The Butterfly Rooms, Saltaire 12 February 2011

My friend the ceramicist Lis Holt invited me along to this newly opened gallery space above a sweet little gift shop on Bingley Road in Saltaire. I already have several pieces of her work in my collection so was delighted to see her latest pieces. She is showing her work alongside that of photographer Daniel Shiel and painter David Starley. All three artists had organised a 'meet the artist' afternoon and I spent a pleasant hour in the two sunny, white painted second floor rooms, glass of wine in hand chatting to the artists about their work.

The first room was given over entirely to David Starley's heavily impasto oil paintings. En masse the effect was rather overwhelming especially given the strong smell of drying paint and the vibrant colours of some of the work. The more brightly coloured scenes, for example the poppies in cornfields were not to my taste but the more thoughtful work like the gloomy canalway at the back of Salts Mill or the grey, rain-shined cobbles of Victoria Road in Saltaire suited the weight and mass of the technique.

Daniel Shiel 'Corrugated Iron 2'

The walls of the neighbouring room were more lightly hung with Daniel Shiel's exquisite photographs of both natural and man-made surface textures. The eye was caught by the extraordinarily beautiful patterns formed by the decayed surfaces of peeling paint, bleeding rust and bleached wood. Daniel uses the computer to further point up these patterns by creating collages and mosaics of the photographs. I particuarly loved the work called 'Saltaire iron and stone collage' showing a series of old iron staples set in lead rusting into their stone settings. It came as no surprise that Daniel, like me, trained as an archaeologist, he writes that he  "... considers the rich textures, patterns and colours evident in many everyday objects both natural and artificial: details often unseen and overlooked at first glance. The themes at the centre of my work are associations with the past, decay, destruction and loss."

Lis Holt 'Wave' next to Daniel Shiel collage

Lis Holt pots

It seemed that some of the rusty staining from Daniel's photographs had somehow made their way across into some of Lis Holt's normally mechanically-perfect matte blue glazes. Her Wave forms were all the better for it and all her pieces showed well against Daniel's work. Many of her vessel forms are inspired by those of ancient Aegean pottery and the full-bellied pots and single bowl displayed effectively in a deep recess beside the room's chimney breast looked as if they had been excavated from a sunken trading ship with their mottled or crusted surfaces and simple wave-like repetitive decoration.


The exhibition at The Butterfly Rooms continues until 26 February 2011. Details from their website www.thebutterflyrooms.co.uk 

'Pairings: a conversation' Farfield Mill Arts & Heritage Centre, Sedbergh

I didn't have nearly enough time to appreciate this wonderful exhibition when I visited last weekend but thought I'd share a few highlights anyway as I'd really like to recommend it to everyone. 'Pairings' is co-curated by Alice Kettle and this comes as no surprise as I saw the beginnings of the idea, bringing applied artists from different disciplines together, at her 'Clay & Thread' display at the Harrogate Knitting & Stitching Show in 2009. At that exhibition she had worked collaboratively with two ceramicists, Helen Felcey and Alex McErlain (brilliant YouTube video of Alex making pots here) both of whom appear in the Farfield show too.

The Pairings project is an interdisciplinary project conceived by Alice Kettle and other tutors at Manchester Metropolitan University, it went from one involving textile artists and ceramicists "responding to each others' marks and forms" to one involving 18 pairings of artists from a wide range of disciplines from glass to metalwork to writing.


The pairing that caught my eye immediately was that of Sharon Blakey and Ismini Samanidou "a conversation between cloth and clay". The linking theme shared by the two artists was that of antique looking spoons, gorgeous monochrome woven textiles with rows of spoons were placed underneath dark clay spoons, washed grey and cream, each flowing into the other. The textiles also had panels of scribbled words, I wondered if these were the conversations. The ceramic spoons were like archaeological artefacts, twisted, dark and broken, the textiles on the other hand appeared to have been produced on a Jacquard loom using digital programming. In spite of this the textiles achieved a similar appearance of being antique and used, indeed one lime green, orange and cream piece was worn in holes reminiscent of the work of Chiyoko Tanaka, a well-known Japanese weaver who grinds away the surfaces of her textiles with stones and bricks. The 'damaged' woven piece was mirrored by a similarly-coloured square plate with an impressed textile pattern in its delicately coloured surface. There was precious little information to go with the work of the individual artists so I was delighted to discover a blog later by Sharon Blakey in which she provides a great deal of background information on this collaboration, for instance that the spoons are based on those from the Mary Greg collection at the Manchester Art Gallery and that some of the scribbled texts are copies of Mary's inventory of the collection. Read more here

I've already mentioned Helen Felcey's collaboration with Alice Kettle at Harrogate. Here she is partnered with David Grimshaw using 3-D printing technology to recreate a slip cast cup using a variety of modern materials. Their task was "trying to make sense of the made object through exploring modern technologies". Visit the Shapeways website and search for 'slip cast cup' to order your own!

