In a New Light: Celebrating the Precious

The most recent exhibition I have taken part in was in School of Art Gallery 1, Aberystwyth University and just finished this week.  Six of us from the Fine Art PhD Forum group had got together to organise this exhibition in which we all chose an item from the School of Art and Museum's extensive collection and made new work prompted by our chosen piece. Part of the impetus behind the exhibition was that this year, the School of Art celebrates 100 years of teaching art at Aberystwyth and also making a new work directly inspired by a piece or artefact from the School's collection hadn't been dome before.

I chose Crucifixion 1927 by David Jones because of the multiple imagery that accorded with the layering of my stitched pieces, his spirituality and also the affinity I felt between the marks of his wood engraving and my own hand stitch. I gave my section the title Reconciliation Path.

This view shows the wall in the gallery that was dedicated to most of my work on exhibition  -  one further piece Futility was shown on the opposite wall.

This is the print Crucifixion by David Jones. It is a wood engraving on white Japanese paper made for Llyfr y Pregeth-wr; the Book of Ecclesiastes published by the Gregynog Press.

The Book is seen here in its box in the display cabinet, Gallery 1, the School of Art.

The image here is of the whole cabinet and shows the book beside the artefacts chosen by Carmen Mills for her work  -  they made a nice display together.

When I started looking at the print, I began my ideas for work by sketching from the print:-

Initial sketch from the print.

I then began thinking along the lines of a piece in multiple imagery, as David Jones had done with his print and I have often done with my textile pieces and installations, so I began with a pen and ink sketch comprising images from my own drawings:-

My initial intention had been to make a two-sided hanging in multiple imagery but, as the piece grew and visual ideas developed, it became clear that the issues depicted would be better served by being viewed as two separate hangings, so Conflict's Web and Reconciliation were born.

Gunmen and poppies from Conflict's Web.

A central image for the theme of the piece, the armed gunmen are connected to one another and to poppy images by the stitches of the 'web'. The impetus for these figures was a mural of gunmen I had seen in East Belfast, making them originate from a Loyalist organisation. However, I altered the image to make it ambiguous as to which 'side' they might belong to; gunmen maimed, killed and terrorised from both sides of the conflict.

David Jones drew images of the Passion Flower in his work, drawing full blooms on each side of the embracing couple and a figure at the foot of cross holds high a bunch of the flowers in his hand. This flower is symbolic of Christianity through various parts of the flower relating to Christ and His passion or crucifixion. Within this symbolism, the leaves of the plant are said to represent the holy lance or spear that pierced Christ's side and David Jones has featured many of these leaves in the ground of his print.

The print by David Jones was destined for a book of the bible, so it was natural that he should employ a passion flower, symbol of Christianity. My work, however, was not destined for such a purpose and I decided to use the image of the poppy in all that it symbolises. The poppy has been used so very many times already but despite the universality of its use, I think it can still speak to us through the many different ways in which it has appeared in artworks, through the flower's character of tenacity through fragility and also in its most common variety, through the petals brightly red as blood.

I had made pencil drawings of poppies growing in our garden and used these images for the poppies on the hangings that I was making for the exhibition.

Poppies on the hanging Reconciliation  . . .

 . . . and as they appeared around the figure in the kitchen, one of the images on the hanging. The original here was a pencil drawing I had made in 1971 of my grandmother in the kitchen which I made into an etching. On the hanging, the etching is reproduced as a digital print on linen, then further stitched into by hand.

Futility on exhibition in Gallery 1 in the In a New Light Exhibition.

This doorway image is from my piece Aftermath

This photo of myself by my work in the exhibition shows my piece Destruction's Path on my right and behind me, the main piece Aftermath with small pieces that formed the complete work for the exhibition.

This photo of myself talking with visitors was taken at the Opening of the Exhibition.

We had a very good experience exhibiting together in the School of Art and there were some lovely comments written in the Visitors' Book about the exhibition in general with some really nice comments about my own work. I also owe thanks to those who contacted me personally to say how my work had touched them.

