Creative nourishment - May

I treated myself to two days in London so I could find nourishment for the ideas in my head. As spring has advanced, the murmurings of my winter mind are starting to find a voice. At the forefront of these ideas are a wish to embrace colour. With that is a return to a love of folk art and a symbolic expression of the soul. My soul.

I have found my way back in to nature, planting my garden and meandering in the woods. My work has often included trees and it is to trees I am returning for inspiration. At the weekend I was fortunate to visit the Weleda gardens. It was a beautiful fresh spring day and I could feel the sap rising in the trees there, and in myself. It is that connection between us and the trees, the 'tree of life' that is a symbol of many cultures, that I am exploring in my new work.

So, with those ideas in my mind I headed to the Victoria & Albert Museum to explore their collection. I've been visiting the museum since childhood and there is magic in those rooms of beautifully crafted artefacts.

I spent hours drawing from the collections, recording decorative details and symbols of trees and growth and shared a connection with those makers who had drawn from our shared symbolic language. 

Whilst there I had the opportunity to attend the Alexander McQueen retrospective. Not usually drawn to fashion couture, this exhibition blew me away. The creation of the exquisite and the totality of McQueens creative vision was hugely inspiring. It was beautifully curated, sensory exhibition. What I take from the exhibition is to honour the urge to create and to nurture my creativity and creative voice.

So back in the studio this week, I'm working on vision boards and bringing together the threads of ideas so I can start some new work.

If you would like to share a day with me creating with symbols to represent the universal themes of growth and life, I'm running a 'Grow your own art' workshop on Saturday 27th June in Long Eaton near Nottingham. It will be about finding ways to move forward on your creative journey and you will create your own work of art that symbolises growth. I'm taking bookings now. 

Real post!

Today I received real post!  A lovely package of inspiration from our good friend Peter.  It contained an old tin (soon to have buttons in), a book on David Gentleman's work and an article on picnics.....I love a picnic.

David Gentleman wood engraving

Wood engravings for press advertisements

Penguin jacket, 1957

I know David Gentlemen's work from a beautifully illustrated book from his travels to India, but I hadn't realised what a talented designer he was.  Likened to Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious, he designed for advertisements, stamps, textiles and books. He studied at St.Albans College of Art, where my own creativity found flight.  The book, David Gentleman Design, is a great addition to a library of mid-century art and design.

Also included in my inspiration pack, was a leaflet about the V&A pattern series.  These books are much coveted by me though I've yet to acquire any of them.

Hope inspiration pops up for you in an unexpected place.

Just off the board

I've just cut this image off the board ready for stitching into.  I decided to use the ink a bit more to create the background and shapes to collage on to.  I was inspired by the inky glazes on the pots I saw in the V&A.  Also inspired by Ed Kluz whose work I saw at St.Judes gallery at New Year.  I'm also trying to bring in some pattern elements, influenced by the textiles I've been looking at recently, like these:

Hans Tisdall, Pheasant Moon, 1960

Margaret Calkin James

Sonia Delauney, printed cotton, 1925

V&A ceramics

I felt like a did a trolley-dash visit to the V&A.  I was so hungry for inspiration and found it at every turn of every corner.  I hadn't really expected to feel so excited by the ceramics.  I was greatly inspired by all the glazes which reminded me of the way the ink travels on my paper collages. I also remembered my Foundation tutor who suggested I pursue ceramics.

When I saw this charming article in World of Interiors I felt the inspiration to make bowls.  Irene Feesey has led a handmade life and her home is a gallery of her talents.  Her bowls are papier mache and I find them frail and beautiful.  I think my paper based work would lend itself to decorating a paper based bowl.  With this in mind I dined on ideas in the ceramics gallery.

I felt I wasn't the only designer to have been inspired by the ceramics.  World of Interiors also featured a new range of ceramics by Richard Ginori called 'Broken'.  She must surely have stood in front of the dish above.  It was a great gallery to be in; laid out so you could see through to the conservation areas and see work being prepared for display.

If 'transparency' is one of our era's buzz words, then theV&A has certainly become more transparent.  It is as if it has been turned inside out and all areas are now accessible.  As a visitor from outside London, I will certainly frequent the virtual gallery online and access information on the ideas behind the exhibitions. 

Also see:

Toki no Kumo

V&A glass

The glass rooms at the V&A really appealed; the exhibits like huge boiled sweets.  Such a frail, vulnerable media yet hard and enduring. Some pieces dated back to Roman times. 

The stripey piece reminded me of the work of Ptolemy Mann. In cloth she manages to capture that same radiance.  I especially love her rug designs.

