Yinka Shonibare MBE: Fabric-ation, Yorkshire Sculpture Park 27th February 2013

It seems a while since I was last at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, last time I drove, in glorious warm sunshine. This time I caught the train in cold but again, sunny weather and was ferried in style to a private bloggers view organised by Emma the lovely Culture Vulturess. The show this time around couldn't have been more different to the YSP's normal fare. Instead of steel, stone and wood, we were almost immediately faced with bright colourful textiles thanks to the UK's most extensive show to date by this British-Nigerian artist.

As a textile artist myself, I had already come across Yinka Shonibare's interesting take on the Dutch-made faux-batik textiles that ended up becoming adopted as the cloth of choice of nineteenth century West Africa. A casual observer might assume that the brightly patterned fabric was native to Africa and Yinka uses it to great effect in virtually everything he does, from film, to sculpture and photography.

The leitmotif of the fabrics, variable as they are is at once a thread that gathers the exhibition at YSP together and yet at the same time raises troubling thoughts about the emperor's new clothes. I should say right here that I loved the exhibition, but the friend I came with, an experienced dress-maker, absolutely hated it, focussing on the fact that very little of what we saw was actually crafted by the artist himself. That we had a good long argument about it on the train home I think is in fact a tribute to the artist's ability to provoke and stimulate so I wouldn't let this put you off visiting and making up your own mind!

So, back to the show...curator Sarah made us most welcome and provided an in-depth narrative about each piece as we were shown round. If I had a criticism, it was that we didn't have enough time to simply observe in silence and make up our own interpretations. We learned that Yinka had chosen to explore issues of African authenticity from his time at art college, having first of all believed the Dutch cloth was traditional along with everyone else he realised that it was the perfect vehicle for him to explore all sorts of issues around 'africanness'.

The floating space capsule in the YSP foyer with its umbilically-attached astronauts in their natty fabric space-suits for instance, is a statement about the invisibility of African in the USA vs USSR space race. We moved on into the Underground Gallery and met with his 'Food Faeries' - headless dancing children in Victorian outfits and feathery wings. They had nets full of fruit slung over their shoulders and reference a myriad of ideas from the Victorian British Empire's annexation of the world's resources to the food inequalities that persist today and the children that suffer most as a result of these inequalities and whose agonised faces appear on our televisions in a bid to get us to pay for the food aid that will be flown back out to them in times of famine. There is also the idea that for most western consumers, the food they eat might as well be brought to the supermarket by faeries for all the interest they have in the source of what they stuff in their shopping trolleys.

Cannonball Heaven 2011. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

We moved on to the first room with its Nelson theme. From Trafalgar Square to HMS Victory, you couldn't really pick a more obvious symbol of Britishness and Yinka has clearly enjoyed subverting all that British stiff upper-lip kiss-me-Hardy stuff. We are treated to more headless figures ramming fabric shot down ship's cannons all clothed in Yinka's trademark dazzling fabrics now fashioned into very authentic looking eighteenth century styles. Around the walls are Yinka's take on the classic death bed scene painting from Chatterton to da Vinci, but again subverted by both the fabrics and also the non-white faces of characters inserted into the well-known scenes. They were in fact hyper-real photographs, glowing with colour and large scale in a rather histrionic way.

Fake Death Picture (The Suicide - Leonardo Alenza), 2011. Courtesy the artist and James Cohen Gallery, New York, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

Back out in the corridor the headless figures were replaced with even more disturbing figures with taxidermy heads of foxes and a calf, carrying golden guns (a Saddam Hussein reference apparently) called Revolution Kids. As someone who finds the recent use by several artists of taxidermy specimens rather unpleasant and at the very least, disrespectful, I didn't really enjoy looking at these objects although I was interested in the subject matter which was the youthful leaders of both the Arab Spring and the London riots... spot the Blackberry phone...our irrational fear of half-human feral kids was underlined by the use of the ultimate urban survivor, the fox, placed on the bodies of French Revolutionaries.

Revolution Kid (Fox Boy), 2012. Courtesy the artist and Collection Museum Beelden aan Zee, Den Haag- Scheveningen (The Netherlands). Acquired with the generous support of the BankGiro Loterij.

Gallery 2 was full of aliens in Da Vinci style flying machines, part of what we were told was Yinka's mission to amuse as well as confront. Gallery 3 had a huge painting called 'Black Gold' which referred to the exploitation of oil, a current source of conflict in Nigeria. And on we went, past a kaleidoscope of colour and  big questions, quite exhausting thinking about it now, but from the notes I made on the day, utterly  engaging, and ending up with a mysterious film of eighteenth century dancers and a murder, replayed over and over again, sometimes backwards, sometimes forwards with all the oddness that implies. At this point I realised I had begun to see the Yinka fabrics as no longer cheap market stall cottons but as gorgeous plumage worn by human birds of paradise. I wondered if that was in the end the effect that Yinka wanted - that a white Western viewer would begin to see these cheap fabrics through the eyes of the Africans who wore them with pride and delight and as symbols of their wealth as well as their joy.

As a postscript I should like to recommend that people pop upstairs in the main building to see Yinka's collaged drawings. They have a lightness of touch and beauty which serve as a wonderful place to actually start your viewing. If you have any doubts about the artist's skills then see these and believe.

Yinka Shonibare MBE: Fabric-ation continues at YSP until 1st September 2013. Further details here www.ysp.co.uk

'ReCollections' Craven Museum & Gallery, Skipton 23rd Feb 2013

A new year, and a nice new show at my local gallery. The main artist Roo Waterhouse has worked with historic toy collections in Halifax and Burnley museums and used them to inspire conversations with community groups. Each of her unframed oils on canvas explores a different toy era and is displayed alongside selected quotes from participants in her workshops and museum cases full of toys and games from a variety of eras. There was some fun to be had spotting items from one’s own youth, I was a particular fan of Britain’s farm models.

The paintings themselves have a rather eerie atmosphere, they have flat, smooth surfaces and are painted from a very low ‘toy’s-eye’ viewpoint or perhaps a child lying on their tummy? The perspective comes across a little oddly perhaps because of this. I couldn’t quite decide whether this oddness was deliberate or simply because the paintings weren’t well-drawn. They are certainly strange to look at, moments frozen in time with the toys looking as if they are actually living things, caught unawares – there are of course no actual children in any of the paintings. The fun, noise and excitement to be had from playing is entirely missing, almost as if these are archival records of a past civilisation now dead and gone.  I wondered if this was as a result of the objects actually being from museum collections? The title of the show is of course a play on the idea of museum collections being used to recollect the past

By contrast, the wooden automata by Lisa Slater were anything but dead. Adults visiting the show (and there were plenty in when I dropped by) were gleefully turning the little handles making a whole herd of bristly-maned birch-wood mules chomp and nod and twirl their tails with gay abandon. A lovely sight, and such fun! Mounted on the wall were some rather darker objects ranging from a spinning rack of well-used wooden spoons to shoe-stretchers that played a tune. Even better were the no-doubt Quay brothers-inspired porcelain dolls’ heads spinning around in their little dark boxes, eyeless sockets staring at nothing. I really coveted the ‘Opera Singer’ made from reclaimed bits of carved wood turned by magic into a rising and falling costume.