Exhibiting in Donegal

Just a little bit about an exhibition that travelled to Donegal. The exhibition was War-Torn Children and was organised under the auspices of Conflict Textiles, headed by Roberta Bacic who curated the exhibition.
Conflict Textiles is home to a large collection of international textiles, exhibitions and associated events, all of which focus on elements of conflict and human rights abuses and is an ‘Associated Site’ of CAIN (Conflict Archive on the INternet) at Ulster University, Northern Ireland. If you click on the following link you can find out more about the organisation and exhibitions put on by it:-

http://cain.ulster.ac.uk/conflicttextiles/about-2/

The War-Torn Children Exhibition included arpilleras, photographs and posters and was shown in the Regional Cultural Centre Letterkenny, artists exhibiting in it bringing into focus the devastating impact of war on children, families and communities. The piece I showed here was Her Pillow, the Earth, the first time my work has been exhibited in Donegal. I have previously shown in Dublin with exhibiting group Prism whose members, including myself, produce textile inspired art. 

Her Pillow, the Earth   full image

The figure of the child is taken from a drawing I made of my daughter when she was just a toddler. My feeling as I stitched the piece was that, in placing the child in outline surrounded by a sweep of fabric like a shroud on one side and ruined buildings on the other, her fate was slightly ambiguous in that either the child had died or she was a refugee sleeping on the ground. So many children still suffer in our world at the hands of those who wage war and, as I worked, I felt as if the ruined buildings were toppling onto the child and there was nothing I could do about it. I do support groups who strive to help innocent victims everywhere but it seems so difficult to stop the violence erupting in the first place.
More details about the piece and the impetus that led me to create it can be found by using the following link:-

http://cain.ulster.ac.uk/conflicttextiles/search-quilts/fullevent/?id=184

War-Torn Children had previously been shown in the Linen Hall Library, Belfast in spring 2017 and it will travel to the Roe Valley Arts and Cultural later this year where it will be on exhibition from 5th September until 29th November 2018. I will be giving a talk/workshop during the exhibition on Friday 5th October 2018 and further details of events and activities during the exhibition will be posted in due course.

This image shows Roberta talking to a visitor about Her Pillow, the Earth at the launch of the War-Torn Children Exhibition in Letterkenny.

Roberta at the Exhibition Opening, War-Torn Children, February 2018.

This is my piece in its place between works by Heidi Drahota seen here on the left and Linda Adams on the right. It is my pleasure to have met both artists at previous exhibitions and enjoy talking to them.

A view of the works in the War-Torn Children Exhibition Opening February 2018.

Stitching the cape

In preparing for my Conflict Exhibition in Mid Wales Arts Centre, one of the pieces shown in the exhibition is a nurse's cape that I'm embellishing with stitch. This cape is one actually worn by a nurse whose name is stitched on the inside of the cape and I was very kindly given this cape when I visited the hospital just over a year ago. I had to hand in my cape when I left.  The nurse who wore this cape worked in the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast and this has direct links with my own history, as I was a student nurse for a while in the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, until I had to leave because I didn't have enough resistance to infection.

The two hospitals share the same site and are directly beside one another, though the building I worked in is now being replaced by a new one  -  I'm not sure if any of the old building will remain.

A view of the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children

I will always treasure my time spent as a nurse and perhaps because it was for a limited period, I remember very clearly many of the patients I nursed and wonder how their lives have worked out. I also, of course, recall many of the procedures I learned and feel it was a privilege to have been a part of a team of people dedicated to healing.

The main front entrance to the old building

This Hall of Residence for nurses was right by the hospital and I lived here during my time as a nurse. It is being demolished now to make way for a newer building!

My nursing was in the 1970s , at the height of Northern Ireland's 'Troubles' so working at this time in Belfast involved experiences not always part of nursing sick children. One of these was when a bomb was planted in the carpark of the Children's Hospital  -  I was on duty at the time and some of the  children who were very ill couldn't be moved, so we had to pull down the blinds on the ward and move their little cots as far away from the windows as possible. Mercifully, the bomb was diffused. I have such admiration for the soldiers who perform this hazardous duty. They save so many lives, always at the risk of losing their own.

The Quiet Room

This room is for meetings now but when I nursed in the late 1970s, it was the quiet room where the body of a child who had died would be placed. Part of our training was to sit, alone, for an hour with a child's body. This was because a child could die when we were alone on night duty and we had to be able to deal with this situation. I sat once with a young boy who had died owing to leukaemia; he was extremely peaceful and I felt peaceful with him. 

To return to the nurse's cape . . . .

