2021 textile designer Jayne Emerson created the textile group she wanted to be part of. She expanded her Instagram challenge #fabricrecipes which offered prompts to encourage the exploration of possibilities and No RulesTextile Society was born. How does the society work? No Rules Textile Society is an ideas incubator using word prompts to spark exploration. A new prompt is announced every six weeks and Jayne uploads a mini online course full of ideas that she has amassed during her 30-year career. Members use these lessons as a jumping-off point to create their own unique take on the prompt. Is there an overriding principle that binds you together as a group? We are brought together by curiosity, by the ‘what ifs’…

■ KOLKATA, THE OLD CAPITAL of the British Empire, is a city full of grand colonial architecture. But it is so much more. India’s former capital is packed with art galleries that feed the thriving creative community and has a plethora of cultural festivals, jostling markets and overflowing temples. It is also the final resting place of MotherTeresa. Could you find another city more steeped in tradition and history, and yet one that is so joyfully alive and, ultimately, invigorating? Based in this kaleidoscope of a city is the Ginger Jerry Studio, whose philosophy is to go further when consistently creating outstanding pieces of work for their clients by seeking to preserve the centuries-old artisanal skills handed down the generations. And it does this with a ‘twist’ of originality. Matthew…

On show ARUNDEL Unearthed (includes Claire Benn) until 30 December, Gallery 57, 57Tarrant Street BN18 9DJ. gallery57.co.uk 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 BARTON UPON HUMBER Making 50: a landmark exhibition celebrating 50 years of the Textile Study Group until 26 November. The Ropewalk, Maltkiln Road DN18 5JT. theropewalk.co.uk BATH Connecting Threads until 22 December. Garments by Bath College students inspired by the collection of Museum of East Asian Arts, 12 Bennett Street BA1 2QJ. meaa.org.uk BOVEY TRACEY Under the Tree 2023: Contemporary Craft for Christmas, 18 Nov–6 Jan 2024. MAKE Southwest, Riverside Mill, DevonTQ13 9AF. crafts.org.uk BRISTOL Elias Sime: Eregata – one of Ethiopia’s leading artists. Show includes…

■ FIONA GILL IS happy to call 2023 ‘a super year’. The artist has seen one of her wet-felted images of a red squirrel appear on the satellite TV show Meet the Richardsons; while her more recent work in finely detailed embroidered portraiture has been featured on the cover of Embroidery magazine (May/June 2023); at the Stitch by Stitch show in Oswestry and at the Wirksworth and Staithes festivals of art. The muse struck during the Coronation, first with a portrait of Her Majesty Queen Camilla, patron of the Royal School of Needlework, which was created using British wool, and then with a picture of His Majesty King Charles, titled The Gardener King and stitched on floral furnishing fabric. Fiona says: ‘From an artist’s perspective, they have such wonderfully interesting…

At the end of 2016 a patchwork was found discarded in the attic by the new owners of a cottage in Crown Lane, Chislehurst. It was photographed extensively and much discussed. What is unique about this patchwork is that the fabrics used to create the front of it are of working class origin, whereas the templates on the reverse are from a well-to-do individual living in Chislehurst in the 1890s. In the illustrated booklet Material Evidence: A Chislehurst Patchwork by Eleanor Burkett and Kathy Baker, the authors unlock the story of the people and places contained within this extraordinary creation, plus what it reveals about the social history of Chislehurst and how it functioned at the turn of the 20th century. Material Evidence: A Chislehurst Patchwork by Eleanor Burkett and…

Annie Taylor has an affinity with water – and mermaids – despite being a poor swimmer. During her childhood in South London her family’s running joke was that there wasn’t a local stretch of water that she hadn’t fallen into. ‘There are family photos of my mum, dad and brother but I’m not there because I’m wearing my dad’s jumper with all my clothes strewn out on the bulrushes drying, again.’ Seventeen years ago Annie and her husband moved to live by the sea in Whitstable, where her artistic career began to coalesce. The artist started imagineering fantastical mermaids and fairy folk. Diminutive initially, popped into jars and teacups and tagged ‘freshly caught mermaids’, they sold well in her Whitstable Tails Etsy shop, but later were to develop into ‘life-sized’…

We’ve all heard anecdotes about young people turning up to do a fashion or craft degree and not being able to thread a needle. More recently teachers tell us that some young children starting school can’t even hold a pencil, as they lack fine motor skills. There is a skills gap here, but is poor dexterity more significant than that? Creative education has been in decline for some years and the ripples are being felt in wider society; disruptive behaviour in school and a deficit of attention have reached unprecedented levels. As we try to understand the implications of artificial intelligence and hurtle into the fourth industrial revolution, we risk losing the craft skills that make humans unique. Society values work we do with our heads more highly than work…

Not much gets past the ‘beady’ and wise eyes of Sarah Gwyer. Her extraordinary portraits of pop stars and more socially-engaged work is intricate and flawless in its construction. But how did she arrive at beading as her chosen art form? Initially trained in fine art during her university degree in Cardiff, followed by a Master’s in printmaking at the University of the Arts, London, Sarah Gwyer made the switch to embroidery after seeking a way to go beyond the flatness of print. She has since developed an expertise in stitched and beaded work of extraordinary detail, colour and composition through a practice which incorporates celebrity portrait pieces alongside more socially and politically inspired works, which bring issues of consumerism into the mix. ‘In my final year I started embellishing…