The design sketches accompanying the centrepiece horse and rider model showed that the artist is no slouch with a pen either which impressed me even more. The fact that all the objects can be played with and are well-made enough to be surviving so far is wonderful too.

The show is on until 6th May 2013

More details www.cravenmuseum.org

The Quay Brothers at Hyde Park Picture House, Leeds 24 April 2012

I came across the amazing stop motion animations by the Quay brothers while researching my MA in Contemporary Applied Arts a couple of years ago. I have an abiding interest in the dusty forgotten corners of the human world, the artefacts and dirt that accumulate underneath and behind things which have a life of their own just out of the corner of your eye, so coming across the extraordinary underground world of their film 'The Street of Crocodiles' was a mind blowing revelation. When I found out that the twins would be presenting four of their films on the big screen at the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds this month I could hardly believe my luck. The event was a taster for the much anticipated Overworlds and Underworlds event that the brothers are orchestrating for the Leed's Cultural Olympiad next month (details below).

Thanks to the ever wonderful Emma of Culture Vulture I swung a ticket for the film show and so found myself once again entering the magical, frightening, utterly unique world of the Quay brothers.

The first film was my favourite, 'The Street of Crocodiles' and I find it hard to describe how overwhelming the experience is of seeing this on a large screen in a darkened auditorium. I also find it very hard to put into words what the piece is about, I always feel that there is a meaning just out of reach and that if only I concentrated hard enough, and my brain worked fast enough, I'd grasp it. Sadly I never do, but for me, in the end, it's all about the marvelous dirty corners and grimy glass and my fascination with the life of the objects that the brothers manipulate: the dandelion clock, the rusty screws that dance and spin, the creepy porcelain dolls heads with the glowing eyes and the endless string running around pulleys from and to an unknown dark place. I have seen resonances of this piece in several places including some well known advertising campaigns. Most of my friends have never heard of the Quay brothers but they will certainly have seen work influenced by their unique vision.

The second film was 'Stille Nacht' which I had not seen before although I remember seeing a room set from it in their fabulous 'Dormitorium' exhibition in the Leeds Town Hall crypt last Autumn. This is the one with the magnet and the dancing iron filings and was at once joyous and scary with the battered doll's head peering out at us from the screen in giant scale.

The third film was a more recent one called 'Maska' and unusually seemed to have a narrative with its nightmarish story of a 'woman' created frankenstein-like in a laboratory, brought to life and female gender in order to seduce an enemy of 'the king', only it turns out 'she' is a praying mantis-like monster whose purpose is to assassinate this enemy. There were some amazingly richly saturated shots of the 'palace' interior and stormy seas and lightning lit skies outside. A thoroughly disturbing story of pursuit and death unfolds against this backdrop.

The final film was 'In Absentia' which combined live action with stop motion animation and a terrifyingly atonal music score. Again a story of sorts is involved, this one a real life one of a woman in an insane asylum who wrote endless undelivered letters to her husband pleading to be released. Being a Quay brothers production we saw the fate of all the broken pencil leads, apparently danced or raged over by a little demon or god of broken pencils, who collects them up and crushes them into staining graphite pools. Underneath the woman's chair, a sea of pencil shavings builds up and we see the woman's hands blackened with pencil lead in uncomfortable close up as she laboriously attempts to write her futile letters and over it  the soundtrack with its wailing, sobbing and hysterical laughter. About as close to the endless pain of insanity as I ever want to get.

The lights came up and we all sat a little shocked and considerably awed for a few moments. We were then treated to a Q & A session with the men themselves. They are notoriously hard to interview and for a while it looked like we were only going to get monosyllabic answers as they were unsuccessfully probed about what Overworlds and Underworlds was going to look like. However things began to warm up after some intelligent (and brave) questioning from the audience and we were treated to a tiny insight into the minds of these incredibly thoughtful artists. I was left feeling like I'd been in the presence of greatness and with a strange desire to learn more about phenomenology, whatever that is!

Roll on Overworlds and Underworlds, Leeds city centre 18 - 20 May 2012. I am clearing my diary for the whole weekend. Find out what little there is to know so far at www.overworldsandunderworlds.com
Who cares though - whatever happens it will be the most extraordinary thing to hit Leeds in a very very long time. Get ready!

'Five Truths' video installation, Howard Assembly Rooms, Leeds 13th Feb 2012

I was lucky enough to visit this intriguing piece of work on its opening night and the introductions from the Opera North and Victoria and Albert Museum personnel really helped set the scene. Up to that point I'd had no real idea what it was I had come to see - exciting in itself - and the rest of the experience was based on a similar level of ignorance, but in a thoroughly involving way. I found out that the V&A collect performing arts materials and that this project came about from research into a production of Hamlet directed by Stanislavski. No film of the performance survived and this led to a consideration of the 'truths' around theatrical performances. There can never be a right or a wrong production but every director endeavours to bring a new interpretation to even a well-known play like Hamlet.

The result of this research is 'Five Truths' - five performances of a single scene by five different directors, each one showing Ophelia descending into madness and played stunningly by the same actress Katie Mitchell. The five performances were videoed and then shown on two screens each, within a darkened room.

Needless to say, having entered this magical dark space the effect of these screens playing out such a harrowing scene was mesmerising, confusing and at times distressing. I found myself unsure how to view the work, standing in the middle and just glancing around or concentrating on one performance at a time. In the end, knowing I was to blog about the event I chose the latter, but of course I couldn't ignore the other performances going on around me. The almost silent and internalised Stansilavski interpretation kept being interrupted by the heart-rending wailing of Grotowski's Ophelia descending in a shuddering Bedlam of madness.

Each performance ended with the actress drowning herself and this immediately took the performance away from the stage production to the filmic since I'm sure Ophelia's drowning occurs off stage. Our images of the event come from the cinema or even pre-Raphaelite art. This raised the question of how well I knew the play, clearly the Brecht performance had substituted some modern language about credit cards and other financial stuff for Shakespeare's words and I then began to notice other alterations and stretching of the original school texts I studied. What of course I couldn't know was how representative of the styles of the different directors these films were, since I assume they all directed stage plays rather than film versions.