Self wearing the nurse's cape in Mid Wales Arts Centre at set up of Conflict Exhibition September 2017

I had to hand in my cape when I left my nursing but I did love it! Nurses' uniforms have changed so much now and I don't think the capes form part of them any more but those capes that seem to have been worn since the 1900s until recently were so warm!  Deep navy in colour and made of heavy, felted wool, they could be lined either in red or blue  -  a shade in light ultramarine or royal blue, so differentiating clearly from the outer navy hue  -  and the lining was also wool.

The cape in position for the Conflict Exhibition.

A sweep across the gallery with the cape in its corner and more of my pieces on the wall.

The cap told a story, in this corner of the gallery space, of healing and survival together with the two portraits of my Dad  -  one in his RAF uniform c 1943 and the second a stitched piece that I made in 2016 from a pencil drawing of him that I had done c 1970. Alongside these were the little cotton scrap from a nightie with the red stitches, a poem to my father, some of my 'The Invitation' books and business cards, mostly the ones with a detail from Requiem: les Fleurs du Mal.

My father was a survivor of both WW2 and the Troubles. Sadly, he died in 1991 before he could see the Peace Process that got under way just a few years later.

Stitched portrait of my father.

With some images on the cape now, there are more that I will do and I have found stitching by hand into the felted wool is quite different to stitching into cotton or linen. Threads of the stitches tend to sink into the wool as I stitch so a slightly different technique is required.

I am including various images on the cape and am allowing it to grow organically so the whole thing is not planned out beforehand.

The hospital is situated on the Falls Road, so I have stitched this in Gaelic and English on the cape and beside this, the outline of a baby. The figure of the baby connects with my time nursing children and there is a memory of a particular baby who I nursed that will never leave me. He was only a few months old and we knew we couldn't save him, so care was palliative.

One day, this tiny child kept down half a feed and smiled at me  -  I was so joyful for him and had just come from being with him when there was a commotion in the hospital with people running  -  a six-year-old girl had been shot through the head on the Falls Road. She was rushed to theatre but I don't know if she lived or died. No doubt, the shot had not targeted her deliberately but it seemed so ironic that I had come from a baby who knew nothing of life except how precious it was and how he struggled to keep it. He fought for every breath he took and here was a child whose life may have been taken in an instant  -  the tragedy of conflict.

The figure of the girl going to help the wounded victim of a bombing says much to me of healing. I am also stitching cloud/smoke billows around several images on the cape. In Japan, some kimonos are cloud kimonos and my cloud images speak of the smoke from bombings but also of skies where clouds drift in times of conflict and of peace.

A hankie corner and the blanket stitch is done all round the border of the cape.

Action and reaction

So many people suffer in our world, through experiencing pain in all of its forms, traumas physical and psychological, personal and political distress, fear that encompasses young and old. Something that affects me personally is neuropathic pain. It can come in the night, tends to hit my left leg particularly, and is like being stabbed repetitively by an onslaught of sharp knives. This attack keeps me pinioned on its force and jerking with spasms until it finally subsides. I can't go to sleep again until the knives at least reduce to needles and the perspiration makes these 'several night-clothes' nights. I wake up exhausted with both legs aching despite the barrage of anti-spasm and supposedly pain-killing tablets I take daily. Actually, they do work to a degree, otherwise I would be incapable of doing anything in this life and that is not my way. It is so important to occupy the brain with, for me, thoughts of creativity and it is very important not to dwell on pain.

Once I am able, I very often stitch. I found years ago that, when my muscles are acting up, hand stitch is just about the only activity my body can do for any length of time; holding my arms in a position to type doesn't last long, my hands don't want to keep writing, painting is impossible and my voice tires very quickly, so a voice-activated computer wouldn't help, so stitch it is and I have found such a wealth of possibilities with this! Another great thing about hand stitch is that it can be carried out even in bed, so my body can get some rest while I work with colours and rhythms in thread and cloth.

It can still be frustrating, despite my love of stitch, not to be able to carry out other activities when I would like to, even jobs in the house! I used to work as an Art Therapist with the elderly and think of how what I used to say to my patients some years ago now applies to me. Illness often causes, in modern parlance, a necessity to reinvent oneself. My creating artwork with the needle may have come about through illness but it is so important now in fighting against the diminishing of the self. I feel it is vital to turn the negativity of pain, when at all possible, into a positively creative act. My pain is nothing compared to what others go through in this world. To listen to the news or watch it on tv only shows how so many people, from tiny children to the elderly, suffer at the hands of others or through the frailty of the human body.

