10 November – 2 January 2022
Preston Threads are a contemporary textile group based in the north west of England who share a common passion for textile art.
They meet regularly to inspire and aid the development of each other’s work.
As a hand embroiderer, I am inspired by plants and natural objects. I use my photographs and drawings to create linear designs. I have recently been experimenting with a variety of stitches and have been interested in the way they can form patterns and rhythms. I stitch into silk organza usually with fine silk or cotton threads. The organza is then stiffened, allowing me to cut into the fabric to create an open structure.
I am a textile and mixed media artist. I create 2D and 3D abstract pieces using fabric, paper and print. Since completing my BA Hons in Textile Surface Design I have been developing my practice based at Neoartist Studios in Bolton.
My practice is inspired by the urban landscape and the patterns created by our interventions and manipulation of nature. I have a strong interest in marks made by corrosion and decay.
My process starts with a photograph that I have generally taken from a landscape that has inspired me. I make sketches and notes of my thoughts and ideas as the words are important and help form part of my response. Representation is about the essence of the scene and my response to it, the mood I want to convey. Pieces build over time with slow stitch, contrasting areas texturally rich in stitch with ‘quiet’ areas, spaces between stitches or little or no stitch at all. In this way I explore the rhythm and movement which brings a scene alive to me. An atmosphere evoked, a pictorial reading between the lines.
I work with scraps, vintage and re-purposed fabrics and threads wherever I can to consciously move away from the new, manufactured, environmental calamity that textile production has become.
Hand stitching and working with fabrics and threads is an addiction from my childhood starting with my Mum, who for years made all our clothes, to the amazing opportunity of the needlework teacher as my form teacher for four years, leading to the success of a GCE in Needlework. Later this became an obsession with embroidery and creative textiles.
Recently through joining a tailoring class, to be able to make clothes that fit, I have renewed my interest and fascination with the construction, skills and processes involved in the making of garments. Deconstructing a well-made garment reveals the underlying beautiful shadow of its construction created with skills, processes and techniques which are the inspiration for this work.
In this work I have been exploring garment construction stitches, materials and techniques in a creative way through sampling, to explore the skills and processes involved in garment making.
My work is inspired by the Lancashire and Devon coastlines. I like to sketch, photograph and collect interesting objects found on the beaches, cliffs and dunes.
The joy I get from my work is from the unexpected results I achieve from the plant dyes and rust which I use to colour my fabrics and paper. I combine the dyed fabrics into collages, allowing my work to change through the making. I like to include my shoreline ‘finds’ in some pieces. Recently, I have also included recycled fabrics in my work.
I am concerned with embodiment of landscape, rather than direct representation. I aim to draw the viewer in and invite them to look closer and notice things they may well have overlooked.
I worked as an art teacher after completing my degree in ceramic. I have always been interested in creative embroidery and developed an interest by visiting the specialist shows in Harrogate and Birmingham. I always wanted to complete my C & G course which I finally succeeded in achieving. Soon after I joined Preston Threads. My work is based on the local environment. I collect resources using my ‘wombling’ skills, recording ideas in sketchbooks using different media including photography. I am interested in the patterns that you can see in fields especially during the summer months and glimpses you get of fields though gaps in drystone walls.
HER STORY TO BE TOLD
I discovered Ethel Carnie Holdsworth when researching Cotton Mills of my hometown; Great Harwood, Lancashire. Ethel was born in 1886 to a weaving family and began work at the cotton mill as a part-timer, aged eleven, working full-time from the age of thirteen. She wrote poetry from an early age; much, she says, at her loom. She went on to publish three books of poetry, 10 novels, 15 serials and is thought to be the first working-class woman to publish a novel. Much of Carnie Holdsworth’s work was politically radical, springing from a working-class, feminist perspective. In an article for The Woman Worker in 1909 she described the factory worker as ‘practically a beggar and a slave’, declaring all workers ‘dependent on the whims of a master class.’ She was a Socialist, pacifist, feminist, suffragist and believer in the goodness of the human spirit and the powerful effect of beauty and freedom upon it. This body of work is inspired by her poetry.
I have always been fascinated with surfaces. At Leicester, my degree specialism was in woven and structural textiles. I am still excited by repeating units and tessellations; minute variations on a theme; colour on colour; building up layers, cutting away, adding more and, generally, experimenting.
After working in industry as a textile designer and, for 30 years, as an art teacher I am enjoying the freedom to create as I wish. My main approach is translating my sketch book observational drawings into fabric pieces and, if possible, learning and applying new techniques.
