Thursday 7 July 2022

Tale of an exhibition

 It’s hard to believe but it’s now several months since my PhD exhibition A Sorrowful Healing finished. The exhibition was in Galleries 1 and 2 of the School of Art, Aberystwyth University after almost nine years of studying and working, a bit longer than originally planned due to a couple of health crises, one rather scarily involving my sight. The pandemic, of course, didn’t help but I was very lucky to be able to have a Private View although this was a bit awkward to organise as it was to be by invitation only. Numbers had to be restricted because the university was still under Covid regulations.

I know the exhibition is over but we got a lot of really nice photos during set-up so I thought I'd just put them on this little blog. I haven't done a blog for a long time. Somehow, I got out of the way of doing them. Anyhow, I'll share the photos here now for anyone who may read this!

There was a lot of work to be done before the exhibition was ready, of course, and I was very lucky in having Arthur and Ed there helping me so much. Others from the uni helped, too, namely curator Neil along with Phil and Karen.



Ed and Arthur holding work for placing on gallery wall, Father, Forgive and Continuum


Self in gallery when work positions were being planned.


 
Arthur and Phil securing Street Violence to the wall. Her Pillow, the Earth already in place.


Things had moved on by this stage.


And on the back wall in the other gallery space, Aeolian Lament was hung.



I liked how the Information Board, Futility and Street Violence fitted together in the gallery space.


Position chosen for the A Cape for Healing. Aeolian Lament already placed.



Much help was had  -  and appreciated!



Father, Forgive, Continuum and Destruction's Path all ready now. Poem Continuum seen behind the ladder. The boards that Neil supplied really worked well for the poems.

This was a while ago so I have everything at home now, including the poems on the boards. Hopefully they'll be of use somewhere else.

 


There are two walls with these arches, one in each gallery and they were ideal for the large pieces, Futility and now Façade. The small piece After and poem of the same name looked right placed near to Façade.





Façade



Transition and Via Dolorosa had found their places, too.



Aftermath was there, too.




With After, stitched piece and poem and Façade.




Everything secured in the cabinet. Continuum film ready on its plinth, too.



I had to make sure there were no wrinkles  -  or at least as few as possible!



It was very neat when everything was in its place!



De Profundis was there, too.



And A Daily Living.



Everything in place here now.



A Sacrifice Too Great joined in its place as well.



Another view of the gallery.


February being a cold month, it was pretty chilly outside!


It seemed half the beach had washed up onto the pavement!


And of course, there were the starlings!


All the labels in place, too, so all was ready!


Things ready here, too.


The uni had this platform which was ideal for my little blocks.


All packed up and ready to go!


I got this new dress for the Opening!


Just a little photo gallery of setting the exhibition up. I'll put on some more info about it next time. 

There will be a film coming out in a little while. Some problems arose but it will be there in due course.

Now the thesis continues!













Monday 21 June 2021

Exhibiting again!

 It has been a while since I've taken part in exhibitions but now I have two pieces in MOMA Machynlleth in 'Women's Art in Wales - A Personal View' curated by Jill Piercy and another in 'Oriel Lockdown' in Aberystwyth Arts Centre. The works in MOMA are A Sacrifice Too Great and Leitmotif with Street Violence showing in the Arts Centre. This latter exhibition will open on 21st June and run until 5th September 2021 while MOMA re-opened on 29th May and current exhibitions here will run until 4th September 2021.

Arthur and I visited MOMA last Wednesday and there is a lot to see with four exhibitions running simultaeneously! It is a big gallery and we're going to go back again as we didn't have time to see quite everything. 'Women's Art in Wales' is in the Owen Owen Gallery (where my works are hung) and the Bridge and a catalogue to accompany 'Women's Art in Wales' should be out in a couple of weeks' time. We took some photos of my pieces on gallery walls again! The exhibition is really well hung, being sensitive to both colour and theme among the works. All four exhibitions are dedicated to art by women so we're filling the galleries!



