hand embroidery Archives - Page 25 of 58

10th July 202329th August 2023

2023 Leeds Summer Group Show

I’m pleased to announce that Sound of the Kenwood Chef and Giant Cauliflower Harvest have been selected by curators Courtney Spencer and Helen Dryden for the 2023 Leeds Summer Group Show.

The mixed-media exhibition takes place at The Leeds Playhouse, Leeds, West Yorkshire, 22 July – 7 Sept 2023.

We received over 500 submissions from 150 artists and 77 works by 54 artists have been selected by the panel.
Courtney Spencer

The 2023 Leeds Summer Group Show is an eclectic exhibition showcasing talent from across the UK. This annual exhibition was started in 2015 by Courtney Spencer, and this year she will be co-curating the show with Helen Dryden, an artist and curator based in Leeds. They were joined on the selection panel by Nigel Walsh, the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art for Leeds Museums & Galleries, based at Leeds Art Gallery.

The show’s selection panel

Nigel Walsh is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art for Leeds Museums & Galleries, based at Leeds Art Gallery. He joined the team in 1986 as its first dedicated Exhibitions Curator, after training with the Scottish Art Council in Glasgow following a degree in English Studies and Fine Art (History of Art) from a Scottish University. Until very recently he was Chair of Trustees of the Ilkley Literature Festival where he’d been a member of the Board for 20 years.

Helen Dryden is a Leeds based visual artist who works primarily in painting and is the curator of Compact Contemporary Gallery which is housed in her studio at Sunny Bank Mills. She has an MA in Curation Practices from Leeds Arts University and a BA(Hons) in Graphic Arts and Design from Leeds Beckett University.

Courtney Spencer is an Australian artist, curator and collaborator. She was the director of an arts charity for five years, began the Leeds Summer Group Show in 2015 and is the founder of The Art Court which works to support artists and collectors in the North of England. She has worked with organisations including National Trust; The Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate; S1 Artspace, Sheffield; Leeds Playhouse; and The Old Parcels Office, Scarborough. She also writes a monthly column called Snooping Through Studios for The State Of The Arts.

Update:

Exhibition images courtesy of curator Helen Dryden.

5th July 20235th July 2023

Maggie Scott – Meet the Artist

A little textile inspiration from my YouTube Collection. Today it features the colourful nuno felting by textile artist Maggie Scott.

Join Maggie Scott as she shares her beautiful work in the ‘Five Times More’ exhibition.

Maggie Scott: https://maggiescottonline.com/

Five Times More exhibition

‘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. 

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.

Filmed at the Knitting & Stitching Show 2022.

28th June 202328th June 2023

Vivienne Beaumont – Meet the Artist

A little textile inspiration from my YouTube Collection. Today it features the beautiful machine and hand embroidery by Vivienne Beaumont.

Join Vivienne as she shares the art in her ‘Seeds, Flowers and Flowing Hair’ exhibition and explains the processes and stories behind the work.

https://youtu.be/9WZeg9zjIog

Vivienne Beaumont: https://www.viviennebeaumont.net/

Hand & Machine embroidered artwork by Vivienne Beaumont

Ripe with seeds, pomegranates and scenes of harvest, Vivienne’s work is shaped by stories and symbols. She takes inspiration from myths and nature, from female archetypes and the process of transformation.  The work has a soulful quality and often a sense of otherworldliness – her frequent use of gold threads reflects something of the Rumpelstiltskin, the fairy tale.   Her figurative scenes look to the ephemerality and cyclical nature of life, representing both life force and loss.

“Fields are often aglow in the late summer, through the harvest and its aftermath. I try to capture something of this in my work, as well as something of the folk tale or fairy tale: the jeopardy of the miller’s daughter, the alchemy of weaving straw into gold. That these tales have endured the ages, suggests they hold a deeper meaning for us.

The Red Riding Hood story, for example, is at heart the tale of a maiden’s rite of passage. The young girl is growing up, the mother is letting her daughter go on her own into the woods. The story alludes to virginity and the spilling of blood. The wolf traditionally plays the role of the sexual predator, but I portray the wolf as the protector, the threat instead from the darkness and the unknown. 

Mothers and daughters, love and rites of passage – the repeated cycles from one generation to the next – these loom large in my textile story.”   
Vivienne Beaumont.