An altogether fascinating experience then, a wonderful combination of the visceral and the intellectual. I came away wanting to know more about the history of theatre direction and also remembering some of the live performances of Hamlet I have enjoyed over the years including one in Bulgaria in a floodlit castle patrolled by policemen carrying guns!

'Five Truths' continues until 25 February 2012 and there is also a 'Who Is Ophelia' installation trail around Leeds which looks rather good. Details here http://www.operanorth.co.uk/productions/installation-five-truths

Spring Exhibition at The Hepworth, Wakefield 8th February 2012

I was absolutely delighted to get Culture Vulture's invite to this bloggers preview at The Hepworth  as I have been itching to visit this wonderful new venue ever since it opened to such acclaim last year. I am pleased to say that the gallery did not disappoint and we were all made to feel most welcome as we gathered to view their new spring exhibition. After a short but heartfelt greeting from Simon Wallis the director we were taken on a guided tour of the three gallery spaces given over to the work of artists Ben Rivers, David Thorpe and Heather & Ivan Morison. Frances, the Head of Collections I think, explained that for this new show they had decided to try something different by inviting these four artists to show across the three temporary gallery spaces with work which while very different created a dialogue across the spaces through the intertwined themes of utopian, post-apocalyptic societies.

We began with the remarkably crafted work of David Thorpe with its overt references to the theories of the Arts and Crafts movement and rejection of contemporary fine art practices where artists remove themselves from the actual making of their work, employing armies of technicians to realise their visions instead. We heard that David uses traditional techniques to paint, manufacture and build his pieces but is all too aware that by doing so he lays his work open to being rejected as 'fine' art. The decorated boxes on legs shown here are like creatures that bristle against such opinions, one gives out a warning hum, while another has a small hole cut down to its core from where a bright white light shines representing the pure soul that all such hand-crafted items have. The attention to detail was clear although the leather cutwork decoration and the friezes of glazed tiles were fooling no-one who looked closely, they mimicked historic styles but could never be exact reproductions. Immersion in the process of making seems to be the key to these pieces, allowing the artist to experience the pleasure of producing good work, well-made just as Ruskin preached. The work thus becomes an active expression of these utopian principles.

In the next gallery we glimpsed a short section of Ben River's film  'Slow Action' with its wonderfully eerie vision of post-apocalyptic human communities, isolated and evolving in separate directions. Masked, paint-daubed humans postured and danced in a variety of exotic island locations. We didn't get to hear the accompanying soundtrack but the Lord of the Flies vibe was quite powerful enough. The use of glowing 16mm film stock added to the feeling I had that we were watching a historic ethnographic study rather than a future world as was suggested by the artist himself who kindly left off setting up his work to chat to us about the ideas behind the film. We heard that inspiration came from a commission to celebrate Charles Darwin's anniversary where he had learned about the importance of the study of isolated populations of animal species on islands to Darwin's theories of evolution.

In the third and final gallery, we entered yet another strange world, this one created by Heather & Ivan Morison. Although it was still in progress of construction, what we saw was a collection of seemingly disparate rather Dali-esque sculptures and giant friezes which together were to form a stunning whole. What we were in fact seeing and hearing was an interpretation of the science fiction novel 'Ice' by 20th century British author Anna Kavan. Pieces in the room represented characters in the story which confusingly blends fiction with the author's own life story. A giant illuminated balloon anchored to a stool made of iron that looked like wood, represented a Child lost to the author but also part of the novel. A huge black broken square painted on the wall represented a male character blackened through fire and known as the Warden while a silvery block painted in multiple layers on the adjoining wall was the female character, the 'purest of forms'. Ivan Morison explained to me about how the black and white pigments used came from burnt and ground up animal bones, mixed with soot taken from the chimneys of Wakefield houses. Other items in the exhibition were made from cement mirroring the cement used to clad The Hepworth's facades and chalk gathered in the artists' home town of Brighton - linking and earthing the pieces into both their actual and their artistic milieu.  We heard that water will eventually pour from the ceiling and that gallery staff are to be involved in puppet performances of the story at intervals during the exhibition. A quite extraordinary tour de force even in the state we saw it in.

It was a fitting end to a delightful and inspiring evening. I would suggest that the show could stand repeat visits to truly appreciate all its subtelties and to unravel both the individual artistic stories and to grasp the links between them, the reward will be images and concepts that will stay with you for a very long time.

The show continues until 10th June 2012 and entrance is free. Further details here.

Many thanks again to the Culture Vulture for organising the event and to the staff and artists at The Hepworth who so freely gave of their time - it was much appreciated.

Northern Art Prize, Leeds Art Gallery 21 November 2011

Sarah Brown welcomes us

Once again and after a bit of a mad dash for the train, I found myself attending a blogger's preview event in the company of social media specialists all organised by The Culture Vulture. This time we gathered in the glorious tiled hall at Leeds Art Gallery before being introduced to our host for the evening, Curator of Exhibitions, Sarah Brown. As one of the selectors for the Northern Art Prize she was perfectly placed to walk us round the work of the four shortlisted artists on display in the groundfloor galleries.

As an applied artist I usually find myself a little intimidated by the cutting edge of contemporary art but helped by Sarah's lucid explanations of each artist's motivation and working methods I really enjoyed our look round. The show wasn't due to open for several days so we saw some of the work in the process of being readied for display so this review is of necessity a little incomplete.

Richard Rigg 'Some Rest on Six Occasions' Detail

We started with Richard Rigg and his two telegraph poles whose tarry aroma filled the main entrance hall and which disappeared into the gloom of the upper floors. I always have a problem with artists who take unmodified, found objects and present them as art. Even Duchamp's urinal had a fake signature after all. Rigg's oddly titled work "I forgot what was said [etc]" served to make us crane our necks upwards and marvel at its height and wonder at the effort needed to install it but I think we needed to see it lit from above to fully appreciate its function of making us appreciate the architectural spaces of the gallery. It was a slightly disappointing start but the work we saw in the next gallery space more than made up for it. Here we saw four wildly different pieces all distinguished by the artist's remarkable mastery of the skill needed to make them. I am a huge fan of Rachel Whiteread and Rigg's hollow cast of a Victorian coat hook reminded me of her House with its evocative cast of empty spaces. As curator Sarah explained, it was as if the white box of the gallery space was hooked up and hung from the outside causing me to have a brief but rather dizzying vision of an alternate dimension beyond the walls of the gallery where we were all part of the exhibition! This surreal state of mind continued as we began to really look at the two pieces of furniture in the room. Both were exquisitely crafted but have no practical function. They made me smile with pleasure at the joke, carried out with such deadpan skill that you had to look twice before you saw the six joined chairs were impossible to sit on and the two mahogany writing tables one on top of the other could not be separated. A quick glance at a dark and rather mysterious cyanotype of a complex rope knot left me wanting to know more - always a good sign.

