Every year at the Festival of Quilts, work from the UK’s leading textile artist students, selected by City & Guilds, are given the opportunity to showcase their final year’s work.
Archana’s making process involves collecting old memory artefacts such as photographs and maps then deconstructing them to re-use as threads. Archana’s is born of British and Indian heritage, and she specialises in stitch and fine art textiles.
Vintage maps used as the foundation of the work
Having been raised in India and now living in London, the uprooting and the subsequent re-rooting have been transformative, and the origin of the exhibited work lies in this. This exhibition reveals the evolution of her work, which follows the threads of transient boundaries and belongingness.
Re-imagined landscapes are inspired by the cycle of a day and are a harmonious representation of co-existence, multiplicity, and connectedness.
‘Five Times More’ depicts the intimate relationship between mother and child, reflecting on both personal and collective experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood.
Maggie Scott’s technical practice is unparalleled in the landscape of contemporary British art, sitting at the boundary of tapestry and digital media, she employs a combination of photography, digital collage and silk and then injects colour by laboriously pushing vibrant merino wool fibres through silk in a process known as Nuno felting.
The intensely physical process of felting is followed by the careful process of using stitch to emphasise the smaller details of an image, evoking both the physicality of childbirth and the careful attention and tenderness of what follows. In working with fibre Scott pushes a medium traditionally associated with craft into the realm of fine art. As a textile artist, Scott employs distinctly feminine materials, but with soft images, she speaks hard truths.
Birth is the most innate experience of human existence yet for centuries, childbirth has also been the most dangerous undertaking of a woman’s life. Rates of maternal mortality have dropped dramatically in Britain since the mid-18th century.
Nuno felted art
However, the effects of modern medicine have not been felt equally. In 2019 MBRACE UK published data within its Perinatal Mortality report, which revealed that people of colour remain at a much higher risk during pregnancy and childbirth within the British healthcare system. Most disturbingly the report revealed that in the United Kingdom a Black woman is five times more likely to die during childbirth than her white counterpart.
Five Times More humanises the statistics published by MBRACE UK.
