Wirksworth Arts Festival - open trails weekend

8th - 9th September 2012

For anyone whose never been to Wirksworth Arts festival Open Trails weekend and is interested in art then next year you must go! Its a fantastic event where you can see anything from visual art, drama, music, performance  art, an absolutely definite date to put in your diary.  The festival is described on the website as 'Brilliant, electrifying, weird, radical, curious, unexpected, dramatic, visionary, provocative – contemporary visual art in the heart of rural Derbyshire' - a great description. www.wirksworthfestival.co.uk/home/curated-programme

 
This is the 5th year I have been and it just gets better and better. The whole town becomes a gallery with more than 170 artists and makers showing their work in private homes, historic building, gardens, shop windows, churches and even a train. 

Also if your nosey ....like me and love looking at/inside peoples houses ..like me and have got a bit of the Kevin McCloud in you..... then its a great way to look at art and see some incredible private houses that people open up for the general public to wander in...to look at the art but also to nose at  their homes! There are some beautiful homes that are very old buildings architecturally but ultra modern inside ..a real eye opener.

The town has a really vibrant feel to it as you wander round. Not ony do you get to see a hugh variety of art but also to talk to the artists.Work from well known, established artists  to new graduates is exhibited showing contemporary fine art and unique and inspiring contemporary craft. Its great to just wandering through the town listening to music being played from buskers to full bands  and taking in the atmosphere.

My highlights from this year festival:

Lynne Shaw

This year ex - Leek College Foundation Degree in Contemporary Art student Lynne Shaw exhibited her fantastic books.

'its good to talk'  - Lynne Shaw

 

'Dear Norma - from Mam' - Lynne Shaw

Lynn Shaw: 'I am a Fine Art Artist specialising in Artist Books, which I produce to record information for posterity and to share with others. I create either unique or small number edition books using traditional book binding methods, printing, collage, digital imagery and vintage papers. The size and the construction of each book are unique to each individual theme. Inspiration for my books is diverse and includes urban degeneration; war; chronicling of my past and that of others important to me; epitaphs; stamps and emotion at football games'.

We are hoping to get Lynne to run a workshop at college.

Helen Hallows

I chatted to Helen Hallows who produces mixed media work based on landscape. Helen ran a workshop at Leek College last year and is returning later n September to run another one with Foundation Degree students

'Valley Deep' - Helen Hallows

'Home' - Helen Hallows

  

Helen Hallows: I create mixed media work that is an emotional response to nature and the environment. Using ink, collage and stitch I capture the transitions from night to day or season in to season. My ‘British Landscapes’ series has been well received and sells through galleries and art markets across the East Midlands and Yorkshire. Expanding into high quality prints and cards has allowed my work to reach a wider audience.

2 new artistic discoveries for me were Landscape inspired artists Andrew Bird and Jo Hulme.

Andrew Bird

'Fulcrum' - Andrew Bird

'Leaving Thailand' - Andrew Bird

Andrew Bird is based in Derbyshire, and a frequent visitor to Cornwall, where he finds inspiration for his paintings. He captures an 'essence' of a place or situation as well as  simplify the form and colour of what he sees. His paintings undergo many additions, with building up of layers, scraping, scratching and re-working the surface to reveal textures and colour.


Jo Hume



'Sunset over Otterburn Ranges, Northumberland'

'St Bees Head, Cumbria'

 

Jo describes her work....'Northscapes’ There are some visual moments in nature that ignite in me a strong sense that we are mere fleeting fragile witnesses in time and space and which suggest values and traces of being within ourselves. This inspiration finds expression in a range of media as the painting emerges in abstracted form, a summing-up of memory, imagination and experience, with a life and energy of its own. I find ‘visual moments’ in the land and seascapes of Northern England endlessly inspirational – a reminder of human fragility and perhaps suggesting deeper values and meaning in life. This inspiration finds expression in a range of media as the painting emerges, in abstracted form, a summing-up of memory, imagination and experience, with a life and energy of its own'.

The video below features artists & visitors talking about arts festival - watch it...it will give you a good idea of what the festivals about...and make you want to go.

 

Look out for next years arts festival - the date of the open arts trail weekend are not available yet but the festival always runs in September with the trail weekend being the first or second weekend - http://www.wirksworthfestival.co.uk/.

