Sunday 8 May 2022

Changes afoot!

Here we are in May already and we've been very busy over the last couple of months - not to mention Covid and other complications, so it's great to get back here with some important news.

After our very successful gallery exhibition at the Sock Gallery, Loughborough and good shows at NEC Fashion and Embroidery and Uttoxeter Quilt and Stitch Village, we have been looking ahead to our future plans and have decided to expand. So, this is going out today on our Facebook and Instagram pages ...


... together with this post.

'Being a well-established group of mixed media textile artists, Traverse is set up to create work, often using diverse themes as a starting point, with a view to seeking out opportunities to exhibit at a professional and exhibition level. This opportunity is open to all artists who use some form of textiles in their work.

Please remember that your commitment as a member will involve you not only in exhibiting opportunities, but also offering the group your time towards administration, publicity, setting up exhibitions. etc. We are looking to share these aspects as we move forward as we all have various other commitments - many hands make light work!'

If you are interested in finding out more or would like to be considered:

  • Please check out our work on our Instagram and Facebook pages following the links above
  • Please then email us at traversetextileart@googlemail.com telling us about yourself and your work and attaching some photos.

We are meeting as usual at Deb's studio in Birmingham on June 1st and hope to be discussing any applications then. We look forward to hearing from you and seeing your work.

Cath


Saturday 19 February 2022

Who knows where the time goes?

 So where did January go? And New Year? Or even Christmas? They've all passed me by in a blurred haze of ill-health (both my own and in the family), various choral performances over the Festive season and also a massive (always leave it till the last minute) rush to prepare and frame my work for Traverse's first ever gallery exhibition.

Happy to report that all is now much calmer on all fronts and our exhibition has been up and running for several weeks, with just over a week to go at The Sock Gallery, Loughborough Town Hall.

'Before' and 'After'  photos of one area on set-up day, with an action shot in between!






View from the entrance


The Sock Gallery is a beautiful, light and airy space and we are thrilled to see our work there. Here you can see Dia's wonderful hanging, revealed in the background, drawing you in ...


... and here it is! Well - a section of it as it's enormous! Many hours of work there on the wall.


Deb's dress and Vicki's hanging and skull studies - she is pleased to have sold a couple of these!


The wonderful work on Janet's wall:



Another of Deb's amazing 'unwearable dresses' with her fabulous 3D felts ...

... and some of her beautiful embroidery.


Dia has sold some of her fabulous 'Northern Light' series, seen here on the left:


Vicki's two stunning large pieces, flanked by a couple from Cath:


Finally a slightly wobbly video of Cath's wall:



Here are a couple of photos from our last 'Meet the Artist' session. Not sure what I was saying here but hopefully, it was interesting!


Rather excitingly, I was discussing a possible commission here.


We'll be in the gallery for our final 'Meet the Artist' session on Saturday, 19th February. Looking forward to seeing more lovely people and chatting about our work. Maybe see you there ...

Cath

Saturday 13 November 2021

And then there were five

Continuing the theme of change and new beginnings from the last post, we are very happy to share the news that we have a new member - Janet Donnell - a long-time friend of Cath's, who, like her, discovered textile art after retirement and has never looked back!

Recently, we spent a lovely day together at the studio to enable Deb, Dia, Vicki and Janet to get to know one another - chatting and working alongside each other. Everything went just fine and she fitted right in with the general exploratory fun and playtime that usually exists in our studio days!

Here's how Janet described herself for her page on this blog:

My approach to textile work is very much What will happen if?I have a germ of an idea, then begin to explore materials and techniques to see what happens when various methods are combined and developed. I love to work with the soft luscious textures of wools and yarns, or the flamboyant brightness of silk, as well as sheer fabrics, paints and dyes, textured fibres, cottons, lace, beads, papers - or anything else that will add to a finished surface that is full of touchable texture.  Working with my sewing and embellishing machines, as well as a lot of hand stitches, something emerges. I find landscapes and maps, rivers and contours - and the finished piece of work is usually nothing like the idea I started out with….