A Sacrifice Too Great


Leitmotif


A gallery view with Leitmotif



Gallery view including both pieces

We also took some views of each other by the works.




Two photos 'visiting the exhibition 2021 style'!



Then two photos as we always used to take them!

The gallery has restricted opening times and Covid rules mean there has to be a booking system but this can be done either online via the link or by phoning the gallery on 01654 703355.  At present they are open Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturday mornings. There is a lot of information on their website.

It was so good to see exhibitions again and say hello to friends in MOMA we haven't seen for quite some time! It's a lovely gallery and well worth a visit. 

I'm also looking forward to going to the Arts Centre again. It will be interesting to see the exhibition and how the centre looks now after they had to do refurbishments because of flooding. As with MOMA, there is an appointment system for visiting the centre.


This is a detail from Street Violence

So exciting to be a part of exhibitions again!

Besides stitching, I'm also writing an article for a journal on textiles and the thesis is progressing! I love doing my stitching but I also enjoy writing and it's great if people find an interest in reading what I write as well as what I make. The other string to my bow, so to speak, is music and as well as working on my singing and playing  -  mostly guitar with some piano  -  it's a great pleasure for me to continue to work with my son, Ed, on musical compositions and arrangements. My practice times are often shorter than I would ideally like because of my physical restrictions but it's so good to be able to express myself musically as well as through art and writing.

I find one creative activity feeds another and am so fortunate that I have such encouragement from my family in what I do and I give unceasing thanks to my husband, friend and partner, Arthur, who does so much for me in this life!













Tuesday 23 March 2021

Looking from both sides

 I am still working towards my PhD Final Exhibition, now scheduled for 7th February - 4th March 2022, and on my thesis. There is a particular piece, a long hanging, that I am currently stitching that I'd like to share with you. I am calling it simply 'Father, Forgive' and there is an important image within it that I'll just talk a little about here.



Image from the base of the nurse's cape.

This is the image of a girl holding the wrist of an injured man, seen as stitched on the nurse's cape, which image I had already used in my piece 'Continuum'. I decided to stitch her again on the cape as I felt it important to show how compassion had not been killed by the violence that sewed seeds of fear, tension and mistrust in the population and, of course, the nurse's cape is by itself a symbol of healing and compassion.

As is my wont, I used a hoop to enclose a small area of the cape to achieve the stitching and it was when I was looking at the back of the stitching after much of it was done that I was struck by the power of this rear of the stitches.



Girl seen from rear of fabric


For me, the stitches here have a raw quality not evident from the front that somehow lends the image a greater universality than the more obvious image of the young woman. The empty, open cavity of the mouth and pits of dark fabric that signify the eyes act to emphasise the horror of the moment of violence.

On the new hanging, I am using this rear view printed out digitally in different guises; solidly as here against the deep, dark navy of the background, ghostly and pale with an ethereal quality given to it by the transparency of organza fabric and, printed in a smaller version, set within a larger rectangle of cotton silk-painted in red.

The hanging will be long, floor-length and is designed to witness not only to the conflict of the Troubles but also to point to the importance of forgiveness and reconciliation without which the Peace Process could never have happened. Peace and the continuing path of reconciliation need now to be preserved within the uncertainty of the current political situation brought about not by the Covid-19 pandemic but by Brexit with all its problems surrounding the border and much more.

More images will follow as the hanging progresses and there is also an article I wrote on my work for a Special Issue of Contemporary Voices; The St. Andrews Journal of International Relations which will be due to be published fairly soon  -  news on this in due course.