Edinburgh August 2012

Dieter Roth - 'Diaries' - Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
2nd August - 14th October 2012

During the summer,  whilst visiting the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, I went to see a really interesting and very thought provoking exhibition by German/Swiss artist & writer Dieter Roth (1930 - 1998). Dieter Roth kept a diary throughout his life recording lists, addresses, appointments, deadlines, ideas, photographs, drawings and poems. In the mid 1970's he attempted to record a year of his life by collecting and preserving all items of waste less than 5mm thick. The resulting work - Flat Waste - celebrates and subverts the ordering principles of a diary. Also showing was Solo Scenes - a vast video diary recording the last year of his life before his death on 128 video monitors.

 

Roths diaries

Roth's box files where his flat work pieces are organised and logged.

For his final project, Roth set up surveillance cameras all over his home and studio and filmed his every move for the last months of his life. Seen on the 128-screen rig now at the Fruitmarket gallery.

 click  to watch youtube video above about  Dieter Roths work

To display the archival material collected by 20th century German artist Dieter Roth throughout his life, the Fruitmarket has transformed its upper floor into what appears to be the obsessively ordered library of an anally retentive architect.

Everything is filed, dated and shelved. The few things on display are, at first glance, small in scale.

Roth, who died in 1998 and left a body of work that ranges from sculptures and installations to films and books, was a compulsive diarist and detritus collector. He was constantly self-referential and an early incorporator of found objects into his collages and montages. This, for the first time, is the material in the raw.

In 1975, to make Flat Waste, he collected every piece of garbage that could be flattened into a ring binder. The original box files, labelled with the date and location, fill half of the floor space. Three folders are out for in-depth noseying: here is his Marlboro packet, the top of a beer bottle, a boarding card. The smell of tobacco smoke still lingers. It is part journal, part evidence from a murder scene, a year of a life in five chunky shelf units.

Roth’s copy books – scrap books made from his ongoing collections of drawings, photographs and stuff – were printed in small runs, for sale or as gifts for friends. Self-portraits dominate and a series of double-sided ones are cleverly displayed.

Some are heavily smudged and over-scrubbed, some so delicate they could be fragile tracings.

Other copy books display a less serious side: family snaps, defaced photo- booth pictures, wild freeform doodles. His actual diaries are tiny and methodical, with only the odd tiny image among to-do lists and appointments.

Roth recorded his final year in video format. Flickering on a wall of 128 monitors, this is not the florid confessional of the Big Brother house but an old man in his studio, reading in bed, washing the dishes, speaking on the phone.

A show that at first appears underwhelming turns out to be intimate and moving. In itself, it’s beautifully achieved. It’s just a shame that the body of Roth’s work is not better known, to put this revelatory private material in the context of his public output.

www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/dieter-roth-1870

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/edinburgh-festival-reviews/9456517/Dieter-Roth-Diaries-Fruitmarket-Gallery-Edinburgh-review.html

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Edvard Munch | Graphic Works from The Gundersen Collection

Whilst in Edinburgh I was lucky enough to see the Munch exhibition showing his graphic works - including the iconic image 'The Scream', 'Anxiety' and 'Madonna'
Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) is renowned for his preoccupation with universal emotions such as isolation, melancholy, anxiety and love. His graphic works are amongst his most arresting and poignant, and are celebrated world-wide for their technical mastery and visual intensity.
The exhibition was very moving, Munch aimed to reveal the psychological and emotional life of man, drawing on his own, frequently troubled experiences to fuel his artistic output. Rejecting Realism in favour of symbolist and expressionist styles, he stated, ‘No longer will interiors and people reading and women knitting be painted. There shall be living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love’.

My personal favourites in the exhibition were:



'Madonna'

'The Scream' (Lithograph)

'Two Human Beings - The Lonely Ones'

 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Sculpture Park

   

The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is split over 2 sites - Gallery One and Gallery 2. Set in beautiful grounds above Edinburgh they have a sculpture park in front of the galleries.
My favourite piece was this piece of work by Nathan Coley which features large outdoor work comprising illuminated text on a large scaffold support. The text on the sculpture is created by using light bulbs and having a personal interest in text used in art and a love of 'lights' i found it  was a striking piece, it also made me smile.