Leo Fitzmaurice 'Horizon' detail

In the next space we were confronted by the remarkable sight of about 20 landscape paintings from the gallery's own collection jammed one against the other in a choppy line from one end of the room to the other. This was the creation of Leo Fitzmaurice and it wasn't until Sarah pointed it out that I saw that he had lined up the horizon line of each painting all along the wall and that the subject matter progressed from early morning to night time. It was a truly clever and very playful way of getting you to really look again at these rather run-of-the-mill 18th and 19th century landscapes with their dramatic clouds, immobile cattle and languid peasants. By placing them so close to each other one's eye is naturally drawn right out to the edge of each work, parts that are normally unexamined and the flow of horizon and time gave an extraordinary sense of expansiveness as well as pointing up the shared cliches of these works. Fitzmaurice's companion piece, a slide show of modern urban landscapes showing inside a shipping container-like room wasn't working but I can imagine the juxtaposition will add real impact.

James Hugonin 'Binary Rhythm 2' detail

James Hugonin's complex and mind-bendingly detailed geometric paintings were our next stop. Sarah spent some time talking about the labour involved in the precise placing of each of around 55,000 coloured marks by the artist who will spend up to a year on each large piece. Fragments of the artist's working drawings showed the complex mathematics behind each piece with their tiny pencilled numbers and finely drawn grid lines. Stepping back, the paintings shimmer and seem to be revealing patterns which fade away the harder you look and I think I should have spent longer simply exploring this effect. Curator Sarah used the word 'hedonistic' at one point but after hearing about the artist's practice I saw neither joy nor pleasure, only obsession. I was strongly reminded of the slightly sick feeling I had when I saw the thousand upon thousand of tiny human figures hand-cut from red tissue paper by Chinese artist Lu Shengzhong in his 2007 installation 'Little Red Figure'. It's a feeling I find quite hard to analyse - I want to be impressed by the hours and hours of concentrated effort but I am also horrified at the sheer madness of the desire of the artist who undertakes such a herculean task. I also wonder who carries out all the domestic duties needed to support this sort of intensity of purpose. I think in the end I would have been better not knowing about how the pictures were made, thus giving me the chance to simply enjoy them on a more emotional level.

I had no such conflicting feelings over the work of the final artist Liadin Cooke . Her work is an absolute riot of colour and above all texture. Her work could not be called attractive but it packs an emotional punch even though sadly one can't heft the weight or feel the complex surfaces (or even take photos). With my background in traditional textile skills I was particularly drawn to her piece 'Miserable Object' inspired by an unusual embroidered sampler in the V&A. The latter records the sad life of its maker and her eventual redemption. Cooke's work is a series of wobbly parallel lines 'drawn' horizontally across a white background using red wax. The lines are like the readout from a heart monitor - almost flatlining but with just the tiniest flutter as the artist's hand wavers across the canvas. I saw in the piece all those endless lines of embroidery stitched by all those faceless Victorian women whose fate was to be as forgotten as Middlemarch's heroine.

Having called Cooke's work unattractive I should make an exception for the work hanging next to 'Miserable Object' whose title I failed to note. It consisted of a dark, smoky rectangle of crushed nettle leaves with a single pearl set into it slightly off centre. Simple, beautiful and intensly mysterious. Her unfinished piece 'Some Particular Place' lay nearby and couldn't have been more different. A really large lump of unfired clay, pummeled and shaped into a mass of chaotic spikes, whorls and crevices then sprayed with car paint in a rather nasty shade of metallic purple, it sat and brooded behind a protective screen like a malevolent sea creature. It will be fascinating to see how it changes over time as it slowly dries, maybe it even moved a bit while my back was turned, I wouldn't be surprised.

I am really looking forward to a return visit to the show now it is fully open. I am sure I will begin to see lots that I missed during this first brief look. The winner of the Northern Art Prize will be announced on 19 January 2012. We all disagreed about who we thought should win. My choice on the night was Richard Rigg, but having written this blog I'm not quite so sure anymore....!

Social media types engaging with art!

Thanks again to The Culture Vulture for the invite and to Sarah Brown and Leeds Art Gallery for hosting us. The Northern Art Prize exhibition continues until 19 February 2012. Visit the Leeds Art Gallery website for opening times.

Northern Freeze Show, Mill Bridge Gallery, Skipton 11 November 2011

Mill Bridge Gallery is Skipton's newest art venue, specialising in art photography and sculpture. Having been to their wonderful opening night in September it was lovely to be invited back to see their new winter-themed exhibition. The gallery is worth a visit for the building alone - a gorgeous late medieval structure, once an outbuilding or kitchen for a grander house on Skipton's High Street now long since demolished. The gallery's owners have done a marvelous job restoring it and the whitewashed walls and dark timber showed off the icy, snowy photos on display to perfection.

View from gallery garden

In an age when almost all the photos we see are digital, snapped on our mobile phones or compact cameras, it is a salutory experience to spend time with large format, pin-sharp prints. Tony Crossland's bleak snowy views of Ingleborough from the Turbary Road really brought this home. Every fragment of limestone was etched in the sharpest monochrome, while the blasted white slopes of the mountain stood out superbly against a faintly pink tinged sky. Daniel Shiel's pieces consisted of fascinating studies of frozen water. Some explored the swirling textures formed as the water solidified, others carried the shimmering reflections of unseen objects just out of shot. One particularly affecting picture showed the reflection of a bare winter tree which seemed to be trying to gather up armfuls of the dead leaves fallen and frozen into the water's surface.

Snow must be one of the hardest subjects to photograph given its lack of colour so it was interesting to see how the various artists had tackled it.I wondered if Brett Meikle had used lights and filters to produce his shot of a startling white sculptured snow drift set against a darkening evening sky of the deepest indigo and turquoise. Keith Craven's photograph Malham Tree looks rather ethereal set among the frosty grass but a closer look and the branches look rather odd  almost like streaks of electricity seared across the sky. The image is then reproduced on sheets of brushed aluminium which magnifies this rather magical effect.

At the preview

Another magical photo was friend Mark Butler's Cow Close Waterfall with its close up imagery of spray and  icicles and bright green moss. A reminder that winter can strike fast even before the summer seems to be over. Henry Meyer's black and white photos dating to the l940s and 50s record winters how they used to be. The one that lingers in my memory  was Blizzard taken in 1952 and showing a solitary figure hunched against the wind, trudging across a blurry snowy field. I felt cold just looking at it!

Alongside the winter photos are an excellent selection of other photographs, ceramics and sculptures some of the latter on show in the gallery's delightful garden overlooking the canal at the back. Do pay the show a visit if you find yourself in town, it's well worth supporting such a brave new venture.