Tuesday 29 December 2020

Christmas Poem and Image

 I wrote a poem with a Christmas ethos a little earlier this year and it has been published in the December issue of EGO magazine, a monthly publication on all things Aberystwyth and beyond. This is the poem:-



A Son

                           (listening to Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt)


Slowly, slowly, heartbeat of

piano's melody lays steady
 
path where bow of violin

enters and breathes across

strings, together flow in

spirit of sustaining song,

harmony of eternal

spheres  -
                    

and there was

                                 a star once, pulsating
                                     
glimmer-shimmer from

farthest heavens, voiced in

light from light message for

present, for future, for time

beyond time   . . . .     He is
                          
                          here, come

to be with you, laugh with

you, weep and proffer
 
gentlest of arms to enfold

you in warmth

                                   unimaginable . . . . 

of woman born, passed

through fabric of pain,

passage of earthly flesh

to love

                                       everlasting   . . .
                             
                         
               He is my son,

infant grown become man

with humanity who was,

is God   -   He is my son,

       listen to Him.


I submitted the poem with a couple of possible images to Kiran Sharma, poetry editor of the magazine in November. Kiran liked the poem and published it together with the image 'The Cloths of Joy', a detail from one of my embroidered pieces.



The Cloths of Joy
(detail)

The two appear together on page 104 of the magazine and below is the link to the publication.


Warmest wishes to all for 2021!

Saturday 25 April 2020

Arpillera Doll Virtual Exhibition

Just now I'm concentrating on preparing for my final exhibition for my Phd which was scheduled to take place next March 2021. It might still happen then, I'm not sure but I'll keep on getting everything ready!

In the meantime, while doing mostly the PhD work for now, I have taken part in an Arpillera Doll Virtual Exhibition in connection with Conflict Textiles.  My husband, Arthur, photographed the little doll that I made cradled in the palm of my hand and she features on the exhibition poster, seen below.



The idea for an arpillera doll exhibition originated with the exhibition Embracing Human Rights: Conflict Textiles' Journey curated by Roberta Bacic in the Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Centre, Limavady, Co. Londondery which was to be ongoing until 16th May 2020 but, due to the present situation, can now be visited online. The centre's Kids Activity Section had issued an invitation to make your own arpillera doll in connection with the online version of the exhibition and this prompted the widening out of the doll-making activity.

Pieces in the exhibition were sourced within the boundaries of Northern Ireland which meant that those held farther afield, such as mine in Wales, were not included on this occasion but the invitation to make a doll connected to one of the pieces exhibited was expanded to include not only original  exhibitors but also those such as myself who have a close association with Conflict Textiles.

Among the works exhibited, I was drawn particularly to Mi Guernica/My Gernika by Edurne Mestraitua. I found this a very moving piece through its imagery and colour palette and also when I read the story behind the arpillera. Edurne's mother lived through the terrible day of bombardment in  Guernica in which so many of the townspeople died and, though she told her daughter about her experience repeatedly, she did this only in her later years and Edurne's father, who lived through the same event, never spoke about it. Mi Guernica/My Gernika can be seen here.

It may be that I was drawn to this piece especially because of associations with my own experience of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. My living and working in Belfast in the mid 1970s - early 1980s meant that I was in the city at the height of the Troubles and I experienced many incidents from witnessing rioting and explosions to being caught up in them. There was one particular bomb blast in which I was convinced I had lost my life  -  it turned out I had lost consciousness and all feelings of bodily reality for a time but I gradually realised that I was still alive in this mortal being after all!

Edurne has modelled her interpretation of her mother's memories of the bombardment through Picasso's painting Guernica. The lace on my doll's dress echoes the lace on Edurne's arpillera and the red of her dress connects with the flames in Mi Guernica/My Gernika. Other colours which Edurne has used in her arpillera are greys and as with Picasso's Guernica, blacks and whites feature prominently. These relate strongly to many of my pieces on conflict and also to the colours that are important in my poem Belfast: Lagan Revisited which you can hear me reading on SoundCloud and which begins:-

It was black and red then
shadows darker than coal . . .