What are your early memories of cloth, stitch and embroidery? My early memories of cloth are my brothers and I playing hide and seek among the sheets drying on the washing line. What joy it brought us! I saw my mom and her friends sewing and embellishing things for the house with embroidery. I loved watching what looked like a mysterious women’s ritual. How did you start collaging silk? It was really out of necessity as I was a cash-strapped university graduate who wanted to create and fabric is just so practical; my first few pieces were donations from friends. I really resonated with the properties of raw silk and the complimentary swatches I collected called me to make works of the Johannesburg Central Business District. What do you think…

Give the gift of inspiration this Christmas Give the next 3 issues of Embroidery delivered direct to their door for £18.99 UK, £26.49 Overseas Or, give the next 3 issues in print, PLUS access to our fully searchable digital archive for the duration, with over 450 issues dating back to 1922, for just £26.49 UK or £33.99 Overseas Or simply treat yourself! Call the hotline on 01778 392 468 Quote promo code: EMND23 Subscribe today bit.ly/EMND23 EMBROIDERYMAGAZINE.CO.UK scan here for the offer!…

■ THOUGH ONLY A 20-MINUTE drive from her home in Newcastle upon Tyne, textile artist Mandy Pattullo’s studio seems like a world away. Located in Horsley, a diminutive rural village in the Tyne Valley, her workspace is one of eight artists’ studios in The Hearth, a small arts centre and café established in 2004 in a restored, wattle and daub, 17th-century manse. Pattullo evidently finds such day-to-day shifting between the urban and the bucolic beneficial. ‘It was a conscious decision on my part to get a studio in the countryside. I don’t particularly want to live there but I like dipping in and out of it. And I like the journey, it gives me a good separation between home and work.’ But it’s not only the drive and change of…

Your cultural background forms the narrative behind the textile artworks in your exhibition Talking Threads. What do you hope visitors learn about your life? The body of work that you see is the accumulation of years of gathering and making. I have used photographs, drawings, illustrations, painting and documents in my textile work and artist’s books. Each textile piece has a weight of its own where time stops, within each specific frame there is a sense of whisper, storytelling and sometime lamentation. My subjects are trying to overcome their grief and fight with their circumstances. As a young girl I faced many obstacles. I didn’t have the freedom of choice my brothers had, so I turned to reading, poetry and art. This was the start of a beautiful journey for…

There’s no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway. Cyril Connolly (1938) Enemies of Promise ■ A RECENT RECIPIENT of the prestigious Boston Institute of Contemporary Art’s Foster Prize, artist Venetia Dale is testimony to the wrongheaded nature of Connolly’s now infamous quote. For Dale, her family is her artistic practice. They are one and the same. Indivisible. They feed and nourish each other. A precious act of presence, of bearing witness, of paying minute attention to the daily motion of her domestic life, Dale’s oeuvre is one of collecting, casting and reimagining the flotsam, jetsam and unfinished nature of our existence. Mother to three children between the ages of three and eight, Dale’s home-life is a demanding one: ‘I’m the keeper of time in…

Jennifer Collier reinterprets ubiquitous objects with paper and thread. Whether it be a camera, sewing machine, typewriter or telephone, such objects, though remaining ostensibly domestic in both scale and familiarity, through her artistry take on a kind of fabulist quality. The artistic reinterpretation of everyday, known objects isn’t new: the Dadaists and Surrealists used it as a ruse to both unsettle and provoke questions about our taken-for-granted ways of seeing, with Dali’s Lobster Telephone, Man Ray’s Cadeau (an iron with spikes) or Duchamp’s Fountain (an upside-down urinal) as now infamous examples. Less overtly subversive, Collier’s is a gentler art. As her website video reveals, with the deftness of a Saville Row tailor preparing a toile, Collier forms these articles from a series of layered, sometimes single, cut paper sheets which…

1. GIVE YOURSELF A GIFT Rebecca Devaney, a former haute couture embroiderer in Paris ateliers, conducts tours of Paris’s charming haberdasheries, nestled in the winding streets of Le Sentier, the city’s historic textile and fashion district. These boutiques are brimming with the highest quality ribbons, yarns, threads, beads, sequins, gems and buttons – perfect for a spot of festive ‘self-gifting’. Alternatively, enjoy a Saturday morning flea market tour as Rebecca guides you through the labyrinth alleys of Paris’s oldest marché-aux-puces to discover hidden treasure troves filled with vintage lace, linen, passementerie and golden threads. (Closed: December, January and August.) textiletoursofparis.com 2. PAUSE THE MERRY-GO-ROUND If you feel drained in the months heading up to the festive celebration, make time to book on to Crafty Sew and So’s Christmas rag rug…

Canadian artist Ava Roth works with embroidery and encaustic painting techniques, weaving willow sculptures and incorporating driftwood and found antlers into pieces that place organic materials at their heart. An unusual and highly distinctive body of work, largely produced in gold and dark blue threads and beadwork, and featuring abstract repeat shapes such as starbursts or flowing curved waves, her Honeycomb Collection is a collaboration with local honeybees, in which embroidered pieces are placed carefully into hives. This placement allows honeycomb to be gradually built within designated spaces in the frames. ‘One of my favourite things about this project,’ Roth notes, ‘is that I really can trace my own journey as an artist through it. It happened organically as a natural outgrowth of various things that I was doing for…