Ceramicist Duncan Ayscough had chosen to work with felt artist Helen Belcher. Three paired sets of clay and felt vessels were arranged side by side. In one the felt and the clay colours were a closely matched burnt orange, the warm colour and matt surface of the clay and felt perfectly matched, the felt cradling and cuddling up to the clay. In the next set, cold turquoise-glazed vessels reminiscent of Edmund de Waal's work contrasted sharply with the similarly coloured felt ones which tried to hug the shiny surfaces warmly but seemed to slide away. In the final set, black, hard, rough, matte clay vessels sat beside rather limp soft white felt ones which tried and failed to mirror their solid black shapes. A simple display but remarkably interesting in its use of texture and form.

Kirsteen Aubrey, Victoria Brown and Jane McFadyen rather broke the mould by working as a threesome "creating shapes that envelop each other in glass, felt, pewter and thread". They had worked together far more closely than many of the other artists putting something of themselves into each of the pieces on display which together formed an exotic, sensual collection of rounded fruit- and seed-shaped objects, thick 'rinds' of red or white felt enclosed glass 'flesh' studded with glistening red glass beads like pomegranate seeds along with shiny twisted hollow 'stems' and 'calyxes' in crocheted wire and silk yarn. Quite delightful.

Finally, I can't leave without mentioning the pieces by Alice Kettle and Alex McErlain as previously seen in Harrogate, here described as "a conversation through sketches in embroidery and clay". I'm not a massive fan of Alice Kettle's huge, densely embroidered pieces but here the partnership with the ceramicist seems to have freed  her to produce work with a delicacy and lightness of touch I usually find missing. One embroidery hangs loosely with sparsely rendered images of a vase turning gradually into a woman's body through repetition. It is a lovely, light piece and links beautifully with Alex's tiny repetitive biro sketches of vessel forms on the insides of brown envelopes which are displayed nearby.

So, a thoroughly inspiring exhibition redolent with generosity and creativity which I have really only scraped the surface of in this blog. My only niggle? The lack of  accompanying visual material. A catalogue is available from self-publishing website Blurb for £25 I discovered after a bit of Googling, however it didn't really seem to reflect much of the work on display at Farfield and for those of us on a limited budget and banned from taking our own photographs, some postcards would have been appreciated!

'Pairings: a conversation' continues at Farfield Mill Arts & Heritage Centre until 3 April 2011. Opening times and other information can be found on the mill's website.

'Endings and Beginnings' Arts Factory Open exhibition, Love Keighley Gallery 5 February 2011

This year, Keighley Arts Factory has decamped from its main gallery on North Street and taken over an unoccupied shop in Keighley's Airedale shopping centre. The Love Keighley Gallery is all part of a town centre regeneration effort which is all too familiar in shopping centres throughout the country and pop-up galleries as they are often called are a sad reflection on the local economy. Today's preview was a jolly affair for all that and well attended by artists and friends. We will see what the rest of the town's residents make of it over the coming month.

Shops are not always ideal venues for art shows but this one with its
corner position and large glass windows showed off the work fairly well although the glass also meant that the hanging area was necessarily restricted so some work was less than ideally placed high off the ground and not so easily viewed. One artist who suffered in this respect was Linda Harrison. Her 'Beginnings' work appeared to be the tooled cover of an old book which had red tabs placed like bookmarks behind it but the piece was hung so high it was impossible to see what the words printed on them were and whether they were significant. Her 'Endings' piece on the other hand was an easy to read photograph of a wall of old glazed tiles and peeling white paint, simple but I'm a sucker for images of decay and wear.

This is why I was also drawn to the work of Stephen Capstick showing images of old peeling painted doors, one 'Untitled I' with a battered tin-plated letter box, the other 'Untitled II' with a rusty hasp and padlock. Again, they were too high for me to get a really good look and I couldn't tell if they were prints or manipulated photographs, but at £50 each I suspect the latter.