The poem is based around a particular evening in Belfast when multiple bombs were exploding in the city and I had to walk along unfamiliar streets to get to the train station from the Central Library where I was working at the time so that I could get home to the village of Groomsport where I lived. There was fire everywhere, buildings darkly anonymous and smoke billowed into the sky. The vivid memory of that night has not faded over the years so I feel I could relate in a small way to the dreadful happening in Guernica and how the trauma of such an event stays in the mind. My little doll is dressed in those colours of Mi Guernica/My Gernika and of Belfast aflame.


Here she is against the wood of a table.

At first, I didn't have a name for my little doll but I have decided to call her Maria Chiara because Maria (or Mary) speaks to me of the name of Mary the Mother of God and of Mary Magdalene, first witness to Christ's resurrection and Chiara (Claire) means clear, light, luminous. This quality of light is important because my little doll is gentle. She carries the sorrowful memories in the crosses on her apron but her features are benign because she looks on the world with gentleness. Her experience has not made her bitter because she knows that love wins out over the blows of hatred and violence. She is a witness to the conflict but it has not destroyed her spirit. She has a fragility and so I cradle her but  she has strength, too. She is a survivor and this has resonances with these strangest of times that we find ourselves living in in these early years of the twenty-first century. If we work together, despite all the arguments and debates, mistakes and problems that confront us and that we ourselves create, humankind can and has overcome terrifying situations that the world has seen throughout history. Many are suffering now but many are also working to find a way through and we all of us can play our part in helping the world survive.



My work as witness to conflict and to peace continues and Maria Chiara now sits in one of my thread boxes beside me as I work.

Monday 26 August 2019

The PhD: the Beginning

This is another poem which I wrote after starting work on my visuals. I am listening to other survivors' stories from the height of the Troubles and, stitching and painting about some of the things that happened, memories come back to me of my own experiences.

There was one particular event when I completely believed myself to be dead and was somewhat surprised to find myself still on this side of the grave! In truth, this experience has never left me. One of the no-warning bombs went off and I felt the push of the blast. I was at Queen's University in Belfast to attend a lecture but the lecturer had been delayed in London so the lecture had to be cancelled. This turned out to be quite providential, as the room where the lecture was to be held caught the full force of the blast  -  afterwards, it was a complete mess of broken glass and splintered wood. I had only recently graduated, so I went instead to a nearby room to consult career journals.

As the bomb went off, everything in the room seemed to melt like jelly, steel shelves shimmering and running like liquid, and I blacked out. I have no recollection of hearing anything, I was probably temporarily deafened but I felt a great excitement when I thought I had gone into death and no thoughts came to me of any anger at the perpetrators. It seemed an amazing thing that I had just died! My presumably last thought had been in connection with the Futurist painters and was, 'Are these molecules actually jumping apart or only appearing to jump apart?'  I went down into blackness and emerged into a white light, peaceful, like milk, where I existed purely as thought with no sensation of physical being at all. I waited to be met and to become or be made aware of what existence I now had. It was only when I realised that the little gold sparkles which appeared in the light after some time  -  I had always hoped it would be pretty!  -  slowly twisting and turning, really were dust motes shining in the sun that I foun I hadn't died after all! My emergence after this time in the white light, I don't know how long it was, into what was this mortal life, then seemed like the other side of the coin.

What had happened was that I had been pushed forward into steel shelves housing the journals and had then been hurled backwards, finishing up feet away against a wall. It took some time to think myself back into a physical body, miraculously in one piece, which could move. I had lost consciousness because I had hit my head first at the front and then at the back  -  I remember the pain and the blinding headaches for days afterwards  -  but I was alive, I am alive, I have had so much life since.


For the Others

          In the white light,
                 
                         I survived;

       I didn’t meet the others then,
       those who had gone on that day,
       or on other days, cruelly
      catapulted    from       
       frame of bone and tissue;

       ingestion in the mother’s womb;
       the first breath, cries, smiles, growing,
       running, laughing, discovering  -  all
       the sing-song days of life bloodily
       torn a -p - art, ripped and sh -  re - dd ed into
                       silence;

         no, I didn’t see the others
        then, nor those who died of
        grief and consummate sorrow;    

                  I survived;
        but I hear their cries sorrowing
        in my head, so I stitch paths of
        remembrance, red veining in
        lines of silk and cotton,     
        blood red  threads   that are life and
        death and hope
                                         and grief

                      and  resurrection.