Janet was working on this beautiful piece on our studio day:

Shetland Pathways - stitch detail

Here's the full piece, which was finished back at home and wrapped around a canvas.

Shetland Pathways

Janet wrote these words about the piece.

This is made with wool yarns, hand-dyed and bought in Shetland. It is worked onto an un-dyed wool background that has been machine felted onto a wool felt base fabric. It has connections to where I live, with Leicestershire Black-Faced sheep wool yarn running though it in spirals. It reflects the time spent in the very quiet and empty Shetland Isles during a gap in the Covid restrictions which allowed us a brief holiday up there in August 2020. The discoveries we made walking along the coastal paths are tied up in the swirls and stitches. 

You can see more of Janet's work by checking out her page by following the link above.


Meanwhile, here's a little look at what the rest of us were doing in the studio that day. Deb and Dia have begun spending regular days at Littleheath Barn and one of their projects has been stitching on small squares of dyed, painted or printed fabric.

Here's one of many lovely squares that Dia bought to show us ...


... and a beautiful one from Deb, from a series called 'Other Worlds'.


It was very interesting for me to see these smaller pieces as I imagined I would struggle to work on that scale but I might just have a go, sometime!

In complete contrast, Vicki continued working on the very large printed piece she began last time - making more great printing blocks and adding a third colour, which worked very well. 


I was looking ahead to our upcoming exhibition at The Sock Gallery, Loughborough and adding beads and stitch to a smaller piece, which I began a while ago, using angelina fibres on a velvet background, heated and then cut with a soldering iron - nearly ready to go into a frame now.


Altogether we had a very happy and productive day as we welcomed Janet to Traverse and we are now very pleased to be continuing our creative journey, moving forwards together as a quintet.

Cath

Friday 17 September 2021

Times of beginnings

I've been contemplating writing this new blog for several weeks now, in a spectacular case of procrastination, and I've realised that sometimes you just have to go for it, even if you're not sure what you're going to say. It's been such a long time since the previous one at the end of last year and in some ways very little was changing in Traverse's world. My relationship with my textile art to a large extent remained tenuous and I've gone for long periods without making anything, apart from occasional bursts of creative energy. I know from our Zoom chats that Deb, Dia and Vicki have also, for various reasons, gone for long periods without doing much textile art.

However, things are slowly changing and finally we've managed to meet together in Deb's studio a couple of times recently. It's felt so good to be in the studio again, working alongside each other and sparking creativity and inspiration together. We are keeping everything crossed that planned shows next year will be going ahead and also have our very first gallery exhibition coming up in January next year. It will be at Sock Gallery, Loughborough Town Hall and we are very excited!

We decided to call the exhibition 'Together/Apart -  a Retrospective' to reflect how our creative lives have been affected recently. As we wrote in our description:

“An important part of our ethos is to celebrate our diversity, share our various strengths and to grow together, working side by side. However, having recently lived through strange times in our world and working apart for over a year, we are celebrating coming together again to present this retrospective, which reflects not only work on our themes but also work produced alone, exploring loss, personal viewpoints and our emotional landscapes – together and apart.”

Here are a few sneak peeks at what we've been up to.

Vicki has been making her own printing blocks and playing with paint and embossing powder ... 





... and a little bit of fabric manipulation.



Dia has been recycling (or is it upcycling?) coffee capsules, inspired by fireworks - the first stage is playing around with different arrangements before adding stitch.


I wonder if this will be the final choice.


Another of Dia's explorations with this felted background and more fabric manipulation ...


... and some stitching on some beautiful hand- dyed fabric.


Some more gorgeous stitching from Deb ...




...and part of her latest unwearable dress - I love the colours on this one!


I have been playing around with a couple of pieces - both of them things I started ages ago. First, something from the Experimental Textiles course where Traverse first met and it definitely needs a lot of work, specifically on the very flat background, which  needs texture. The embellished felted pieces have copper either inlaid or on top so I've been experimenting.

Where shall I put the small copper circles and should they have a dark red (or maybe turquoise) border?

Maybe I'll move some copper from the bottom to the top.