The Mill Bridge Gallery is open Wed – Sat 10.30am – 6pm, other times by appointment.

Rachel Goodyear 'Modifications of the Host' Yorkshire Sculpture Park 1st October 2011

My second visit to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park this year and again at the invitation of The CultureVulture to a special bloggers' preview. This time I was there to see Rachel Goodyear's new show in the Bothy Gallery called 'Modifications of the Host'. The weather last time I was there was glorious and this autumnal evening we were blessed again with the last sunshine of a short Indian summer. It was lovely to see Jaume Plensa's sculptures, catching the light and reflecting the sky and glass of wine in hand we were all a little reluctant to leave the view behind and go into the gallery. A short introduction from our hosts and Rachel told us about her work and importantly the collaborations she has forged learning new skills in porcelain and stop-motion animation to complement her drawing. It turned out that she has spent time getting to know the park and some of the work we were to see was inspired by her experiences there.

The Bothy Gallery is quite a small space so it suited Rachel's small-scale intimately detailed pieces perfectly. Slightly confusingly for the eager blogger, there were no labels in sight. I was wondering how easy it would be to identify work from my descriptions alone but then I noticed the laminated room maps with labels. It may have been the glass of wine but these weren't as easy to follow as they might have been and I spent some time twisting my copy around (along with my head) trying to work out what I was looking at!

'Bad Berries' Rachel Goodyear

'Escapologist' Rachel Goodyear

There was some useful introductory text but I had also checked out Rachel Goodyear's website beforehand and this quote from David Beech interested me the most: "Nothing is at home in these works, as if the world had been tapped lightly and everything had stumbled into unfamiliar positions". Once actually in the presence of her work I felt as if it was more like I had given a shove and ended up in a world not quite the same as the one I thought I was in. 'Restless Sleeper' was the first drawing to catch my eye - it takes several seconds to realise what you are looking at but you finally see a naked woman, apparently asleep and with a wild boar fused to her body. The blackness of the animal's hair stands out again the stark white flesh of the woman who twists her head to one side. The stiff legs and cloven hooves of the beast draw the eye and in my notes I wrote the words 'possession'; 'the devil' and 'succubus' - I was thinking of medieval beliefs in evil spirits who possess people's bodies while they sleep. Next up was a tiny porcelain head called 'Bad Berries' set in a wasteland of white wall. Tiny white berries protruded from the mouth and eye sockets in a thoroughly disturbing way while the head was wearing a set of long ears. I immediately thought of the film 'Donnie Darko' and then of Bottom in 'A Midsummer's Nights Dream'. Were they rabbit ears or those of a donkey? Humans wearing long ears appeared in several of Rachel's pieces it turned out and I began to see them as symbolising people who were somehow possessed by nature or maybe apeing being part of nature. In the case of 'Bad Berries', nature seems to have struck back in a very unpleasant way.

The random cruelty of nature seemed well-represented by the limp porcelain corpses of two birds on a white plinth titled 'Escapologist'. From the beak of one a pencil drawing of more bird corpses seeps and drips down the side of the plinth like all those other unnoticed generations of dead birds that each one carries in its DNA. 'The Perils of Falling Asleep in the Woods I & II' shows two porcelain creatures both of whom are being overwhelmed and absorbed into the forest floor. Their bodies rot into leaf litter and lichen.

A room at the end of the gallery is given over to a projected stop motion animation called 'Woodman'. A strange scarecrow human with a sack for a head stands with his feet among dried and rustling vines, odd noises play and eventually mossy growths appear all over him only to vanish back into his flesh and clothing again in the blink of an eye. His blank dark holes for eyes stare out at you while the soundtrack booms and whispers, a man of the wild, gamekeeper, woodsman, men you rarely meet unless you are in the middle of a dark wood where maybe you are trespassing.

The Perils of Falling Asleep in the Woods

I began to see patterns in the work from this point - the humans with masked or hidden heads, that seem to be 'becoming' or possessed by animals; the bodies that bleed and rot back into their natural constituents and finally the animal world that seems to have been distorted and altered by the human. And dominating them all the little red pan-like horned creatures that dance and celebrate the fact that humans will never escape their ties to nature, in the end we all rot back into the soil. Sometimes we embrace it, most of the time we fight it. Rachel shows us that it will always defeat us. That hidden world that we often can only experience at night because we have driven it so far away from our normal lives, a hidden world that is still just waiting for us however much we deny it.

A truly remarkable and disturbing show then which has had me thinking for days now about that false veil we draw between the human and natural worlds. And as a final gift from that latter world, as I was leaving a huge crescent moon rose and far away in the dark I could hear geese calling to each other, not a human within miles of them.

Rachel Goodyear's 'Modifications of the Host' continues at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park until 3rd January 2012.

Thank you again to Emma The Culture Vulture for the invitation and to YSP for hosting us.

The Joy of Food - Lund Gallery 25 September 2011

A summer of working on my own exhibition has kept me away from other galleries and boy, how I have missed it! Stella Adams-Schofield and I had our lovely preview of The Read Threads: Emerging Talent on Saturday 24 September and the very next day I was on my way to the Lund Gallery at Easingwold near York, clutching my preview invite to their new show The Joy of Food. I was definitely in need of a treat after months of hard work and was not disappointed. It's not the largest space in the world being converted from farm outbuildings and it was crammed with eager punters when we arrived. Juggling the price list, a glass of juice and my notebook while trying to see and identify the mass of work and avoiding bumping into people made it a bit of struggle and maybe not as relaxing as I hoped. But what a feast for the eyes, there was a marvelous selection of ceramics and glassware plus relevant textiles like Joanna Kinnersley-Taylor's printed tea towels and some lustrous linen cloth whose maker I couldn't identify.

Lou Rota mug

As a keen collector of studio ceramics I recognised several of the makers immediately, I already own one of Lisa Hammond's teapots and there was a wonderful range of plates, cups and jugs by Kaori Tatebayashi whose work I also already own and adore. But alongside the old favourites there was a whole feast of makers whose work I wasn't familiar with. Nigel Lambert's bowls and plates first caught my eye, thick and chunky with splodgy bold paintwork which I really liked and incredibly reasonably priced. Sandy Brown is a more established artist and her big solid bowl and handled vessel with their blue, dripped splashy lines were full of movement while being earthily solid. A huge contrast were the china mugs decorated by Lou Rota with outsized stag beetles and other creepy crawlies - they really tickled my mum and she bought one with rose buds and black beetles crawling all over it.