Saturday 27 July 2019

Fragility Exhibition

The Fragility Exhibition with Prism at Hoxton Arches seems to have been and gone so quickly! It's already well over a month since it ended and now we're looking to the next venue, the RBSA Gallery in Birmingham where our exhibition will open on Tuesday 8th October, closing on Saturday 19th  October with a Private View on Saturday 12th in the afternoon. I'll be there at the PV and am also stewarding on Sunday 13th in the afternoon.

I have two works in this exhibition, the wall piece A Sacrifice Too Great and little artist's book A Quiet SingingThe wall piece is made up of silk-painted and digitally printed fabrics, opaque and transparent, on a linen base with inclusion of dried flower petals and is hand stitched throughout. The book A Quiet Singing, also all hand stitched, is made up using mostly two different types of paper, linen and silk-painted fabrics.




A Sacrifice Too Great




I made this piece thinking of the fragility of society, how a peaceful situation can so quickly become one of terror and uppermost in my mind was what might happen to the position of the border in Ireland following Brexit and what impact this might have for the people of Ulster. The last thing we want is some sort of return to the violence and tension of the Troubles.



In the piece, the violence is represented by the shadowy figures of the gunmen, seen in this detail above and by the building where an explosion is happening, as seen in the detail below.

Stitched beneath the gunmen is a little scene from one of the many trips I made to one of my favourite places in Northern Ireland, a beautiful area of water and islands, Strangford Lough. I was born in Newtownards, at the head of the lough and we lived not far from it. In the background behind the water and near-ground islands, are the lilac forms of the Mourne Mountains. I love the water, the springy volcanic soils of the islands, the hills and valleys of the mountains.

These places were visited in the peaceful years of my childhood and their beauty is locked forever in my soul, the tangy salt of the rippling water, heady coconut smell of gold-yellow whin blossoms, spring of pine needles underfoot on wooded slopes. But the mountains were also visited in my adulthood when they were places where gunmen had hide-outs in the secret folds of the hills and I witnessed this myself on two occasions when men looking at myself and those I was with through binoculars, ran towards us across the fields, rifles in hand. We escaped driving fast on the narrow mountain roads.





The sleeping child represents both the fragility of humanity and also the vulnerability of children themselves. In sleep especially, the child needs to be safe and protected and one of the cruellest aspects of conflicts, it seems to me, is when the young suffer for the political aims of others particularly when these aims are sought through violent means.

I thought carefully about what fabric to to use to cover the child. The little boy was originally a drawing then watercolour of my son asleep when he was just under four years old, snuggled up under his favourite blanket. In the original drawing he held a favourite toy-companion not included in this portrayal. The fabrics that I chose to use are some of my silk-painted chiffon and organza, again not in the colours of the blanket in the original painting but in a neutrality of almost autumnal bronze-golds. These fabrics are semi-transparent though I chose not to use this characteristic over the child's form which is curled up and hidden beneath layers of covering. The folds are created through manipulating the fabric into the shapes I want then securing these with the positioning of small running stitches. In my work I use running stitch as I would a brush or pen, choosing the length and direction of every sitch I make and working in this way, the cloth maintains its sculptural folds in this and other pieces with no need of spray or fixative. 

This little figure floating on the linen ground shows just two of the many methods which the textile medium offers the artist, his body and pyjamas formed through through a network of hand stitches and coverings built up using the sculptural properties of the cloth itself.

