Painting with Cloth – Cas Holmes
30 March – 15 May 2022
Exploring the connection between landscape, people and place Cas collects found materials as she goes. Marks are then created which combine cloth, paint and stitch with a disregard of the divisions of medium usage and application that often define the world of painting and textiles.
Drawing inspiration from the world in front of her, Cas thrives on the challenges of the unforeseen and unexpected. She is equally guided by the materials she works with as to her ideas connected to the landscape and nature. She is fascinated by objects with a story to tell, cast-off sheets and clothing, handwritten papers, and the history of what we do with them and the familiarity they have in our own life (Allison Young, Gallery Curator Rochester Gallery on the exhibition Painting with Cloth).
‘I have Romany ancestry and as a child we led a thrifty life. My father was a painter and decorator by trade, and I used up his old paints, wallpaper books and paint rags. This re-use of materials remains in my work today, cloth, paste, colours, papers and stitch are built up in layers, cutting, tearing, layering as I go. This painterly approach best suits my mode of expression. None of my pieces are neatly planned, there is a lot of intuition, a response to materials and the given environment or the landscape in the pieces.’
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