June Russell's three pieces were definitely prints and all very accomplished. 'Autumn Chimneys' was a delightful lino print rooftop view through leaves while 'Hedges at Cowgill' a simple monochrome etching and aquatint showing a drystone wall and single silhouetted tree.

Perhaps the most accomplished artist in the show was Janet McLelland whose gloomy, powerful landscapes caught the eye of all three of my guests. The photo shows them in the centre of the shot, one above the other. Janet writes in the catalogue, "In these three made-up Landscapes I evoke renewability of Land, endless circles of Beginnings and Endings that are yet to be portrayed". I'm not entirely sure what that means but for me they spoke very directly, the centre one of war-torn landscapes, the mud of the Somme with its artillery shattered trees and rain-soaked skies. The bottom one seemed to be an image of a powerful river silvered with moonlight surging past a dark forbidding forest. Again, very reasonably priced at around £100 each.


While the quality of the rest of the show is variable there is enough decent work here for me to recommend a visit. For reasons set out below, make the most of it as it may be your last for a while in Keighley.

The show continues until Wed 23 February, the gallery is open Mon-Thurs 10am to 4pm Fri 10am to12noon Sat 10am to 3pm

Postcript: While at the preview I learned from the curator Jo Whitehead that Leeds City College is closing down the KAF gallery on North Street. It will be sadly missed.

Giles-Peyton-Thompson ‘Aspects of a Collection’ Craven Museum & Gallery, Skipton 18 January 2011

Another friendly preview at Skipton’s Art Gallery and a fascinating exhibition which rewarded the extra time I spent getting to know it over the evening.

The three artists have spent the previous year in residence at the museum, with a free pass to access the entire museum’s collections. As most people know, only a fraction of a museum’s holdings are ever on display at any one time and museum stores are true Aladdin’s caves as all three of these artists has clearly discovered.

A first glimpse of the resulting work, mostly painting and print, proved a little disappointing. It appeared to be a show entirely made up of simple representations of artefacts from the museum’s collections, kitchen implements, clogs, children’s games and so on. However, as mentioned already, upon closer inspection, an entirely different story emerged.

Joanna Thompson’s work made the most immediate impression. ‘The Relics’ is a series of medium-sized acrylic canvases with peculiar museum objects dangling or placed centrally against an apparently whitewashed wall with torn fragments of garishly patterned wallpaper applied to it. In her blurb she describes how she was inspired by strange-looking, surreal, mysterious objects in the stores, it was irrelevant to her what the function of each object was, instead they began to take on a life of their own. Surreal they certainly were, some of the items began to look like slave chains or instruments of torture with spikes and hinges. Each item was painted as if a strong light was being shone onto it throwing a dark shadow against the white background as if in a horror movie or an interrogation room. A collection of paintings showing giant butterflies pinned through their thoraxes was equally unsettling.

Sarah Giles’ paintings are on a much smaller scale. Again she portrays life-like images of museum artefacts. There is a slight optical illusion, at first sight I believed that she had miniaturised normal-sized objects, a pair of clogs, a set of dominoes, a teapot, however, the museum has helpfully set up a case with some of the objects in nearby and it turns out that the items are in fact as small as they are painted. The illusion has been created by placing each object in a relatively large empty space. As Sarah describes “There is sometimes sadness in the work, a sense of loss, something missing suggested by uncomfortable spaces.” Handling the objects, once loved and played with and now abandoned forever have clearly left their mark on the artist.

Helen Peyton has gone a step further than the other artists in that her work is not only inspired by but also actually made using a museum artefact – a huge 19th century Britannia printing press. Unlike the other two artists, the objects she chooses to illustrate are much more familiar, at least to the older generation of visitor. They are the objects of post-war modernism and prosperity, the Bakelite television, the 1950s gramophone, the enamelled cooker. The muted creams, turquoises and greens of the reduction lino prints are quite beautiful and perfectly redolent of the period. The inks used have produced a shiny surface to some of the prints which harks back to the shininess of the new enamel and formica surfaces of those once modern kitchens, sparkling and clean after the griminess of the coal-heated Victorian kitchen. The butterfly collection has also caught her eye and there are a number of decorative prints showing cut-out silhouettes superimposed one on the other.