V&A textile archives

I loved being in the V&A.  Since I was last there, there has been alot of building and re-development.  The spaces felt fresher and more comtemporary, areas led more freely into each other.  Stay a while, wandering from one area of design specialism, or arts from a specific geographical area, and you start to get overwhelmed.  So much beauty, so much intense learning passed from generation to generation.  So many millions of hours creating so much finery.  And I love that about humanity.  Okay, we're about to screw it all up and fry but look what we've achieved!  There is an inate human instinct to beautify, and when I visit the V&A and see treasures of art and design dating back to antiquity, I feel alive and justified in pursuing an artist's life.

On this visit, and for the first time, I visited the textile archives.  Antique cabinets are filled with wooden frames containing fragments of cloth from all history.  There are the most detailed pieces of tapestry, embroidery, jacquards, brocades, lace and prints, all accessible to study up close.  The archive rooms are so quiet and tucked away.  The cataloguing is so reverential of the textile creators whose sweat, blood and tears went into the production of cloth.  And so irreverent.....who had the job of taking scissors to cloth to display a section?

With my interest in tapestry weaving, it was a pleasure to see The Devonshire Hunting Tapestries.  I'm normally quite dismissive of these large scale historical tapestries, faded depictions of the nobility out hunting.  These were so fresh though, and instead of looking like paintings, were so full of pattern and colour.  I was amazed to see they were woven in the mid fifteenth century, their style and patterning seemed far more contemporary.  I kept isolating sections that I wanted to abstract from and render in miniature.....I don't think I'll ever be weaving a wall sized tapestry,  each of The Devonshire Hunting Tapestries was ten years on the loom.

V&A Quilts exhibition

At the End of the Day, Natasha Kerr 2007

One of the main reasons for heading to the V&A Museum was to see their current Quilts 1700-2010: Hidden Histories, Untold Stories exhibition.  I came away from the exhibition with mixed feelings, my brain confused by the mixed bag of textiles I had seen.  Covering such a long period in the life of a Craft was bound to be difficult to curate but I struggled with a lack of cohesive curating.  The work, across five rooms, was exhibited thematically which worked in a historical context but the contemporary work seemed out of place and strange juxtapositions occurred that I couldn't understand.  I also struggled with the displays, many quilts were laid horizontally on plinths, as mock-ups of beds, but this made the detail of the quilts hard to see.  Those that were hung vertically were far more accessible.

Winter/Male, Jo Budd 2010

On the whole though it was the contemporary work that most inspired me, although it was hard to accept some pieces as "quilts".  Once I let go of preconceptions, and stopped trying to define a quilt, I fell in love with some of these textile pieces and the concepts behind them.  The piece that I hold in my mind, is by Jennifer Vickers.  Her quilt was made from 38,000 squares of white paper, interspersed with 100 coloured squares, some photographs.  The white squares represent the civilian casualties in the Iraq war to date, and the coloured squares, the 100 British servicemen to have been killed in the conflict.  It was beautiful and harrowing at the same time; the large expanses of blank, white squares, challenging the void in our Media when it comes to representing the true cost of war. The use of the patchwork quilt as a social and historical device was aptly chosen and resurrected by the maker.

A Chinese Dream (detail), Susan Stockwell, 2009

In terms of my own work, I liked the artists whose work bucked the trend and used paper instead of cloth to make their quilts, having myself made the journey from working with cloth to working with paper but still calling it textiles.  I was attracted to the delicacy of the surface and it's vulnerability and the denial of function of the quilt.

There were many traditional quilts to satisfy quilt purists, as well as film celebrating and emulating the craft.  The film by Clio Padovani, projected onto a plinth, patched elements of film together, the projected light creating an elusive, shifting surface of textile fragments.

Coming away from the exhibition, my mind too holds an elusive, shifting bank of memories from the exhibition.  I was so hungry for this exhibition to satisfy.  It had to uphold the craft, be reverential of it's makers and lead the way in defining the "quilt" in the 21st century.  A tall order indeed.  It fulfilled those challenges but I would have preferred to see the contemporary work separate to the historical.

Good friends

Yesterday I sat in the Victoria and Albert Museum cafe with two of my favourite people drinking coffee, talking about art and books and life, and generally feeling that life is rather super.  It's been a long time since I have been to London and I have filled my mind, camera and notebook with shapes, colours and ideas......all will be revealed.

I travelled back up the country mindful of the book of paintings by Eric Ravilious that I had seen.  The landscape was still held back by this cold spring.  The green intensifies but the trees stay bare and brusque.  Just the odd tree was graced with acid green leaves, there hasn't been enough sunshine for full photosynthesis to occur.  Due to an error with my ticket I was upgraded to first class.  I would much rather have shared Ravilious' journey in this third class carriage.