sutton071

Sue Stone: Faith , 2017 (mixed media, hand/machine stitch, acrylic paint) Sue Stone: Displaced April 28 - May 28, 2017 Owen James Gallery, Brooklyn, NY Time, memory and family are at the heart of Sue Stone’s mixed-media works. She merges the past and the present to connect personal histories and local identities through dream-like narratives. Starting with old family photographs, she interprets and transforms them through techniques that include hand & machine stitched embroidery, fabric collage, writing and painting. Stone is also deeply influenced by the history of her native Grimsby, England. For many years, Grimsby supported a major seaport and fishing industry, and where Stone’s father was fish merchant. The industry declined over time, but allusions to it remain in her work.  Stone started sewing early on, learning from and working with her mother who was a tailoress until her early death. This sense of loss, and of displacement, in both emotional and economic terms, is a...

Illustration: Roxanne Lasky. Migration. Hireath So many creative individuals come to work with textiles, some briefly integrating the discipline within their larger mixed media work, others looking for some significance that they feel that textiles can bring them. Artists can drift into textiles through seeming coincidence, others with a more defined purpose.  Fine artists in particular often seem drawn to textiles as a medium in which they feel comfortable. It seems to give them a means in which to express themselves more clearly, more empathically, it gives them a subtlety of colour and texture, and perhaps more importantly, it gives them a means to express themselves emotionally. Illustration: Roxanne Lasky. Tidal 1 Illustration: Roxanne Lasky. Tidal 1  (detail) The artist Roxanne Lasky came to textile art through fine art painting, she originally expressed herself through watercolour and oils. It is not hard to see elements of that fine art discipline in Roxanne's work, sh...

Illustration: Annie Taylor. Fucketyfucketyfuckfuckfuck Most textile disciplines have been around for countless generations. They have a long history of relevance and tradition, they also have a long history of being connectors of individuals, groups and communities, very often using innovation, and subversion. Embroidery is a textile discipline in particular that has had more than its fair share of relevance, continually reinventing itself within different contemporary eras, with each successive generation finding the means to reinvent, or at least add towards, the strong tradition that it has as part of its history. Illustration: Alison Fizgerald Lucas. Beaver There is always a risk that if a discipline does not reflect the contemporary generation that uses it, at least in part, then its fate could well be to become fossilised within its own history, within its own tradition. This is not to say that all practitioners have to reflect the society that they find themselves in, but as lon...

The artist Kirsty Wallace has always had an interest in the passage of time, in the ageing of materials, in the journey of visible wear and the interaction with that wear, often through the process of mending. She can remember back to her childhood when these ideas made their initial impact on her, where she instinctively came to value items and objects, the 'things' of life that had been discarded by others.  A part of that interest, at least for Kirsty, was generational. The history of her family, like so many across the planet, was steeped in a strong emphasis on make-do-and-mend, of scarcity, of the lack of luxury, certainly of the luxury to discard. There are rolling and seemingly endless generations of individuals who picked and unpicked fabrics, who added stitches, took stitches away, brought in endless new additions to the fabric, continuing its life as far as they possibly could. Many added their own styles, their own character to this process, but they also added thei...

 Illustration: Clare Plug. Ice Crack 2 , 2008. The New Zealand textile artist Clare Plug has spent the last few years of her career developing a fascinating body of work that entails intimately observed details along with wider conceptions and observations of the most rarely visited of all the planets continents. In 2006 Plug was lucky enough to visit the continent of Antarctica as part of a fellowship, staying with the official government Antarctica NZ at Scott Base in the vicinity of the Ross Ice Shelf. It is no small exaggeration to say that this experience fundamentally changed her views and the entire aspect of her work, so much so that much of the textile art work that she produces to this day is haunted by this most spectacular and hauntingly beautiful continent. Illustration: Clare Plug. Ice Crack 2 (detail), 2008. The three works shown here are examples of Plug's Antarctica Series which explores a number of aspects of the continent from the fragile and relatively recent...

Illustration: Dominie Nash. Big Leaf Impromptu #8 , 2008. The Big Leaf series of textile art pieces by the artist Dominie Nash allows us to see both the robustness of the natural world along with the delicate and transient character that we often associate with particular aspects of nature. Leaves seem especially poignant to us with their ability to haunt us with ideas about decay and death. However, leaves should also be seen as an aspect of the cycle of life, dropped leaves in autumn only showing us part of that cycle. Illustration: Dominie Nash. Big Leaf Impromptu #9 , 2008. Nash may well have been initially inspired to produce a series of textile art pieces using the construction, both delicate and robust, of a leaf, however the sequence of compositions that she has produced go a long way past any mere observational interest or aspect. These pieces have taken the most important features of the leaf from its complex colour tones to the emulation of the skeletal structure of the lea...

Illustration: Wen Redmond. Trees Seen, Forest Remembered, 2008. Of all the images and work produced by textile artist Wen Redmond, I have chosen a sequence of work produced by her over a couple of years. An observational and emotional tie to the theme of the tree links the images together, but it is perhaps her wide ranging and varied working methods that make the link all the more apparent. Redmond is an artist that has strived to incorporate some particularly personal elements into her work. Photography seems to loom large, but it is the personal nature of observation and an emotional link with the subject that has guided the artist. An artist with a camera is a powerful combination. They tend not to randomly choose subjects that may prove useful at some point in the future, but are guided more to that of  individual elements within the environment, elements that are not always explainable individually, but become segments of a composition that may well be built up over a fairly...

 Illustration: Ellin Larimer. Winter. Ellin Larimer's work celebrates colour, texture, and ultimately that of the drawn line. Through textiles, Larimer is able to express an innate understanding of both the complexities and subtleties that are involved within the parameters of a fine art context. Through the five pieces shown here, part of her Counterpoint series, Larimer takes segments of her work and produces through a fascinating process of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction, a composition that flows in harmony colourwise, but seems to stagger with juxtapositions, linewise. There is a strange mixture of both tranquillity and movement within the work. The colours and textures play their part in allaying any fears the eye might have as to harsh, sharp, or drastic breaks in the composition, while the drawn line still retains these elements it seems less so because the clever use of colour balance.  Illustration: Ellin Larimer. Tumult. There lies the strength in ...