I think I've found some interesting texture for the background anyway!

The second piece is much older - I began it on a workshop with Alysn Midgelow Marsden in 2014! I know I put it away because it was quite fiddly, working with Romeo soluble and tiny pieces of metal cloth but I didn't intend to leave it for quite so long! I love the texture created and also the heat patination on the three different metals - steel, bronze and copper. I'm trying to decide which orientation I prefer and was surprised at the difference it made when I rotated the following photograph taken in Deb's studio.

 



The sunlight coming in through Deb's window was creating some very interesting shadows that day and the way I look at it now makes quite a difference. A bit of a theme for me lately and I'm still not quite sure how it will end up but remembering my opening sentence - 'sometimes you just have to go for it, even if you're not sure what you're going to do'.

Cath

Thursday 31 December 2020

Times of endings

It's been an incredibly long time since the last blog post and I suddenly remembered that I usually write one at the turning of the year so here it is! I've been thinking about time this morning and how these strange times have unfolded and look likely to continue well into the New Year.

At first, way back in March, time became elastic and seemed to stretch out ahead of me and I imagined how I would use this time of enforced separation from my normal life to do all manner of creative projects - what a wonderful gift it might be! I could investigate new techniques, read all the many inspiring textile art books on my shelf and spend many happy hours upstairs in my room. But this was not to be.

I began well enough by finishing work I'd already started or planned for our 'Senses' exhibition, which we still hoped to show in the Autumn. My 'Ocean Drum' and the metal weavings, 'Moon' and 'Sun', have already been mentioned here in blogland, (Ocean drum in Winds of Change  and Sun and Moon in Lockdown Life) as has my doing the 'Swirls of Colour' workshop with Isobel Moore (also in Lockdown Life), but after that I began to lose creative focus. It slowly became clear that we wouldn't be exhibiting anywhere in 2020 and exploring any new themes just didn't excite me.

Ocean Drum - La Mer

Round and Round the Garden
(Ocean Drum reverse)
     
Moon

Sun

Finished Swirls of Colour piece - untitled as yet

         

I know from artists that I follow that I'm not alone in feeling like that - some have made great use of that elastic time to change direction or explore their work in greater depth, while others have felt like me. I questioned my belief in myself as an artist sometimes but thankfully those times were short and I reached a quiet acceptance that I needed to focus on other things in my life which fed my spirit - mainly singing, virtually on Zoom, with many people all over the world, which has given me great joy.

But this is a textile art blog so gladly I do have some other artworks to write about and they also followed what was emerging as my lockdown theme - finishing things. I found a small piece of embellished felt I'd started many moons ago, which needed some stitching and beads and so that soon came together, although it's unframed and untitled as yet (and the colour looks very odd in the second photo).



I also finished another piece, which I started earlier using one of Maggie Grey's paint-resist techniques; this will be part of another exhibition, curated by Chris Gray, hopefully sometime next year. I was inspired by aboriginal dreamtime symbols and imagery for the central panel layered on felt and I was very pleased to find a piece of handmade paper, which I'd previously dyed on a workshop with Alysn Midgelow-Marsden, which worked well for the background. That has made its way into a frame and is ready to go ... but who knows when?



Turquoise Dreamtime

I'm now working on finishing another piece for Chris, which had to be wearable, so I'm upcycling an old boiled wool jacket, which had a few moth-eaten holes in it - also on the dreamtime journeys theme.



I'm enjoying marrying the needle felting with the use of Kantha stitching and also working with no clear idea of where I'll end up, which I suppose could also be a useful metaphor for where I am right now on the last day of 2020 - with no clear idea of when the strange times will end or what lies ahead. Maybe I needed to concentrate on the endings to make room for new beginnings and I'm hoping for changing times soon. The elastic 2020 time, stretching out far ahead, eventually seemed lost altogether, leading to a timeless quality of life for me and I'm hanging on to truly timeless themes of joy in nature, music, friendship and love.

"What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from."

TS Eliot


I'll be back with more news from Traverse in 2021 but till then we all wish you a very Happy New Year and hope to see you soon!

Cath