My choice of linen as ground fabric is significant in that I have personal connections to the fabric itself and it has a great social and economic significance in Ireland. My grandfather was a designer of embroidery images for Belfast Linens in the early to mid-twentieth century and two of my cousins run a firm producing linen goods in Dublin bequeathed to them by my uncle who first worked for and later became the owner of the firm. The linen industry was very important to the Irish economy and, along with shipbuilding, to the growth of Belfast in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries particularly. Belfast was granted city status in 1888 and the city became the capital of Northern Ireland in 1921 following the formation of Northern Ireland as a political entity in 1920.

Silk-painted linen pieces are also stitched to the raw ground of the bleached linen where their colour and prominent forms add sombre voices to the work. To use linen fabric within textiles as creative medium brings with it associations of domesticity and familiality and also connotations with the wider economy and society which working with a medium such as oil painting would not do. Linen has a powerful voice and brings with it these associations of industry carried out in peace and domesticity of the family to the images of conflict in my work on the Troubles.





Visitor looking at  A Sacrifice Too Great in Hoxton Arches Gallery, London


The wall piece then speaks of the vulnerability of both humanity and society and the little book A Quiet Singing takes the discussion further to speak about the violence of the conflict of the Troubles but also the level of reconciliation achieved after the Peace Process of the late 1990s and the desire to continue living with this peace, however imperfect and despite tragic breakings that have occurred. Poems also speak of human relationships and the power of love.






Front cover of A Quiet Singing


The book includes images and five complete poems and is made up using Saunders Waterford paper 300 gsm with its lovely smooth surface, ideal for the words of the poems, the textured surface of Indian rag paper and fabrics including linen, cotton, organza and silk-painted mulberry bark.


The poem Belfast: Lagan Revisited is the second one on the book and starts with the lines:

It was black and red then;
shadows darker than coal
blood-bright puddles reflect
flames   shooting  high, colour
the night sky;





The words of poem go over two pages in the book and this is the first page






This image shows the book during making

As you will have seen from the above excerpt, colour features prominently in this poem and I used the properties of the organza itself to enhance what the words are saying. Silk-painted in red, the organza fabric was cut into sections that were hand-stitched together then placed within a 'frame' of  Saunders Waterford paper. Although the fabric page was created in a relationship with the poem that follows, it also forms a page in its own right and words from the poem and beyond are hand written on the fabric's paper 'frame'.



The organza page in its finished form. This also illustrates how the words of the poem are seen through the fabric.


The poem Gift: for my Father is another of the poems featured and included with it is this Portrait of my Father. The image is a photograph of an embroidery digitally printed onto cotton and mounted on Indian rag paper.





My father died in December 1991 and I wrote the poem for him in the autumn just about a year after he had died in words that came to me as I thought about him while listening to the wonderful cadences of Barber's Adagio. Music has an almost mystical power to move us and reach into the very core of our being and, although on revision I have played about with the position of the words, especially later in the poem, the words themselves remain essentially as they came to me to the flow of the violins from somewhere in the very depths of my soul. The image has featured in the MA Anthology a Grain of Sand published by Aberystwyth University and the poem begins:-


Beyond the window, wan grey sky
seeps onto rooftops, clothes-line
drips the reign of autumn;
within the room, I sit, still,
close my eyes and follow    
strings of violins sing sounds
of Barber’s ‘Adagio’, silk,
beneath sparrow’s pipe-trilled pizzicato;


I feel that when I am writing poetry, it is a process akin to writing music which I have also done during my life  -  many years ago, music almost became my main area of study and although my life moved in a different direction, the rhythms and sounds of music have continued to remain an important part of my creative process in the various media in which I work  -  colour, cloth, stitches, words  -   and I have at home a piano and a guitar which are precious to me.




One of the book's closing pages
  



Pictured here are A Sacrifice Too Great and A Quiet Singing on exhibition in Hoxton Arches Gallery. White cotton gloves were supplied so that visitors could safely look through the book and this method worked well in the exhibition with visitors making use of the gloves to examine what they wanted of the book.


Visitor making use of the gloves to look through the book