Jack Doherty tea bowl

We both also loved the incredibly detailed tapestries by Amanda Gizzi with their food-based subjects, particularly 'Pasta al Uovo' (hope I spelled that right!) - a generously proportioned woman is shown pummeling pasta while the hens responsible for the eggs crowd round and watch. More birds appeared on James Campbell's rather mythic vessels, a single swift flies high over a wind-disturbed lake while trees toss along the shore, a large black crow struts arrogantly in a field. Wonderful, and there was so much more that I didn't spend nearly enough time looking at because I was completely bowled over by the work of St Ives potter Jack Doherty and my mind was made up, I had to have one of his gorgeous soft smoky surfaced porcelain pieces. I eventually chose a small turquoise and grey tea bowl with the most amazing texture and depth of colour.

A thoroughly satisfying and beautifully laid out show then. The colourful cauliflowers and bowls of cherries may have been removed by now but I'd heartily recommend a visit even if you have to imagine your own food.

Catherine Bertola at the Bronte Parsonage Museum, Haworth 15th April 2011

Rather to my surprise I 'won' a ticket for two to the preview of Catherine Bertola's new work in Haworth via a little competition run on Twitter by Art in Yorkshire - supported by Tate. I was delighted to receive them as I am already an admirer of the contemporary art programme organised by Arts Officer Jenna Holmes at the Bronte Parsonage Museum. I have also come across Catherine Bertola's work before as part of the V&A's Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft exhibition which I saw January 2009 at the Tullie House Museum in Carlisle. Her site specific work 'Everything & Nothing' created from dust collected by cleaners and curators at the V&A was both beautiful and thought-provoking.

The Bronte Parsonage Museum offered the artist a very different opportunity to interpret a historic space. There are no brightly lit wide-open gallery spaces here, just small, dark rooms in an old house which have become a much-loved shrine to the lives and work of the famous 19th century authors. Catherine's response has been to create 'To be forever known', a sound installation which plays on a 6-minute loop in the dining room where the Bronte sisters wrote. There is plenty of interpretation available in the house to explain the laborious reading, recording, rerecording process which went into the installation but we were lucky enough to have Catherine Bertola explain it to us over a welcome glass of wine. For those not lucky enough to have been there, listen to this excellent interview online.
A Conversation with Catherine Bertola by Art-Talk

She told us about her impression of the house as a 'period set', a faithful reproduction of how the house might have looked but in the end not actually real. The only 'realness' is the space itself, unchanged since the sisters wrote on or walked round the dining-room table after their evening meal. Into this space Catherine read out excerpts from five of Charlotte Bronte's letters, recording them, then replaying them in the space and re-recording them until the words almost vanished and all that was left was the resonances of the sound in the room. And what strange sounds they are, the audio track hums and whoops and saws like a bad dream out of the BBC radiophonics workshop. The dining room is placed right next to the entrance door so there was a constant background noise of people chatting while they came in and out and I found it hard to hear more than these eerie synthetic sounds, not the "unintelligible whispers" mentioned in the interpretive leaflet. The piece is also very short and I have to say that a first listen left me quite disappointed. However, an odd alchemy took place as I explored further and I found that I began to listen much more closely to the sounds of the house, the creaking of the floorboards upstairs as people moved about and the ticking of the clock which I'd never noticed before. For the first time during a visit here I began to feel the house come alive, and those strange noises have continued to haunt me, becoming transmuted in my memory into an odd song like whale music.

Haunting is quite an appropriate word to use since it is clear that the artist is trying to recapture something of the life which people believe still lingers in the fabric of the building. Her companion work to the dining room installation is 'Residual hauntings', three black and white photographs taken on a slow shutter speed of the artist re-enacting some of the day-to-day activities and domestic tasks which once took place in these rooms. The resulting images show ghostly spectres descending stairs, planting bare feet on the kitchen floor or whirling around the dining room table. In an age where there is a plethora of fake paranormal television shows, these photos perhaps don't have the power that they might once have had, but they increased my conviction that behind this work is also an unstated reference to the world of 19th century spiritualists whose activities Catherine seems to be emulating, using science to make real the vanished sounds and souls that once filled these rooms to those who have made the pilgrimage. I have to admit I remain unconvinced by references to the artist's use of "...scientific methods...revealing the resonant harmonies and tones of architectural spaces" but the results certainly had the desired effect of making me think hard about the real meaning of preserving a house like this. Why do all these people visit the Parsonage if not to try to touch something which is in fact long gone. The spark of genius that once walked these rooms can now only be found within the pages of the Bronte's books but this doesn't stop people wanting to experience the atmosphere of the house that was once so filled with creativity. And this in the end is what Catherine's work did for me, I took away a great desire to hunt out my well-thumbed copy of Wuthering Heights in order to touch that genius for real once more.

Catherine Bertola's work can be experienced at the Bronte Parsonage Museum until 8th July 2011 and there are several exciting 'Conversaziones' coming up which the artist has organised as part of her 'To be forever known' project which I shall certainly try to attend.

Thanks again to Art in Yorkshire - supported by Tate for organising the tickets for me. They are actively promoting the arts in Yorkshire through their great new website Art in Yorkshire. Read more about the larger commission called 'Personal Tempest' that the Catherine Bertola work at the Bronte Parsonage Museum is part of on that website.

Jaume Plensa at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park 6th April 2011

I felt tremendously excited by the opportunity to attend this special bloggers' preview evening at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, showcasing the work of internationally-renowned, Spanish artist Jaume Plensa. And I’m glad to say I wasn’t disappointed. YSP looked sublime on a gloriously sunny April day and as the evening progressed and the sun went down, Jaume’s external sculptures really came into their own, polished steel surfaces reflecting the sunset and then white lights inside seated figures mirrored by the glittering lights of a distant town.

The preview began with a chance to hear the artist himself talk modestly about his work in the Underground Gallery, framed by three of his extraordinary illuminated human figures crouched protruding from the walls of the room. Sadly the room’s acoustics were such that I didn’t hear much of what was said other than his concept that as humans we have auras that surround us and fill space and a quotation from Blake, “one thought fills immensity”. The words were immediately resonant as we stood with the three glowing figures looming over our heads carrying on their faces the first of the many words we were to discover.

YSP curator Sarah Coulson then took over and as we walked on from room to room, she attempted to explain more of the ideas that drive the artist, these include a deep love of humanity and a desire to create connections between people, both in a social sense but also between people and his work. It was interesting to approach the work with these explanations in mind. I have to say that I came away with some quite different impressions but that of course is the beauty of good interpretation, it allows you to make up your own mind!

Jaume’s work is mostly concentrated in the Underground Gallery with in addition, one piece hanging from the roof of the YSP Centre corridor and several large sculptures in the surrounding outdoor spaces. What follows here are just my first impressions after a necessarily short look round concentrating mostly on the indoor spaces, but I will definitely be returning for a longer visit very soon.