 

'The words are divided into three lines, giving it the formal appearance of a haiku. The use of white electric bulbs, together with the unusual typeface, evokes 1970s disco glamour as well as fairground aesthetics, at once elegant and tacky, and at variance with the message of the text. Coley is a Scottish artist whose work explores society's expression of itself through the environment it constructs, whether through built architecture and monuments, or through intellectual and religious beliefs and systems'.

Artistic endeavours you can get roped into if you are artistically inclined - again!

 

I have decided, on our departmental blog, not just to post exhibitions visited etc but to show the interesting, 'fun' side of being an artist and what strange things you can find yourself involved in....following on from my British Legion re-design (still to be done) my new challenge was float decoration! Be careful what you agree to!

 

This weekend I was asked, or rather pleaded with, to help decorate a 'float' for a Poppy Queen to travel around in at Hartington Wakes! The float was a very old wooden cart attached to the back of a tractor in a large shed in the Hartington Dales. Watched on by a family of peacocks (or rather an 'ostentation of peacocks' as they are known), and a dozen or so cows and a very inquisitive terrier! Just shows what you can do with with some white fabric, a box of ribbons and an 'unusual' audience encouraging you on!

 

The challenge.....

 

 

before.....

 

during...

 

 

....After - transport fit for a queen!

 

My 'audience' - less than impressed!

 

Manchester 23rd July

'62@50'

 

www.62group.org.uk/

 

In July I visited Manchester to go to The Holden Gallery, Manchester Metropolitan University to see an exhibition  of contemporary textiles celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the 62 Group of textile artists (including a friend of mine Hazel Bruce who is a member of the group).Over the years the 62 Group has held many high profile exhibitions, and membership, which can only be achieved through a rigorous selection process, is now international.is in the 62 group.

 '62@50' is a collection of the most innovative and creative work by the group’s members.

The group initially formed in 1962 as a collective of embroidery graduates who wanted to show that embroidery was not simply a “ladylike pastime” but an art form in its own right.

The exhibition was very inspirational containing a broad approach to mixed media fine art textiles, breaking the preconceived ideas of what textiles is. I got caught sneaking a photograph of some work by the artist herself - very embarrassing - but she was fortunately a very nice women who was flattered that i wanted a photograph of her work and chatted at length about her textiles - phew! The work was by artist Jan Miller - see work below:

 

'New work begins and ends with a collection - researching old and creating new. Practical sampling stimulates thinking and further making. It is a circular process informed by experience and memory. Cloth is marked by repeated manipulation or folding; natural dyes, inks and powders deepen the marks left by creases and incisions; printing and handstitch accentuate detail and increase texture and depth. I re-use discarded fabrics and papers – layering in my own history.

Collections - of objects, photographs, textile etc - are infused with unique personal thoughts, connections and experiences. Selection and juxtapositions evoke and reinforce memories. Point-of-view (2010) defines my visual thinking. A collection is displayed on and between transparent blocks that shift, slice, multiply and obscure what is visible as the viewer moves around the exhibit' - Jan Miller. http://textilestudygroup.co.uk/members/jan-miller/

 

 

 

Other interesting work included Jae Maries 'A day in the life of...the world which ewas inspired by the  31st October 2011, and that on this day the earths population reached 7 billion. little Danka was declared the 7th billion person to arrive on the planet - featured in the piece of work where she creted 350 small figures reusing old work each representing 20 million people. You can see the tag featuring little Danka below.

www.jaemaries.com

 

Elaine Megaheys work was very painterley and textured crossing boundaries of painting and textiles - Elaine's work employs print-making,mixed-media,stitch and photography 

 

 

www.62group.org.uk/artist/elaine-megahey/

 

 

Follow the link below to see extract from the new book 'Radical Textiles'  - 1962-2012: The 62 Group of Textile Artists celebrates 50 years at the forefront of innovation' and creativity with the publication of ‘Radical Thread’, written and edited by Professor Lesley Millar. This book features the work and thoughts of 57 current members, as well as covering the history of the Group through a conversation between Jan Beaney, Jae Maries and Audrey Walker.

Free extract from Radical Thread book  available - www.issuu.com/directdesign/docs/radical_thread_sample?mode=a_p