Through creating my art, I wish to give to society, not just be a drain on those around me. In restoring my own sense of self worth, I hope that my experiences can also speak to others and that is part of the reason for this work in the PhD. I experienced the Troubles with the distress they brought to so many; now there are terrible problems that we all face and the solutions are so difficult to come by. If only human beings could love much more and not hate  -  why must intolerance, suspicion and cruelty reign with such appalling force and seem to be so impossible to eradicate? To speak of universal love eventually winning over all that is evil seems, at least as far as this side of the grave is concerned, a naive dream but people do respond with love in this life, not always hate  -  the dream will just take who knows how long to become a reality but slowly, I hope, we can keep spiralling towards it.

The following are a few photos of details of the large piece I am working on at the moment, in places complete with pins! They are not perfect representations of the work but will at least give an idea of it for the moment. I find it can be quite frustrating in the effort to achieve a really good image of textile artwork with the camera  -  highlights and contrasts seem to get exaggerated beyond what they are in reality. I will stitch a little more then spend some time working with the camera to get truer images of the piece.

This image shows some wreckage from the vehicle. What are we looking at? Are these pieces of  metal tubing bits of the vehicle itself or what it held? It is now not possible to know unless perhaps examination from an expert could gradually discover what function these pieces once had. From the point of view of the artwork, it is not necessary to know this because they stand for the needless disintegration of lives that the violence has wrought.

As you see, this has been photographed in the hoop to show a little more of the work in progress.

This image zooms in on the two trees photographed. The camera has picked up on the edges of the silk-painted organza pieces and mulberry bark and has exaggerated the light falling on these.  This will be addressed in part as I complete my stitching but will probably also need to be adjusted photographically.

I have also used many more 'burnt' colours on the trunks of the nearer tree and on another tree (not photographed) in the full piece which were closest to the exploded vehicle than appear in a colour  version of the original photograph. This is because I want to contrast the fresh green of a July countryside in Co Down, where the incident took place, with the unnatural after effects of explosion.

Another of the strange shapes thrown up by the explosion. What once had a recognisable form and function now has become an alien object.

I have included a final close-up of the tree-trunk to show the form of the stitches. All of the work is being done by hand and this matters to me for several reasons, one of which is that the original incident happened through the hands of the bombers, hands used for destructive purposes. However, the hand can also heal and, medically, stitches are used to close wounds; so as a needle punctures cloth, threads then 'heal' the wounded fabric.

At the same time, as the work progresses, colours and rhythms of stitch are slowly transforming the raw material into the image of the incident. Both the event itself and a photograph of its aftermath happened in seconds but, paradoxically, this stitched image will need thousands of stitches and take months of work to complete. The artwork is also not contemporary with the original event which occurred some years ago. The hand of the stitcher, then, could be regarded as mediator and interpreter between the incident as it originally happened and as it is now re-presented in the present moment. To produce a stitch is both a physically active and intellectually meditative act and the image that results is not so much the portrait of a past moment but a scene imbued with the memories of several disparate events. The new conglomerate exists with its own life and perdurance in time.

That the artwork is beginning to have its own life and meaning was vividly made clear to me just the other day when a friend made a very interesting observation on the work. She said how my use of colour, the burnt browns and contrasting green foliage, made her think of camouflage on an army uniform. This had not been in my thoughts as I stitched but it is only too sadly appropriate to the occasion in that it was rogue elements in the armed forces who carried out both the bombing, killing themselves in the process, and the shooting that followed.

Etching with 'A Belfast Peace'

When I visited Belfast almost a year ago, I took a lot of photos of the city as it now is, as opposed to when I knew it in the 1970s and 1980s. In those decades, it was a very tense place to be because of the violence that plagued the city and Northern Ireland in general but I'm very glad to say that it is now a much changed place with so much happening socially, architecturally, in the arts and in tourism. The same is true of Derry/Londonderry which I have now visited for the first time. I was here to attend an exhibition opening in the Verbal Arts Centre and I'll be posting about this visit in my 'Thread of the Spirit' blog. In this post, I will include images and details of another exhibition 'Stitched Legacies of Conflict' on at present in the Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Centre in Limavady, a few miles from Derry, as I have one of my conflict pieces 'Continuum', in this exhibition.

The photographs I took of Belfast last year inspired me to make a piece within my 'Conflict' work which looks toward a peace which has begun and is ongoing, if still not perfect. Added to the pleasure of thinking about a peace that seemed impossible for so many years - the Troubles are generally spoken of as lasting 30 years - the medium for my new work is etching, something I carried out with such joy as an undergraduate and to which, thanks to the help of Andrew Baldwin in the School of Art, I have now been able to return!