The four large rooms in the Underground Gallery might have been built to house the four incredibly diverse works on show in them. Jaume’s signature use of a wide range of materials in his sculptures was well-illustrated, demonstrating his words, “the material is never a direction, but only a vehicle.” The first room I have already described, the three hollow glowing plastic figures crouching on opposite walls like evil incubi. Stare at one and disturbingly you catch another out of the corner of your eye hovering in the dark space. Each is portrayed trying to cut themselves off from the world with their white waxy hands covering their ears or eyes or mouth, each an absolute expression of isolated anxiety. I was left wondering what terrible thing they were trying to block out.

In the next room, hollow illuminated plastic is replaced with the heavy timelessness of alabaster in a completely stunning array of giant, elongated Benin/Easter Island-looking heads hacked out of the raw stone. Some are like Michelangelo’s unfinished Captives, still emerging out of their roughly hewn blocks of stone, others are much more complete and float free. For an instant as my eyes adjusted to the gloom they shimmered like an optical illusion, glowing weirdly in their individual bright white spotlights as if they were holographs or projections flickering into life as some unseen switch is tripped. The alabaster is cracked and flawed while each face is polished smooth and the surfaces glitter in the harsh white light as you move around them. I thought the faces were all the same but Sarah explained that they are actually based on the digitally manipulated photographs of a series of girls. Jaume believes that women may be the future of the world and these quiet contemplative heads are displayed like fragments of a future civilization’s art laid out in a museum store, hence the wooden crates they stand on. For me they seemed more like a set from a film, a temple from a lost alien culture, eerie and other-worldly or perhaps powerful objects being readied to be packed away in a vast Raiders of the Lost Ark-type government storage facility.

The following room juxtaposes stone and plastic. Three giant white illuminated children’s heads are placed on a square carpet of tumbled marble rocks which have a floury white texture quite at odds with the smooth white plastic of the heads which face across their stone carpet towards each other but entirely unknowingly since they have their eyes shut. Across their smooth young features are ‘tattooed’ in raised letters words such as Hysteria, Insomnia, Disease and Hunger, all the ills that man is heir to along with all his sins, Desire, Wrath and Ignorance among them. Sarah described Jaume’s work as essentially hopeful, the words used here are from an Oscar Wilde letter describing the experience of prisoners in Reading Gaol in an effort to ameliorate the conditions. I saw no hope however. These children weren’t communicating with each other, they were withdrawn and silent, passively waiting to be scarred and damaged by the things we see written on their faces. Like all humans, they exist side by side but ultimately they will be isolated from each other by their individual experiences.

The silence and sadness of that room was shattered by the next and final room where a dimly-lit circle of brass gongs hangs ready to be brought to ear-shattering life. The noise when people really got going was powerful in the most primitive and visceral way, I managed to record a short clip on my phone although it was so loud it nearly blew out the speakers!
I was immediately transported to the world of film again, this time to the temples and seductresses of Hollywood epics, like Samson and Delilah or Cecil B DeMille's Cleopatra. The quotes from the Bible’s ‘Song of Songs’ cast in clear resin on each gong underlined this feeling with its erotically charged story of the woman who searches for her lover.

In complete contrast to this powerful assault on the senses is the curtain of cut-out steel letters which sways and quietly tinkles along the whole length of the corridor which fronts the Underground Gallery. It is titled ‘Twenty-Nine Palms’ and contains sentences from a selection of the artist’s favourite authors.

Jaume Plensa 'Twenty-Nine Palms' YSP April 2011 from Karen Griffiths on Vimeo.
I liked Sarah’s description of Jaume’s concept of words lined up on the page as if in front of a firing line, which he then frees with a new life of movement, light and sound in his sculptures.

Verses from the ‘Song of Songs’ are also engraved on the steel doors of two glass brick built 'cells' illuminated with soft coloured LED lights which are located in the entrance lobby of the gallery. Step inside and you are completely isolated from the outside world, a soothing gift from the artist perhaps better experienced on your way out after all the visual and aural excitement of the rest of the gallery.

Escaping into the open air, words from many different languages appear on the skins of metal men solemnly kneeling and embracing a collection of trees. Or they form the actual skin of a number of steel sculptures, delicate kneeling forms with no faces, bleeding letters over their stone plinths. Each one like a shining Tower of Babel, chattering silently as the sun went down. As the artist says “I invite you to listen to these noises. I invite you to imagine silence”.

Jaume Plensa continues at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park until 25 September. Opening times and other details from their website www.ysp.co.uk

A big thank you to YSP for the opportunity to view and photograph the work and meet the artist and to Emma www.theculturevulture.co.uk for organising it all.

Find a full set of the photos I took at the preview in my Flickr photostream

'The Art of Printmaking' The Butterfly Rooms, Saltaire 19th March 2011

View of Anna Tosney's exhibition

My second visit this year to the Butterfly Rooms’ little upstairs gallery on the main road through Saltaire. This time I was there to see the work of a long-time favourite of mine, printmaker Anna Tosney, along with that of a selection of other local printmakers (and one ceramicist). Anna’s work took over the whole of one of the upstairs rooms and it was a pleasure to see so much of it so well-displayed. A thoughtful introductory label described her technique as a mixture of drypoint and monoprint, the latter laying on the background and infill colours while the former is responsible for the scratchy textures and thick black outlines that are so characteristic of her work. Interestingly she also uses environmentally-friendly soy-based inks.

The heavy black lines described, vibrate with energy even when portraying still subjects while the monoprinting produces a simple palette of relatively dull colours perfectly suited to the rural subject matter of farmers, sheep and wild animals. All are sharply observed and the drypoint technique provides wonderful textured skies and woolly sheep coats which contrast the shimmering outlines. There is the occasional veering towards twee-ness, for example ‘ Goose Chase’ with a lamb being chased by three hissing geese but the lack of facial features and the flat cut-out shapes lift them above this. It’s quite remarkable how much energy and life she actually gets into the people and animals in her work given the 2D, almost cut out flat shapes. In one work a group of deer by moonlight have the faintest touch of silvery white on their rumps while ‘Deer 4’ has no colour at all and is almost Japanese in its simplicity, just a tiny touch of feathery detail in the grassheads surrounding the two completely motionless deer, poised just before flight.

My friend and I spent some time discussing her influences without really nailing it. We agreed that there was a hint of Japanese anime and some of the naivety of Jean Dubuffet and also perhaps of free-hand graffiti with the heavy black outlines and flat coloured infill, but it is certainly a question I would like to put to Anna next time I see her. My friend did like the work enough to treat herself to a delightful print of a wood pigeon (pictured left).

