Hitting the wall.........

It has been a busy year. We came back from our Christmas trip last year in the knowledge that expat life was about to end and that we were lucky enough to be coming home to the UK. Something like our 6th move in 11 years. It took two months for our main shipment to arrive (including all my art materials and fabrics).

We settled into our house, just the two of us only to find our son descend on us from Uni for the summer. Then our daughter came home in October, bringing with her our beautiful grand-daughter, after the breakdown of her relationship. So here was my favourite little person in the house to play with and my textiles sat untouched in my studio (that's the conservatory to everyone else). Then with the colder weather it was too cold to work in there, it had a heater but who on earth can afford to heat a conservatory all day at the moment? Thankfully my lovely husband worked on a Saturday to move all the dining room furniture into the conservatory and all my materials into the dining room.

Enough procrastination yet? No, I had Christmas cards to make. If I had put as much effort into my painting and printing on fabric section as I had those cards, I'd have been onto the manipulating fabric section back in June.

I feel incredibly disappointed in myself. I was actually firing on all cylinders and doing very well I thought. But if I look back at the past 9 months with a fresh eye, I have actually done very little. What did I think I had achieved? And was I pleased with how I had achieved it? In a word, no. I think I thought that I could simply wander through the coursework, picking it up when the mood took me, when I now know that I should have been eating, drinking and sleeping Textiles.

Although I can see that I've done quite a few physical pieces, my sketchbook has been left seriously wanting,  I haven't been particularly vigilant about research either. I'm determined to fix this. I have made the decision to go back to the beginning of the painting and printing on fabric section and work through it, adding and expanding on what I have done already. Obviously Christmas is about to hit and so this next few weeks is going to be busy. I'm not procrastinating! I'll be working on my sketchbook. The sketchbook has been a major stumbling block for me. I have only really sketched to set out some basic designs for my textile projects. I know that I need to fill those sketchbooks with all sorts of things, ideas, fabrics, papers, photos. I bought Kay Greenlees' book 'Creating Sketchbooks for Embroiderers & Textile Artists' back in June and it has been inspirational. Now I just need to pull the proverbial finger out and get down to some hard work.

I'm going to try to sketch something each day for the next couple of weeks and will be putting the results either here or on my tumblr.

Wish me luck!!

A visit to Aberdeen Art Gallery.

One of my favourite artists of all time, is Annie Lennox. From her days with the Tourists (I know, I'm showing my age now) through The Eurythmics and then as a solo artist, her music and style has always held a great appeal for me. So when I heard that a collection of her costumes from videos, tours and album covers was going to be on display at Aberdeen Art Gallery this summer, I was very excited.

It was great but a massive drawback for me was that photography was not allowed in the exhibition itself and I had really wanted to write about it and include lots of photos. There was a guide book but it was thin and didn't include many images. Thankfully, Aberdeen Art Gallery is much more than that one exhibition and I was surprised at just how much there was there.

One of the first things that really caught my eye was a sculpture by Kenny Hunter - a Scottish artist - titled 'Feedback Loop' - it is stunning. I'm not entirely sure why I liked this so much. It has an almost cartoonlike look, akin to the type of characters you would see in Japanese computer games. I know that it is of a Japanese girl from the streets of Harajuku but the holding of the pink flowers (the only colour other than grey in the sculpture) made me think of Tiananmen Square, of youth and hope standing strong and proud but slightly coyed by the situation. I love this sculpture and I want it in my living room. Isn't this the feeling that art is supposed to convey?

Highly Sprung by Julia Douglas is a completely different piece of art entirely. It is a dress made from the small metal springs from clothing pegs and surrounded by a circle of the wooden pegs. The scary thing is that I didn't even realise that this is what the dress was made of. I was staring at the hem of the dress and how it flowed onto the floor when my husband pointed out what it was made of. I love the flow of it. I especially like the rusted element to the hem.

There is a section of the gallery devoted to samplers, costume and Applied Art - which has more than 1500 items, covering all aspects of applied and decorative art, design and craft, costume and textiles.

One of the samplers was by an Ann Stopforth, aged 12 years in 1822. It's very interesting to look at something that was made with great care and attention that has been kept so long and passed through many hands and that it is still in such good condition.

Another standout piece for me was a statue of mother and child called A Thank Offering by Benno Schotz (1891 - 1984). It cries out to be touched. I'm not sure if the photos do it justice but there is the grain of the stone running all the way through it, layers and layers that he has worked on - almost as though the sculpture is ring upon ring of stone and not sculpted.

Aberdeen Art Gallery has many pieces of work by many artists, including Degas, Moore, Turner, Hirst and many lesser known artists and sculptors. It was delightful to find so many new (well, new to me) artists and I will definitely be going back. It may not be on such a grand scale as the National in Edinburgh but it has so many wonderful works of art and it is impossible to appreciate them all in one morning.

The Embellished exhibition at Provost Skene House, Aberdeen

We went along to an exhibition in Aberdeen a few weeks ago at Provost Skene's House, titled Embellished , it featured embroidered garments and accessories from their permanent collection. It was quite a small collection but there were some beautiful items including a wool Victorian walking suit with a Russian style braiding - see below.


Unfortunately, the lighting was an obstacle to getting very good images with my camera. 


You can see how the embroidery along the bottom of the skirt is very different in style and quality to the braiding on the cape and it is very possible that the braiding was a later addition.

One of my favourite pieces in the exhibition was the pink beaded 'Flapper' dress from around 1923-1924. I'm not sure if the photograph is of a high enough quality for you to be able to see the tiny glass beads that cover the entire dress and the decorative bands of bugle beads clustered at the right hip that sweep up towards the shoulder and waistline.

 I can only imagine what this must have looked like under the lights with all the tiny sparkles from the glass beads as the wearer maybe danced the Charleston or the Shimmy.

The blue dance dress (late 1950s) is a far more structured outfit, with a skirt made up of gored panels with inset fishtail sections, this added a fullness to the skirt, giving a very dramatic effect when dancing. The floral embroidery and Tambour work is enhanced with sequins and diamante stones.

Whilst it was a very small exhibition, it really helped me being able to see some of this work up close instead of just browsing the internet or pouring over the books. It wasn't just about the clothes as Provost Skene house has a lot of very interesting displays including recreated rooms with original artifacts.

In one room, there was a wooden four poster bed with a very pretty embroidered coverlet.

It wasn't just in the obvious textiles that took my interest, once I started looking around, even the ceilings, windows and flooring were photographed with a view to using them at a later stage.

Next exhibition for us will be the 'House of Annie Lennox' which I can't wait for.