View of presses in the Printing Department, School of Art, Aberystwyth University

The bench I work at in the Printing Department.

I started off with a copper plate  -  I had only worked on zinc before  -  and used the new ground for etching and aquatint called BIG (Baldwin's Ink Ground) that Andrew developed as a non-toxic method for etching and aquatint - when I worked in the medium years ago, health and safety weren't regarded in the same way that they are now! It was such a pleasure to be doing etching and I have fallen in love all over again with the plates, the prints, the method and process  -

Photo of my etched copper plate on my bench.

Inking up the plate  -  the 'Titanic' workers with 'Rise' behind.

The image that you see on the plate has, as its main components, my interpretation of a bronze sculpture in East Belfast of three figures that represent the 'Titanic' workers of 100 years ago and, behind them, a sculpture in steel by the Falls Road known as 'Rise'.

The figures of the three workers, sculpted in bronze by artist Ross Wilson, stand on the Newtownards Road and, unveiled in 2012, they depict the 'yardmen' walking home, a tribute to the industrial legacy and folk history of the workforce of East Belfast. This was made as part of East Belfast Partnership's project Re-imaging the Newtownards Road and some of the most contentious murals in the area were removed and replaced with 'No More' and 'Ship of Dreams' community artwork.

Harland and Wolff's iconic cranes, Samson and Goliath, one of which I have pictured here, can be seen rising above houses in the background at some distance behind the bronze figures. I have not included the cranes in my etching.

This is a night-time photograph I took from the car, using my phone, of the sculpture 'Rise.

Built to represent hope and known locally as 'The Balls on the Falls', it is a structure in white and silver steel, almost 40 m tall and 30 m wide and I think it is particularly effective seen lit up, when its two geodesic spheres, supported on slender stanchions, seem like ethereal lace against the dark of the night sky. The large sculpture stands on the Broadway Roundabout at the junction of the Westlink and the M1 motorway, a main road into the city with access to the Falls Road via Broadway and it is visible from a considerable distance and can be seen by both sides of the community. Artist Wolfgang Buttress, who designed the work, wanted it to be simple, universal and the same when looked at from every angle.

The print showing the sculpture 'Rise' with the 'Titanic' figures.

From plate to print

For the very first trial pull, black without extender was used but it turned out to be much too dark, so extender and Prussian Blue were added. This use of the extender to thin the very dense ink and adding the blue to the black gave a much more subtle colouring to the image. 

Using a single ink mix, Prussian Blue with Black and extender.

Andrew talked to me about the method called a 'double drop' which would involve inking the whole plate in Vermilion, using extender to define and give the desired character and effect in particular areas, then repeating the whole process using Prussian Blue. I thought that Vermilion could give a warmth to the image, so we tried this out on the plate. However, instead of the sepia tones I had been expecting from the mix of red and blue shades, the colour that resulted was very much more burgundy than sepia and I didn't think this tone suited the piece. Vermilion is also a very strong colour and, as well as the tendency toward burgundy rather than sepia, I felt the colouration Vermilion gave with the 'double drop' was much too strong, drowning out the blue shades almost entirely and robbing the piece of the subtler atmosphere the Prussian Blue had given it.

Experimenting using Vermilion as a 'double drop'.

Inking up and printing to find the right colour balance and treatment of the inks.

The solution was to use a recipe of Prussian Blue, Black, a little Vermilion and touch of extender as the initial colour for the entire plate. The plate was inked up using this colour recipe, then extender was applied to appropriate areas where a softening or suffusing of tone was wanted. After this, Vermilion was applied only to sections where it was needed and again suffused using extender. The result was a satisfying blue/black with the vermilion adding hints of warmth to the lower sky and foreground of the image.

 

The finished print on Somerset paper. I gave it the title 'A Belfast Peace'.

I was thrilled when Andrew said he would like to include my print in his exhibition 'Breaking New Ground'! This is an exhibition of prints using the etching and aquatint ground known as BIG, developed by Andrew. The exhibition features work by artists from all over the world and it opened on Friday 7th October in the School of Art Gallery, Aberystwyth University and runs until Friday 18th November 2016.

I find this is a really exciting addition to my processes and I have now printed onto linen and am stitching the etching on paper  -  next blog will include images for this next stage in my work!