The rest of the exhibition was in the next door room with a wide selection of different styles and techniques on show. June Russell’s work was the first to catch my eye since I recognised it from the KAF Open Exhibition that I blogged about last month. She uses a mixture of techniques but my favourite from this show was ‘Holme Moss’ (etching and surface print) with its abstract representation of a pinky-grey swathe of scarred moorland. I also liked the more representational ‘Hedges in Cowgill’ which I first spotted at the KAF exhibition. Cath Brooke on the other hand showed a more coherent set of collograph/drypoint impressions of Brimham Rocks in blacks, turquoise and brick red. Being a bit of a geology nerd, I couldn’t help seeing a metaphor for the river delta origins of the rocks in the liquid flowing style of the lower half of each print with the solidifying gritstone emerging out of it in the solid lumpy shapes of the upper half. Or maybe I was just feeling a little light-headed because it was near lunchtime!

Catherine Sutcliffe-Fuller’s large prints certainly brought me down to earth. They were a long way from some of the ‘prettier’ pieces in the show. Peer into them and you see complex, slightly chaotic, definitely worrying, images. ‘Dixons Hollow’ has a distant cyclist vanishing into a looming woodland. In ‘Exposed’, two red-rucksack carrying walkers are seen heading into a maelstrom of weather on a mountain. Each print is flat in texture but full of energy and threat. Piers Browne is probably the best known of all the artists represented with a long and distinguished career as an artist-printmaker. His work has a lyrical, romantic air with its evocations of English summer days. ‘The Comet over Croagh Patrick’ with its silver moon peeping from behind a cloud called to mind the mystical visionary landscapes of Samuel Palmer, for example his ‘Cornfield by Moonlight’. Attractive work no doubt if a little backward looking for my taste.


Finally I should mention the work of the ceramicist Kath Bonson which at first sight seemed to have little connection to the work on the walls. However, a closer inspection revealed screen-printed images from her own photographs on the flat surfaces of the stoneware paper clay she uses to create her intricate forms. Again, a thoughtful piece of text placed the work in context. They form part of a project she calls ‘Cullingworth – a Sense of Place’. She goes on to explain that they represent her belief that there is no, one, definitive view of a landscape and that the various surfaces and shapes are an attempt to capture some of these interpretations. I particularly liked ‘The Viaduct’ which looked like shards of old cardboard box, printed with a multiplicity of views then torn and singed then finally reassembled with its tantalising glimpses of the old Victorian railway viaduct.

The show continues at The Butterfly Rooms until 8 April. Visit their website www.thebutterflyrooms.co.uk for opening times.


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'Northweave', Platform Gallery, Clitheroe 12 March 2011

(c) Margaret Crowther

Clitheroe is always a great place to spend a Saturday morning with its superb coffee, shoe, wine and clothes shops not to mention some of the best quality charity shops for miles around! But the icing on the cake is the Platform Gallery located in the old railway station, run by the local authority and long may that last. This weekend I was there for the opening of 'Northweave', an exhibition by northern members of the British Tapestry Group. The last time I saw a BTG exhibition was Tapestry 08 in Halifax, a huge, high-quality show over two venues which dispelled a lot of my preconceptions about tapestry. Unfortunately, my first few minutes in Northweave had me feeling nervous - there were hints of the misshapen wobbly porridgey textures and crude geometric shapes and colours which remind me of school craft projects. Luckily those first impressions were quickly dispelled by the first of three superb pieces by Margaret Crowther who incidentally was one of my favourites at Tapestry 08. 'October' is made from woven and knotted paper yarn coloured the orangey-coppery brown of autumn leaves. Stare at it and within its intense deep surface you can see tumbling leaves and wind-tossed tree branches. There were also string-like yarn fragments that looked like rotted leaf ribs - I was reminded of Andy Goldsworthy's extraordinary Leaf Stalk Room at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2007-08). 'Meridian' was a smaller version of some of the 3-D work that Margaret is known for. In orange-red sisal, the detail and texture proved to be endlessly fascinating, staring at it for several minutes I suddenly saw a series of beautiful little curls along one edge that I hadn't noticed before. Stepping back, the honeycomb, folded object became almost animal-like, frozen and flopped over its plinth like a beached sea-creature barely holding up its own weight. Her final work in the exhibition was a stunning wall-mounted piece called 'Firemarks' - big, wild, chaotic with fluctuating shades of brown, orange and ochre rippling across its surface. Images of Iron Age huts with wattle walls; and dry Aboriginal landscapes came to mind along with the work of Nigerian artist Nnenna Okore. The broken curled edges had the brittle look of ancient Egyptian baskets preserved in sand. Superb work by any standard - she writes "In this creative process of weaving, knotting and wrapping I look for ways to express my fascination for the random growth and ordered chaos of the natural environment".

(c) Vasiliki Skepetari

This description might also have fitted the work of Vasiliki Skepetari. Her untitled piece was made from wrapped paper yarns from which she has created a series of hanging cords like thick tree roots penetrating through the roof of a cave but also like computer cables with the bright flashes of turquoise in amongst the bands of orange, brown black, beige and yellow. Tiny flashes of copper wiring underlined that interpretation - I thought of messages being transmitted down those wires or nerve pathways in a giant brain. She writes that trees and rocks inspire her, "Their textured surfaces reveal figures and shapes to me, I interpret them as messages coming from our ancestors through the centuries."

The next work to catch my eye was on an altogether smaller scale. Three framed tapestry 'fetishes' by Alison Carthy, two were mislabelled but once we'd got that sorted out with the gallery staff I fell in love with them all, one was mossy green with red blobs and a piece of silvery green lichen, another was themed around a moorland fire with a bird's black feather tangled in fiery red and orange yarns and the third was a grey fragment of woven wool with long dry pine needles pushed through it called 'Lodgepole Pine'. My own work currently revolves around ideas of amulets so I couldn't resist this piece of textile voodoo and bought it on the spot [photo to follow]. She writes about her work as follows: "Place is important, this being the land on which I stand. The work is driven by my concern about how I see mankind using the earth's resources with seemingly little regard for who comes next". Sounds just like a rag rug maker!

These were my highlights but honorable mention should also go to Beryl Hammill's 'Moor Lat 55N' with its pastel-coloured glimpse of a heather hillside and scribbled rush shapes like shorthand; Shirley Ross' 'Red Water' a very finely woven abstract evocation of red sunlight on grey water and Joyce Coulton's teeny tiny jewel-coloured scenes 'Underground' and 'Workings'.

In the end Northweave turned out to be an exhibition with enough really contemporary tapestry work to get even a sceptic like me excited so I'd really recommend a trip (not forgetting some shopping too!).

Northweave continues at the Platform Gallery, Clitheroe until 23 April 2011. Admission is free. For opening times see the Platform Gallery's webpage