So, all in all, an exhibition that is definitely worth a second look. Closer contemplation uncovers the eeriness behind the realism of Giles’ miniature objects surrounded by empty space like abandoned children, lonely and frightened, or Thompson’s quaint curios, turned into instruments of interrogation, hidden in cellars with whitewashed walls and torn wallpaper and unshaded, brightly-burning light bulbs. Peyton’s prints are perhaps the least disturbing with their unashamed nostalgia for the domestic objects of our parent’s youth but even they with their hints of technical drawings, front, side, top and back of the Bakelite television for instance, remind us that the factories that produced these symbols of prosperity so readily, had only a few years before been mass-producing weapons of war.

The exhibition continues until 2 May 2011. Further details here www.cravenmuseum.org








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'STILL' Recent Photographs by Graham Hardy

I know Graham from his work as a video maker so I was intrigued to be invited to the preview of this show of his still photos at Seven Art Centre in Chapel Allerton, Leeds this week (Wed 8 December). The preview was a very relaxed affair in this obviously well-used cafe bar type community venue. Graham's discreetly framed works were grouped around the room and there was a little awkwardness involved in having to lean over chattering customers to look at them. He was also showing a series of location based shots digitally projected onto a wall which were easier to view.

The framed colour photos fell into two groups, both still lifes, but one set referencing a trip to New Orleans with musical instruments and cheap Mardi Gras trinkets, the other, natural objects like shells, stones and feathers either singly or in carefully placed associations.

Graham writes, one assumes, of these latter works, "...one work leads to another, a hanging stone is joined by two others, and then a feather,which hovers over a bone, then salt somehow enters the stage and so it goes on...I think issues of death are in the photos, about the ordinary becoming extraordinary".

The objects from this latter set float in profoundly inky black spaces apparently without support. I saw in these works a type of memento mori with the bones and sheep's skull and particularly the shot of a long piece of pale fabric knotted in the middle and hanging quietly like a shroud.

The Mardi Gras photos might at first glance be seen as quite the opposite being memories of celebration and joy, however Graham's projected photos contained many images of post Katrina dereliction in New Orleans. The beads, mask and abandoned trumpet took on a much more melancholic hue as a result, symbols of the Big Easy as it once was but may never be again.

Considering the small number of framed works, this exhibition made quite an impact with the contrast of the artistic still lifes with the photojournalistic projected images of seedy urban spaces both in the north of England and the US. Some editing of the latter to make the 'story' clearer might have helped. The shots of New Orlean's deserted ninth district provided a superb foil to the still life memento mori on their own.

Graham Hardy's website can be found at www.wix.com/grayboy/stillmovingimages





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Knitting & Stitching Show, Harrogate 2010

We sadly had a rather shorter visit than normal to this crafter's cornucopia thanks to a snow storm that swept in mid afternoon and sent us scurrying home. Poor Angie Wyman from the University of Cumbria stand was forced to overnight in Harrogate it was so bad. I managed just a few of the exhibitions so here follows just a taster of what was on offer. Follow the links for images and more information on the artists.

smallCHAT 'Power of Ten'
I have a soft spot for this group as they are based in one of my favourite villages in Essex, Thaxted. I first came across them doing a group show at Wimpole Hall, Cambs and was particularly impressed at the time by Helen O'Leary's creepy, ghostly hanging wedding 'shrouds'. This time around she has gone mad for rust-staining. Various embroidered rust-stained fabric frames surrounded sepia photos of World War I soldiers and brides, none very convincing, possibly if she'd used the original photos rather than grainy scans I might have liked them better. More interesting was the rusty bride's veil hanging on a scrubbed pine door, raising memories of Miss Havisham and her tattered wedding outfit. Sue Walton's work evoked similar memories of the Victorian era with her bizarre embroidered felt fantasies housed under glass bell jars. They obviously referenced the silk & paper flowers and other odd creations made by middle class Victorian women with time on their hands but had an odd rather surreal feel to them as if they were living creatures found at the bottom of the sea.

Elizabeth Tarr 'Out of Indigo'
I absolutely love indigo dyed textiles and Elizabeth's stitched narrative images didn't disappoint. The majority closely referenced images from the works of Velasquez. Some of the pieces on the face of it were crude and primitive in style but the indigo added a remarkable depth and texture which quite transformed them. For me the most successful were the pieces with silhouetted images, for example 'Infanta Series: Dog' where the shadowy dark blue dog is set against a creased blurry background, or a pair of shadowy Infanta images with gilded sentences "I carry the sun in a golden cup" and "...the moon in a silver bag". Less effective were the images with crudely painted faces and hands superimposed onto the blue shadowy figures.

Gizella K Warburton
Rather pleased to come across something a bit more conceptual at last. Gizella's ripped, monochrome stitched pieces were like a breath of fresh air. They were gnarly, scrubbed, painted, fraying and scribbled on in pencil. Squares of cloth or slate had applied thread, paper yarn or wire circles and other scraps of fabric overlaid on them.



Clyde Olliver 'Kirkby Roundhead'



'Large Slate'

 Clyde Olliver
Another soothing selection of monochrome imagery amongst the chaos and bling of the rest of the show. Clyde also uses slate and stitch but his work is more solid than Gizella's with thick tough yarn threaded through drilled holes. The little arrow and triangular shaped stitches looked like a code on 'Kirkby Roundhead' and contrasted the fine hair-like threads used on 'Large Slate'. The latter was very grungy with dirty looking thread plus dried patches of lichen.


Sadly at that point the snow started falling and we had to tear ourselves away from the next display, a wonderful selection from Manchester Met University's textile archive called 'Machine Stitch Perspectives', a show put together to celebrate the publication of the book of the same name by Alice Kettle and Jane McKeating. Tantalising glimpses of work by Maxine Bristow  and Michael Brennand-Wood were briefly seen!

More about what I missed can be found on the Knitting and Stitching Show website

South Square Salon Show 2010

I love the South Square Centre's quirky gallery spaces and was really looking forward to their new salon show although I was soon kicking myself for forgetting to submit my own work. When we arrived we found the venue already bursting at the seams and there was such a squash in the upstairs gallery where the salon was taking place that I only managed to make the briefest of notes as we shuffled round.

The hang was really impressive, floor to ceiling just like a proper salon exhibition. The work was thoughtfully displayed and I was left pondering how on earth they managed to cram it all in with no spaces. Given that the show was entirely unselected I was immediately impressed by the overall high standard of most of the work. Sadly there was no information with the works other than the name of the artist so some of this blog is based on guesswork!

For me there were several real highlights and these were in no particular order:
Gillian Holt Porcelain vases with photos and documents on their surfaces. They were sepia-toned, old stuff which looked like the result of family or local history research. The bone-white porcelain contrasted the poignant crumbling, faded photos and words, documenting long past lives.

Onile Onile The piece that caught my eye by this artist was a wall hung shallow open wooden box. Inside it was painted or rather encrusted with viridian green paint, several wooden partitions criss-crossed the interior and there were fragments of ceramic or flint placed randomly within. One, formed into a pebble imprinted with something indecipherable was placed on the top, like a visitor's rock placed on top of a jewish tombstone.

Ann Rutherford 'Brown Earth' A deceptively simple print of a curving sweep of ploughed field. It brought back powerful memories of the heavy clay fields of my childhood in Essex - a frozen sea of turned soil. It even reminded me of the smell of the freshly cut and turned earth.

Janet Molelland The work I liked by this artist was an abstract acrylic, mostly in grey in which I saw a stormy seascape, full of movement and power. It was a little like the work of the fabulous Katy Moran whose work I saw at MIMA a couple of years ago.

David Thomas This was the first artist whose work I knew. The piece that caught my eye was a grey acrylic study of pebbles in a white-washed corner- slightly unfocussed and soft. Lovely range of greys, and flaky whites.

Madelaine Burt She had a couple of square wall mounted pieces which may have been enamel on metal or glaze on a ceramic tile, I couldn't tell [checking her website I find it's neither! A resin-based medium it turns out, read more on her website]. Anyhow, the piece I loved had a gorgeous coppery-red surface with lots of subtle texure and depth, to one side was a fine white painted outline of what looked like a bird skeleton, I was reminded of Rozanne Hawksley's mummified birds or of a Pictish stone carving of some magical beast.

All in all a great show and we all enjoyed the veggie pie and peas and parkin and not forgetting the burning of the cardboard phoenix along with everyone's hopes and wishes for the coming year.

The show finishes on 23 December 2010. Opening times and details of other shows on in the same building at http://www.southsquarecentre.co.uk/